Cherry River Fishing Access

Big Food Crisis Links Roundup

2008-04-27T08:01:00.004-06:00

The past couple of months, we are suddenly hearing a great deal of panic over rising worldwide food prices and the spectre of global scarcity. Here is a collection of worthwhile reading material on the subject, from a variety of angles.

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March 6:

Jon Markman at MSN Money explains why "it's a good time to invest in agricultural stocks."

Most unusual about this phenomenon, according to BMO Financial Group strategist Don Coxe, is that until now, food crises in world history were regional concerns that arose from crop failures, war or pests. Once global trade of grains got going in the 19th century in a major way, food shortages in one country were ameliorated by imports, he said. What's happening now is a lack of supply everywhere at once.

Markman blames urbanization, income growth leading to increased meat consumption, and increased ethanol production... and recommends buying stock in Monsanto.

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March 11:

The BBC covers rising food prices in Egypt.

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March 14:

Rising wheat prices and their effect on one Kansas bakery, via The Ethicurean.

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March 19:

Tom Philpott at Grist warns of a potential fungal disaster: wheat stem rust.

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March 20:

Blog Food and Fuel America points out that, while input costs are increasing for the big food-processing corporations such as General Mills, somehow their profits are managing to rise significantly. How can this be? (I’ve read in several places that Cargill’s profits are up by more than 80% also.)

The AP's Katherine Corcoran, covering rising world food prices, assures us:

In the long term, prices are expected to stabilize. Farmers will grow more grain for both fuel and food and eventually bring prices down. Already this is happening with wheat, with more crops to be planted in the U.S., Canada and Europe in the coming year.

Of course, this supply-will-adjust-to-demand argument assumes an infinite wealth of available land. For now, she does not deny the situation is dire.

Food costs worldwide spiked 23 percent from 2006 to 2007, according to the FAO. Grains went up 42 percent, oils 50 percent and dairy 80 percent.

Economists say that for the short term, government bailouts will have to be part of the answer to keep unrest at a minimum. In recent weeks, rising food prices sparked riots in the West African nations of Burkina Faso, where mobs torched buildings, and Cameroon, where at least four people died.

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March 21:

Tom Philpott takes on the financial and food crises together and gets seriously sensible:

The first thing I'd do is end the government's absurd, expensive, and myriad biofuel subsidies, which are jacking up food prices while providing little if any environmental benefit. According to one reckoning, the federal government has committed $92 billion between 2006 and 2012 to prop up biofuel production. Attracted by this government-guaranteed market, the very same investment banks and hedge funds that brought us the mortgage debacle are now buying and selling corn and soy futures, snatching profits while consumers gape at the price of grocery staples.

Pulling the plug would cause grain and soy prices to drop, bringing down food prices but hurting farmers. To limit the latter effect, the government could step in and buy excess grain and hold it, replenishing stocks that have fallen to all-time lows. That would keep farmers in business while also improving food security.

With the massive savings that would result, the government should invest in local and regional food-production infrastructure, which has been systematically dismantled by agribusiness over the past half-century. Such a program would not only provide consumers with a ready alternative to industrial food, but would also re-establish food as an engine for building wealth within communities -- and lessen its ecological footprint.

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April 9:

David Streitfeld at the NYT reports that high grain prices are motivating farmers to pull millions of acres of land out of the Conservation Reserve Program, which pays farmers to leave uncultivated habitat for birds and other wildlife.

“We’re in a crisis here. Do we want to eat, or do we want to worry about the birds?” asked JR Paterakis, a Baltimore baker who said he was so distressed at a meeting last month with Edward T. Schafer, the agriculture secretary, that he stood up and started speaking “vehemently.”

The Guardian covers potential risks to global stability posed by soaring food prices.

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April 16:

John Vidal of The Guardian writes an excellent short piece summarizing the new International Assessment of Agricultural Science and Technology for Development [IAASTD] report and its relevance for the current food crisis.

Sixty countries backed by the World Bank and most UN bodies yesterday called for radical changes in world farming to avert increasing regional food shortages, escalating prices and growing environmental problems.

But in a move that has led to the US, UK, Australia and Canada not yet endorsing the report, the authors said GM technology was not a quick fix to feed the world's poor and argued that growing biofuel crops for automobiles threatened to increase worldwide malnutrition.

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April 18:

Gretchen Gordon at Food First points the finger at deregulation for the food system crisis. Another terrific piece.

The impact of all this deregulation was to replace local market access for the majority of small producers with global market access for a few global producers. Thanks to non-existent anti-trust enforcement and rampant vertical integration, we’ve reached a level of concentration in our global agriculture system that would make Standard Oil blush. Three companies—Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland, and Bunge—control the vast majority of global grain trading, while Monsanto controls more than one-fifth of the global market in seeds. Consumers from Sioux City to Soweto are more and more dependent on fewer and fewer producers. By eliminating the breadth and diversity of the system, we’ve eliminated its ability to withstand shock or manipulation.

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April 21:

From the NYT business section… biotech takes advantage of growing desperation.

In Britain, the National Beef Association, which represents cattle farmers, issued a statement this month demanding that “all resistance” to [GE] crops “be abandoned immediately in response to shifts in world demand for food, the growing danger of global food shortages and the prospect of declining domestic animal production.”

Take-home message? Industrial agriculture and the unregulated free market, dominated by a few big food corporations, have created the dire emergency that some of us have long anticipated. There's an opportunity here: the public, even in relatively wealthy countries, is suddenly paying attention to the food system, and may be open to new ideas and structures. But there's also a very great danger that the big players will convince a fearful populace that they must place their trust in the hands of "the experts" or face famine, and use the crisis merely to ramp up their own profits and wreak more destruction. Let us come down firmly and loudly in favor of opportunity.

[Update]:

April 27:

Grasshopper Planet by Devilstower at Daily Kos.

Crisis in Organic Dairy Prices

2008-04-26T16:06:00.004-06:00

The Northeast Organic Dairy Producers Alliance (NODPA) issued a substantial press release in March, complaining that milk prices paid by big companies such as Stonyfield Farm are too low to support organic dairy farmers at current fuel and feed costs.

“There is a very serious situation going on right now and some of our very best farmers are looking at bankruptcy,” says Darlene Coehoorn, Wisconsin farmer, Organic Valley member-owner and President of the Midwest Organic Dairy Producers Alliance (MODPA), “and we need Organic Valley, Stonyfield Farm, HP Hood, and Horizon Organic to recognize that our families are suffering. While the major brands are signing on new farmers with bonuses and incentives, they need to take care of their farmer-owners and farm partners by paying us a price for our milk that allows us to support our families and pay our farm bills.”

Shortly thereafter, Gary Hirschberg of Stonyfield published a reply at Grist, basically arguing that market pressures currently prevent Stonyfield from raising the cost of its products enough to pay farmers more profitably, and that the company has been extremely supportive of organic dairy in general. Ed Maltby of NODPA responded once again. Grist's Tom Philpott summed up his own thoughts on the matter here.

If you'd like to hear more, Boston's WBZ radio interviewed both Maltby and Hirschberg on April 22. Listen via the NODPA site.

Quick Links, 4/26/08

2008-04-26T13:22:00.004-06:00

Mmmm... test tube meat. I really can't think of much less respectful of animal life than growing lumps of senseless flesh in a laboratory for consumption. PETA needs to take a good hard think here.

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The Farm Bill is extended for another week, until May 2.

The package currently still includes Sen. Baucus' disaster relief program as well as significant boosts to nutrition programs. Funding offsets include raising Customs user fees and lowering a tax credit for ethanol processors. FarmPolicy.com has much, much more.

Once Again... the Farm Bill

2008-04-19T17:13:00.003-06:00

Still the Farm Bill limps along, one short extension at a time, while lawmakers try desperately in conference to hammer out something which will satisfy the House and Senate Agriculture Committees, House leadership, the House Ways and Means Committee, the Senate Finance Committee, and the obstructionist White House. Among other people.

House conferees are here.
Senate conferees here.

The latest 1-week extension has been signed with a great show of reluctance by President Bush, giving the Conference Committee until next Friday, April 25, to come up with a workable bill. (If that successfully comes to fruition, an additional 2-week or so extension will be arranged in order to get the bill passed through the House and the Senate and-- hopefully-- signed by the President.)

If funding for the Farm Bill were unlimited, few sticking points would remain, but pay-as-you-go rules demand a bill whose funding sources are carefully delineated. This means there are two major areas of conflict: 1) with a limited budget, the powerful players are struggling over whose pet program(s) will see short shrift, and 2) even when the congressional players are in agreement about finding additional funding for a program, the Bush White House usually takes issue with the proposed offsets and threatens a veto of the entire bill.

I don’t use the word “obstructionist” lightly: rather than standing on some particular principle, the White House seems determined to keep throwing wrenches in the works of the Farm Bill.

Negotiations are in disarray as lawmakers from the House and Senate are squabbling over how to pay for the legislation. House and Senate negotiators have suggested a number of different ways to come up with an extra $10 billion needed for the bill, including some ideas the White House has backed previously. But administration officials have rejected most of their ideas, saying they would rather use the money for other priorities.

As for the programs at issue in the Conference Committee, controversy is focusing on a priority of my own Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT). Baucus, who chairs the Senate Finance Committee as well as sitting on the Agriculture Committee, has had tremendous power in negotiations so far. Sen. Baucus insists on the inclusion of a $4-billion disaster relief program for farmers (in Montana, for instance, “disaster” might come in the form of drought), a price tag at which the House has balked. (The Environmental Working Group points out that “[b]ased on their historical share of ad hoc disaster spending, of the twenty states represented on the Senate Finance Committee, just four stand to gain over half (55 percent) of the committee’s allocation of disaster aid expenditures under a permanent fund: North Dakota, Kansas, Iowa and Montana.”) The House is also reluctant to come up with offsets for the Senate-proposed $2.5-billion bundle of agriculture-related tax cuts championed by Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA). (Speaker Pelosi, in particular, feels strongly that – even should an additional $2.5 billion be located—such funds would be better used for beefing up nutrition and food stamp programs.)

AP:

At a farm bill meeting in Rangel's office Thursday, shouting could be heard behind closed doors. Several senators, including Baucus, left angrily.

"Let's just say it wasn't good," Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., said afterward.

Reuters cites Tom Harkin on the set of possible outcomes:

If there is no breakthrough, said Senate Agriculture Committee chairman Tom Harkin, he will order votes on Tuesday to settle the matter. Harkin is in charge of the talks.

"We'll see if people really want to bring the farm bill down to have a tax package," said Harkin, Iowa Democrat. "At some point, it has to end."

By the end of next week, Harkin told reporters, the farm bill will be wrapped up or there will be a decision to either extend the 2002 farm law or to let the farm program revert to 1949 law, with land controls and high grain subsidy rates.

As an aside, the entire amount of the disputed funding—disaster relief plus tax cuts-- is worth about the cost of a week and a half in Iraq .

Some Old Business

2008-04-13T09:00:00.003-06:00

I keep thinking someday I'll be more than an intermittent blogger, but will life ever stop kicking my ass on a more-or-less regular basis? Not likely. Anyhow, the loads of things I'd wanted to write about are piling up in the meanwhile, and a thoughtful piece on each and every one is just not going to happen. So I'll start throwing out some important links that have come my way in March, in acceptance of the fact that they're already beginning to moulder.

Oh, and I have every intention of a full blog design update, but when on earth is that going to happen?

Here are the first couple of stories, and then I must rush off again.

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From the March 1 NYT, Free Lunch Isn't Cool, So Some Students Go Hungry:

Lunchtime “is the best time to impress your peers,” said Lewis Geist, a senior at Balboa and its student body president. Being seen with a subsidized meal, he said, “lowers your status.”
San Francisco school officials are looking at ways to encourage more poor students to accept government-financed meals, including the possibility of introducing cashless cafeterias where all students are offered the same food choices and use debit cards or punch in codes on a keypad so that all students check out at the cashier in the same manner.

Also from March 1 NYT... My Forbidden Fruits (and Vegetables):

Farmer Jack Hedin explains some of the bureaucratic barriers to converting commodity cropland to fruit and vegetable production.

The commodity farm program effectively forbids farmers who usually grow corn or the other four federally subsidized commodity crops (soybeans, rice, wheat and cotton) from trying fruit and vegetables. Because my watermelons and tomatoes had been planted on “corn base” acres, the Farm Service said, my landlords were out of compliance with the commodity program.
I’ve discovered that typically, a farmer who grows the forbidden fruits and vegetables on corn acreage not only has to give up his subsidy for the year on that acreage, he is also penalized the market value of the illicit crop, and runs the risk that those acres will be permanently ineligible for any subsidies in the future. (The penalties apply only to fruits and vegetables — if the farmer decides to grow another commodity crop, or even nothing at all, there’s no problem.)
[...]
The federal farm program is making it next to impossible for farmers to rent land to me to grow fresh organic vegetables.

On Day One

2008-04-09T06:47:00.002-06:00

What a good idea: a food garden on the White House lawn.

Not even the rain has such small hands

2008-03-11T20:57:00.002-06:00

Those of us with school-aged children probably respond especially strongly to stories about child laborers around the world, children much like ours but without the protections of law or economic security against exploitation, abuse, and exhaustion. My six-year-old daughter has terrific manual dexterity and loves sewing and crafts. Right now she fits these pursuits into her limited free time between school and activities, comfortable regular meals and bedtimes. Under other circumstances, she might be putting in 16-hour days making beaded clothing for a pittance. It’s an unbearable thought.

The March 10 Forbes has an extensive article on child labor, mostly in agriculture, and in particular detailing the problems of the GE cottonseed industry, undertaken by Indian farmers contracted to companies like Monsanto and Syngenta. According to the article, there are between 12 and 50 million children under the age of 14 working in India.

Cottonseed farmer Talari Babu is a slim, wiry man dressed, when a reporter visited him, in black for a Hindu fast. "Children have small fingers, and so they can remove the buds very quickly," he says, while insisting that he no longer employs the underage. "They worked fast, much faster than the adults, and put in longer hours and didn't demand long breaks. Plus, I could shout at them and beat or threaten them if need be to get more work out of them." He could also tempt them with candy and cookies and movies at night. Babu says that pressure from Monsanto and the MV Foundation, an NGO in Andhra Pradesh backed by the Dutch nonprofit Hivos, forced him to quit using child labor.

But many farmers still use children for this delicate and dangerous work.

The pollination work lasts for 70 to 100 days and is followed by cotton-picking staggered over several months. Children's hands are ideal for the delicate work with stamens and pistils. Their bodies are no better at withstanding the poisons. At least once a week, says Davuluri Venkateshwarlu, head of Glocal, farmers spray the fields with pesticides like Nuvacron, banned by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and endosulfan, methomyl and Metasystox, considered by the EPA to be highly toxic. Venkateshwarlu ticks off the effects of overexposure: diarrhea, nausea, difficulty in breathing, convulsions, headaches and depression.

In other parts of India, children are producing GM tomato, eggplant, okra and chili seeds for the American market, again under heavy pesticide regimens, and earning 5 to 10 cents per hour. Other young kids are doing dangerous stone work in quarries, turning out decorative stones and cobbles for American yards and gardens. The garment industry, of course, is a familiar offender, as well as producers of handmade carpets and decorative items. Here’s one group of very young boys who live together in a tiny Delhi room room making sparkly picture frames with sequins and bits of glass:

In one such room, where the only piece of furniture is a low workbench, 10-year-old Akbar sits on the floor and mixes two powders into a doughy adhesive, his fingers blackened by the chemicals. Another boy spreads a thin layer of the mixture on a photo frame and a third, seated on his haunches, starts pasting tiny pieces of mirrors and sequins along the border. He sways back and forth, a habit most kids have developed to keep the blood flowing through their limbs as they sit for several hours. Decorating one 5-by-5-inch frame consumes six child-hours. The boys, who all live in the room and cook their own food here, typically work from 9 a.m. to 1 a.m. for $76 a month. Many have teeth stained from cigarettes they smoke and tobacco they chew to relieve the tedium.

The whole article is worth reading.

While India has passed some limited child labor laws, they are only loosely enforced. Likewise, the many familiar corporations mentioned in the article—not only Monsanto and Syngenta, and Bayer, but the Gap, Lowe’s, Target, Ikea, Bloomingdale’s, and other importers of goods-- have policies against buying from contractors who exploit child labor. Clearly, having a policy on the books does not constitute sufficient oversight.

In the seed industry in particular, it is important to remember that a plant grown in the U.S. may still spring from seed harvested across the world by very young laborers, on behalf of companies who reap giant profits from the transaction.

One of many reasons to know where your food comes from.

At Large

2008-03-10T16:32:00.004-06:00

I figured it was time to educate myself on the state of the MT-AL House race, a seat held for the past 4 terms by mediocre Republican Denny Rehberg, whose most recent legislative accomplishment according to the Library of Congress was introducing a resolution to recognize the 125^th birthday of Billings. It was referred to committee nearly a year ago.

More about Rehberg as a Very Serious Person, in a Daily Kos diary I’d previously missed, here. What an ass.

Montana, besides having a popular Democratic governor, is also (since the election of Jon Tester in 2006) represented by two Democratic U.S. senators. Sen. Max Baucus (often mentioned here, due to his degree of influence in agricultural policy) should coast to an easy reelection. The time is right to focus on targeting Rehberg this November.

As of February 12, we have a declared Democratic opponent for Rehberg: consumer and personal injury attorney Jim Hunt of Helena.

Hunt is a fourth-generation Montanan and retired lieutenant colonel in the Montana National Guard. The Missoula Independent explained why he’s likely immune to some traditional stereotypes that work against Democrats:

Born on the Hi-line in Chester, Hunt doesn’t need to do any phony acting to come across as a genuine Montanan. He’s a lifetime member of the National Rifle Association, an avid sportsman, a true conservationist, and a Chancellor for the Episcopal Diocese of Montana. Taken together, that background deflects about 90 percent of what Republicans have traditionally shot at their Democrat challengers. No, Hunt isn’t going to take your guns away, and yes, he does know how to use them—and he won’t be posing like John Kerry if he shows up in goose-hunting gear. Moreover, he realizes the value of maintaining a clean and healthy environment—just like our state promises—and not just for hunting and fishing, but for all the myriad reasons the drafters found it necessary to include such a groundbreaking provision in our 1972 Montana Constitution.

A little on his law practice:

We represent clients all types of personal injury, wrongful death, and related accident cases including Auto and Truck Accidents, Medical Malpractice, Brain Injuries, Slip & Fall Accidents, Construction Site Accidents, Work-Related Accidents, Semi-Truck Accidents, Dog Bites & Animal Attacks, Dangerous & Defective Products, Motorcycle Accidents, Premises Liability, Nursing Home Negligence & Elder Abuse. We do not represent businesses, corporations or insurance companies in Montana. We represent real people with real physical, emotional and financial problems caused by an injury or death.

