#third plate

So what is intensive farming? Quick break down. Intensive farming is spending a lot of capital on inputs such as manual labour, technological innovation, and mechanization to work the land or a green house to produce high yields and low fallow. Seems pretty simple and harmless until you see what that money buys and how those products are implemented. For example technological innovation could be inputs of pesticides, chemical fertilizers, and plant growth regulators. All of which compromise the real nutrition provided to us and the land it's grown on as well as, a more critical issue, the after effects and unforeseen externalities, such as depletion of ground water, poisoning of water sheds, and eutrophication, (heavy doses of nitrogen and other nutrients that are leaked into rivers and lakes, which end up suffocating the watershed of all oxygen) of our estuaries. (What is an estuary you might ask? where rivers meet the oceans. These places are some of the most bio diverse places in the world). There are also different types of intensive farming, from fruit and veggie growing, to raising animals for meat, dairy, and eggs, to producing cereals for consumption and baling hey. All these different types, have a right way, and a wrong way of being worked.

The following is a quick snap shot of different versions of intensive farms according to me. There is much more information and for the sake of keeping it to the point I made this brief list.

Intensive farms the ugly

-Heavily dependant on fossil fuels. -Often use a big plot of land for one crop, which has proven to lead to disease, infertile land, followed by a disappearance of bio diverse life forms. -Use technological innovations, such as chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, to control and get predictable uniform behaviour from crops. -Fruits and veggies ripened using various gasses, fossil fuels, and chemicals for the purpose of supply and demand. -Feedlots, often only feed corn or soy to the animals in a tight space. Disease, and bacterial outbreaks are often the result, as well as added fossil fuel emissions into the atmosphere. These farms are the same places that supply you with meat and veggies at your grocery store. -Deplete soil fertility due to lack of cover crop and extensive use of chemical fertilizers which kill most nutrients, fertility and life forms within and around the land. -Nutrient density in crops often non existent.

Intensive farms the compromise

-Dependant on fossil fuel inputs such as tractors, and combines -Do not use chemical fertilizers. -Till land by way of mechanical inputs, which causes stress to the microbial environment in soil causing fertility and top soil to decline. -Use of polycrop system which includes annual and perennial food systems and crop rotation techniques. -promotes bio diversity, and more bushels of food per acre than that of a mono crop field. -Use natural techniques and organic matter to grow, ripen, and cure food. -Maintain and Improve soil fertility, by way of using compost, crop rotation and cover cropping after harvest. -Nutrient density in food grown, is exponentially more than non organic.

Intensive farms the ideal

-Limited or no dependancy on fossil fuel inputs. -Use of poly crop system which includes annual and perennial food systems and crop rotation techniques. -Promotes bio diversity, and more bushels of food per acre than that of a mono crop field. -Use of natural systems or a mimic of natural systems, that brings a harmony and balance with nature. -incorporate animals to add balance, strength and fertility, to food, land, and ecosystem. -Improve soil fertility by way of compost, cover cropping, and more use of perennial food systems for less disturbance of land and soil. -Food grown has a nutrient density far superior to a non organic farm. -Minimum till involved, due to intensive labour and use of hand tools, as well as use of perennial system rather than intensive annual systems.

What a lot of people don't understand about growing food, is that in order to grow nutritious and healthy whole foods, you must always start with healthy soil. You need happy healthy soil, to get the best nutrition on your plates. Yes, soil is alive, and is in itself an ecosystem and in my opinion an organism. To have happy healthy soil, you have to feed the various organisms that live in the soil for the nutrient density to have value and create delicious food. So worms, fungi, bacteria and various other microbes need to be fed to cycle the nutrients in forms of minerals, chemicals, and proteins, so that plants can take that along with photosynthesis, create a highly nutritious form of sustenance to us or other animals, of which we end up eating. You want to eat the best steak, you will need that cow to graze the best vegetation, courtesy of healthy soil. However there is a balance needed to maintain proper soil fertility. If you over fertilize your soil, it becomes too rich, and as stated in Dan Barbers book, The Third Plate, "the crops start to resemble a guy on the street who's had too much to drink." If say your soil was the opposite and it was lacking fertility, then you will get certain weeds presenting themselves giving you information on what your soil is lacking, for example the presence of dock will let you know that your soil may have a high lime content. There is a great article about weeds and the indications they give of soil conditions posted by Ecological Agricultural Projects from the University of McGill. Posted below is the link.

eap.mcgill.ca/publications/EAP67.htm

The healthy plants produced by healthy soils also eliminate pests. Insects only attack unhealthy plants, giving the opportunity for healthy plants to maintain their lineage and strengthen the gene pool. Unfortunately due to the use of chemical fertilizers and poor farming practices, our soil reserves have been disappearing.

