Midweek Linkage

Everybody (who counts) seems thrilled about Obama's nomination of Kathleen Merrigan for Deputy Agriculture Secretary. It looks as if the President is maintaining his trend of counterpoise, with Merrigan the yin to Tom Vilsack's yang.

This is a nice older article from the St. Pete Times about a northern Florida version of libertarian uber-farmer Joel Salatin. "Screw the conventional, big agricultural model, and screw the U.S.D.A. for prostitution to industrial interests and monolithic heavy-handedness":

After the state Department of Agriculture shut [Stoltzfoos] down for five months in 2005, he received a license to market his eggs, poultry and dairy products as pet food.

Selling raw milk for humans is illegal in Florida, and, according to many food scientists, dangerous and foolish. The fat-soluble vitamins in milk, A and D, stand up well to the heat of pasteurization and even ultra-pasteurization, when milk is heated briefly above the boiling point. Raw milk drinkers risk E. coli outbreaks, such as the one that swept through a natural foods co-op in Washington state in 2005.

Other scientists say there is no doubt milk from grass-fed cows is higher in vitamins and essential fatty acids and that pasteurization destroys some nutrients, including beneficial bacteria. Also, they say, raw milk from small farms is safer than milk from the filthy, urban dairies that created an outcry for pasteurization in the early 20th century.

New Yorkers are trying their hands (and turning their noses up) at vermiculture. I think city-dwellers need firsthand contact with organic processes--a world with more stink and less geometry. Whether in food or tennis shoes, we've all got to overcome the meretriciousness and obscurity of the market.

Got some time and a yen for edification? Read "Putting Meat on the Table: Industrial Farm Animal Production in America" from the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production. The PDF is available at Pew Charitable Trusts' Save Antibiotics site--well worth exploring.

Got more time and a modicum of curiosity? Then find out where your fresh fruits and vegetables come from with this calculator from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture. Newsflash, Georgia: You may be the domestic leader in greens, but the Peach State trails California, New Jersey, Washington, and South Carolina in producing its namesake crop.

Yes, New Jersey.

Did I Say "Vengeance"?

How about with a limp? I'm putting together a big, eclectic, aggregated post today to make up for lost time and exaggerated proclamations.

Here's the first shot, courtesy of Josh: U.S. Food Policy blog. Read anything, read everything. I was turned on by the post on declining nutrient content in fruits and vegetables.

.........

6:00 p.m. Update:

The super-cell thunderstorms have passed my part of North Georgia, and now my blood pressure has lowered sufficiently to put a sentence together. I hope everyone else is lucky enough to escape the severe weather.

• I've got to start by going back to U.S. Food Policy, which does an excellent job of linking policy papers on the economics and "healthiness" of the domestic food industry. I just finished reading a paper on "implicit subsidies to corn sweeteners and the U.S. obesity epidemic." And it's hard to come away from it doubting that the oil and corn commodity bubble will finally burst in the next decade, with traumatic effects. While I'm not going to give away the conclusion, since I'm fond of provenience stories, I can't refrain from quoting at length about the origins of high fructose corn syrup in the American diet.

  With per-capita consumption weighing in at 43 pounds per year, it is worth retracing how HFCS came to be America’s sweetener of choice. In the 1970s and 1980s, HFCS burst into the sweetener industry as it replaced sugar, most prominently in carbonated beverages, but also in baked goods and other foods. As a liquid, HFCS is easier to work with than sugar, and six times sweeter. It also prolongs shelf life and resists freezer burn. From 1980, the year when Coca-Cola first used HFCS in its sodas, to 1999, per capita consumption of HFCS grew by a staggering 235%. Today, HFCS represents more than 40% of the caloric sweeteners added to foods and beverages, and is the only sweetener added to soft drinks in the United States. Each year, about 500 million bushels, or 5%, of the U.S. corn crop is used to produce HFCS.
  
  In the 1970s, HFCS’s competitive advantage over sugar derived partly from R&D expenditures in the corn wet milling process. However, corn sweeteners have also benefited from the U.S. sugar program, which includes prohibitive trade restrictions and production allotments. With a high price floor for sugar and below-cost corn underwriting liquid HFCS, sugar cannot be price-competitive with HFCS. Data from 1963-2005 show real corn prices falling more than twice as fast as real sugar prices. As such, manufacturers have historically been able to purchase HFCS at prices 20% to 70% less than sugar prices. A 1983 Fortune magazine article estimated that Coca-Cola gained a cost advantage of $70 million annually over Pepsi when it switched from sugar to HFCS.

• OK, where have I been? For one, I've been at the Farm Service Agency, checking into drought insurance payments (come on, big money), wetlands and riparian buffer conservation programs, and potential start-up loans. Word of advice, if you're in Georgia, don't go to the state office in Athens. They know nothing. It's not worth you time to go through the metal detector.
• I've been cleaning up the old, forgotten cemetery in the woods on Ellison Farm Road because my great-great-great-great grandfather stays there, inside a rudimentary stone enclosure. His wife, Jane Bell, my great-great-great-great grandmother, is also my great-great-great aunt. But that's a story we don't want to get into. I've also been hanging out with the old folks in the cemetery up the road, which I'm happy to say the subdivision developers fenced off neatly.
• I've been admiring beeches, and I think you should admire them, too.
• I've been listening to a lot of Charley Patton: Shake It and Break It.
• I downloaded The Greenhorns Guide to Beginning Farmers. No review yet.
• I'm almost finished Wild Card Quilt: Taking a Chance on Home by Janisse Ray, whom I can't wait to see at the Georgia Organics conference in March. I also started reading The Good Life, which I am thoroughly enjoying for its sense of political independence combined with practical know-how.
  
• I now know the proper pH level for growing blueberries. I can rank the N-K-P content in the manure of rabbits, chickens, feeder cows, horses, and sheep, respectively. I've got a good idea how to compost a lot of chicken shit to take the heat off--and a good deal of cow shit to kill the seeds inside.
• I've been examining plows and disc harrows and flipping through catalogs of heirloom tomato seeds. I discovered that household vinegar is a fine herbicide. But killing bermudagrass still defies me. The best advice I've heard so far is to split a couple atoms on your land and incinerate the stuff in a nuclear holocaust. Let's see what the county agent has to say first.
  
• I've got plans for a dandelion salad and echinacea tea.
• I turned down a remarkable offer to help a small farm outside of Raleigh in its transition to a fully organic operation that runs off-the-grid. Why?...
• Because, as some of you might have guessed, I'm about to go halvers on a truck-farming operation in Georgia: 3 acres and a pile of tomatoes. Cherokee purple tomatoes (pictured at the top). This is going to be a hell of a thing, but it's time for risks and the courage and energy to pursue the kind of life I want. And this is family, which trumps almost everything else.
  
  
  The Upper Farm fifty years ago.
  
• Lastly, I saw a bobcat last Friday night/Saturday morning. That's not an obscure euphemism about Valentine's Day. I really saw one. I also saw a 260 lb. man fall and bust his head about 2:30 in the morning. Nothing that a bag of Krystal's couldn't fix up.
• Miscellaneous links: Walter Reeves on Georgia gardening, University of Georgia College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences on Growing Vegetables Organically, Mother Earth News blog.
  

Selah

Coming Back with a Vengeance

No new content on Rural Pen. Booor-ing.

Where have I been? Salmonella outbreak in Georgia--I know, I know: right up my alley. Well, I apologize for my indisposition and cross my heart, hoping to die, that it will never happen again.

Watching a superb and shocking episode of This American Life last night, I felt inspired to post something about factory farming today.

Here goes. Pity the piglets: