Interesting Read..Bio/Greenites Unite
January 25th 2007 03:10
I don't normally take a writer's work and post it as is, but this I thought worthy. Appropriate credit given at the bottom of this article.[I]
The locavore’s natural habitat is usually a fairly urban sort of setting, maybe a college town, probably situated on the East coast or West. A farmers’ market where they can forage for freshly harvested food is essential to their survival.
But in the heartland? Locavores are about as common as quinoa, or kamut. Good luck finding locally grown spinach in Illinois; the nation’s breadbasket reportedly had a grand total of 20 acres of spinach when the E.coli outbreak hit.
Spinach, you see, is what the USDA terms a “specialty crop,” which is how it classifies all fruits and vegetables, as opposed to the commodity crops brought to you by ADM and DuPont. How weird is that? At a time when the FDA is constantly chanting the “more fruits and vegetables” mantra, our government relegates these very foods to the fringes of our agricultural policies.
That’s why it’s so heartening to read the story in today’s Peoria Journal Star about the Land Connection, an Illinois-based non-profit, giving aspiring organic farmers the opportunity to buy 10 or 20 acre lots of an 80 acre farm formerly owned by environmental activist and biologist Sandra Steingraber, author of the pesticide exposé Living Downstream.
Founded in 2002 to create “healthy farms, healthy food, and healthy communities,” the Land Connection’s mission is to not only save precious farmland from sprawl, but to help conventional farms make the transition to organic, sustainable agricultural practices, and assist new organic farmers.
Will they succeed in stepping up the ratio of spinach to soybeans in their region? It’s an uphill battle, acknowledged Terra Brockman, Land Connection’s executive director:
“It's hard here in the Midwest where every acre is set aside for commodity crops like corn and soybeans. We know nothing will change overnight but there's a huge opportunity for entrepreneurial farming."
The Land Connection began when its founders banded together to buy up 21 acres of pasture put on the market by an elderly farm couple who needed to sell off a chunk of land to pay for their medical bills:
Year by year, this is an increasingly common story. Farmers get older, their children do not want to farm or cannot afford to farm, and so land is sold to developers who turn around and sell it in 2-acre plots. This in turn drives land prices up, effectively preventing any young farmers from getting started.
As we soon learned, that 21 acres was the tip of an iceberg. Much of the land surrounding it is also owned by elderly farmers who will be selling it to the highest bidder in the coming years. Hundred of acres of fertile farmland is on the verge of being lost forever. We have all seen what the future holds: homes and businesses, strip malls and parking lots. Already 3 plots have been sold off to individuals who have built or will be building homes on them on prime farmland. A startling statistic I came across is that 2,750 acres of farmland are paved in the U.S. every day. And that statistic is 10 years old.
Once farmland is gone, it’s gone. Once a rural community becomes a bedroom community, it is changed forever.
Conservatives love to trot out the myth of the estate tax-endangered family farm, but that rural legend’s been effectively debunked.What’s killing the small family farms is not the so-called “death tax,” but situations like the one described above, in which the farmer couldn’t afford the costs of health care and could get twice as much money for his land if he sold it to a developer to subdivide than if he sold it to a fellow farmer.
President Bush is supposedly going to offer some solutions to our health care crisis in his SOTU address tonight, but I doubt any of them will offer real relief to a small family farmer burdened by medical bills.
Oh, and the energy initiatives he’s reportedly going to propose? Prepare to be pelted by corn, corn, and more corn. Don’t be sucked in; despite all the hoopla, corn-based ethanol is a boondoggle, not a boon. There may be environmentally friendly ways to make ethanol, but corn ain’t one of them.
Meanwhile, the cost of corn is shooting up as agribiz and Wall Street see green in this not-so-green biomess. The price of tortillas has tripled south of the border, compelling angry Mexicans to take to the streets in protest.