Soil reserves are being depleted in many parts of the world, which can lead to outcomes like desertification. If good land turns to poor land, no matter how much rain you get, water will not soak in, and the nutrients will get washed away and erode. Soil that is fertile is not just better for growing food but it helps to alleviate flood damage, water shortages, and allows for rain water to soak into the soil, rather than leach the nutrients and wither away the soil. By the 1970's a third of the arable top soil in the United States was washed away into the sea. Who knows where it's at now, a lot worse I'm guessing.

Contrary to popular belief that chemical fertilizers are what balance the soil and allow for the optimal soil conditions to grow food, has been debunked for well over 50 years. Natural farming, or organic farming has proven in many ways how to balance and feed soil not just without damaging it, but improving the land. Chemical farming made way by the Haber Bosch process of making NPK, (chemical fertilizer that fixes nitrogen in soil) although providing record yield after record yield, has caused more damage than gain in agriculture. Where as if it were done organically, we would be looking at planting legumes because they magically fix the nitrogen in the soil. The legumes are able to grab the nitrogen in the atmosphere and feed it to the soil, giving it what it needs, and wants. While I was in Costa Rica, there were rows of leguminous trees that were planted between rows of fruit trees to help with the process of nitrogen fixing. Where as at my current farm, Foxglove, an organic intensive annual farm, replenishes nitrogen to the soil once a crop has been harvested. The harvested field is cover cropped with clover grass to replenish the soil from fall until spring when the field will be used again for planting its annuals.

In the book written by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, the secret life of plants, states, "it should be obvious that soil is vital to health. Healthy soil, properly composted, with the right bacteria, fungi, and earthworms, free from chemical fertilizers and pesticides, produces strong healthy plants which naturally repel pests. Healthy plants make strong healthy animals and strong healthy human beings. Poor land grows poor food, poor vitamins, minerals, enzymes and proteins; this produces poor, sick people. Worn out land causes people to leave the farms and go to live in the slums."

That last part is rather harsh, and maybe over the top, but what is explained here is what has happened all over the world. There has been a mass diaspora from rural living to city living. Many small holder farmers have to leave their communities to find work in cities, because of either lack of income, or food due to famine, or policy changes, making it difficult to have a livelihood in a rural area. I  was also told this by friends in Costa Rica who saw there friends leave the small town of Mastatal for work in the big city, only to see their physiology completely change. Going from healthy individuals to pot bellied bread eating fiends.  Basically abandoning the best nutrition and active life they could have had for an empty source of nutrition, and a fast paced stress that only a city can offer. All this can puts ones health in a state of imbalance. To prove this point further, in Dan barber's book The Third Plate, discusses the nutrient density in a carrot grown in a monoculture "organic" field by a big multinational corporation, in relation to one grown at his farm, Stone Barns, in upstate New York. Dan's farming friends pulled out a device called a refractometer which measures nutrient density by giving a reading of the sugar concentration. Anything above a 10 is a good healthy product. The grocery store "organic" carrot had a reading of zero. Meaning you are not really getting what you're  paying for, and you are certainly not anything nutritionally speaking. Most of those zero carrots are headed for big cities and surrounding suburbs. I can attest to that because my body has changed so much since I started eating organic whole foods, courtesy of Rancho Mastatal and Foxglove farms, but when I come back to Toronto, it's quite easy to fall back onto non organic foods, because it is served everywhere and quite cheap, and once again I see my body change in the brief months I'm there.

