THE FOOD CO-OP - Port Townsend Food Co-op

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food for thought Who’s A Farmer? What’s A Farm? “Farming” can be many things: production agriculture that produces produces commodity crops for the global market; market; traditional farming of the past that produced cash crops and food for the table; subsistence farming (the way most people in the world farm) that focuses on growing food for the family and perhaps selling the excess to a local market. Today, farming might also be backyard farming, urban farming, rooftop farming, and more. According to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary (online at www.learnersdictionary. com), a farm is “a piece of land used for growing crops or raising animals” and farming is “the job or business of running a farm.” Scott County, Iowa defi nes a farmer as “A person or persons actively engaged in farming and deriving taxable income from such activity” (http://www.scottcountyiowa.com/planning/farmer_ ag.php). Scott County has a rather defi nite set of parameters for what may be called a farm and it’s not anything under 40 acres, except “by making application to the Zoning Board of Adjustment in accordance with the Board’s procedures for Appeals of Interpretation.” In our own county, the Jefferson County Farmers Market Guidelines (available online at www.jeffersoncountyfarmersmarket.org) defi ne a farmer as “one who raises the produce, plants or animals, or animal products on land they own, rent or lease in the state of Washington, or harvests seafood or other approved wild edibles, which they sell at the market.” According to the USDA defi nition, a small farmer is defi ned as one that grows and sells between $1,000 and $250,000 per year in agricultural products (Small Farm News, http://ucanr.org). Defi ning Terms In Changing Times DEBORAH SCHUMACHER, Sta Writer “...you might have ten acres or one acre...” How we defi ne a farm Putting aside the various institutional defi nitions of this fundamental occupation, if you are using a piece of land to produce food, you are farming. You might own and operate a farm of many acres to produce food for a local or regional or national or even global market. You might have 10 acres or one acre or a greenhouse on a city lot where you raise and sell a farm product through a CSA, local farmers markets, and local and regional retail markets. You might hire yourself out as a “personal farmer,” cultivating other people’s backyards to provide food for their table. Or it might be your “job” in the labor market of your household to weed the garden in the backyard. “It takes two flints to make a fire.” - Louisa May Alcott Thinking about who and what is a farmer isn’t just an interesting thought experiment. Depending on where you live, local zoning ordinances may limit the scale of your operation or what you can raise on your farm. Your town or city will permit some farm animals: hens but not roosters; pigs but not goats; goats but not sheep. There may be hoops to jump through or costs to incur. Does the city or county you live in give you legal status as a farmer? How does this designation—or lack of—affect your access to water, tax breaks, federal dollars to subsidize your operation, to the ways you get to use your land? The good news Two hundred years ago, most of the U.S. population was farming. Today, that number has dwindled to 2% and the average age of a farmer in the U.S. is 55. The good news is, in the last few years, there’s been an increase in the number of farmers, mostly in organic agriculture, and more young people are interested in farming as an occupation and a way of life. But because access to land, especially good farmland, is so limited, young and beginning farmers are having to fi nd new ways to enter the fi eld. For this reason, it may be time to think about how we defi ne farms and farmers both culturally and legally. In our hearts and in our government let’s enlarge the defi nition to include those who farm in places or in ways that haven’t been traditionally seen as “farms” or “farming.” Should the global agricultural project fail, more of us may be pressed into the service of providing food for our families, our neighbors, and for others in our community. The way we will “feed the world” will likely be the way we feed ourselves—supporting and even subsidizing all the ways we grow food will be a necessary part of the new food economy. THE FOOD CO-OP COMMONS www.foodcoop.coop 16 July / August 2011
Bottled Water The New Uncool DEBORAH SCHUMACHER , Sta Sta Writer In the history of good ideas, bottled water will one day go down as…not such a good idea. According to “The Story of Bottled Water,” consumption of water sold in plastic bottles is down while the sale of reusable drinking bottles is increasing. In this eight minute clip about the history of bottled water (you can view it at www.storyofbottledwater.org) it’s predicted that if the trend continues, drinking water from a single-use plastic bottle will soon be as uncool as smoking cigarettes. Americans drink their way through a lot of plastic water bottles (a half-billion a week, or enough to circle the globe fi ve times); about 80% of them end up in landfi lls or are burned in incinerators (“The Story of Bottled Water”). Plastics in the landfi ll leach chemicals that can end up in