What would it take to get Americans to take to the streets? Could there ever be a Boston Tea Party for our era? Hard to imagine, when Americans won’t take to the streets for all the tea in China. I’m just hoping we can muster up enough energy to demand better energy policies and a family farm-friendly farm bill.
authored by kat at EATING LIBERALLY[B]
The locavore’s natural habitat is usually a fairly urban sort of setting, maybe a college town, probably situated on the East coast or West. A farmers’ market where they can forage for freshly harvested food is essential to their survival.
But in the heartland? Locavores are about as common as quinoa, or kamut. Good luck finding locally grown spinach in Illinois; the nation’s breadbasket reportedly had a grand total of 20 acres of spinach when the E.coli outbreak hit.
Spinach, you see, is what the USDA terms a “specialty crop,” which is how it classifies all fruits and vegetables, as opposed to the commodity crops brought to you by ADM and DuPont. How weird is that? At a time when the FDA is constantly chanting the “more fruits and vegetables” mantra, our government relegates these very foods to the fringes of our agricultural policies.
That’s why it’s so heartening to read the story in today’s Peoria Journal Star about the Land Connection, an Illinois-based non-profit, giving aspiring organic farmers the opportunity to buy 10 or 20 acre lots of an 80 acre farm formerly owned by environmental activist and biologist Sandra Steingraber, author of the pesticide exposé Living Downstream.
Founded in 2002 to create “healthy farms, healthy food, and healthy communities,” the Land Connection’s mission is to not only save precious farmland from sprawl, but to help conventional farms make the transition to organic, sustainable agricultural practices, and assist new organic farmers.
Will they succeed in stepping up the ratio of spinach to soybeans in their region? It’s an uphill battle, acknowledged Terra Brockman, Land Connection’s executive director:
The Land Connection began when its founders banded together to buy up 21 acres of pasture put on the market by an elderly farm couple who needed to sell off a chunk of land to pay for their medical bills:
Year by year, this is an increasingly common story. Farmers get older, their children do not want to farm or cannot afford to farm, and so land is sold to developers who turn around and sell it in 2-acre plots. This in turn drives land prices up, effectively preventing any young farmers from getting started.
As we soon learned, that 21 acres was the tip of an iceberg. Much of the land surrounding it is also owned by elderly farmers who will be selling it to the highest bidder in the coming years. Hundred of acres of fertile farmland is on the verge of being lost forever. We have all seen what the future holds: homes and businesses, strip malls and parking lots. Already 3 plots have been sold off to individuals who have built or will be building homes on them on prime farmland. A startling statistic I came across is that 2,750 acres of farmland are paved in the U.S. every day. And that statistic is 10 years old.
Once farmland is gone, it’s gone. Once a rural community becomes a bedroom community, it is changed forever.
Conservatives love to trot out the myth of the estate tax-endangered family farm, but that rural legend’s been effectively debunked.What’s killing the small family farms is not the so-called “death tax,” but situations like the one described above, in which the farmer couldn’t afford the costs of health care and could get twice as much money for his land if he sold it to a developer to subdivide than if he sold it to a fellow farmer.
President Bush is supposedly going to offer some solutions to our health care crisis in his SOTU address tonight, but I doubt any of them will offer real relief to a small family farmer burdened by medical bills.
Oh, and the energy initiatives he’s reportedly going to propose? Prepare to be pelted by corn, corn, and more corn. Don’t be sucked in; despite all the hoopla, corn-based ethanol is a boondoggle, not a boon. There may be environmentally friendly ways to make ethanol, but corn ain’t one of them.
Meanwhile, the cost of corn is shooting up as agribiz and Wall Street see green in this not-so-green biomess. The price of tortillas has tripled south of the border, compelling angry Mexicans to take to the streets in protest.
What would it take to get Americans to take to the streets? Could there ever be a Boston Tea Party for our era? Hard to imagine, when Americans won’t take to the streets for all the tea in China. I’m just hoping we can muster up enough energy to demand better energy policies and a family farm-friendly farm bill.
authored by kat at EATING LIBERALLY[B]
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