So you might ask yourself how can a carrot grown and labelled organically have barely any nutrition in it? It's organic and you assume it was grown ethically. This is where the confusion and treachery by the big guys gets even more evident. Simply put, they don't feed the soil what it needs, and to know what it needs, you have to observe it. Most big ag corporations do what they can to maximize the most for the least. In this case they will create many short cuts to reach organic food grade codes, charge you more for the organic label, and for the empty nutrition, They probably don't cover crop once harvesting is done, which is vital for soil health when you are growing annual crops. They probably may not use compost, or minerals, and will almost find someway of using some sort of pesticide or herbicide that has not been put on the banned substance list. All this tells me, that the system is flawed, and rather than seeing adds at grocery stores for organic foods, which trick you, you should see a section where you can purchase food grown by way of chemicals, and call it chemical foods. Then have a complete other section called regular food that has never once had any human alchemy touch it. Guarantee you, it will make you think twice about what you buy.

To take it another step further and guilt y'all a bit more, there are big unforeseen externalities when you buy chemical foods. Sure there is your long term health that is surely affected, but there is also the fact that those growing your food in the field have such an unfair life, so you can purchase your food at an affordable price. Take for instance the Florida tomato producers. In the book The Value Of Nothing, author Raj Patel, does some startling investigating on the Florida tomato business, which produces ninety percent of the winter tomato supply for the U.S. What he finds is modern day slavery in the first world. These farmers work for private family owned corporations like Six L's packing company, and Pacific Tomato growers, and are over worked, immensely under paid, causing them to live in unbelievable living conditions, especially considering it is in a first world country. As Patel writes in his book "Work for tomato pickers is irregular, dependent on the weather, and merciless. A talented picker who is lucky enough to work in a field that hasn't yet been picked (they're picked up to four times, and on the fourth sweep, there's pitifully little left on the vine) can fill 150 buckets a day. Workers lift up to 2.4 tons of tomatoes per day, sold in the stores for about $5000, and for which they might get paid $67 for twelve hours work. This is a rate of 45 cents per thirty two pound bucket of green tomatoes, and it has increased only five cents in the past thirty years- If the piece rate had only kept up with inflation it would today be $1.02 per bucket"

Now consider these folks living conditions. They live in an off campus trailer park where a handful of local slumlords charge them forty dollars a week to share a trailer that is crammed with 8 people. Every morning they cue to use the bathroom, and stove in the evening. If they want an AC unit they pay an additional twenty dollars a week, and if they wanted to wash the pesticides of there skin after work, they were charged $5. Some workers thought it better to wash their hands in bleach.

Reading this, I was heartbroken and disgusted, that something like this would happen not just in the first world but close enough to Canada. Now I don't think Canada has this type of human rights issues with agriculture, that I know of, but most of our winter produce comes from South America or the States. So what are the externalities of what we buy in a grocery store? I don't know, but if this situation can happen in the states, who knows what happens elsewhere in the world, that we are blind to.

Another inconvenient truth

Sadly it gets worse. I said earlier agriculture is the largest producer of green house gas emissions. That is all thanks to the factory farming method of feedlots for various forms of livestock. Rather than have cattle grazing and eating a varied nutritious diet of grasses, weeds and grains, they are subjected to hybridized and cheaply produced corn and soy feed. This type of nutrition is made to get the cow fat, so when you buy a steak it gets a nice marbling. However, once again it is very empty nutrition.

If a cow got to graze rather than fed grain, it would eat a very varied and nutritious diet. A cow is very good at finding what it needs for its own diet. A cow may start off eating a particular type of grass, but it will move on when it has eaten a sufficient quantity, because it needs other nutrients from other sources of vegetation. It instinctually does this because the nutrients it needs, doesn't just come from one or two things. A cow eating grass also helps to make the grass thrive, because when a cow bites down on grass its mouth is designed by nature in a way to not be able to eat the whole plant in one bite. So the cow stresses the grass with its bite, which cause the roots of the grass to go deeper and fortify itself, and the tops of the grass to grow with more vigour and abundance. Now over grazing has definitely occurred, but that falls to poor farming practices, and not enough varied vegetation on the land. Essentially you don't have to feed the cow any type of feed, because the cow is instinctually made to eat grass, and knows what it needs. The key in grazing livestock is to not have the animals graze on the same patch of land. You need to implement rotational grazing, so that the grass that has been eaten has time to recover. This type of farming has many benefits. It mimics and completes the circle nature created for wild grazing animals. The dung from the cow will eventually biodegrade and build soil, for future land fertility, and also create a microclimate for grass and soil to not erode, dry up, or wash away from various weather scenarios. Not to mention grasses cover a much bigger area of land than trees and are thus able to sequester more carbon than trees.