Spokesmen for Rehberg distance him from the damaged Republican party, saying that he “votes for Montana's interests, regardless of whether a proposal is supported by the president, Republicans or Democrats.” However, in the 110^th Congress, Rehberg voted with his party 92% of the time, putting him well above average for party loyalty among Republicans, and GovTrack.us characterizes him as a “rank-and-file Republican.” Hunt could get some real traction with civil liberties issues: Montanans have a strongly libertarian streak, and Rehberg’s alignment with Bush administration surveillance priorities could hurt him. From yesterday’s Great Falls Tribune:

Hunt also criticized Rehberg's support of a bill that would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunication companies that aided the Bush administration in spying on Americans with warrantless wire taps.

"He and I dramatically split on that," Hunt said. "Montanans don't want people tapping into their phone records, getting into their medical records, getting into their gun records. Montanans are private people."

Hunt is also critical of Rehberg’s support of the Administration on

Iraq

"Rehberg has voted with Bush ... right down the line on the war to the point where he said, 'it's not my job to second-guess the president on the Iraq War,'" Hunt said. "It is absolutely the job of Congress to second guess the executive branch on those types of issues. He's dead wrong on that approach."

Jim Hunt’s issues page.

You can contribute here.

The Pig-headed Presidency Meets the Farm Bill

2008-03-02T12:23:00.004-07:00

From Peter Shinn at Brownfield Network, writing last Sunday, Feb. 24:

An extension of the 2002 farm law through at least the end of 2009 is looking increasingly inevitable as negotiations on the next farm law drag on toward the March 15th expiry of the current extension of the 2002 measure. That’s the word from Senate Agriculture Committee Chairman Tom Harkin of Iowa, who put the blame squarely upon the Bush administration for the current farm bill stalemate.

Harkin notes that the Senate version of the Farm Bill passed by 79 votes, and would have passed by 83, except "'four people were out running for President.'"

The stalemate, at least officially, is mostly over the total cost and funding sources of the bill.

Harkin added that the Bush administration’s intransigence has come despite his view that the Senate has offered repeated concessions on cost. Harkin also noted that the Senate version of the farm bill would raise revenue using methods suggested by the Bush administration itself in its current and prior budget requests. That’s why Harkin is now of the opinion that a new farm bill won’t get done during the current congressional session.

The 2002 farm bill extension is set to expire on March 15. Nancy Pelosi has said House conferees will not be appointed until the bill's financing and budget have been agreed upon.

Five days after this story was published, little appeared to have changed.

If a deal is not reached by March 15, either the 2002 farm bill will be extended again or the law will automatically revert to the Agricultural Act of 1949. The USDA and Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer don't think much of either idea, but the former is almost certainly more acceptable to them than the latter. From the USDA paper published Friday (download Word doc) regarding reversion to 1949 law:

Often described as a reversion to “permanent law,” such a result would dramatically narrow the universe of producers who receive support, and would do so in a way that most producers will view as irrational. For instance, those wheat producers who happen to have historical acreage allocations would receive dramatically increased benefits, while all other wheat producers would become ineligible.

The second part of this memorandum focuses on the effects on other programs that are administered by USDA, explaining that many conservation, energy, trade, nutrition, and other programs would be eliminated or substantially curtailed.

The threat of neither passing nor extending a farm bill by March 15 is therefore a serious bargaining chip for Congress with the administration; most suggest, however, that such an outcome is unlikely.

Symbiont

2008-03-02T11:24:00.003-07:00

A side note on commensal relationships:

my fish, which is still miraculously fine despite requiring water of a more tropical temperature than that of my Montana apartment in winter, is being kept comfortably warm by my DSL modem.

(This is not my fish, but looks a little like her.)

Brief News & Links, 3/1/08

2008-03-01T18:15:00.003-07:00

Seed-saving?

The Global Seed Vault was opened on February 26 in Svalbard, Norway.

Bored into the middle of a snow-topped Arctic mountain, the seed vault has as its goal the storing of every kind of seed from every collection on the planet. While the original seeds will remain in ordinary seed banks, the seed vault's stacked gray boxes will form a backup in case natural disaster or human error erase the seeds from the outside world.

Spain-based nonprofit GRAIN warns against overreliance on seed banks for conserving diversity while the world's farmers plant an increasingly uniform set of crops.

...relying solely on burying seeds in freezers is no answer. The world currently has 1,500 ex situ genebanks that are failing to save and preserve crop diversity. Thousands of accessions have died in storage, as many have been rendered useless for lack of basic information about the seeds, and countless others have lost their unique characteristics or have been genetically contaminated during periodic grow-outs. [...]

The deeper problem with the single focus on ex situ seed storage, that the Svalbard Vault reinforces, is that it is fundamentally unjust. It takes seeds of unique plant varieties away from the farmers and communities who originally created, selected, protected and shared those seeds and makes them inaccessible to them. [...] the system operates under the assumption that once the farmers' seeds enter a storage facility, they belong to someone else and negotiating intellectual property and other rights over them is the business of governments and the seed industry itself.

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Action item:

The EPA has proposed a rule change eliminating required reporting of airborne ammonia and hydrogen sulfide emissions by factory farms. While manure pit emissions can cause respiratory and nervous system effects, the EPA has apparently come to the conclusion that reporting is "not useful."

See EPA page here.

The public comment period for this rule change ends March 28 (leave a comment here). Mine:

It is appropriate for airborne toxic emissions of ammonia and hydrogen sulfide, which have been shown to potentially cause respiratory and nervous system health effects, to be reported regardless of which industry is the source. Reporting of emissions is not an undue "burden on farmers," where farms are of the size likely to endanger air quality. The reporting requirements in this matter should not be eased, and doing so would be both a threat to public health and an unnecessary giveaway to factory farms, which must be held responsible for their environmental and community impacts.

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Resource:

The Cornell Small Farms Program is offering a $200 online course for beginning farmers.

If we are ever to reclaim our country's tradition of small-scale farming, we will have to find innovative ways to educate a new generation of farmers in their work. Currently, the average age of U.S. farmers is 55, and only 6% are under 35.

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Debt relief for (very) small farmers:

India's latest national budget will completely cancel the farm loan debt of all farmers with less than 2 hectares of land, at a cost of $15 billion. While some farm groups feel the land-size cut-off is too small, 80 percent of Indian farmers work less than 1 hectare of land, and the farm sector employs more than 60 percent of the labor force.

On the other hand, farmers have to have had access to credit in the first place for debt forgiveness to be helpful.

More on the Beef Recall

2008-03-01T15:29:00.004-07:00

Conflicts of interest:

Christopher Cook writes on "Meat Roulette" in the L.A. Times, highlighting the fact that Hallmark/Westland was engaging in its abuses while supposedly operating under full USDA oversight:

Ultimately, what needs fixing goes far beyond recalling 143 million pounds of meat. We need to greatly expand the number and the role of food-safety inspectors; erect a stronger firewall between inspection and promotion, so the agency that sets line speeds and promotes productivity is not also charged with evaluating food safety; give the government full authority to require meat recalls and to identify where tainted meat has been shipped and sold; and slow the production line to enable more accurate inspection and greater care in handling the meat, which would also reduce the high worker injury rates. Finally, the extreme consolidation into a few corporate hands must be checked, to break the meat industry's stranglehold on regulatory policy.

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Lame cows:

One likely reason for the "downer" status of the cows: laminitis. "Hallmark principally slaughters "spent" dairy cows for the Westland Meat Co.," says the Humane Society of the U.S.. High-producing dairy cows (commonly treated with rBGH to increase output, then-- spent early-- slaughtered for beef) often develop this painful inflammation of the hoof lining, limiting their ability to stand or walk. (The reasons appear complex, and to be linked to inappropriate diet, other inflammations like mastitis, and environmental conditions such as concrete flooring and restricted movement, among other factors.) Some of the downed cows in the Humane Society video do appear actually injured or deformed, as opposed to merely weak or sick.

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The wrong answer:

Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA, Chairman of the Senate Agriculture Committee, and, usually, proponent of progressive farm policy), says that the Westland recall justifies support for the National Animal Identification System (NAIS). Harkin's premise is that, under NAIS-- which would track individual animals or lots throughout the food system-- the beef recall could have been much smaller and more targeted.

...we would have known what lot and what animals were involved in the meat and where the meat went," Harkin said. "As it was, they had to recall all of this meat because they didn't know."

Senator Harkin, with all due respect, you are sweeping aside the implications of the documented abuses. You are suggesting that we pour our resources into building the capacity to track down and eliminate the specific meat from the specific animals whose "downer" status happened to be filmed by an undercover spy for the Humane Society.

That plant was USDA-inspected, and yet the flouting of regulations appears to have been routine. How many animals entered the food chain over the weeks or years whose treatment and condition went undocumented? At how many other companies are such practices common? I suggest we use our resources to improve federal inspection and regulatory compliance on the part of the meatpackers, rather than pushing an invasive, unnecessary program that carries substantial and disproportionate burdens for small livestock farmers.

What Is Local?

2008-02-29T20:55:00.002-07:00

Saying you're going to "eat local" is all well and good, but what counts as local? In a large, semi-arid state with few population centers, I have to figure out how widely to cast my net. No matter where you live, this matter of arriving at an appropriate definition is crucial and must vary from place to place, depending on the productivity of local land and the activity of the local economy.

My community food coop, for instance, defines their "local" product label to mean that the food is produced within 300 miles. That seems a bit far to me-- perhaps more "regional" than "local"-- but not absolutely absurd given the landscape I live in, and the fact that it's around 100-200 miles between cities here. There is at least one direction (east) in which I can drive 300 miles and still be in the same state.

View Larger Map

On the other hand, in the Northeast, where I come from originally, 300 miles would be a ridiculously long distance to consider local. Is Boston-to-Philadelphia "local"? Yet it is only a few miles farther than Bozeman-to-Miles City.

Definitions:

Here's a great post from the Wedge Natural Foods Coop in Minneapolis, struggling with the same issue. Writer Barth Anderson considers and rejects a number of problematic definitions of "local" eating, including the "100-mile diet," simply in-state, and within a day's round-trip drive, before settling on a very broad criterion: "any local food company or local grower located in Minnesota or a state bordering ours" (so that would be Minnesota, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, and Wisconsin-- and what about Manitoba and Ontario?). Note also that "local food company or local grower" includes foods that are processed locally out of ingredients that may not be local-- another problem requiring a decision.

Then Anderson goes on to remark that, for him, "Cargill is local," a troubling complication. What if you live near a Coca-Cola bottling plant? Does that count? The fact is, "local," however it is defined, only goes so far as a food ethic.

The Farm-to-Dartmouth project also notes how difficult it is to define local, but here's what they came up with for their purposes:

For many people, local food is more easily defined by what it is not than what it is. Local food, by this classification, is not mass-produced food shipped from distant regions at the expense of taste and nutrition. Often equated with greater nutritional, social, and ecological benefits, local food is simply that which is produced by farmers living in a region geographically intimate enough to be called a community. For the sake of this project, the definition of local is that approximately 80% of the food is produced in the 69 towns of the Greater Upper Valley using ingredients produced in that same area, and the remaining 20% is produced in the bi-state region of Vermont and New Hampshire.

Caveats:

The Wikipedia page on the local food movement raises more problems:

Where local food is determined by the distance it has traveled, the wholesale distribution system can confuse the calculations. Fresh food that is grown very near to where it will be purchased, may still travel hundreds of miles out of the area through the industrial system before arriving back at a local store. [...]
Often, products are grown in one area and processed in another, which may cause complications in the purchasing of local foods. In the international wine industry, much "bulk wine" is shipped to other regions or continents, to be blended with wine from other locales. It may even be marketed quite misleadingly as a product of the bottling country.

Finally, this final section of a report from the Hartman Group, a market research group that looks at underlying motives and trends in consumer behavior, should serve as a warning that big corporations are already seeking to play on our desire to “buy local.”

In the industry, there is a belief that you can only be local if you are a small and authentic brand. This isn't necessarily true; big brands can use the notion of local to their advantage as well. There are a lot of ways for a big brand to be local by having limited edition and/or seasonal products. A nutrition bar, for example, could have a nut in it that is grown in a certain area that gives it better taste perceptions.

It is important for manufacturers, marketers and retailers to understand that quality markers, such as use of local ingredients and narratives of local production and origin, are factors that resonate most strongly with consumers when it comes to determining what is authentically local.

As local continues to evolve in sophistication as a marketing concept, the ultimate success of the "buy local" message (e.g., selling more products, increased revenues, higher profit margins, improved quality image, repeat purchases, etc.) and its sustainability over time depends on any number of cultural, societal and lifestyle factors, all covered by this overarching principle: you can’t fake authenticity.

“Taste perceptions”???

More and better definitions:

Gary Paul Nabhan, whose tremendous 2001 book Coming Home to Eat detailed his own local-eating experiment (within 200 miles of his home in Flagstaff, AZ), writes in his blog post "Deepening Our Sense of What Is Local and Regional Food" that-- now that "eat local" is becoming a popular concept and catchphrase-- "It is time that we deepen our sense of what we mean by local and regional, offer others better reasons as to why these concerns matter, and steadfastly resist any pressure to endorse simplistic formulas such as a 100-mile diet or an in-state diet."

His own list of what it means to promote local eating includes:

1. Local means from a farm, ranch or fishing boat that is locally-owned and operated, using the management skills and the labor of local community members. [...]

2. A regional food is one that has been tied to the traditions of a particular landscape or seascape and its cultures for decades if not for centuries. [...] Yes it may be produced five miles from your home and thereby reduce food miles, but its seeds are not saved and adapted to local or regional conditions, they are bought from afar every year.

3. The miles a food travels (“food miles”) must be placed in the size and volume of the mode of transport, its source of fuel, and its frequency of travel. Using biodiesel in a larger truck may be more efficient, and leave less of a carbon footprint than using leaded gas in an old clunker.[...]

4. On-farm energy and water use matter. [...]

5. Other on-farm inputs matter just as much. Where are the sources of hay for livestock, compost for garden crops or nitrogen for field crops? They should be locally if not regionally-sourced. [...]

6. Fair-trade with other cultures, localities and regions is fair game. Circumvent the globalized economy for the items you truly need from other regions by establishing fair-trade exchanges. [...]

7. Invest in the foods unique to your region that cannot or should not be grown anywhere else.

Sure, some of the above are a tall order to fill. But remembering that we're choosing local foods for reasons beyond simply saving fuel is important. Nabhan's list provides a number of reasons why Cargill, no matter where you live, is not local.

So, the question remains, of course: how should I define "local"? And should I define it at all, or simply follow my instincts towards the best available choices?

I am open to suggestions.

Let the Locavory Begin

2008-02-23T17:31:00.002-07:00

I've mentioned this to several people now. But I'd yet to make a public commitment. Here goes:

My daughter and I are “eating local” (with a couple exceptions), for a year, starting June 3 with the opening of the first of two local farmer’s markets.

In this, as many will recognize, we are inspired by Barbara Kingsolver’s wonderful and immensely popular Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which I also raved about here.

It’s also the case that, as my shopping habits have changed over the past few years, I have naturally increased my use of local products. The majority of my vegetables this year have come from a farm called Gallatin Valley Botanical, where I have a CSA share; I ate them fresh during the summer, and froze some for winter (I’m still eating them now, at the end of February). My bread and flour, and my milk and cream and eggs and butter, have long come from local or regional producers. I don’t buy much meat, but we have excellent local beef, buffalo, and other meats in Montana, and I try to choose grassfed products from nearby ranches. In various seasons, I can and do get local apples, dried beans, vegetable oil, honey, and other products.

But I’ve always approached food shopping with list in hand, the question of what do I need/want? having been considered ahead of time, and the choice amounting to which version to purchase (local? organic? cheapest? etc.). Because, in our American market environment (with the exception of certain “food desert” areas), everything on the list is virtually certain to be available. Years ago, when I did a lot of exotic cooking, yet thought little of seasonality or food transportation distance, I’d be flummoxed on the rare occasion when some fresh produce item demanded in a recipe was not to be found in any of my several nearby supermarkets. It was scandalous, because anomalous, when nobody happened to have lemongrass, or Belgian endive.

The real problem, as Kingsolver and others have made clear, is not that it is difficult to adequately feed oneself on mostly local products. The challenge is to change one’s mental habits so that one embraces the food available, then figures out how to best and most deliciously use it. This requires abandoning the idea, I think, pushed by many American personal-budget gurus, that meal planning must come before shopping. When endeavoring to eat locally, we need to take an approach that should come more naturally to us as a formerly foraging species: go out and gather what there is, whether from our own garden, a nearby farm, or a market. If we live in an area with a cold season, then we have to gather more than we immediately need; avoiding waste means preserving the excess, not shopping according to a rigorous plan.

After all, which gives me more joy? Buying a jar of spaghetti sauce, a bag of pasta, and a pie slice of parmesan cheese in preparation for a dinner when we will surely have spaghetti (again)? Or receiving those unsolicited boxes of tomatoes, or root vegetables, or apples, that our elderly neighbors used to leave on our doorstep, overflow from their productive back yard, and musing over “how to use them up”? Even leaving aside all questions of sustainability, the first task is simple, carefully-delineated, impersonal, and more or less the same from week to week; the second is creative, complex, invokes a neighborly relationship, and never failed to give me a feeling of abundance and satisfaction. Potatoes, carrots or apples, yes, I did always have a use for them.

I am positively looking forward to what feels almost like a luxury: instead of budgeting some precise weekly amount for food, if I find something wonderful at the farmer’s market, I will buy it. (Maybe a lot of it, because we only get fresh foods, here in Montana, from about June to October.) I will give myself leave to explore the really good stuff that’s out there, instead of always maintaining a carefully balanced larder of peanut butter and breakfast cereal and salsa and rice and frozen juice concentrate and spaghetti sauce. I will enthusiastically take my friend up on her offer of sharing her yard’s yield of apples and rhubarb and raspberries, in exchange for picking labor and some vacation garden-watering. (Fruit is a northern-climate luxury: YES, I’m interested.)

I bet I’ll eat better than I do now, though I may have to give up peanut butter (honestly, I don’t really care). I’ll be motivated for the first time to fully explore what foods are produced in my area. And you know what’ll be fun? Travelling. When I go to Austin in July, it’ll be exciting, because there will be different local foods there.

