“Can she bake a cherry pie?” chants the American folk
song. That didn’t mean opening a can of
goo from the supermarket and dumping it into a frozen pie shell. It mean knowing when the cherries were sweet
and ripe, harvesting and pitting them, creating the pie shell from scratch
(perhaps hand-churning the butter), and knowing what other local and available
ingredients to mix in to make it all taste good. The song referred to a real and necessary
skill base which our ancestors recognized was essential to survival. A skill base that most of us alive today no
longer have.
Most of our ancestors grew food. They preserved food. They knew the seasons of their food, and they
knew how to “get by” with limited food supply between harvests or through tough
times. Today, food production is a lost
art.
Most people alive today have grown up on a food supply
produced by industrial-style agribusiness.
Massive fields. Massive combines.
Factory farms. Global transportation
networks. It is a system which is deeply
dependent on nonrenewable and now‑depleting fossil fuels. This system is pillaging irreplaceable
topsoils, polluting our waterways, draining nonreplenishing ancient aquifers, generating
atrocious waste, perpetuating socio-economic and cultural repression, and
drawing enormous financial subsidies from our government in order to continue to
do so.
The system is doomed and failing. And we have no backup plan. We have no “Plan B” for our food supply. We need to reclaim the lost art of food
production.
Into the middle of this, global warming is throwing a swift left
hook. Even as we scramble to recover
great-grandma’s lost knowledge and create a backup to the broken industrial
system, even as we scurry to discover what might work here in Southern
California, global warming-driven weather disruptions are bringing wild weather
surprises.
In Winter 2004, funnel clouds touched down in the Ladera
Heights part of Los Angeles. In
2006-2007 we experienced extreme drought conditions. The next January we had record-breaking
freezes. In December 2010 rain clouds
dumped record rainfall. Looking to the
future, scientists forecast heavier rains in some places, amplified droughts in
others.[i] For large-scale industrial farming operations
– the food system we have depended upon – these weather shifts present
challenges for which they do not have answers.
We desperately need to have backups in place.
And backups – particularly when they involve acquiring new
skills, creating new habits, and cultivating widespread social change – take
time to set up. We have to get it moving. Now.
Organic techniques are a critical element in all this. “Organically farmed soil stores carbon. A lot
of carbon. So much, in fact, that if all
the cultivated land in the world were farmed organically, it would immediately reduce the climate crisis
significantly.”[ii]
As you’ll learn in Chapter 2, “organics” is much, much more
than just subbing out the chemicals with a few homemade sprays. Organic techniques demand an entirely different outlook upon farming, land, soil
life, air, bugs and butterflies, our seed heritage, ecosystems, and humanity’s
place within those vast systems.
Organics works. It’s
the way humanity has farmed its food since the dawn of the agricultural
revolution some 10,000 years ago.
Compare that to what we think of as “regular” agriculture which has only
been in existence since the beginning of the 20th century. Some might debate that we have “better living
through chemicals” but that’s only because the marketing departments have told
us to think so.
And organics is cheaper.[iii] (But the chemical companies don’t want you to
know this.) When the natural ecosystem is
working on your behalf to feed and nourish your plants, there is no need to buy
stuff.
Facing a world which will soon be without cheap petroleum
and petrochemicals, a world where the economic situation continues to worsen, we’d
better rediscover organics. We’d better
get back in the habit. We’d better
figure out how it was done in the past – plus how we can make it work for a
very different present with more than 82% of Americans living in cities and 7
billion people to feed. We need to
rediscover a lost art, and we need to modify it for a dramatic new future.
The plot thickens:
Here our particular local spot on earth – in Southern California – agriculture
is a relative newcomer. Native Americans
in this area didn’t “farm” in the European sense. For 5,000 to 8,000 years since coming over
the Bering Straight, they obtained much of their food by being careful stewards
of the existing terrain. They harvested
native oaks in their season, and gathered local plants like chia, Miner’s
lettuce, cattails, and manzanita berries. The Spaniards farmed a little, but they had
the luxury of vast tracts of land and relatively few mouths to feed.
Humans do not have an agricultural history with the land
here in the way that people do in other places.
In communities like Tesuque Pueblo in New Mexico and St. Helena Island
in South Carolina, people have cared for the land and cultivated its fertility,
nurturing it into ongoing production in some cases for hundreds of years. In Europe, some lands have been producing
food since the time of the Romans.
Thus here in Southern California, we are not merely
rediscovering the art of long-term, ongoing, sustainable food production and
soil fertility. In this place – with its
unique year-round growing season – we are
the pioneers, exploring it for the first time.
Welcome to the journey.
We do not have the answers yet. You
are part of the discovery process – you and all around you who are engaged in
growing food. Share this precious
knowledge as you discover it. Share what
worked and what didn’t. We need you.
“There’s too much to
learn!”
But look at what
you already know. Look at the
massive amount of knowledge you have acquired in the past 3 to 5 years to
learn to effectively use that electronic communications gadget you carry in
your pocket or purse. A decade ago,
you didn’t know those skills. You
acquired them recently and rapidly.
Look at the vast
warehouse of knowledge you have about how to get around in a consumerist
society. Need new sports shoes? I’ll bet you know where to go, where to
get the best prices, what route to drive to get there (not to mention the
skills of driving), and what hours the store is open. Salad for dinner? Another store, another set of memorized
characteristics. You think nothing
of knowing how to best get across L.A. or O.C. in cross-town traffic, how
to use the internet or Facebook, and a bazillion other peak-of-petroleum
skills.
Growing food
effectively with great yields sounds daunting to us because we are on the
front end of the learning curve. We
haven’t yet acquired the body of knowledge
But unlike cell phones (which are completely optional in my regard),
at this point in human history, learning how to grow food is no longer an
option. It is essential to survival.
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[i]
Union of Concerned Scientists, “Climate Choices,” http://www.climatechoices.org/ca/index.html
[ii]
Maria Rodale, Organic Manifesto (p10)
[iii]
Why then is “organic” more expensive at the supermarket? Government subsidies are awarded to the
biggest mega-farms (80% of the subsidies go to x% of the corporations). In most cases government subsidies keep the
cost of conventionally-produced food artificially low.