The following video is a bit long, but Joel salatin, a very good, intelligent and reputable farmer, does a great job of explaining this.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4Z75A_JMBx4

With feedlots, you get corn and soy fed to the cows, who gorge on it because that's all they have. They are crammed into a pen, and are essentially in a dog eat dog world, a prison for growing meat. It's quite inhumane to only eat, not get excerise, and walk amongst your own, and your fellow mates piss and shit. Herbivores like cows and sheep are grass eaters, and the different grasses they eat give them a variety of nutrition. This unvaried diet and uncleanly situation is the perfect ground for poor quality meat, disease, and health defects. I doubt you ever here of small scale organic cattle farmers having ecoli outbreaks. All the recalls for beef come from feedlot farming. What's worse about this, there is so much cattle shitting and farting, that they are literally spewing out green house gas emissions of monumental proportions from the their bum holes. Worst of all, all the bio mass created from the dung, is not used that effectively. It's often discarded, rather than used as a fertilizer to dress the top soil. Instead the manure becomes a water quality risk, where algae blooms, salmonella, e.coli, and groundwater contamination become increasingly evident. The big difference with rotational grazing, is that the cows eat grass, take a shit, the shit decays and fertilizers the land, before you come back on you next rotation. Allowing for a natural cycle to take place.

But it still gets a little more bizarre with feedlot meat. Now when you go to a grocery store and buy your feed lot steak or ground beef, do you notice the color of the meat? It's like a pinkish red colour. That's not the colour of the meat. That's a die meant to make the meat look clean and neat. When you cook this meat, it may look like blood running out, but it's actually the dye. You go to an organic butcher you will see a much more natural colour, a maroon like colour with a well defined marbling. It may not look all that clean or appealing in comparison to the grocery store, but that's how it should look. To me it's very appealing and natural looking when I see legit organic beef.

Now this isnt meant to turn you off of meat, but this is a video that will give you great idea about why livestock feedlots contribute so much, and in fact the most towards green house gas emissions. However, this doesn't mean I ask you to not eat meat. We need to be more cognizant of our health, and eat in moderation. We certainly do not need to eat meat every day let alone three times a day. Raising livestock is a merit good for the land. Cows, goats, pigs, chickens, sheep, etc, do a huge favour to add fertility to the soil. Not just with their shit, but with their hooves. When grazing animals are raised with good husbandry, there is an amazing give and take relationship here.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=WrXaQuBl6Z8

The following Ted talk by Allan savoury explains the importance of grazing animals and why proper husbandry can help you reduce green house gases and reverse the effect of land turning into desserts. So all you vegetarians that think we should all stop eating meat, you are ill informed and lacking some awareness of the importance of ecosystems, and how humans need to mimic natures system for the benefit of all.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=vpTHi7O66pI

Green revolution misconceptions

There is an argument for chemical fertilizers and artificial selection that shows a great success. The green revolution, pioneered by a man named Norman Borlaug, has said to have saved a billion lives, especially in India, where in the nineteen sixties there was a dire need for food. Borlaug was able to breed high yielding crops like dwarf wheat and rice, and distribute hybrid seeds, to help Indians dire food shortage. The only problem, these new varieties would only cork with  synthetic fertilizers, and pesticides. For his efforts, Borlaug received the Nobel peace prize. A worthy distinction for saving a billion lives. However there is a catch. A deep unforeseen externality, that probably a lot of people did not see coming, and the cries from activists in the sixties and seventies, fell on deaf ears. India is in the midst of another possible famine for the same reason the green revolution was a success. The fertilizers, pesticides, and high yield hybrid varieties that were used, have all but depleted her land of fertility. Ground water is polluted, along with that rivers, and creeks, that serve as habitat for many creatures and Eco systems have little life left in it. Crop diversity also suffered, which by now you should know is so very important to healthy land. Not only did India lose a large amount of indigenous crops, but they also lost what makes sense for sense of place, as in a cultural identity. The green revolution was also sparked by the efforts of small holder farmers, however the high yield crops needed vast amounts of lands and vast amounts of chemical fertilizer in the form of NPK, making small holder farmers to discard their polyculture farms in favour of a monoculture. What saved a billion people, was a quick fix, patch work, because now three to four billion people maybe affected in the immediate future. Every year that goes by, these hybrid crops need more and more chemical fertilizer and pesticides to be affective. Without it, it cannot grow. It also takes  upto three maybe four times as much ground water to grow the crops. Imagine a place like India, a culinary center of the world, not being able to produce food for its delicious local cuisine, and having to depend on imports.