There are a few things I can’t give up. Coffee—it’ll be locally-roasted, but I have to have it. Spices and salt—but these are dry goods used in small quantities, and I don’t feel too badly about their transport. The same would probably go for things like leavening. The idea is not to suffer deprivation, but to investigate and enjoy what is available, and to relearn some more traditional ways of food use and preservation.

And, if I’m at your house, of course I’ll eat anything you serve me.

As we are living this project, I expect there will be many follow-up posts about various details.

Wolves to be delisted; How do your Congressional members stack up on environment?

2008-02-23T14:41:00.005-07:00

Gray wolves will be removed from the Endangered Species List unless litigation from a number of environmental groups delays delisting. After reintroduction to the Greater Yellowstone ecosystem 13 years ago, wolves have had impressive success at reproducing and dispersing, winning some enemies in the process. Management of the wolves would fall to the states of Montana, Idaho and Wyoming, and would likely allow hunting; each state, however, has committed to maintaining its own population of 150 wolves, including at least 15 mating pairs.

While some groups (including NRDC, the Sierra Club, and Earthjustice) are disputing the decision, other environmentalists and biologists believe the gray wolf is truly an example of successful species recovery and that delisting is appropriate. The original goal was a stable Northern Rockies population of 300 wolves; current population exceeds 1500.

**

If you are curious about a U.S. House or Senate member's environmental record, the League of Conservation Voters gives a quick, easy-to-use environmental scorecard.

Downer Cattle Update: Now It's Recalled

2008-02-17T20:55:00.005-07:00

So, as you all may remember, we were supposed to feel reassured when state and local officials reminded us that Westland beef had not been recalled, despite serious concerns about sick "downer cows" having entered the food supply.

Because, if it's not recalled, it must be OK. It's when they recall it that you should be really concerned.

Tonight from the AP:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture on Sunday ordered the recall of 143 million pounds of frozen beef from a California slaughterhouse, the subject of an animal-abuse investigation, that provided meat to school lunch programs.

Officials said it was the largest beef recall in the United States, surpassing a 1999 ban of 35 million pounds of ready-to-eat meats. [...]

Secretary of Agriculture Ed Schafer said his department has evidence that Westland did not routinely contact its veterinarian when cattle became non-ambulatory after passing inspection, violating health regulations.

[...]

Officials estimate that about 37 million pounds of the recalled beef went to school programs, but they believe most of the meat probably has already been eaten.

Some links, 2-16-08: bats, beets, and budgets

2008-02-16T16:25:00.003-07:00

A widespread affliction is threatening bat populations in the Northeast.

The disease was first discovered in a cave near Albany, N.Y., in January 2007 and was soon found in three more within 7 miles. In March, officials at the New York Department of Environmental Conservation determined that as many as 11,000 bats had died from the disease, dubbed "white nose syndrome" because of a flaky white fungus on the nose of many of the sick and dead bats.

[...]

Scientists say they are extraordinarily concerned because the disease is already affecting four species - including the Indiana bat, recognized by the federal government as an endangered species - and mortality has reached as high as 97 percent in some caves. In one New York cave, the population crashed from 1,300 bats several years ago to 38 this year.

The U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service has asked the public to stay out of caves, mines, and other bat havens in the Northeast, for fear that humans may be serving as a vector of disease spread.

Bats are important in insect control, and diminished populations could have a negative impact on area crops.

***

The Jew and the Carrot covers this year's big new GMO story: Roundup Ready sugar beets. Like Monsanto's other Roundup Ready products, the GE sugar beets will revel in the application of herbicides; the EPA has increased the allowable amount of glyphosate residues on beetroots by 5000% in a remarkably accommodating gesture. There are other problems, too. Read the post, by a lawyer for the Center for Food Safety.

***

The new Bush budget for 2009 proposes to cut public funding for agriculture research at land-grant schools by nearly 1/3. Without public funding, our research institutions are dependent on corporate dollars to determine research priorities. As Nancy Scola writes at Alternet,

When it comes to how industry-university relations shape academic research, UCLA's Andrew Neighbour is the person to talk to. While an administrator at Washington University in St. Louis, Neighbour managed the school's landmark multiyear and multimillion-dollar relationship with Monsanto. (Note: WashU is a private institution.) "There's no question that industry money comes with strings," Neighbour admits. "It limits what you can do, when you can do it, who it has to be approved by."

And so the issue at hand becomes one of the questions that are being asked at public land-grant schools. While Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta, et al., are paying the bills, are agricultural researchers going to pursue such lines of scientific inquiry as "How will this new corn variety impact the independent New York farmer?" Or, "Will this new tomato make eaters healthier?"

This is a fairly long and complex piece, which is definitely worth a read.

Please Weigh to Be Seated

2008-02-16T14:45:00.003-07:00

While word has it it isn't going anywhere, this crazy-ass bill has actually been introduced in the Mississippi legislature:

AN ACT TO PROHIBIT CERTAIN FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FROM SERVING FOOD TO ANY PERSON WHO IS OBESE, BASED ON CRITERIA PRESCRIBED BY THE STATE DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO PREPARE WRITTEN MATERIALS THAT DESCRIBE AND EXPLAIN THE CRITERIA FOR DETERMINING WHETHER A PERSON IS OBESE AND TO PROVIDE THOSE MATERIALS TO THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS; TO DIRECT THE DEPARTMENT TO MONITOR THE FOOD ESTABLISHMENTS FOR COMPLIANCE WITH THE PROVISIONS OF THIS ACT; AND FOR RELATED PURPOSES.

Are you effin' kidding me? (Apparently not.)

That is all.

Our New Oceans

2008-02-16T12:59:00.004-07:00

We have mentioned, before, the vast floating wasteland of plastic debris-- fairly recently described as "twice the size of Texas"-- that has accumulated in the North Pacific subtropical gyre. I still encourage anyone to read the long Best Life Magazine article at that link, but not if you're already at the edge of despair today.

Turns out, not surprisingly, that our ocean garbage dump has continued to grow since that article was published. It's now twice the size of the United States, as also blogged at Daily Kos by FishOutofWater. From the Independent article linked above:

About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.

The garbage soup, which floats in a becalmed area of ocean normally avoided by boats, was discovered in 1997 by Charles Moore, an oceanographer and heir to a large oil fortune who “subsequently sold his business interests and became an environmental activist.”

The research vessel “Alguita” is currently exploring the Garbage Patch, and keeping a frequently-updated blog of their observations. From Feb. 10’s post:

Clear skies and gentle seas made debris watch a much more appealing activity, and drew the crew with nets, cameras, and binoculars to the bow. For a solid two hours, we fished as fast as we could, pulling up floats, toothbrushes, plastic and glass bottles, a golf ball, a billiard ball, an unused glue stick for a hot glue gun, and several rope boluses filled with crabs and tiny striped fish - But most appalling was the plastic confetti. An endless stream of delicate, white snowflakes, like plastic powder coating the ocean’s surface. This, remarked Charlie, is indicative of the gyre, “where the trash comes home to roost and degrade…..”. A school of cavorting dolphins lightened the mood - the first Charles has spotted in his 10 years of visiting the gyre.

Our Manta sample mirrored what we observed – a bowl full of plastic, with almost zero evidence of life. We wouldn't be surprised if the plastic to plankton ratio here was 100 to 1. The contrast between this “clean” sample and the mass of zooplankton from the other day was remarkable, illustrating the dramatic range in biological productivity throughout the ocean.

***

In more bad ocean news, yesterday’s Los Angeles Times reports on growing “dead zones” off Oregon and Washington, likely a result of climate changes that in turn affect winds and currents.

Peering into the murky depths, Jane Lubchenco searched for sea life, but all she saw were signs of death.

Video images scanned from the seafloor revealed a boneyard of crab skeletons, dead fish and other marine life smothered under a white mat of bacteria. At times, the camera's unblinking eye revealed nothing at all -- a barren undersea desert in waters renowned for their bounty of Dungeness crabs and fat rockfish.

"We couldn't believe our eyes," Lubchenco said, recalling her initial impression of the carnage brought about by oxygen-starved waters. "It was so overwhelming and depressing. It appeared that everything that couldn't swim or scuttle away had died."

Superdelegates and Me

2008-02-15T19:51:00.003-07:00

I took the time to write a note to the superdelegates as requested by David Plouffe, Barack Obama's campaign manager, explaining my support for Obama. This was, in my opinion, a clever move on the part of the campaign; I'd heard they were specifically trying to prevent their supporters from relentlessly pestering superdelegates in unauthorized fashion, and had some kind of coordinated plan in mind. This is it. They're collecting testimonials and bits of persuasion, collating the best material themselves, and then distributing it. Sure, the end result will be a little more polished and less perfectly representative than the pool it's drawn from. On the other hand, it'll spare the superdelegates aggressive rants, a good deal of pablum, and mountains of repetitive material.

I decided that, since I hate telephoning, this was one thing I could try my hand at. You can too, at the above link, if you're a supporter. Since I bothered to write it, I figured I might as well post it here too, and come out as a true partisan.

I went into this primary season undecided. It was not for lack of paying attention; I follow election politics closely, but I liked both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I'd read Clinton's autobiography and Obama's Audacity of Hope. I'd read endless discussions of their relative merits and demerits on political blogs and in the press. I felt Clinton was a tough progressive with her head screwed on straight about most issues, who'd been unfairly maligned by right and left for many years. I was impressed by Obama's pragmatism and eagerness to look past kneejerk ideological posturing in seeking solutions, his humor and charm, his charisma, and his tremendous facility with language.

For a long time I'd told others I was "leaning slightly" toward Obama, but I didn't make up my mind for certain until the actual primary campaign drama began to unfold. That seems like an age ago, the beginning of January. Since then, I've become progressively more sure of my vote until my preference has become something of a passion. The highly distinct campaigns the two candidates are running are the reason why.

While I like Clinton personally, her campaign has failed to show a unifying vision for the country. Across the board, her strategy has been to dismiss and divide. Whether it's downplaying the importance of African-American voters in South Carolina, leaving aside entire rural states-- like Idaho or North Dakota-- as unworthy of attention, or using surrogates to make racially-tinged remarks about Obama, her campaign has chosen badly if it wishes to attract goodwill and maintain a rapport with all segments of the American electorate.

Obama, to his great credit, has taken the opposite tack. His campaign is inclusive and has clearly brought a sense of individual political empowerment to many volunteers. There is campaign presence in every state, and it is diffuse and democratic in nature. Watching 15,000-person rallies in Boise and listening to volunteers gush about the pleasures of door-to-door canvassing in Nevada and phone-banking nationwide... I can believe, not only that Obama will bring millions of new voters into Democratic politics this year, but that the enthusiasm and skills they've learned from their activism on his behalf will carry over into continued engagement with the work of the nation after he is President. (The potential down-ticket effects for Democrats are nothing to sneeze at, either.)

I'm a 36-year-old almost-divorced mother living in Bozeman, Montana. Although Montana has tended to vote Republican in presidential elections, we now have two Democratic U.S. Senators, as well as a very successful Democratic governor. Obama has shown tremendous strength in this region of the country. I believe he would have a real chance to win this "red" state, and others like it, in the general election-- and paint vast acreages blue on the national map. I urge you to cast your vote for the candidate who is living and breathing the 50-state strategy, and make Montana matter again.

So, it's short, it's trite, it's not terribly personal; maybe you can do better. Give it a shot.

[UPDATE]: My Daughter Won't Eat Downer Cows Forever

2008-02-12T20:20:00.004-07:00

A commenter on yesterday's post, My Daughter Eats Downer Cows, understandably assumed an adversarial position against the school food service:

That's awful. I encourage you to write to Mr. Burrows, who isn't worried and should be, and your local newspaper and also to encourage other parents to write. Let those meat-choosing folks know they are being watched.

I responded to this with a note of caution:

School lunch programs really don't have a lot of choice when it comes to[...]commodity items; they have to feed kids for a very low cost per lunch, and, if they use their USDA-provided meat, cheese, flour, potatoes, then they can use their funds for things like fruits and vegetables. Until we change a lot of other aspects of federal policy, school districts will be limited in their ability to respond to parent demands[...]

This evening I attended a public meeting intended to increase community involvement in our nascent district Farm-to-School program. The talk revolved around fruits and vegetables; bread, flour, and milk are already sourced locally, along with some other odds-and-ends. During the Q & A, I asked the panel (almost all of whose members I knew from smaller meetings), the following question: "Given current policy limitations and budgetary limitations, how impossible is it to think about meat sourcing?" As the representative from the school food service began to laugh and look a little sheepish, I added: "especially given the article that appeared recently in the paper, which maybe you've been hearing from some people about..."

The panel members said more or less what I'd anticipated (USDA commodities, local meat costs 3X as much, shortage of local processors to deliver the cuts we need, the food service rep provided some hard numbers); I'd just wanted to register the issue and didn't expect surprises.

However, I got one. Bob Burrows, the food services supervisor quoted in the Bozeman Chronicle article linked in yesterday's post, turned out to be present in the audience. He stood up and made an extended comment in response, and though he agreed with the current budgetary assessment, he also expressed a great deal of concern (not manifest in the Chronicle version) about the fact that Montana schools, surrounded as they are by local cattle ranches, are serving mostly beef from the midwest and Texas. For Burrows, the driving force of his frustration was a desire to support the local and regional economy; anxiety about food safety was secondary, he said. But he professed to have been distressed by this particular problem for twenty years, and extremely interested in pursuing policy changes to address it.

He sounded surprisingly impassioned, and I believed him. Even the people within the system, they want to change the system. They're not enemies, but natural allies. If a wide spectrum of interests can gather to keep pushing together on state and federal policy, I think by the 2013(?) Farm Bill we can dream some bigger dreams.

My Daughter Eats Downer Cows

2008-02-11T12:47:00.000-07:00

January 30's Washington Post discussed videos, taken with a hidden camera by a Humane Society investigator posing as a slaughterhouse worker, of illegal, abusive practices used to rouse "downer cows" for USDA inspection.

Video footage being released today shows workers at a California slaughterhouse delivering repeated electric shocks to cows too sick or weak to stand on their own; drivers using forklifts to roll the "downer" cows on the ground in efforts to get them to stand up for inspection; and even a veterinary version of waterboarding in which high-intensity water sprays are shot up animals' noses -- all violations of state and federal laws designed to prevent animal cruelty and to keep unhealthy animals, such as those with mad cow disease, out of the food supply.

The relevant Humane Society videos, titled "HSUS Investigates Slaughterhouse" and "Downer Cows Update," can be viewed here.

Hallmark Meat Packing, in Chino, CA, supplies Westland Meat Co., which in turn provides commodity beef (100 million pounds over the past 5 years) for school lunch programs across the country, as well as supplementary food programs for low-income and elderly citizens.

Apart from the question of utterly inhumane treatment of cows, use of downer animals increases the likelihood of a) eating meat from a seriously diseased animal, including one with BSE ("mad cow disease") and b) fecal contamination of the carcass from being dragged through manure and across dirty floors. Allowing such meat to be offered for sale, let alone giving it away to our schoolchildren and most vulnerable populations, is a major public health and safety risk.

I have a schoolchild. She eats commodity beef in her lunches frequently, lunches that we get for free because we're low-income enough. There's certainly plenty of good-quality, local beef here in Montana; but the cost to the school system, compared to what they can receive via USDA, is prohibitive. Right after the WaPo article came out, the story was covered, front-page, by my local newspaper.

About 37,000 pounds of Westland ground beef was delivered to the Montana Department of Public Health and Human Services’ food commodity warehouse in September, and much of it was distributed to schools, senior centers, homeless shelters and food banks throughout the state, Hank Hudson, the agency’s human and community services administrator, said Friday.

[...]

Bob Burrows, support services supervisor for the Bozeman School District, said the district had about 130 cases of the Westland beef on hand.

The meat will not be used, but the USDA order will not impact the district’s lunch program, which dishes out about 2,200 lunches daily, at all.

“I’m not worried about it in the least,” Burrows said. “We have other supplies that are not part of this. And the meat has not been recalled, that’s important to note.”

The meat has not been recalled. What a relief.

In Which I Buy Something I Don't Need

2007-12-01T16:35:00.000-07:00

Rare is the occasion when I go into a store and spontaneously purchase something that I didn't plan and don't need... except in the sense that I don't really need potato chips. But today I saw a product that stopped me in my tracks. It was made in China from 100% polypropylene, and it smells funny. But that's okay (sort of) because it's a reusable shopping bag with the IGA logo printed on it, which means they're finally getting on board with bringing your own bags, instead of looking at me like I'm a space alien and punishing me by making me pack my own groceries while the conveyor belt runs relentlessly beneath.

I had heard such newfangled trends as reusable store bags were catching on in conventional supermarkets elsewhere, but around here I'd thought it was a coop-only phenomenon. The IGA, where I did most of my shopping in my seriously impoverished days, is by no means an upscale grocery. I was thrilled, really thrilled (and surprised) to see a rack of those bags displayed in a prominent location near the express checkout. $1.49 apiece. I was only at the store to buy a single item, so would normally have used no bag at all, but I took one in support of their nascent effort. I'll be using it again, after all. And will probably end up buying two or three more.

The bags looked really tiny, hanging folded up, but I will also vouch for the fact that they expand beautifully into a square tote only slightly smaller than a paper grocery sack, they appear to be strong, and they have the distinct advantage of that store endorsement, giving people confidence that they're not weirdos for using them. Their boxiness also, I dare say, makes them much easier to pack than your standard shapeless tote, reducing annoyance on the part of those doing the bagging.

So, hooray! And... I'm sure the smell will dissipate in time.

If you go to www.reusablebags.com, you can see a running tally (at the top of the page) of disposable plastic bags consumed this year. Just watch it for a second.

Then, if your grocery is offering reusables, make sure you register your appreciation, both verbally and by actually purchasing and using them! This is one trend that needs, badly, to catch on.

Where'd My Tires Go?

2007-11-10T07:54:00.000-07:00

Monday I replaced the tires on my car. They were all-weather tires that had come with the car from the factory in the summer of 2002, and were going bald and cracked. Since my car's a four-wheel-drive, I replaced all four.

But as my daughter and I had walked by the open garage, piled high with tires, she'd marvelled. Look at all those. Yeah, there were a lot, but I've seen more simply dumped in piles here and there across the landscape. My biggest reluctance in tire replacement was not price, it was waste. What the hell was going to happen to my, and everybody's, old tires? If there are miles-long rafts of plastic bags floating in the Pacific Ocean, are there tire buttes, mountains, jetties? The Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) says that industry and EPA estimates suggest an average of one waste tire per year generated by each person in the U.S.. Seriously, where are they gonna go?

