Food Blog

A Farmer's Report from EcoFarm 2011

Weekly contributor and local organic farmer Jamie Collins steered her sights toward Asilomar for last weekend’s EcoFarm. Here’s what she found out, including news on a whole co-op CSA-style town and bad news for alfalfa:

Starting as a meeting in 1980 with a few farmer friends sharing ideas during the winter when free time was more abundant than crops, Ecological Farming Conference at Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove—now in its 31st year—is now a dynamic conference including farmers, researchers, wholesalers, activists, nonprofits, journalists and regular folks that want to learn more about a just and sustainable food system. Each year there is a focus for the program. This year it was “Animal, Vegetable, Mineral, e-Lectrical.”

The opening session, “Farms with Barns” featuring Nicolette Niman (formerly of Niman Ranch), explored her experience working for Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the lead attorney on the organization’s campaign to reform the concentrated livestock and poultry industry, and her book Righteous Porkshop: Finding Life and Good Food Beyond Factory Farms. The discussion quickly moved to the scarcity of humanely derived inputs for farmers who want the entire process of the food they raise—whether it be crops or livestock—to also be humanely completed. It defeats the point, for example, if pelleted chicken manure sold to organic farmers originates from mistreated birds, or if alfalfa is trucked hundreds of miles to feed “sustainable” livestock operations. In response, many farmers are creating systems where the inputs start and end on their land by raising animals and crops in symbiosis. Another option: seeking out other farmers looking to trade who also abide by high standards. Like many sessions, in a world where around 98 percent of farms are huge ag operations, the good news and the options available aren’t exactly numerous.

The most eye-opening plenary session was “Transforming the Food System.” Tom Stearns, the owner and farmer of High Mowing Seeds (a seed company that actually grows the seeds they sell and keeps precious heirloom varieties in circulation) spoke about the town of Hardwick, Vermont and its shining example of a sustainable food shed that supports all of the stakeholders—growers, processors, wholesalers, and consumers. In this little liberal town of 8,000, the community thrives by supporting their local farms, artisans, and restaurants, spending 80 percent of their food money within 10 miles. Included in this microcosm of goodness is a cooperative cheese-aging cave, a state-of-the-art food processing facility for meat handling and the preparation of prepared foods like sauces and (dodging the major overhead and regulatory headaches of opening your own), and a restaurant-bar called Claire’s which operates on a cutting edge model called Community Supported Restaurant—following the CSA model for supporting a local farm in which members purchase a weekly share of the harvest. The community of Hardwick raised over $300,000—in $25/month installments redeemable for meals—enough to prepay the lease for 12 years in advance and insuring the future of the sustainable café and the future of the local farmers that sell to the café.

The Center for an Agricultural Economy, the nonprofit responsible for this little farm town’s epic success, operates under the aim of promoting agriculture as a basis of a sustainable economy and a true working landscape which circulates the goods, services and dollars within the food shed. Better yet: This is a nonprofit that helps the farmer develop programs that contribute to their success and does not using grant funding or community donations to feed their own six-digit administrative salaries.

During the middle of the conference it was announced that Barack Obama and Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack had passed the GMO laden, Round Up-ready alfalfa produced by Monsanto, a decision detrimental to their dairies, the quickest growing organic industry. This was a disheartening blow to the EcoFarm conference attendees, but organizers used the gathering as an opportunity to tweet and gather signatures opposing the decision.

An impromptu meeting was held with PUBPAT (The Public Patent Foundation) which is a not for profit group of patent reformist lawyers based out of New York whose goal is protecting farmers from being harassed and sued by Monsanto at the event of contamination by a GMO crop cross pollination. Currently the laws allow Monsanto to file a lawsuit against farmers that are victims of the drift—yes, really—and do not want GMO seed to contaminate their crops. PUBPAT was confident in its ability to take on Monsanto, which lifted everyone’s spirits.

Other topics addressed publishing, including Talkin’ About Tweeting (farmers learning how to capture a bigger audience with social networking sites), and Women Farming and Writing. Novella Carpenter raised rabbits, chickens and pigs in Oakland and dumpster dove for the pigs daily rations in her hilarious book Farm City. Rebecca Thistelthwaite, formerly of locally sown (and now defunct) TLC Ranch writes a blog called Honest Meat from their pirate ship RV and travels the states with her family stopping in to help other sustainable livestock farmers create systems, learning what challenges other farmers have and blogging about their experiences all along the way.

The United States invented the broken food system and we are all obligated to help fix it. The unconscionable fact that 70 percent of the population is going to die of food related illnesses in a country so well-equipped should provide plenty of motivation on that front. It is also a potent reminder of the vitality of The Ecological Farming Conference to educate, organize and brainstorm its way to contributing lasting changes and keeping new generations of farmers, educators, researchers and activists interested in the future of sustainable agriculture.