Vandana Shiva, a physicist and environmental activist wrote, "it is often said that the so-called miracle of the green revolution in modern industrial agriculture prevented famine because they had higher yields. However these higher yields disappeared in the context of total yields of crops on farms." 

The point she is making is that, you might be able to get say 100 bushels of food on an acre from a monoculture, but, if you take that same acre and planted around 5 different crops, you may get twenty five to thirty bushels per crop, giving you an additional twenty five to to fifty bushels of food. Here at foxglove, we have about a three acres that is farmed intensively in an organic manner, and within the three acres we produced over thirty different fruits and veggies, that are plentiful amounts. This year has been a down year because of the unpredictable nature of weather, however, there is still an abundant amount of delicious food grown.

What Borlaug and the avant garde members of the green revolution failed was in foresight. Not being able to observe and understand what was happening to the land and its surrounding ecosystems could have the potential to bring famine, health defects, and permanent loss of diversity to all its living citizens, from microbe to human. They put together an infrastructure for the moment, but did not prepare one for our grand children, let alone our future sons and daughters.

The need for farms with animal systems, and to eat meat

There is a lot of push back from vegetarians as to why we should not eat meat. They do have a point, and their biggest argument being feedlots giving off the most green house gases in the form of methane emissions. Methane emissions give of triple the emissions of carbon, cause our planet to heat up much more quickly. To a point, I agree, but to a very small point. Yes, methane is released in incredible amounts from cow bums, but the same cannot be said for chickens, goats, lamb and pigs. Cows in comparison double and triple the rest in terms of emissions. Now I still will not advocate for not eating beef, because we need cattle to give fertility to land. They do an incredible service to the planet and us. In return we should give them the life they deserve, to graze the fields, and have freedom to be a cow. Everything a cow gets to do as a cow on open land is a type of trophic cascade. As the Joel salitan video asks, what if McDonald's and Burger King used grass fed, ethically raised beef in their menus. We would all have better nutrition, the ills of feed lots would no longer exist, and everything will belong to a natural cycle. When you displace the natural cycle for immense artificial production, without understanding the outcomes, you are bound to get a broken process, where patch work keeps mounting, until in the end there is no more patch work cause the whole thing imploded. Natures work is designed with so much over compensation and fail safes, that we just have to trust it. The other important things to note is that, we need to eat meat in moderation. We don't need meat everyday, and we should celebrate and be grateful for the service the animals have provided for our own survival, and pleasure. Vegetarians and vegans will also say, that it is cruel to slaughter animals. To that I say, what the hell are you talking about? Ever heard of a lion, or a shark. Do you understand the service they provide to the environment? Have you ever heard of a Venus fly trap? You know the carnivorous plant. Even microbes, in the form of bacteria eat other microbes. This is all part of the give and take relationship that a lot of people are disconnected with. With that said, I leave you with this video, on what is referred to as a trophic cascade, and why predators are important to the overall well being of the planet.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ysa5OBhXz-Q

We need only to understand where humans can be a trophic cascade, and implement it for a harmonious and thriving scenario, so we can no longer be a pestilence to this world. Somewhere between the industrial revolution and present day we as humans abandoned the skill of growing food. Which also soon led us away from the kitchen and making us dependent on others to cook our food. The phrase the whole is greater than the sum of it parts comes to mind when I think of the disconnect we have had with food, both growing and cooking. The moving away from these skills I believe has changed the whole. What if we grew our own tomatoes? What if we canned and preserved our own food with our families rather than depending on a corporation to cook for us? What if we caused a movement to reduce the need of chemical foods, and make organic food the cheaper option? I believe growing our own food is one way to level the nutritional gap between monetary classes, and having it start with children from an early age, will help to set up that infrastructure. The current whole will, I think be quite different in the future if this can be implemented.

Sources

Dan Barber, The Third Plate (penguin books), 57-61

Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, The Secret life of plants (penguin books), 225

Raj Patel, The Value of Nothing (picador), 125-127