So I asked. I made a pretense of linking my query to understanding the bill: so there's a $2.00 disposal fee for each tire? Uh-huh. So... what happens to them?

"I have no idea," said the young guy taking my check, in a conversation that was beginning to turn familiar.

Surely he must have some idea. He works there, for god’s sake. “Like, do they just get landfilled? Do they get recycled somehow?”

“They go to a tire disposal place up in Polson. I have no idea what they do with them after that.”

Well, okay. That’s someplace to start.

Here’s what a little research was able to turn up regarding the tire disposal place up in Polson and what they might do there. They don’t have their own website, so this is a sketchy description cobbled from a number of sources.

First of all, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) gives some general information about what happens to waste tires in the state (emphases mine).

Montana does not ban tires from landfills or require that tires be cut up before disposal. Economics result in the majority of Montana's waste tires being disposed of in landfills. Long travel distances to waste tire markets means landfilling is usually less expensive than alternatives.

[…] The Rasmussen Tire site near Kalispell, Tires for Reclamation near Silesia (Billings), and The Tire Depot near Polson are privately operated Class 3 monofills (tires only) and these operators are required to keep records of tires buried or recycled.

The 1998 Environmental Quality Council's 'Status of and Alternatives for the Management of Waste Tires in Montana: Report to the 56th Legislature', reported that those three monofill sites alone accounted for a total of 174,497 or nearly 51% of the waste tires reported to the DEQ as having been disposed of or recycled in 1997.

From a table in the DEQ’s 1998 report mentioned above, I learn that Tire Depot Recovery, the Polson one, accepted 45,500 tires for disposal in 1997. 19,500 were accepted for recycling.

And what does “recycling” mean, for the minority of tires (perhaps a larger proportion these nine years later) that are actually recycled, up in Polson? It’s certainly a reassuring word, and the Polson facility has been praised highly over the past years, for instance, by our local opposition to a proposed tire incineration plant from Swiss corporation Holcim. Don’t burn the tires and send all kinds of nasty toxins into our air! Send them to Polson!

Montana does have a tire recycler that converts tires into useful products: Vern Reum of Polson, MT. Reum’s operation shreds tires and produces products with several different uses. He is in the process of qualifying for a low-cost economic development loan to buy a tire crumber so that he can expand his business.

In October 2003, though, Vern Reum had testified to the Montana Environmental Quality Council that not enough tires were being recycled in Montana to make recycling economically feasible, so at that time they were sending tires to Canada to be shredded, after which the product was shipped back to Montana for sale. He talked about plans to build a local plant to do this, a process which involves freezing the tires with nitrogen and then pulverizing them. Has that plant been built? I’ve had trouble telling. I found no reports of it; yet the 2006 article quoted just above says he “shreds tires” and the MT 2005 Guide for Buying Recycled Products lists the Tire Depot: “Shreds used tires to produce steel-free fill material. Can also provide crumb-rubber overs for horse arenas and playgrounds.”

So, the actual recycling (=shredding) process either takes place in Canada or has newly begun to occur right on site in Polson. The recycled product is basically… shredded-up rubber. With its many uses. Like fill.

There are some problems even with posing the above plan as an alternative to incineration: Vern Reum’s operation once caught fire in 2001, causing a fairly serious air- and water-quality crisis.

The business has been operating at the location for 14 years, he said. The plant shreds used tires to be recycled as road base, construction backfill and other uses. […]

The fire was contained to an enormous pit where the tires were shredded and stored.* Fire personnel estimated the size of the pit at approximately 400 yards wide and long. It was filled with tires and shredded tires to a depth of at least 40 to 50 feet, they said.

"Millions of tires," said Glenn Reum, Vern Reum's brother. "There are millions of tires in there. He's been hauling them from tire shops all over Washington, Oregon and Idaho. He's the only licensed tire recycler in the state of Montana."

*(Yes, this is a 2001 story, before the Tire Depot apparently had the capacity to shred its own tires. Sigh.)

None of this is to say that I oppose tire recycling, nor that I’m in favor of Holcim’s nasty incinerator, potentially only twenty minutes’ drive away. But there’s no simple, feel-good way to dispose of these big, heavy, flammable objects, of which we Americans produce hundreds of millions per year. Knowing this may help us consider our choices better: buy higher-quality, longer-lasting tires, for instance. Remember to rotate them. Drive less.

It took an awful lot of work for me to figure out even this much about what happened to my tires after I paid some men to take them off my car, then paid two dollars extra, per tire, for them to conveniently disappear. Even the men I paid didn’t know what became of them thereafter. Imagine the difference between this culture of invisible supply/invisible waste (who knows where our meat comes from or where tires go to die?) and a culture in which the whole material chain, from origin to waste disposal, could be transparent—in which business workers and customers might regularly discuss the histories of products prior to sale and their ultimate post-use fates. The repercussions would be huge, and much of the difference might simply rest on which questions are perceived as weird to ask.

I’m shy; it’s hard for me to ask weird questions and get funny looks from strangers. But I’m doing it anyway; the alternative is tacit acceptance of this unnatural universe of disconnected phenomena, where the objects I use appear out of nowhere and go back into nowhere when I’m through with them. I eat anonymous beef and don’t know how my city’s water treatment plant works; I drive on anonymous rubber which can be replaced, for money, without my ever seeing what’s been discarded. There were tires on my car when I dropped it off (one flat); there were different tires on it when I picked it up, none flat. Transaction accomplished. Snap-your-fingers magic.

The thing is, times are coming—or already here—when we need to make major changes to our supply chains and waste management to survive. This kind of magic is exactly what will render us helpless to save ourselves. Witnessing such sleights of hand every day, we expect miracles.

Time to start feeling around inside the magician's hat.

Senate Farm Bill Update and Action

2007-10-31T08:42:00.000-06:00

OrangeClouds115 writes a very similar farm bill digest to the one I was reluctantly gearing up for; now I don’t have to. (Mine wouldn't have had such a provocative title, though.)

We can be pleased that the Senate Agricultural Committee bill contains a pretty good livestock/competition title (read OC’s diary for more details), as well as some other victories for conservation and community-minded farmers and eaters. A few problems, however, to keep our eyes on:

The committee’s version raises EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) payment limits from $240,000 to $450,000 over 5 years. Payments in these kinds of giant chunks help large CAFOs build and manage manure lagoons while depleting funds that could otherwise be available to smaller farms.

The livestock title, though I’m really grateful that it contains so many provisions to help small producers compete against giant ones, is still missing Captive Supply Reform , which would “restore competition in the market for livestock contracts by requiring a fixed base price on contracts and marketing agreements [and] requiring trading of contracts in open, public markets to which all buyers and sellers have access.” Sen. Enzi (R-WY) is expected to offer an amendment re-introducing Captive Supply Reform.

Small livestock owners and small farm advocates are upset (as previously noted) by mentions of NAIS (National Animal ID System) in the committee’s bill. While the bill does not make NAIS mandatory (phew!), it still contains a provision (sec. 10305) that gives implicit approval and support to the “voluntary” USDA program. Section 10305 amends the Animal Health Protection Act to 1) define NAIS, and 2) exempt certain information collected under NAIS from the Freedom of Information Act.

The Farm Bill will probably go to the Senate floor next week (week of Nov. 5), so this is the time to ask your senators to:

support Sen. Enzi’s Captive Supply Reform amendment
strike sec. 10305, which brings NAIS one step closer to entrenched ubiquity.
oppose raising EQIP payment limits if there is an opportunity to do so.

From the first sentence you just know

2007-10-29T20:58:00.000-06:00

I finally had the opportunity to start Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle. And-- here's the thing-- it's fantastic. If you haven't read it yet, go read it now. If you're not moved to tears within, oh, four pages, by sheer amazement at how good this book is, I'm not sure if you're someone I can know.

On eating and drinking in Tucson:

Like many other modern U.S. cities, it might as well be a space station where human sustenance is concerned. Virtually every unit of food consumed there moves into town in a refrigerated module from somewhere far away. Every ounce of the city's drinking, washing, and goldfish-bowl-filling water is pumped from a nonrenewable source-- a fossil aquifer that is dropping so fast, sometimes the ground crumbles. In a more recent development, some city water now arrives via a three-hundred-mile-long open canal across the desert from the Colorado River, which-- owing to our thirsts-- is a river that no longer reaches the ocean, but peters out in a sand flat near the Mexican border.

If it crosses your mind that water running through hundreds of miles of open ditch in a desert will evaporate and end up full of concentrated salts and muck, then let me just tell you, that kind of negative thinking will never get you elected to public office in the state of Arizona.

New to Me

2007-10-28T20:53:00.000-06:00

American Dippers

and a whole covey of gray partridges!

Neither of these birds are in the least rare, but I've never encountered either before (that I was aware of at the time)-- and then it was both in one morning. There were two dippers working the stream that runs beneath a bridge where I was running. There were 6 or 8 partridges bobbing around right near my lab on the university campus. Yes, it was a Sunday, no, not a central location, but still this seemed rather brazen.

"But look at the detailing!"

2007-10-28T20:35:00.000-06:00

CTLiberal at DailyKos diaries more horrific sweatshop abuses perpetrated by contractors for the Gap in Delhi.

For those of us involved in this issue only as consumers, I'd call your attention to the following passage from the Observer article.

"Professor Sheotaj Singh, co-founder of the DSV, or Dayanand Shilpa Vidyalaya, a Delhi-based rehabilitation centre and school for rescued child workers, said he believed that as long as cut-price embroidered goods were sold in stores across Britain, America, continental Europe and elsewhere in the West, there would be a problem with unscrupulous subcontractors using children."

Please think about that (I am). We don't need to wait for the practices of the Gap, or any other company, to be "exposed" by the media. If we find a garment that has elaborate handwork (embroidery, beading, all the details that are in fashion now), and its price does not seem to reflect the labor involved, we have to assume that it wasn't made by someone being paid a fair wage.

Of course, the people who run the Gap aren't stupid either; they're experts who should certainly come to the same realization instead of hiding their heads in the sand. Even if they "didn't know," they knew, and they bear responsibility. But we bear responsibility too, when purchasing, to assess: am I paying a fair price for this item? If I'm not, what are the probable implications?

I'm accustomed to going through that thought process when purchasing food. Now I'll think harder about clothing. Especially the kind with all that ornamentation.

Something Old

2007-10-27T20:32:00.000-06:00

A wonderful Barbara Kingsolver piece, featuring the marvelous Vandana Shiva, appeared in the September 30th Washington Post-- since this was the day my grandfather died, I missed it. A particularly startling assertion made by Shiva and new to me:

"Most of those who have moved off of farms are still working in the industry of creating food and bringing it to consumers: as cashiers, truck drivers, even the oil-rig workers who generate the fuels to run the trucks. Those jobs are all necessary to a travel-dependent, highly mechanized food system. And many of those jobs are menial, life-taking work, instead of the life-giving work of farming on the land. The analyses we have done show that no matter what, whether the system is highly technological or much more simple, about 50 to 60 percent of a population has to be involved in the work of feeding that population. Industrial agriculture did not 'save' anyone from that work, it only shifted people into other forms of food service."

Huh, really? Take the poll I just put up above-- I'm curious. And think carefully: for instance, no, of course I don't work in any kind of food-related job, I work in a fisheries laboratory. Then I thought about it a little more. Our lab has been mostly dedicated to addressing whirling disease, a pathogen that's been decimating trout populations throughout the West. Why, indeed, do we care about trout populations? Partly because of concern for ecological ramifications, or love of sport fishing. But also because trout are a wild food resource still widely exploited by Westerners. Are we so removed from the idea that wild food is real "food" that trout don't count, whereas if I worked with a cattle disease I'd certainly have a consciousness of my role in feeding the country's population? So, yes, okay, I'm (still) in food service.

Other food-service jobs I've held: bakery assistant. Grocery cashier. If you take "feeding the population" literally, nursing home aide. Grill cook. Prep cook. Waitress. Hostess. The past seven years in fisheries. Plus substantial unpaid cooking and gardening. Shiva is right. How about you, dear reader?

My grandpa, by the way, was born to a farm family. Later he grew up and "moved off the farm" (though still a farm-owner), becoming a small-town independent banker and politician. Oh, except the money coming in to the bank was that of local farmers, and plenty of the voters and constituents were farmers too. He was still in food service.

News and Links, 10/26/07

2007-10-26T20:40:00.000-06:00

FEMA briefs itself on its handling of California wildfires. More discussion and links at UncommonSense's Daily Kos diary.

*
The Senate Agriculture Committee has agreed on a Farm Bill which will now go to the Senate floor. Food and Water Watch has come up with a simple list of victories and "needs-work" areas and has an email form to let your Senators know which provisions you want them to fight for.

The current Senate version contains several good things we should hang onto hard, including steps forward on country-of-origin labelling (COOL) and a real competition title (.pdf).

Another persisting problem in addition to the ones Food and Water Watch mentions: the National Animal ID System (NAIS) received tacit approval in Section 10305. NAIS is not appropriate for small farmers selling locally, and its costs make small producers even less competitive against livestock giants. Please ask your Senators to support stripping this section from the bill.

*
Desmogblog demonstrates the "edits" that the White House made to CDC Director Julie Gerberding's Congressional testimony on the impacts of climate change. Said press secretary Dana Perino:

The CDC testimony "was not watered down in terms of its science (or) ... in terms of the concerns that climate change raises for public health."

You decide.

The Anti-Consumerist Child

2007-10-26T20:33:00.000-06:00

I went to the mall this week with my 6-year-old daughter, to search for components to this year's Halloween costume. She's going to be a carrot.

The things we were looking for were: orange pants. An orange or green knit cap. Orange face paint. Green pipe cleaners and some type of big green paper or something, to make fronds out of.

We purchased the last two craft items and the face paint right away, and were left cruising the department stores, hoping to happen upon orange pants or hats. My daughter saw a display of fuzzy animal slippers, cute frogs and bunnies and puppies, and pointed them out.

"Uh-huh," I said warily.

"But I don't need any slippers!" she cheerfully went on. "I've already got two pairs!"

Wow, okay. She stole my line. We went on into the children's department at Macy's, which had a display of gorgeous fancy dresses. Not pink ruffles and lace, but sophisticated, truly beautiful (and expensive) full-length satins in red-and-white patterns, or black, or sage green (my personal weakness). My daughter loves fancy dresses, and picks up a lot of them at yard sales with her dad. I stopped to admire them, ready with my explanation that, while they were beautiful, we would have nowhere to wear something so formal.

But my daughter moved purposefully right past me and the dresses, into the recesses of the children's department to search for orange pants. "Mooommm," she said impatiently. I was wasting time, looking at and touching stuff we obviously weren't going to buy.

She didn't even want a snack at the food court. "No, I can wait," she said.

Later, at another shopping center (orange pants are tough to find), she consented when I suggested stopping to refuel on a couple of tacos; and later still she spent $1.99 of her own money on a Halloween trick-or-treat bag at Kmart and asked for a quarter for the gumball machines. She's not an abnormal child.

We still didn't have all our costume components, so another trip was in the works. But... when did my kid become such a joy to shop with? I remember when, at about age four, Store Lust suddenly hit. Everything we passed-- toys, shoes, towels, can openers-- became an object of intense desire. She didn't throw tantrums, but every shopping expedition became an exhausting odyssey of rational explanation. We don't need that. We can't buy everything. We don't have the money for anything except what's on our list. They're just saying that thing is great because they want to get you to buy it, so their company can make more money. We don't need one of those.

But somehow, somewhere, all that must have sunk in. The presumption of not-buying has overtaken the drive to possess or consume. On that day and the one following (during which we still couldn’t find orange pants, but settled for orange shorts and very long orange socks), we bought only the items we were specifically looking for, plus a very few small treats (on the second day, she bought herself a 50-cent lollipop).

It’s a wonderful thing. Except she wants Heelys.

New Footprint Game

2007-09-29T10:13:00.000-06:00

There's a new "calculate-your-footprint" interactive game out from American Public Media. (Others were previously blogged here.)

As a calculator, it's pretty standard (and, indeed, I got what's more or less my standard result: If everyone lived like you, we would need 2.5 Earths...). It's far more high-tech and visual than most, though (you even make an entirely irrelevant avatar!). It also collects some demographic data, and allows you to compare your scores, not only with U.S. and world averages, but with various subgroups of your choice (I use a little more electricity than most low-income people, but drive far less than most Democrats).

As usual, I'm surprised by how minimally things like transportation and garbage figure in to my lower-than-average-but-still-too-high score. Those are the elements we're accustomed to thinking about, to feeling guilty about and adjusting. But if I took the bus everywhere and recycled every bit of my garbage (man, I miss composting), it wouldn't change the fact that housing and food are my main problems. This despite the fact that I live in a small apartment in a 30-unit building, and eat a diet that is majority local and/or organic with only a little bit (I estimated 2%) of meat.

Electricity (I'm running, mainly, the usual fridge and electric range, a laptop, a handful of light bulbs-- some of which are fluorescent). Food. When these are one's most serious sources of wastefulness, despite real moderation, it serves as a reminder that large structural changes (in power generation, in food production and distribution) can be far more effective in reducing one's "footprint" than adjusting one's personal habits. Of course, the latter is essential too.

Getting Back to the Farm Bill...

2007-09-25T06:27:00.000-06:00

Finally! I admit the August recess (and yes, I'm aware it's September 25) caused me to take my eye off this ball. It's time for a whirlwind reorientation:

First of all, timing. A lot of other things have been on the Senate’s plate this month, including the post-surge Iraq assessment. Poor Tom Harkin and his farm bill have been put off, again. Since the 2002 farm bill expires on September 30, a 30-day extension will be sought (for the time being, though further short-term extensions are certainly possible). Harkin still says he intends for the Agriculture Committee to take up the farm bill in the first week of October, before the Columbus day break. It’s unclear to me how likely that actually is.

Another thing that’s unclear is whether a major personnel shift will cause delays or change dynamics. Mike Johanns stepped down last week as Secretary of Agriculture in order to run for Sen. Chuck Hagel’s seat in Nebraska, and will be replaced by deputy secretary Chuck Conner. Some feel the timing of Johanns’ move is unprofessional:

‘‘For the secretary to walk away in the middle of a farm bill borders on irresponsible,’’ said Sen. Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat on the Senate Agriculture Committee. His remarks were echoed by Democratic Sens. Byron Dorgan of North Dakota, Tim Johnson of South Dakota and Ben Nelson of Nebraska.”

However, Tom Harkin complimented Johanns’ past work, and Rep. Collin Peterson (D-MN), the House Agriculture Committee chairman so influential in the House version of the farm bill passed in July, expressed doubt that the replacement would matter much.