soils and drinking water. These same chemicals are released into the air when plastics are incinerated. And too much plastic (and not just water bottles) migrates into our waterways and eventually into the ocean, where it’s accumulating in the “Great Pacifi c Garbage Patch,” an area of high concentration of debris in the northeastern corner of the North Pacifi c Subtropical Gyre (Algalita Marine Research Foundation). Plastics, like diamonds, are forever Trawl research from the RV Alguita studied plastic debris in the NE Pacifi c Gyre in 1999 and found the plastic to zooplankton ratio in the ocean was 6:1— six pounds of plastic to one pound of food. In 2008 they returned to the region and discovered the ratio had increased to 46.4 pounds of plastic to one pound of food (“Marine Debris: The Pelagic Plastic Plague”). That’s an astonishing fact in itself. More disturbing is that sea animals confuse our plastic refuse for food and eat it. This can result in intestinal blockage if the plastic doesn’t pass through the intestinal tract and in some cases “starvation occurs because the plastic makes the animal feel full without having had any nourishment” (Algalita Marine Research Foundation). Pre-production plastic dust and plastic pellets, called “nurdles,” also end up in the waste stream, in our waterways and fi nally the ocean. Nurdles look like fi sh eggs (food) and contain toxic concentrations of PCBs and other chemicals up to 1,000,000 times the levels found in ambient sea water. Human health is affected when we’re exposed to these toxic chemicals when we eat seafood and fi sh (“Marine Debris”). Many of us try to do the responsible thing and recycle our plastic bottles. But what happens to the tons of plastic bottles that don’t go into our county landfi lls? They might be shipped to places like India, where mountains of plastic bottles are accumulating in other people’s backyards. Are they being recycled? According to “The Story of Bottled Water,” not necessarily. They might be “down-cycled” into cheaper products that get thrown out later or, after a long trip across the ocean, thrown away. food for thought “1/3 of bottled water is ltered tap water” Manufactured demand Why do we buy bottled water? According to “The Story of Bottled Water,” after soda sales started to level off, bottled water manufacturers deliberately created a need where none existed before. Thanks to “manufactured demand,” people were convinced through advertising that bottled water is safer and better tasting than what comes out of the tap. In a couple generations, they’ve been so successful we’re willing to spend about 2,000 times more for bottled water than for tap water. Despite labels that picture mountains and streams, one-third of bottled water is fi ltered tap water, including Pepsi’s Aquafi na and Coke’s Dasani (“Story of Bottled Water”). In a survey conducted by the Environmental Working Group (EWG), more than half the bottled water products surveyed failed their “transparency test”: 18% didn’t say where their water comes from and 32% didn’t disclose any information about treatment or the purity of their water (“Best and worst bottled water brands”). Water from your tap, on the other hand, is regularly tested and you can fi nd out about your local water either online or by contacting your public utility company. Filtered tap water gets the highest score (an A) from EWG’s grading of the 10 top-selling U.S. bottled water brands “because if you can change your fi lter regularly…it is purer than bottled water, plus it saves money.” Clean water for all Water is properly a part of the “commons,” a resource that people share, not a commodity sold by private companies to “consumers.” It was a very clever colonization of the commons when corporations like Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Nestlé bought into public water systems so they could turn around and sell water back to citizens for 2,000 times the cost of water from their own kitchen tap. Maybe it’s time to “take back the tap.” Some suggestions from “The Story of Bottled Water”: demand investment in public water infrastructure, lobby for drinking fountains, switch to reusable bottles, and boycott bottled water. Sources: Algalita Marine Research Foundation website at www.algalita.org “Best and Worst Bottled Water Brands,” Lori Bongiomo (www.shine.yahoo.com) “Marine Debris: The Pelagic Plastic Plastic Plague” (www.nextworldtv.com/videos/ what-isnt-working-1/oceans-of-plastic.html) what-isnt-working-1/oceans-of-plastic.html what-isnt-working-1/oceans-of-plastic.html) “The Story of Bottled Water” (www.storyofbottledwater.org) www.storyofbottledwater.org) “Education is not the filling of the pail, but the lighting of the fire.” - William Butler Yeats THE FOOD CO-OP COMMONS www.foodcoop.coop 17 July / August 2011
Page 1 and 2: e ! THE FOOD CO-OP COMMONS www.food
Page 3 and 4: from page 2 and Linda Davis, were s
Page 5 and 6: Thursday July 21 8 am-9 pm Thrifty
Page 7 and 8: DEBORAH SCHUMACHER, Interviewer sta
Page 9 and 10: healthy people & healthy pets Fired
Page 11 and 12: Sweet Creek Chili Pickles Grown in
Page 13 and 14: Preserving 1: Jams & Pickles Hot ne
Page 15: Composting Heats Up & a word about
Page 19 and 20: Fiddle Tunes! at Centrum! Printed b

THE FOOD CO-OP - Port Townsend Food Co-op

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