‘‘Chuck Conner has been running the show behind the scenes on the USDA’s farm bill agenda, so not much will change now that he’s been named acting secretary,’’ Peterson said.

I kind of hate the idea of the acting secretary of agriculture being a past president of the Corn Refiners Association (member companies: Archer Daniels Midland! Cargill! National Starch and Chemical Company! and more!), but there’s no reason I should be surprised. Read their most recent annual corn publication, Corn - Part of a Sustainable Environment. …Seriously, browse the site. It’ll make you as queasy as a Big Gulp full of high-fructose corn syrup.

This is what’s “running the show behind the scenes.”

*
Another key behind-the-scenes drama is unfolding over funding. Of course, the limited funding available for food and farm programs constrains what is possible: we can’t have farm subsidies at current levels, and strengthen food stamp benefits, and fund every desirable conservation program, and invest in community food programs, and create new departments at the USDA, and provide insurance and disaster relief for farmers, and so on. Well, we can’t unless we, for instance, get out of Iraq; that might free up some funds. But, for the time being, we can’t do everything we want to do.

So Sen. Max Baucus (D-MT—that would be my guy), who’s on the Agriculture Committee but is also chair of the Finance Committee, has pledged to find an additional $10 billion or so in funding for farm bill programs. The hitch is, this situation gives Baucus a tremendous amount of power to determine how that extra money is spent. While Harkin is looking to locate funding for existing conservation programs snubbed by the House bill, Sen. Debbie Stabenow (D-MI) is pushing for the discretionary funds allocated to Community Food Projects to be made mandatory, and anti-poverty advocates still hunger for a stronger Nutrition Title… Baucus has different priorities. Along with Sen. Kent Conrad (D-ND) and Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-IA, and incidentally ranking Republican member of the Finance Committee), Baucus would like to spend at least half that extra money for a permanent USDA-run disaster relief program to protect farmers against losses from drought, floods, and storms.

An excellent article on Harkin’s, Conrad’s, and Baucus’ role in these proceedings, by Steve Kopperud of Brownfield, is here.

Enter emerging co-star Sen. Max Baucus (D, MT), chair of the Senate Finance Committee, who plays the role of the money man in this drama. As when House Ways & Means Committee Chair Charlie Rangel (D, NY) had to conjure up over $4 billion to pay for Speaker Pelosi's desire to expand the food stamp program, all Senators with Farm Bill plans and programs are seeking an audience with Baucus, many on bended knee, in hopes of an offset to pay for their programs.

Baucus is playing it shrewdly, however, and unlike Rangel, he's already said he won't go for tax increases, which means the House scheme to tax the U.S. subsidiaries of foreign-owned companies is pretty much dead. However, he's putting conditions on his largesse. He's known to be putting together an offset package for Farm Bill spending that reports say will "add billions to farm spending." But he'll likely dictate where that money will go and he's a big supporter of the really big permanent disaster program. This does not bode well for Harkin's effort to get an extra $6 billion for conservation, nutrition and specialty crop programs.

Also see this Sept. 6 article from Congressional Quarterly.

Now, besides the obvious problem of trade-offs, a disaster relief program is a good thing in and of itself, right? Who could oppose funds to aid those betrayed by the vagaries of weather? Apparently, however, the question is more complicated than that. The Des Moines Register notes that “Harkin has resisted establishing a disaster program. Critics of disaster aid argue that it encourages farmers to grow crops such as corn in marginal areas.” In fact, the GAO has just issued a report (.pdf summary here) concluding “that crop insurance, in particular, is motivating conversion by greatly limiting the risk of producing crops in areas that are marginal as cropland.” So, for example, a conservation program that compensated farmers for leaving marginal land as wildlife habitat would, in a sense, contradict on principle a program compensating farmers who elected to farm that marginal land and suffered financial loss as a consequence. It is difficult to consider these simply two complementary approaches.

But, from the same Des Moines Register article:

Grassley said earlier Tuesday that he would side with Baucus and favor funding the disaster program[…] Harkin is ‘going to have to make the choice: either less money, or do it the way we want it done,’ Grassley said.

Lovely; here’s hoping Iowa’s two senators are the best of friends.

Whatever happens, funding-wise, we can suspect that the Senate will not be following the House’s lead in trying to pay for stuff by closing corporate tax loopholes or any of that funny business. Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), ranking Republican member of the Agriculture Committee, drafted a letter with five other senators warning against such erratic behavior. The Senate Agriculture Committee’s press release quotes the letter:

‘Since the Senate Finance Committee is the likely source of additional revenue, we wish to express our concern that any provisions to offset spending be carefully vetted and discussed with all members of the Agriculture Committee prior to markup…We wish to avoid a situation such as that occurred in the House which brought forth an unfortunate series of events, straining the farm bill’s long tradition of bipartisan and multi-regional support.'

A few other specific farm bill issues you might be following:

From Agriculture Online , Grassley expresses confidence that lower caps for farm payments, a source of controversy in the House bill, will fare better in the Senate.

An editorial from AgriNews champions Tom Harkin’s Livestock Title (often referred to as the “Competition Title,” because it is a series of reforms designed to break the economic stranglehold of a handful of corporate meat companies over family farmers and ranchers). These reforms include defending farmers against mandatory arbitration contract provisions; passing the Captive Supply Reform Act S. 1017, which would “restore fair market competition for livestock contracts by requiring marketing contracts to have a fixed base price negotiated in an open public market”; and banning meatpacker ownership of livestock, as trends toward corporate-owned, vertically-integrated enterprises are pushing small producers right out of the industry.

I’m not usually someone with much to say on energy, but it sounds as though there may be some unexpected energy-related developments in the Senate farm bill, again due to Max Baucus’ influence. The Community Food Security Coalition cites CongressDaily of Sept. 18 (the latter is subscription-only) as reporting:

Sen. Baucus is reportedly planning on shifting some renewable energy and fuels production tax incentives from the Energy Bill to the Farm Bill. Sen. Baucus said that the agriculture tax package would include provisions to help farmers and ranchers by including tax incentives for the production of wind and other means of alternative energy. Also, Sen. Baucus announced that there would be tax incentives to encourage farmers to grow crops that are used to make ethanol, biodiesel, and other biofuels. Both the oil and renewable energy industries said that they are in the dark about whether the tax incentives affecting them would be in the Energy or Farm Bill and what exactly the incentives will look like.

Stay tuned, I guess.

h/ts due, as usual, to some other blogs for pre-digestion of sources: in particular, More Deliberate Every Day, and the indispensably amazing digests by Keith Good at FarmPolicy.com.

"It Comes on the Truck... Then the Guys Cut it"

2007-09-24T13:58:00.000-06:00

Want to throw the employees of your local conventional supermarket into confusion? Ask them if they know where the meat comes from. Like this:

Do you happen to know where your meat comes from?

Today I had occasion to buy some stew beef-- I wanted to make a borscht with some big beets from the CSA farm-- and it was (sorry, purists) more convenient to stop at my neighborhood market than to hit the coop for the good stuff. It's a pretty small, locally-owned place with its own butcher, so I thought there was a reasonable chance of finding Montana beef for sale there; I looked at the labels on the packages and the signage at the meat counter, but saw no indication of the beef's provenance. No matter; I was going to buy it anyway, and I did.

As the young checker wrapped up my beef in an extra plastic bag to prevent leakage, insisting on giving me excellent service whether I wanted it or not, I asked her, as diffidently as I could: "Do you happen to know where your meat comes from?"

"No!," she said, with an air of thoughtful surprise. "No, actually, I've never even thought about that before." Despite clearly finding the question odd, she also seemed intrigued. "Do you want me to ask for you?"

"That's all right, I was just curious," I said. "You can ask later, if you want, just to find out for yourself..."

She turned to another woman who was stocking shelves, a middle-aged person who's worked there for years. "Do you know where our meat comes from?"

It was this woman-- I will add, a woman I like and respect fine-- who gave the answer, "It comes from the truck."

"Sorry?" I said. "It comes from the truck?" I wasn't sure if I'd heard right.

"Yeah, it comes on the truck... then the guys cut it. I have no idea where it comes from."

"That's okay, I was just curious," I said again. "Thanks." And I went out. I didn't want to cause more consternation.

So, if you don't mind feeling a bit like a space alien, I think it is not bad to raise this question. It plants a seed, even if you don't get an answer; the girl who said she'd never even thought about it before has now thought about it. Both these women may, at slow moments of the shift, idly ask a fellow employee: "hey, this lady came in and she asked me where our meat came from... do you know where it comes from?" Until maybe, someday, somebody will turn out to know.

Please, though, be kind to the grocery workers. It's not their fault our food system is fucked.

Serious Amusements

2007-09-23T21:04:00.000-06:00

Via Virtual Farmgirl, Cinema Botanica (trailer here) offers a little something to keep your plants, er, entertained. Read the press release about conceptual artist Jonathon Keats' films for non-human species.

Mr. Keats came to appreciate the potential impact of arts and entertainment on non-human audiences while choreographing ballet for honeybees at Chico State University last year.

Well, huh.

*

In the “things that remind me of my fish” department: Hunter of Daily Kos’s post on the care and feeding of Congress.

*

I've been working-- semi-working-- for three days on a post summarizing the current status of the farm bill. You wouldn't think it would be that hard. I hereby make a promise (!) that it'll be up tomorrow, provided I don't get all agitated about anything in the interim. Sigh.

Happy first day of fall, everybody. Count me one who's not grieving over the unleaving.

Farm Reads

2007-09-20T21:31:00.000-06:00

At Daily Kos, two interesting farming-related diaries of this week:

OrangeClouds115 puts into simple, convincing terms the argument against allocating EQIP (Environmental Quality Incentives Program) funds to help factory farms build manure lagoons.

And A. Siegel provides an introduction to the idea of vertical farming, ranging from rooftop gardens to diversified agricultural enterprises housed in skyscrapers.

Me, I'm excited, because no more waiting at the library for Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle-- a friend awaited me at my daughter's school this morning bearing a copy for me to borrow. Hooray!

"Each Animal Responds to Grass Differently"

2007-09-19T07:42:00.000-06:00

I don't mind being used as an advertising conduit for my friends-of-friends' (I've never met them) ranch (more about Alderspring's grass-fed beef). Here's an interview on foodreference.com with ranchers Glenn and Caryl Elzinga about their background, philosophy, and methods.

There's an excellent discussion of so-far-failed USDA attempts to define and regulate the term "grass-fed"; for those new to the terminology, it's important to realize that these words alone mean little. As Glenn Elzinga says, "if they want to know how the beef is actually raised, they will have to do a bit of investigating."

In the same vein, Elzinga repeatedly emphasizes the importance of keeping the business small enough to cultivate diversity and attention to detail. The corporate "grass-fed beef" that may take advantage of the trend will not be the same product:

...the implementation of the system is very unlike finishing cattle in a feedlot. For example, sometimes we move our cattle 3 times a day—other times we move them once every three days. It all depends on weather, grass quality, and the condition of the animals. Excellent grass fed beef is truly an artisanal product. Every two weeks, we handpick several head as ‘ready’ from our yearling herd, carefully evaluating each steer for the right amount of finish. The genetic diversity of our herd prevents us from categorically shipping a large number of animals off to the processor at any one time. Each animal responds to grass differently. One animal may finish in 14 months, another may take as long as 20. In the industrial model of the feedlot, it is important to strive for uniformity, both through genetics and feeding regimes, so that animals grow very rapidly and entire pens of cattle finish at the same time, often in 13 to 15 months.

[...]

What most large grass fed producers have done is put their cattle in a feedlot, feeding them a consistent forage-based ration during the last 60 days of life to eliminate the inconsistency of their products. This feedlot-finishing, however, creates many of the same problems that are associated with the current system of finishing animals in confinement on a grain-based diet. Most people interested in organics are interested in the whole picture of how their food is produced, a picture that includes humane treatment of animals, elimination of concentrations of waste that cause pollution problems, reduction of E.coli contamination, and support of small family farms.

Farming the Parking Garage

2007-09-16T21:33:00.000-06:00

There was a superb article on urban farming a few weeks ago from In These Times. Thank you to OrangeClouds115 for bringing it to my attention. I maintain that the only sensible long-term land-use strategy is to cultivate our living spaces-- empty lots, rooftops, and lawns-- for food production; and, for those inhabiting "food deserts," justice demands equitable access to health and nutrition, green growing spaces... and pleasure in food.

Two Great Losses

2007-09-14T11:03:00.000-06:00

Via Devilstower at Daily Kos, Alex the parrot, subject of a fascinating body of animal cognition and language research, has died. More about Alex's great work here and here. Memorial gifts may be made here in support of further parrot research.

[update]: A couple of links for cornfed and anyone else.
Pepperberg's 2002 book, The Alex Studies
Alex with Irene and Alan Alda on PBS' Scientific American Frontiers

Madeleine L'Engle also died last week. A real obituary will likely come later, as I owe her many thanks. For now, I'll just say that Mr. Jenkins One is one of the great characters of modern literature. And goodbye, to one of the most fearless persons we've had the privilege to know.

Something to Read

2007-09-14T06:47:00.000-06:00

I just wanted to post a quick link to a diary Farm Bill Girl wrote last night on Daily Kos entitled "Don't Blame the Farmer for your Food Bill." In her usual passionate style, FBG explains why high corn prices and ethanol subsidies are not the true culprits in rising food costs, and does what she does best: placing the blame squarely on corporate agribusiness. And she does it without supporting ethanol as an alternative energy source, which adds a bit of balance to the argument. The comment thread's worth a read too.

Kids' Book Thread

2007-09-07T10:33:00.000-06:00

Like the regular book thread, this can serve as a long-term comment repository (linked at right sidebar) even after it's scrolled down; this one is for anybody who wants to talk kids' lit with us.

My daughter and I have both been very excited to discover the American Girl books. My much younger half-sister had been a fan of the series as a child, but I'd always been skeptical: they were, after all, associated with the sale of some very expensive dolls and other products, and I didn't have very high expectations for the quality of the books themselves. (There are eight individual series of six books; each series focuses on a fictional little girl representative of a particular time period and cultural group in American history.) My daughter, however, chose to check one out of the public library (it was the first book about Addy, a little girl who escapes from slavery and begins life in the North during the Civil War), and we were both instantly hooked.

The fact is, the Addy books are extremely well-written and emotionally gripping; and they're furthermore highly informative historically. For a six-year-old girl with little sense of American history and virtually no sense of our country's legacy of racial injustice, they've introduced a number of new topics of thinking and questioning: about war, about slavery, about prejudice, about class, about how culture changes over time. Kids this age have a keen sense of justice, and it's a perfect time to expand their concern for playground and at-home fairness into an awareness of imbalances in the wider world. At the same time, the stories communicate historical themes mainly through the daily life of a single girl, stirring kid empathy by focusing on familiar commonalities: feelings about family members, school experiences and social frustrations, games and meals.

We've finished the Addy stories and moved on to Felicity, a Revolutionary-War-era girl living in Williamsburg, Virginia. Because the themes in the Felicity books-- so far, anyway-- are not so urgently life-or-death, I don't find them quite as absorbing. In the first Addy book, Addy leaves three family members behind and risks her own life trying to escape north with her mother. In the first Felicity book, Felicity rescues a horse from an abusive owner. I guess that was pretty life-or-death for the horse.

Another wrong number...

2007-09-05T21:38:00.000-06:00

This thing just gets more and more embarrassing, doesn't it?

Book Thread

2007-09-05T06:48:00.000-06:00

Just for the heck of it (and to remind me to read as well as blog), I've added a new little sidebar item ("What I'm Reading"). The idea is, if you too are reading the same thing(s), or have recently read them, or want to read them... etc.... you can click the link and it will bring you to this book thread to discuss. (Of course, at the moment this post is at the top of the page, but it will ultimately scroll away.)

***
9/16/07
Sy Montgomery's The Good Good Pig

I've only just begun this, so no comment yet.

***

I've been reading Barack Obama's book for the past... almost two months, perhaps. I'm not sure why I'm finding it so difficult to get through, since it is extremely well-written for this type of political memoir/policy outline. Plus, he's funny. My favorite bit is still this, from the second chapter, where Obama describes meeting President Bush at a social gathering on the day of his swearing in to the U.S. Senate (just after hungrily stuffing his face with hors d'oeuvres) :

"Obama!" the President said, shaking my hand. "Come here and meet Laura. Laura, you remember Obama. We saw him on TV during election night. Beautiful family. And that wife of yours-- that's one impressive lady."

"We both got better than we deserve, Mr. President," I said, shaking the First Lady's hand and hoping that I'd wiped any crumbs off my face. The President turned to an aide nearby, who squirted a big dollop of hand sanitizer in the President's hand.

"Want some?" the President asked. "Good stuff. Keeps you from getting colds."

Not wanting to seem unhygienic, I took a squirt.

That's really what I like best about Obama: that quiet irreverence that sees the humanity in everybody regardless of position.

[Update]: And the way he talks about his wife is so sweet you'll have tears in your eyes. After reading the section on foreign policy, though... I'm finally starting to accept that he may not be my primary candidate. Damn.

[Update 2]: He wants to be president... but can he handle the goody bags?

It is left to Michelle to coordinate all the children's activities, which she does with a general's efficiency. When I can, I volunteer to help, which Michelle appreciates, although she is careful to limit my responsibilities. The day before Sasha's birthday party this past June, I was told to procure twenty balloons, enough cheese pizza to feed twenty kids, and ice. This seemed manageable, so when Michelle told me that she was going to get goody bags to hand out at the end of the party, I suggested that I do that as well. She laughed.

"You can't handle goody bags," she said. "Let me explain the goody bag thing. You have to go into the party store and choose the bags. Then you have to choose what to put in the bags, and what is in the boys' bags has to be different from what is in the girls' bags. You'd walk in there and wander around the aisles for an hour, and then your head would explode."

My dearly cherished hope is that my next book will be Barbara Kingsolver's Animal, Vegetable, Miracle... if only everybody else would hurry up with it at the public library.

A Piece of Luck: We get to do Farm to School!

2007-09-03T21:46:00.000-06:00

My daughter's elementary school will be a pilot school this year in the Farm to School program: a collaborative effort of the Center for Food and Justice and the Community Food Security Coalition which assists local organizations in forging ties between school lunch programs and area food producers. Missoula's schools have been trying out this venture for the past couple of years.

The benefits of the Farm to School concept are many:

The school system becomes a reliable market for local farm products, providing some measure of security to existing growers and increasing overall demand for agricultural activity locally.
The school, in turn, has reliable sources of healthy, nutritious, top-quality foods with which to feed kids, reducing reliance on prepackaged items and junk foods, allowing the inclusion of more fresh fruits and vegetables, minimizing dependence on USDA commodity foods (largely beef and dairy), and arriving at a more appetizing result.
The children eat healthier, learn better nutrition habits in the long term, and often spend time learning about local and sustainable agriculture. The program can simply introduce the idea that it's possible-- even interesting-- to know where your lunch comes from.
As with all local, seasonal eating, the environmental benefits of all that food not grown according to a giant corporate model, and not shipped across the continent or further, are substantial.

Given how many are served by the national school lunch program each day, a widespread Farm to School mentality could have a very significant impact on local agriculture, ecosystems, and public health.

There'll be more to say on this topic later; I can attest, however, that my daughter absolutely raved about the lunch on the first day of school. Besides the Farm to School effort, the school is also making general changes to the menu in order to apply for a Gold Award in the USDA HealthierUS School challenge, changes that include:

more fruits and vegetables
more whole-grain foods and fiber
low-fat dairy items
more homemade entrees

Here's a map to help you find a Farm to School program near you.

Feliz, continued.

2007-09-02T22:18:00.000-06:00

Surprisingly many persons, behind the blogscenes, have expressed a desire to hear an update on our female betta, Feliz. Some have already heard the answer in detail, and I apologize to these people for the redundancy. But here's the scoop:

Per my previously-expressed intention to enhance Feliz's happiness via some more natural perks, my daughter and I did two things. First, we went to Petsmart and bought a real plant (a java fern) to replace the more unpleasant of the two plastic ones. Feliz instantly loved the plant; she was tremendously curious to explore it, sidling through all its nooks and crannies, and grazing its leaves with her body. Clearly this was an appreciated improvement.

Second, we took another kid friend and a little net and went out to the creek-- the same one they'd dammed last month-- to catch live food for Feliz. It was quite an outing, involving multiple pickle jars-- we got into catching and looking at stuff for fun, and ended up with somewhat more than a small fish could comfortably consume in a couple of days (which turned out to be the longest our stream creatures could survive in a room temperature, low-dissolved-oxygen pickle jar). Nevertheless, Feliz seemed to enjoy the wriggling treats: midge larvae being popular, as well as a very small leech which was slurped into her upturned mouth with apparent gusto.

I felt a little funny about the leech-- was that good for her?-- but she seemed to like it so much that I was reassured.

A couple of days later, Feliz started to languish. First she hovered, fairly still, near the water surface all day long, leading me to imagine her water needed changing (I try to pay attention to signs of reduced activity). I changed it. She got worse. Soon she was lying on the bottom of the tank, on her side, just gilling, not wanting to eat or to swim. Since my answer to everything is more internet research, I searched large numbers of betta care sites (there are surprisingly many) for clues. The results of my quest: 1) Feliz probably had an impaired swim bladder. If you don't know what a swim bladder is, here is a link. (I tried to explain it to my mother and she thought I had bought a little external flotation device to attach to my fish. Hi mom.) In any case, without good buoyancy control, swimming had become a lot more work for Feliz. 2) The most likely reason for the impairment was...constipation. Oh, dear. Was this my fault? The sites said this turn of events could be fatal. All my good intentions, and maybe I'd killed her.

I imagined that little shape-changing leech stretching itself out in her gut, blocking all passage.

The betta fanciers recommended feeding the fish bits of green pea as a therapy for this condition, and I resolved to secure a bag of frozen peas as soon as possible.

But by the time I'd arrived home that evening with the peas, Feliz had miraculously recovered. "She must have pooped!" my daughter and I exclaimed in wonder and delight. The degree of relief I felt was beyond what I ever would have expected a few weeks before. I love this damn fish. It's just a freaking fish. And I work with fish in my job, and they die routinely, and I, most of the time, hardly care.

Feliz has been full of energy and personality ever since; she's fine, though I'm looking into buying her a tiny lamp to heat her bowl as the weather cools. The newest development is that she'll literally eat out of our hands. But no more leeches; it's prefab betta pellets she's seizing off my finger with her funny mouth.

Everybody Loves CSAs! You Would Too!

2007-09-01T21:19:00.000-06:00

eph89 at Daily Kos writes about discovering Community-Supported Agriculture (CSAs). I too am a huge fan of this model, and am enjoying my second season of weekly vegetable boxes from Matt and Jacy Rothschiller's farm.

By way of example, I fronted something like $360 or $380 (I forget exactly) back in March; in exchange, I get a big box of goodies, plenty for me to use plus freeze a little and share a little, every week from mid-June to mid-October. That represents a southwest Montana growing season; many places it would be longer. This week my box contained:

1 bunch of cilantro
a considerable bag of baby lettuce mix (perfectly fresh, little need to sort through it like the supermarket stuff)
2 yellow and 1 green summer squash
2 ugly-but-tasty tomatoes
3 red onions
a bunch of small carrots, mixed purple, orange, and yellow ones
2 long, curvy cucumbers
a “SunJewel” melon (yellow and oblong, tastes like honeydew)

Other parts of the season I’ll get different things: lots of greens and herbs the first couple of weeks, tons of my beloved beets in June and July, winter squashes as the autumn progresses. Every week is somewhat different, and I get to have absolutely fresh, good-quality produce that supports a local farm family, is grown according to sustainable techniques, and requires little fuel to transport it to the pick-up spot. Every week I am excited to get my box and look inside, and to right away go home and make myself the biggest, most luxurious salad I can put together.

There is also an option, in my CSA, to trade half a day of farm labor per week during the growing season for a reduced-price subscription; while doing so is not sensible or efficient from an hourly-wage point of view (it comes out to about $3/hour), I’m considering trying it next summer for the experience.

If you want to know more about CSAs and their benefits, do check out eph89’s great diary.

A Ranch Worth Checking Out

2007-08-31T22:45:00.000-06:00

A friend of mine directed me to the Alderspring Ranch web site: the proprietors are friends of hers, and she wanted to share their philosophy (and maybe some of their products) with me. Don't let the somewhat primitive-looking layout fool you; this is a wonderfully-informative site with many original pages as well as links to outside resources. I liked, first off the bat, the ranchers' focus on the centrality of grass to their beef production.

"We believe we live in the best grass-fed beef producing area in the country. The cold summer nights and high soil mineral levels of our mountain pastures grows grass like nowhere else, and results in a uniquely flavorful beef."

I'd thought, of course, about the effects of different feed inputs on the taste of beef, but I hadn't quite thought before about the effects of different soil and weather inputs on the flavor of grass, and how those in turn might subtly influence the meat's ultimate flavor.

Not only that, says rancher Glenn Elzinga, but "there are slight seasonal variations in the flavor balance due to a dynamic sward of grass and the various plant stages that define it at a particular point in the growing season."

The site has particularly good discussions of routine antibiotic use in the livestock industry, translating labels on meat, and how to cook grass-fed steaks.

From their page on environmental benefits, the Elzingas briefly describe their own efforts to improve the ecological working of their ranch:

"Water pollution from feedlot-raised beef is a growing concern. At Alderspring Ranch, we are careful about keeping the water that flows through our ranch clean. We have fenced cattle away from streams and riparian areas. We do everything we can to keep the valuable nutrients in cattle manure on our pastures rather than allowing it to escape and become water pollutants. We use a permaculture system of pasture maintenance. We do not plow and seed annual forages. We improve pastures through grazing management and hand seeding. This approach eliminates soil erosion, and works to build the organic matter and fertility of soil.

Finally, we avoid monocultures. We rejoice in our brushy fenced breaks that are home to deer, nesting birds and small mammals. We try to encourage the growth of cottonwoods along our ditches to supply shade for our cattle, and habitat for raptors that then reduce our rodent populations. We allow the wetter areas of our ranch to grow native sedge meadows, and graze these carefully to avoid hummocking."

You can read more about their production protocols here.

Er... Hello Again

2007-08-31T21:57:00.000-06:00

A funny thing to be the first post in three weeks... but, in acknowledgment of our major regional political news:

From Left in the West (and featured by kos): Montana state senator Dave Lewis (R) of Helena thinks pervs like Idaho Sen. Larry Craig deserve the Islamic fundamentalist treatment.

Make that Idaho ex-Senator Larry Craig.

If only we could throw the crooks out for their actual crookery, and not their sad and sordid personal struggles. Senator Craig, for the record, I don't care what you did in the restroom; I care what you did in the halls of power.

Bill Kennedy or at least some Democrat for Congress '08!

2007-08-12T20:35:00.000-06:00

Did I mention Montana only has one Republican politician left on the national level?

Bill Kennedy, Yellowstone County commissioner (that's Billings), plans to run against Rehberg in '08. Probably other Democrats will run in the June primary too. Why am I mentioning Kennedy today?

Because the very first issue Kennedy addresses on his "Issues" page is country-of-origin labelling (COOL).

Agriculture: Montana’s Industry
Family ranches and farms are a critical component to our state economy and I will fight for them. I support country-of-origin labeling that gives consumers the opportunity to support Montana-grown products. Spending the past 14 years working with farmers and ranchers, I've listened and understand the critical role that federal farm policy plays in the lives of everyday Montanans. Given a fair chance, Montana's farmers and ranchers can compete with anyone, but we need a level playing field.

I'm liking your priorities, Bill.

I Never Knew It Could Betta Like This

2007-08-11T21:52:00.000-06:00

My kid was begging for a guinea pig. Our apartment building does not allow pets; and I was enjoying our fur-free existence after living seven years with a two cats, a dog, and a husband with selective cat-vomit blindness. When we split up, he kept the pets (they were his to begin with), bodily secretions and all. I try really hard when I go over there not to point out the vomit streaks.

I think a guinea pig is too big, I said.

How about a lizard?, she said. Or a snake?

I like reptiles, but my childhood experience suggests they're difficult to keep healthy. Lizards are hard, I said. Snakes have to eat mice.

I had a feeling things weren't going to end up the way I wanted. I steeled myself to consent to a hamster. Could we have a hamster? The cage might kind of smell bad. I was enjoying my house not smelling bad. For once.

How about a fish?, she said. Really? Was I off the hook? A fish?, I said. Well, maybe. Give me the weekend to think about it.

Come Monday, I thought a fish was a pretty good idea. An easy fish. My daughter had already killed off several bettas at her dad's, though I knew they were supposed to be the hardiest. I suggested a nice goldfish. But she wanted another betta.

Well, I am supposed to be a fish expert of sorts. I've been caring for laboratory fish for the past 7 years, since before my daughter was even conceived. I had hopes that I could be successful where my ex-husband had, inexplicably, failed. We went to PetSmart and picked out a nice female (A. prefers simpatica over showy).

I took care over the set-up: a bigger bowl than strictly necessary, with a wide opening. Not one but two plastic cover plants. A stick-on thermometer, since I suspected the string of previous bettas-- tropical creatures-- had perished of chill in my ex's wintry Montana basement apartment. Some further conferring with the salesgirl over the best way to keep the bowl warm when the seasons change (I'm not keeping my apartment 75 degrees in the winter for a fish). A. picked out the brightest multicolor gravel, and of course we needed food, and water conditioner, and a scrub brush, and a little net. I ended up spending about $30-- twice what I would have for the little pre-fab betta kit.

We took our fish home, carefully prepared her bowl, and waited for the water to come to room temperature to avoid shocking her with cold (had my ex- done this?). While the betta sat patiently in the cup, my daughter named her. She looks like she's smiling, she said. How about "Smiler"? I made a noncommittal grunt. A. took note of my lack of enthusiasm. Or what about "Happy"?, she said. I know!: "Feliz!"

Feliz was a perfect name. She's a pretty little fish, pale in front with a pinky-violet iridescence towards the tail, and plum-colored fins. Delicate-looking. After we put her into her bowl, I was sure we'd find her belly-up any moment.

At first, Feliz was shy. She lingered towards the back of the bowl and declined to feed until we'd moved away and didn't seem to be looking at her. But, within a day or two, she began swimming up towards us when she saw us approach. A fast learner for such a little fish; a lot smarter, frankly, than the trout I work with. It was strangely gratifying to get up in the morning and say, "hello, Feliz!," and have her actually come to me. I'm just like a six-year-old. Do you think she likes me?

Now, less than a week later, Feliz perks up when I come home from work. Her bowl is on my desk; if I stop typing and address myself to her, like now, she swims over and looks me in the eye, no doubt to assess my feeding-related intentions. Sorry, Feliz, only twice a day. I am well and truly hooked.

I want Feliz to be happy, and not only because of her name. Plastic plants and a roomy, warm-enough, clean bowl are good, but could I do better? Do fish play?, asked my daughter. I don't think so. Maybe I'll have to track down some live food, and real plants. I remember my freshman English teacher, a friend to this day, who asked the class after reading Hemingway's"Big Two-Hearted River": Are the fish happy in this story?

I want the fish to be happy in this story.

Foodie Links, 8/11/07

2007-08-11T18:57:00.000-06:00

At Daily Kos, Runs With Scissors reads Jacques Pepin in a fever dream.

Sustainable Table has undertaken the Eat Well Guided Tour of America. You can read about their farm and restaurant visits as well as, possibly, join them for an event in your area (schedule here). In particular, their "Pie Across America" project features local pies from all along their route. Many thanks to DKos's CSI Bentonville for sending me the links.

KeysAmy of earthboundkitchen.com decides to make entirely local peach pie in North Carolina. Some challenges ensue, but it still looks kind of great.

"Cupcake Porn" from the blog Vegan Cupcakes Take Over the World. You know you want to look.

Conservation and Environment Links, 8/10/07

2007-08-10T21:40:00.000-06:00

I've been quiet this week, but here are a handful of links to chew on in the meantime.

FishOutofWater at Daily Kos writes about a record minimum for Arctic sea ice.

A new study in Science suggests the endangered black-footed ferret population, supported by a captive breeding program, is making progress.

The El Segundo blue butterfly, on the endangered species list since 1976, is making a comeback too.

Biodiversity alert: a 386-square-mile tract of forest in the eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, long-inaccessible to biologists because of regional violence, is found to contain a number of previously-undescribed species as well as a very high level of animal and plant diversity. "The Wildlife Conservation Society notes that chiefs and elders at local villages are supportive of transforming the region into a protected park."

BP proposes coal-bed methane exploration in the Canadian portion of the Flathead River basin, near Glacier National Park. Montana politicians and scientists are alarmed.

Whither the Farm Bill Now?

2007-08-06T06:53:00.000-06:00

I took a farm bill break, and so did most people for a few days after the House passed it on July 27 (its passage is reported here in haiku form). But it's worth taking stock of where we stand, with the Senate due to take up the bill in September, after the recess.

The House put together a bill which was much like the 2002 farm bill in its essentials, particularly in its approach to subsidies, but did manage to include funding for a number of desirable new programs and increase nutrition spending. Both the Environmental Working Group (statement via Mulch) and Pelosi credit the failed Kind/Flake amendment for creating pressure to depart even minimally from the status quo, with EWG suggesting the amendment was "sufficiently threatening to the subsidy lobby to leverage increased funding for conservation, nutrition, organic agriculture, specialty crops, minority farmers and many other priorities.”

There were a couple of positive things about the bill that I haven't yet noted. Dan Morgan, on FarmPolicy.com, says: "The big losers in closed-door deal making that went on in Pelosi’s office until the wee hours last Thursday morning were the oil and gas industry and the crop insurance industry. Their lobbyists were caught short, but there is plenty of time for them to regroup as the bill goes to the Senate and then to a final House-Senate conference." Why were the lobbyists upset? The federal share of private crop insurance administrative costs was reduced, and new fees were imposed on deepwater oil and gas wells. I can get behind those changes.

Also, organics got some additional funds in the House farm bill, including $50 million over the next five years in assistance payments to farmers in the process of converting to organic. Since conversion is a slow and arduous process, with certification (and premium prices) only coming after several years of increased investment, this is a welcome form of aid, though the amount spent this way would ideally be larger.

So what can we expect from the Senate in September? Despite a slimmer Democratic majority, the Senate Agriculture Committee chairman, Sen. Tom Harkin of Iowa, is considered to be more sympathetic to progressive alternatives than House chairman Collin Peterson (D-MN). The San Francisco Chronicle proclaimed him “friendlier to conservation and nutrition programs" and noted his support of "tougher payment limits." In particular, Harkin will be looking to bring back the Conservation Security Program he was instrumental in creating, funding for which was neglected in the House bill. He has indicated that he supports the tax proposal, closing a loophole for foreign corporations, that created so much furor during the House passage of the bill.

What can we hope for and work for?

The Food Research and Action Center urges us to use the August recess "to educate Senators about the importance of Farm Bill nutrition title investments.” That is, preserve the modest funding increases passed by the House; given their modestness, perhaps even improve upon them (hey, we can dream). If anti-hunger efforts are important to you, this is a good time to craft a letter to your Senator.

Despite the disagreements within the progressive blogosphere over the Kind/Flake amendment and its merits or dangers, one thing everyone (even, somewhat frighteningly, Bush; but with the surprising exception of Barbara Boxer) seems to agree on after passage of the House bill is that payment caps remain too high (currently, $1 million in farm earnings in order to be disqualified for subsidies). This should be a major focus of efforts as the bill goes to the Senate in September, something both liberals and conservatives agree on (for different reasons)-- a no-brainer. Sen. Grassley (R-IA) and Sen. Dorgan (D-ND) are planning a bipartisan push for lower income caps ($250K instead of $1 million), and we should urge our senators to support this effort. Since Bush wants this too, lower income caps might also reduce the likelihood of the threatened presidential veto.

Another surprising place where one might find oneself agreeing with the Bush administration over the Democratic House’s farm bill: international food aid. Shipping surplus food overseas, with its associated energy costs, waste, and distribution challenges, doesn’t make sense. Helping to shore up local farm economies in developing countries does. I wish they’d stop calling it “Mr. Bush’s idea”; it’s not like he invented it. But why was this dropped from the House bill? Can it be revived in the Senate?

A couple of other legislative matters to follow, and consider whether you'll support:

Democrats Dick Durbin of Illinois and Sherrod Brown of Ohio will be introducing the Farm Safety Net Improvement Act of 2007. Discussed here, the legislation would change the structure of subsidies to be allocated, not purely based on crop prices, but also on yield. Structuring payments in this way would aid farmers who have a bad year despite high prices, and discourage over-production when prices are low. Durbin and Brown also support the $250K income cap. Here’s a bill overview (.pdf) from the American Farmland Trust, who support the measure.

If you were a fan of the Kind/Flake amendment in the House, the whole matter is likely to be revisited. Dick Lugar (R-IN) supports a version of the Kind amendment. Again, the whole farm bill debate is a dance of strange bedfellows, and Farm Bill Girl at Daily Kos has often pointed to Lugar's far-from-progressive, pro-free-trade ideological reasons for supporting the amendment as proof that it's dangerous.

The Senate is also due to take up the Iraq war later in September, which may leave only a short period available for real debate on the farm bill. Harkin is hinting that the current bill may need to be extended for a few months until the new one is finished. However, the House floor debate lasted less than 24 hours, and we should be prepared for the alternative possibility of things getting pushed through quickly. The timing of the August recess gives us the opportunity to gear up for whichever parts of this fight we deem most crucial.

Meanwhile, Tom Philpott over at Grist talks about work-arounds: how to transcend the evils of the inevitably flawed farm bill by forming local production and distribution networks.

Credit to FarmPolicy.com, as usual, for pointing to a bunch of these links. The Ethicurean's round-ups are indispensable too.

Architecture Is Not Justice

2007-08-05T10:28:00.000-06:00

Poems from Guantanamo detainees are featured in today's Boston Globe (h/t MissLaura at Daily Kos).

Part of the poem by Sami al Haj:
They have monuments to liberty
And freedom of opinion, which is well and good.
But I explained to them that
Architecture is not justice.
America, you ride on the backs of orphans,
And terrorize them daily.

Giant Water Bug

2007-08-04T17:21:00.000-06:00

There's nothing particularly timely about this post... except that it was just yesterday I learned of this creature's existence in the universe. Through being approached by one at the local swimming pond. It was injured and was paddling slowly about, so we had lots of opportunity to examine it. This image seems a pretty good likeness, but doesn't give a sense of scale. The thing was, at a guess, about 3 1/2 inches long, though my insect guide gives 1-2 inches as a more usual size range. Here's a good scale pic of an Ecuadorean one; it wasn't quite that big. Giant water bugs are true bugs, Hemipterans; this resulted in everybody looking at me like I was an idiot for proclaiming repeatedly, "I'm pretty sure it's a bug." They are predatory, and our instinct to stay away from the front pair of legs while handling the bug was apparently correct: another common name for them is "toe-biters." Here are pictures of them eating tadpoles, adult frogs, and a snake.

Apparently, some people not only know they exist, but eat them.

The male giant water bug carries the eggs on his back until they hatch, in order to protect them from predation, a fact that proves that men are badly oppressed and unjustly maligned in our society (.pdf). (I can't link to the specific page-- 151-- of this highly fascinating ebook, "If Men Have All the Power, How Come Women Make the Rules?"... but if you'd like to browse it for yourself, please feel free.) Anyway you can see a picture of the egg thing here. It's pretty neat but I don't think it has much to do with who pays for dates or why women dress so sexy if they're not trying to use their power to subjugate men.

I love discovering that a highly striking, formidable, exotic-seeming creature that I've never seen or even heard of before lives in my local pond, and in fact-- as my insect guide says-- is "relatively common." More things in heaven and earth...

Although I was joking, my daughter takes seriously the possibility that it was a fairy in disguise.

Please Comment on this Post!

2007-08-01T22:22:00.000-06:00

Dear handful of regular readers,

I need your input on something simple. I'd like your thoughts on the readability of this blog, from a purely visual standpoint. While I think the design is pretty, over time I've become uncertain whether it's optimal for reading. The concerns I have are:

text size?: Is it too small? Aesthetically, I like the small font, but in the long run aesthetics are less important than comfort.

background?: This green happens to be my favorite color, but if it detracts too much from readability it goes.

column layout?: I would much prefer a wider column for posts and smaller margins, but blogger uses preset templates and I don't think I can adjust this without choosing an entirely new design. I'm open to using a different template, however, if The People think these columns are just too damn narrow.

The pain-in-the-ass variable line spacing is beyond my control, and is apparently a general bug in the editor, common to many blogspot blogs.

Please advise. This means you. What do you think?: is it fine? If not, which elements need changing?

In the Papers, 8/1/07

2007-08-01T22:09:00.000-06:00

One proposed settlement in a major water rights negotiation would be the largest grant to irrigators since the creation of the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation, representing 15% of the federally-controlled water in California. The recipient of these rights would be the Westlands Water District, a group of large agribusiness operations in the San Joaquin Valley. This is a complicated situation; also at issue is an old unsettled lawsuit by the district against the U.S. government for pollution of the cropland, and potential associated cleanup costs. Coming to an agreement may be a win/win for the feds and the agribusiness group, but who's losing?

Fortunately, the ecological effects of the proposed border fence with Mexico are starting to be discussed in the mainstream news media. Such fencing would inhibit the movements of large migratory species, as well as those of smaller, but crucial, dispersers such as insects and pollen. It would also restrict species' access to water in many places. The Sonoran Pronghorn, mentioned in my first post, is of especial concern. Land of Enchantment has been blogging on this subject at Daily Kos for some time: here, and here , for instance. Her diaries are worthwhile reading.

Small-town police reports: feel the love.

A man fishing at Hyalite Reservoir snagged a wallet that had been on the bottom of the water for 30 years. The wallet will be returned to its original owner.

The Bench

2007-08-01T16:00:00.000-06:00

When my parents visited this spring, I took them to the Cherry River Fishing Access, because it is near town, pretty, and small. It was important to go someplace small, because neither one was physically able to trek far. My mom has a long-standing disability that makes walking arduous. My stepfather was recovering from pneumonia, and he tired quickly at this high elevation.

My mom mostly sat on a picnic bench near the parking lot, some 50-100 yards away from the ponds frequented by waterbirds. The table is still a pleasant spot, but with tall cattails and grasses in the way, you can't see much of the wildlife from there. Meanwhile, I strolled a little with my stepfather; an urban-souled fellow, he was delighted to see and hear redwinged blackbirds, which he apparently viewed as a novelty.

That's one of many good excuses for keeping these small spots alive: they're physically-accessible to people who can't make it into the backcountry, and perceptually-accessible, too, to enthusiastic beginners with little knowledge or experience of their denizens.

After the visit, however, my mother understandably wished she could have sat closer to the ponds, so she, too, could have had a better view of blackbirds, coots, and ducks. Being of an enterprising character, she wrote a letter to Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks, who administer the site, suggesting that a bench be placed on the path that runs between the two ponds, right alongside the edge of the southernmost. I wrote to them, too, offering to pay for the bench myself, as it was almost her birthday, and I didn't want the idea to be rejected based on cost.

MTFWP was surprisingly helpful and cooperative about the request. I was pleased to discover how responsive they were to communications from random persons-- answering promptly, giving suggestions serious consideration, and not a form letter in sight. Here's what simultaneously disappointed and pleased me most: I had already entered into a conversation about timing and price, when I got a follow-up email. Its key point:

"We have had a discussion about a bench location, and the opinion is that in the spring and summer time any disturbance between the two ponds is distrupting to nesting birds & waterfowl even by those walking thru on the trail let alone, sitting there."

I was disappointed, of course, because I couldn't make the gesture of buying that bench for my mother. It might have given her some pleasure during her occasional fair-weather visits, and provided a resting place for others who would have enjoyed the comfortable spot for watching birds and other animals.

But I was even more pleased that MTFWP so clearly had its priorities in the right place: with the needs of the wildlife. This is not always obviously the case in interactions with state wildlife agencies. But here they had turned down a free "improvement" to their parcel, one that had initially sounded attractive (or at least innocuous), because of thoughtful consideration of its impacts. I appreciated both their initial receptivity and eventual retraction of the offer. So here's a shout-out to Montana FWP, Region 3 Parks Staff.

That all having been said, though, the bench negotiation emblemizes-- in a small way-- a conflict that has arisen repeatedly in the recreational use of conservation lands. Most of the time, the argument is not over the placement of static objects like benches, but over motorized vehicle access. The problem is: do elderly and disabled persons, unable to hike, bike, or ski, have a just claim to access remote or rough areas by other means, even if those means have profound wildlife impacts? Which is more important, my mother's opportunity to watch ducks equally with able-bodied duck-watchers, or the ducks' opportunity to nest in greater peace? The Department of the Interior , for instance, does have certain civil rights obligations under the Americans with Disabilities Act. But, as so often in government bodies, they also have other, sometimes competing, mandates.

It's probably obvious, from the above story, that I have mixed feelings, as would anyone with a concern for both people and wildlands. All else equal, improved amenities for people who might otherwise lack access to wild landscapes are a worthy goal. But often, all else is not equal. Usually, access comes with a cost. These costs and benefits have to be carefully weighed on a case-by-case basis (as they were by MTFWP) if wise decisions are to be made. There's no sense in improving access to an area whose unique features would be gradually destroyed by that access; the long-term health of the place, in my book, outweighs the desires and convenience of any of its witnesses.

I say this not because there was anything wrong with my mother wanting a bench, but because the argument for handicapped access has been used widely and (in my opinion) often disingenuously by certain lobbying groups. Here's a statement from the president of the Property Rights Foundation of America, angry over New York state's decision to return the Hudson River Recreation Area to a more rustic condition-- and she's chosen to title it "Disabled Apartheid." (New York Dept. of Environmental Conservation's plan for the aforementioned area doesn't really sound so sinister to me.) This particular type of hyperbole has been common locally as well. MTFWP has a page summarizing access controversies.

Though a bench is surely not as disturbing to wildlife as a snowmobile trail or paved road, I am very glad to know that even such minor decisions are attended to with care by my local parks maintenance crew. May we enjoy such specificity always in the management of our lands.

Amends

2007-07-31T15:23:00.000-06:00

For the record, I (and probably a number of other people) received an apology today from Denny Rehberg's office for their error. Thank you; admitting mistakes is classy, and I now know to chalk the matter up to mere incompetence rather than indifference.

We're still taking him out in 2008.

[update]: But it just occurred to me. This paragraph constitutes the main body of the letter:

Recently the House just voted on the 2007 Farm Bill. I noticed that you have all received outdated letters from my office regarding the Farm Bill. I apologize for this and want to promise you that you will be receiving an updated Farm Bill letter informing you of all the changes this year.

Does this mean that they haven't yet developed any material on this year's Farm Bill? It already passed the House! Were we not paying attention? What did your "yes" vote mean, then, Denny?

Writing My Congressman

2007-07-30T20:21:00.000-06:00

Okay, so last week I wrote Rep. Denny Rehberg (R-MT) a brief email asking him to support the Ryan amendment to the 2007 Farm Bill. The amendment didn't end up being considered at all, so I can't complain about his vote. I can, however, complain about his office's response. Here are some excerpts from the email I received today (emphases mine).

"Dear [eviltwin],

Thank you for contacting me about the 2002 Farm Bill. I appreciate hearing from you on this important issue.

As you know, the new Farm Bill -- the "Farm Security and Rural Investment Act of 2002" -- passed the House of Representatives on May 2, 2002 and was signed into law by the President on May 13, 2002. [snip]

Frankly, there are things in the bill that I would have done differently had I been the sole author, such as dramatically scaling back the Conservation Reserve Program. [way to win my heart, Denny.-- snip]

Finally, I should mention my severe disappointment that our $2.4 billion Ag disaster assistance package was dropped from the bill in the House/Senate conference. The Senate bill came in several billion dollars over budget and our disaster assistance package, unfortunately, was one of the provisions that did not make the final cut. Nevertheless, I want to assure you that as a fifth generation rancher I fully understand and appreciate the tremendous need for this assistance and will continue working with Senator Burns and Senator Baucus until Montana farmers and ranchers receive the financial compensation they need and deserve.

Once again, thanks for taking the time to write. If you should have any questions about Farm Bill implementation, I recommend the USDA website -- www.usda.gov -- or calling your local FSA office. For more information about current legislative issues or to sign up for my e-newsletter, please visit www.house.gov/rehberg. Keep in touch."

You know what, Denny? I'm not going to be looking to you for current legislative issues again soon. That was the 2007 Farm Bill, by the way. And, while I understand you may miss Senator Burns-- it's lonely being one of the last Republican politicians left in Montana-- it'll be Senator Tester I contact with my concerns about the 2007 Farm Bill next month.

Glad to hear you and your staff are keeping up with this important issue.

Confounded by the Cul-de-Sac Kids

2007-07-29T09:30:00.000-06:00

Her father pulled out pictures of two Korean girls.

Carly stood on tiptoes to see the pictures. "Will they get homesick?"

"Our home will soon become their home," her father said. "We want to make things easy for them. You and Abby can help us." He hugged Carly.

"We'll help them learn our ways, Daddy," Abby said.

Carly nodded. "And God's ways. We promise."

My 6-year-old laughed at me in bewilderment as I punctuated this passage in our library book with disbelieving groans; I kept having to put the book down on my lap. "I can't read this," I said. "I hate this book. If you want to get any more of these out of the library, you'll have to read them yourself."

"Why?" she said; but she was still laughing. She could even tell, herself, that there was something strange about the book. We'd already noticed that the first page of each chapter was graced with a small American flag icon. This had worried me even before Abby and Carly launched unexpectedly into their first prayer session in the bedroom closet.

The girls did their hand-over-hand secret code. Then they prayed.

"Dear Lord," Abby began. "We're getting new sisters."

"They might not know about you," Carly added.

Abby finished the prayer. "Please help us show Your love to them. In Jesus' name, Amen."

They turned off the flashlights and crawled out of the closet.

If you had a 1990s kid, perhaps you're familiar with Beverly Lewis's Cul-de-Sac Kids series. Not me. I was caught completely off guard. We'll help them learn our ways??-- They might not know about you, Jesus. I must be dreadfully naive; I never imagined this old-fashioned missionary colonialism was still alive and well in children's literature. Not only alive, but present in my public library. I'm opposed to censorship, but I almost feel there ought to have been a warning label.

"It's, like, a Christian book, isn't it," my daughter said with surprising cultural savvy. She still likes it. That's fine.

But it's a struggle to explain to a six-year-old why this particular juxtaposition of religiosity with the American flags, suburban utopian environment (the cul-de-sac), and clear sense of cultural superiority gives me such heebie-jeebies that I can barely read.

Some customer reviews for the Cul-de-sac Kids: "My son loves these books! He has read them over and over and really enjoys the characters. It is a blessing to not have to worry about what he is reading."

"I enjoyed reading this to my 5 year old. The content is safe for the minds of young children."

That's what you say, people. What does it mean for a book to be “safe” for a child?

Beverly Lewis, by the way, comes from a Mennonite background. Doesn't the overt nationalism of the series conflict with Mennonite beliefs about the priority of faith over national loyalty?

So I got curious about this world that was heretofore unknown to me: contemporary Christian children’s literature, where “Christian” seems, at least sometimes, to apply in the God-and-country sense. Assuming many of my readers are equally unfamiliar, what is out there?

I love this: the Extreme Teen Bible. Is there any title that could better exemplify the cultural collisions of American youth society?

The Extreme Teen Bible is about discovering who God is, what He's doing in the world, and what He promises for your future. So take the plunge into all the great stuff we've packed into this Bible to make your Bible time more extreme than ever before. […] So go ahead: dive in and discover extreme Truth for yourself.

Right after you finish snowboarding and eating that stuff so laced with citric acid that you've barely got any tastebuds left. Oh, wait, someone has already analyzed this.

In the purity ball department: The Princess and the Kiss. Blurb:

A loving king and queen present their daughter with a gift from God--her first kiss--to keep or to give away. The wise girl waits for the man who is worthy of her precious gift. Where is he and how will she ever find him? The surprising answer in this marvelous parable will touch the heart of parent and child alike.

Says the author, Jennie Bishop, founder of PurityWorks: “I asked God how I could teach my young daughters the value of their purity, how I could begin in their early years to stress the importance and beauty of saving themselves for marriage. This is God’s poignant answer.” (She adds, in the Christianbook.com interview: “It's really important that parents speak to those issues intentionally, so our kids know what we approve of, what God approves of, and how they can take steps to keep themselves clean … and why that’s so important.”)

Clean??

One reader review for The Princess and the Kiss:

bought this book to read to our two daughters (aged 5 and 7) and they loved the story and sighed when it ended that first time we read it. But their eyes widened when I said, "Do you know that YOU have a kiss, too?" They were so excited and we explained that someday when each girl was ready, Daddy and Mommy would take her out for a special dinner and give her her own "kiss," which would probably be in the form of a necklace. "You can wear that necklace until you're married and then give it to your new husband on your wedding day," we told them

And then there's His Little Princess:

Cinderella is a great story, but after the last page is turned, little girls can't look forward to the tale coming true when they grow up. It's just "for pretend." Now girls ages four to nine can unveil the reality of their royal calling! His Little Princess shows them that they are not pretend princesses--God is for real! When a grown-up sits down to read out loud these touching love letters, girls will come to understand and embrace how much they are truly loved and adored by God, the King of kings! Recommended for ages 4 to 9.

Oy. And I was going to try to teach my daughter that there's more to be being a girl than princess-hood. Instead, let's encourage that role for life.

Some publishers are actually looking to reprints from the past (here, 19^th century) to protect our children from the evils of the present-- like this “character-building” series from Grace and Truth Books, which “will be valued by any family who desire your children to be saturated in God's truth.”

And then there’s these. Don’t freak out, people, it’s a joke site. I think.

Please understand that I’ve been selective in this post. There are plenty of Christian books, too, that focus on the wonder of bugs (incidentally, God made them), or the value of compassion, or the uniqueness of the individual child. And there are sensible parent reviewers who apply their critical skills to more than doctrinal orthodoxy. Many mainstream Christian sites recommend a familiar list of books that most parents, of any spiritual bent, will consider “safe” and high-quality. I object, not to invocations of God, per se (though, frankly, I often find that startling), but to the strains of jingoism, anti-feminism, and Christian exceptionalism that can be found in some of this literature.

So do we progressives take a page out of the Christian parents’ book and start screening for “safe” stories before we read them to our kids? That’s a key question. For myself, no matter how much The Cul-de-Sac Kids make me squirm, I’m unwilling to forbid them to my daughter. But I’m not going to hide my discomfort, either.

Anyhow, she thinks it’s funny when I screech and wave my hands around while reading.

And... House Ends Farm Bill Debate

2007-07-27T22:31:00.000-06:00

Well, the 2007 Farm Bill passed the House today, 231-191. Only 19 Republicans voted for the bill (including my own rep, Denny Rehberg of Montana) and 14 Democrats voted against, meaning a presidential veto is a real threat. The final roll call vote is here. The House press release (you need a strong stomach to read these, I find) is here.

The bill as it stands includes 13 amendments that were passed last night en bloc. These amendments were:

4. Lucas (OK): makes livestock producers eligible for assistance programs whether or not they have Noninsured Crop Disaster Assistance coverage.

8. Hastings (FL): authorizes research and conservation programs to address pollinator issues and Colony Collapse Disorder.

9. Arcuri (NY)/Welch (VT)/Gillibrand (NY): advises taking increased cost of production into account when adjusting milk prices.

10. Welch (VT): encourages schools to utilize locally-grown foods wherever possible.

14. Johnson (TX): suggests emphasizing research proposals that “examine the efficacy of current agriculture policies in promoting the health and welfare of economically disadvantaged populations.”

17. Latham (IA): “amends the Household Water Well System Program…to allow the use of in-kind contributions to meet the required federal funding match of 10%.”

22. Wu (OR): makes universities working in alternative-energy fields eligible for the biofuels from biomass internship program.

23 (“as modified”-- not sure how it was modified). Clay (MO): offers grants for organic gardens and greenhouses in urban areas.

24. Israel (NY)/Doyle (PA): A couple of what I assume are intended as animal-rights protections: “eliminate the sale of random source animals for research and will prohibit the marketing of medical devices by using live animals in demonstrations to market such devices.”

26. Bordallo (GU): authorizes appropriations for land grant institutions in the territories, for agricultural and food sciences.

28. Emanuel (IL): directs USDA to investigate fraud in which the dead continue to collect farm payments.

30. Hodes (NH)/Arcuri (NY): “The amendment authorizes a grant program for state and local communities and governments known as the Community Wood Energy Program to use low-grade wood biomass in community wood energy systems for state and locally owned businesses such as schools, town halls, and courthouses.” Interested in any comment from the alternative-energy folks on this one.

31:Shuler (NC): allows non-industrial private forest lands to be eligible for restoration funds in the event of insect or disease outbreak.

Amendments that definitely did not make it into the bill:

1. Ron Kind's Farm 21 amendment.

3. Goodlatte (VA): “streamlines and adopts one set of terms and conditions of easements” for several conservation programs.

5. Cardoza (CA): brings plant pest inspection duties back to the USDA from the Department of Homeland Security.

There are a number of other amendments whose fate I can't establish, as I don't have C-Span and today's Congressional Record is not yet posted. Possibly there will be updates on those later.

Yesterday’s Des Moines Register discusses the fact that the bill cuts $4.8 billion from the Conservation Security Program, authored by Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) in 2002, in order to fund other priorities. These cuts will prevent any additional farmers from signing up from the program, “designed to reward growers for farming practices that reduce erosion and improve wildlife habitat,” until 2012.

Blog for Rural America has a post up taking the House to task for its failure to genuinely and effectively address payment limits, despite a lot of rhetoric to the contrary.

The Senate is due to take up the Farm Bill in September.

**

More on the taxes-Boo! partisan dust-up of the past couple days...

The AP story reads:

Democrats rallied around the bill, however, after debate turned bitterly partisan over a tax measure included to partially finance an increase of some $4 billion for food stamp and other nutrition programs. The plan would impose new taxes on certain multinational companies with U.S. subsidiaries.
Democrats said they were closing a loophole and cracking down on foreign tax-dodgers, while Republicans called it a massive tax hike that would affect manufacturers that provide millions of jobs in their districts. The spat sapped the farm bill of much of its customary bulletproof regional appeal, turning many rural Republicans against the measure.

David Rogers, in today's Wall Street Journal (h/t FarmPolicy.com), explains what, specifically, is behind the rhetoric:

At issue are what rules determine withholding rates on earnings by the U.S. units of foreign corporations. In general, companies are subject to a gross basis U.S. tax at a 30% rate, but tax treaties often reduce or eliminate withholding taxes imposed by the U.S. The United Kingdom and many European partners have zero-percent rates, for example, while Japan has negotiated a 10% rate and India a 15% rate, according to Treasury.
“Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D., Texas), who helped craft the provision, said companies can exploit the treaty system by funneling their U.S. earnings through a financial unit in a treaty country, such as the U.K. or Netherlands, while the real headquarters is a Caribbean tax haven without a tax-treaty agreement with the U.S.

FarmPolicy.com gives us the Democratic retort to the "massive tax hike" accusations:

However, House Ag Committee Chairman Collin Peterson (D-Minnesota) indicated earlier this week that, “Apparently, the Bush Administration and some in the Republican leadership care more about defending the ability of foreign companies to exploit a loophole in the U.S. tax system than they do about supporting the hardworking families and farmers in this country. I hope that they will reconsider their opposition and join us in supporting this Farm Bill that represents a new direction for agriculture policy."

**

OrangeClouds115 at Daily Kos uses a clever ploy to get the rank and file interested in the passage of the Farm Bill through the House. She also evinces her usual straightforward good sense:

Those who profit big off of America's ag policy RELY on everyone else thinking this stuff is boring and irrelevant. We've talked about getting involved in the farm bill debate for a year now, so now let's put our money where our mouths are. If we want to turn around half a century of pro-Big Ag, anti-American people farm policy, we've gotta pay attention.

Right on.

Update: House Begins Farm Bill Debate

2007-07-26T21:30:00.000-06:00

As it turns out, the House did begin debate on the Farm Bill this evening. Blog for Rural America has covered the progress so far. Except for Rep. Kind’s Farm 21 amendment, which was allotted 40 minutes of debate and has now been defeated 309-117, each of the other 31 amendments to be considered will only be allowed 10 minutes for debate. The Ryan amendment mentioned yesterday is not to be considered.

The manager’s amendment (summary in Part A here) passed on a voice vote: it contains a whole slew of things probably worth investigating on their own, including mandatory funding for the McGovern-Dole International Food for Education and Child Nutrition Program, creation of incentives for more sustainable crop rotation techniques in peanut farming, and funding to assist claimants charging racial discrimination by the USDA… among many other items. Regarding country-of-origin labelling, this summary by the Rules Committee says, “Cool: Provides that for perishable agricultural commodities and peanuts, such products may only be labeled as having a country of origin if the commodity is exclusively produced in the .” It’d be nice to know the rest of that sentence.

The other 31 amendments can be found in Part B at the same link.

A couple that interest me:

8. Hastings (FL):

The amendment adds a new section for "Pollinator Protection" that authorizes research funding to reduce North American pollinator decline and understand Colony Collapse Disorder. This amendment also adjusts USDA conservation programs to put a greater emphasis on increasing habitat and establishing cropping and integrated pest management practices to protect native and managed pollinators. (10 minutes)

10. Welch (VT):

The amendment encourages schools to submit plans for implementation to the Secretary that include locally grown foods, in areas where geographically available. (10 minutes)

15. Manzullo (IL):

The amendment exempts the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP) from the $60,000 and $125,000 payment limitations, resetting it to the $450,000 limitation that is in the current law. (This is one I’d as soon not pass.)

Tomorrow, probably, the rest of this will get done—with 10 minutes debate, tops, per amendment, there clearly seems to be some premium on speed.

[Update]: 13 amendments were passed during this first evening of debate as an en bloc amendment. They included #8 and #10 mentioned above.

natasha, again, on this uproar over the taxation, oh noes! that was suggested in order to fund the nutrition title.

A Smart Read and an Action Item

2007-07-25T15:10:00.000-06:00

natasha wrote yesterday at Daily Kos about all she sees wrong with Blumenauer and Kind's Farm 21. Some of her points are very convincing, others maybe less so-- but the fact remains that I find her one of the most persuasive, intelligent, and balanced voices covering this stuff. She also writes over at Pacific Views.

The thing is, I don't especially like farm subsidies. I don't really want to be put in the position of arguing for them. But there isn't a full range of choice here. There's electoral suicide and renewed waves of farm country bankruptcies, or there's the status quo with some moderate but perhaps effective improvements.

Some of these modest efforts she'd like to see championed instead: preventing Community Food Projects from relying merely on discretionary funds (making it essentially an optional program when money is distributed); a $40,000 direct payment cap for commodity programs; and full funding for the Conservation Security Program.

**

This would also be a good time to contact your Congressperson, right now today, if you are going to do it at all, and tell them to vote for the Ryan amendment, which will do a better job of limiting the size of farms that can receive subsidies than the Farm Bill as it currently stands. You can use this contact page, if you like. I did. Not that Denny Rehberg (R-MT) is going to listen to me... but hope springs eternal.

House (R)s to Oppose Agriculture Committee's Farm Bill?

2007-07-25T13:47:00.000-06:00

From Blog for Rural America:

Just today, House of Representatives Republican Minority Leader John Boehner announced that the House Republican Leadership would oppose the 2007 Farm Bill passed by the House Agriculture Committee last Thursday. From the Republican Leader's e-alert:

"In a sneak attack on American working families, House Democratic leaders have revealed they will pay for new spending in the 2007 farm bill by imposing a new tax increase that threatens more than 5 million American jobs..."

Their commentary:

This is big, big news. The Democrats are facing a serious fight within their own party over the farm bill, and by no means will Democrats vote unanimously for the bill. The Democratic leadership will certainly require Republican votes to pass a farm bill, perhaps a fairly substantial number of them. If the Republican leadership actively tells its members not to vote for the Agriculture Committee's farm bill, it will be difficult for a farm bill to pass. The type of amendments offered and approved on the floor could easily affect those votes, and this development alters the politics of the floor process. In fact, there is already speculation that the floor process, scheduled for tomorrow, will be postponed to deal with this.

Meanwhile, the White House is threatening to veto it.

A large part of the problem, apparently, has to do with funding for nutrition programs, including the increase in minimum food stamp benefit I wrote about a few days ago. In order for the $4 billion worth of programs to be implemented, offsets had to be found; the Ways and Means Committee has been considering sources for that funding. When Committee member Lloyd Doggett (D-TX) proposed paying for nutrition programs by taxing overseas businesses with U.S. subsidiaries, that's apparently when all hell broke loose.

So now the whole Farm Bill is in danger. It's supposed to go to the floor tomorrow-- we'll see. This gets more and more interesting.

[Update]: Mulch is running frequent updates on today's Farm Bill blow-up over funding for nutrition programs. There are apparently a lot of international corporations who deeply object to Rep. Doggett's proposal.

Day(s?) of Rest

2007-07-22T07:58:00.000-06:00

The author of this blog is now, like the rest of the nation, reading Harry Potter. A long pause ensues.

Saturday Reading List, 7/22/07

2007-07-21T19:26:00.000-06:00

The House Agriculture Committee passed their version of the Farm Bill yesterday. Here’s their press release. The bill as it stands is available here, not that anyone is likely to add the whole thing to their Saturday night reading list.

Ken Cook at Mulch is irate about the bill that’s come out of the Committee, and its stubborn attachment to corn subsidies above all else. He fears that Nancy Pelosi’s party discipline makes the current version a done deal. The Farm Bill is coming to the floor already this Thursday, July 26, and proposed amendments must be turned in by 6 pm Tuesday. Not much time.

lineatus, who writes a weekly bird diary at Daily Kos, this week profiles Heron's Head Park, a reclaimed wetland in the heart of a San Francisco industrial area.

Devilstower at Daily Kos reviews the tenure of Julie MacDonald, disgraced ex-deputy assistant secretary of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. A few-- but only a few-- of her suspect involvements in endangered species rulings will be revisited due to "inappropriate influence."

Food Stamps: Forget $1/meal, try 18 cents

2007-07-21T18:20:00.000-06:00

Earlier this spring, we saw many well-publicized efforts by Congresspeople and other public figures to eat, for one week, on average food stamp benefits. The average benefit is $21/week, or-- as many pointed out-- $1/meal. Some blogged their experience, and the results are definitely worth reading. Rep. Barbara Lee's (D-CA) and others' can be found here. Rep. Tim Ryan (D-OH)'s is here. More can be accessed via the first link in this post.

Nevertheless, for many individuals-- mostly elderly and disabled singles-- the benefit is much, much lower. Currently, $10 per month. That's been the minimum benefit since 1977, and about 10% of food stamp households receive it. $10 a month. That's about 11 cents per meal.

So, the people who receive such piddly benefits aren't really poor, right? Not according to this fact sheet from the Food Research and Action Center. In fact, the majority of households receiving the minimum benefit have incomes below the poverty level.

Furthermore, many eligible households don't bother even applying, given that the reward for all that bureaucratic hassle is so small. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities says:

"Fewer than one-third of households with seniors who are eligible for food stamps receive them, according to USDA estimates. Groups that work with senior citizens report that many seniors believe they will receive only $10 a month and that the small benefit is not worth the hassle (often including trips to, and long waits at, food stamp offices) and paperwork of applying for and maintaining food stamp benefits."

30 years ago, $10 bought about three times as much, grocery-wise, as it does now. The value of the minimum benefit has plummeted, and most parties agreed it was time for an update. Enter the 2007 Farm Bill. High hopes.

Well, the marked-up bill that came out of the House Agriculture Committee yesterday did raise the minimum benefit. Hooray! Instead of 10 dollars, the minimum benefit is now 10 percent of the maximum benefit for a household of one... and the maximum benefit gets adjusted, over time, to inflation. Here’s a .pdf of the en bloc amendment containing the minimum benefit increase (the relevant bit is on page 9).

Good news, yes? Well, yes. Unfortunately, the new formula only yields a minimum benefit of, now, 16 dollars per month for 2008. Still only half, in real terms, of what it was in 1977. Still only 18 cents a meal. Is this good enough? I don't think so.

The Farm Bill goes to the House floor Thursday, and amendments have to be submitted by Tuesday evening. If anyone knows of a planned amendment that would further raise the minimum benefit, please post that information.

If I had to, I could probably figure out a way to eat for $1/meal. Not $0.18, though. Could you?

Friday Night Newsy Links-- 7/21/07

2007-07-20T21:41:00.000-06:00

Agriculture:
natasha at Pacific Views blogs yesterday’s vote by the House Agricultural Committee to continue to allow mandatory arbitration provisions in livestock contracts. Contracts between growers and processors that contain such provisions (as most do) prevent growers from taking their grievances to the courts, thereby solidifying the livestock company's control over smaller farmers.

Environmental Justice:
FEMA ignored hundreds of complaints and the results of its own testing in declaring its trailers safe to house hurricane victims despite high levels of formaldehyde fumes. The AP story notes:

The House committee unearthed documents in which one FEMA lawyer advised: "Do not initiate any testing until we give the OK. ... Once you get results ... the clock is running on our duty to respond to them."

FEMA tested one occupied trailer at a level of 1.2 ppm (parts per million); a concentration of .016 ppm, over extended periods, is considered an appropriate threshold for use of a respirator. For the math-impaired, the Mississippi trailer was at 75 times the “safe” level.

It’s worth noting, in passing, that this is the same problem plaguing the guards’ sleeping trailers at our new embassy in Iraq. Your government at work.

Conservation:
The BLM has agreed, as a consequence of pressure from state wildlife officials and environmental groups, to more closely review environmental impacts before issuing certain oil and gas leases in Montana. At particular issue is the well-being of the sage grouse, a species petitioned for ESA listing with significant populations close to many of the parcels. Says the AP piece:

“Grouse need vast swaths of undisturbed sage brush to thrive. In northeast and western Wyoming, southeast Montana, northern Utah and western Colorado, those swaths increasingly are crisscrossed by service roads leading to gas fields.”

*

Cranes:
This afternoon two sandhill cranes flew over me, calling to one another in their weird voices. You can listen to audio of their call here.

The Oreo Problem

2007-07-19T22:53:00.000-06:00

My daughter and I were eating Oreos in the park. It was the end of a picnic which had previously featured cheese-and-lettuce sandwiches, and water. A utilitarian sort of picnic.

"What is this, Mom?" my daughter asked, investigating her Oreo's inner substance. She had the two black halves pulled apart, and was scraping at the white center, as children, for some reason, do. I did too.

"Is it ice cream or frosting?"

This question required an uncomfortable pause for thought. It certainly wasn't ice cream. But, could you call it frosting, really? It was, you know, cream.

But not the kind of cream that comes from a cow. Oreo cream. Pressed to define this, I could only suppose it consisted largely of shortening (trans-fats!) and sweeteners (HFCS!). Fact is, I really didn't know what it was. My daughter seemed bemused by my hesitation.

Q: What is "Oreo cream" made of?

A: A mix of canola oil and palm oil-- not trans-fats since 2005 (see here for a long article on the history of Oreo filling fats!); sugar and/or high fructose corn syrup (both are somewhere in the Oreo); soy lecithin; vanillin. I think. This is a work of deduction. So, yes. Sweet shortening, though they've over time dumped both a) lard and b) hydrogenated oils. Not just out of the goodness of their hearts, to be sure.

If you would like to read a spirited defense, from the 2005 era, of the use of trans-fats in Oreo cookies-- in fact a threat to boycott if the company does not continue to use trans-fats-- you can read this freerepublic post. WTF. Moving on.

One more thing:

"Even lab rats had a ravenous taste for Oreos in a late 1980s experiment Levine ran at the University of Minnesota. They poked the cookies, sniffed them, ate them to excess. Many even tore apart the two dark wafers and licked away the creamy filling."

The real question, of course, remains: should I be sitting in the park eating something whose fundamental substance is a mystery to me, whose origin lies well beyond my conscious awareness? While I can think, with some effort, about what an Oreo might be made of, and research the matter further, it is so far from a recognizable product of nature that I am momentarily stumped by the natural curiosity of a child.

The Farm Bill Gives Me a Headache

2007-07-18T21:30:00.000-06:00

Here's the real truth: I only wish I genuinely understood all the dimensions of debate around the 2007 Farm Bill.

I wish this because I care very deeply about the future of small, ecologically-healthy, diverse, lively agricultural operations in this country. Unfortunately, having a set of worthy ideals does not always immediately produce an obvious set of specific policies that will attain those goals. Especially if a multitude of players are attempting to disguise or spin the meaning or effect of those policies; or (more charitably) if there is legitimate and well-intentioned disagreement about their potential consequences.

Boy, it's tough, isn't it, when issues don't break down neatly along party and/or ideological lines, and nobody is telling you exactly what to think (or different people you trust are telling you different things), and you are forced to think for yourself?? I'm not anywhere near done with that process yet. But I'm not willing to totally give it up, either, so-- in the interest of all of us thinking for ourselves-- I present you with some various viewpoints I've been considering today.

First off, let us recognize that yesterday marked the first day of the House Agricultural Committee's markup session on the Farm Bill. Natasha of Daily Kos was there and blogged the day's proceedings. Her synopses of each member’s comments help to identify key issues contained within the bill, and the positions of various constituencies. It is valuable to note that even some Republicans, such as Rep. Jeff Fortenberry (NE) seem seriously concerned about corporate concentration of agriculture. Yesterday's session was also covered here at FarmPolicy.com.

I've expressed some interest here in the Farm 21 plan espoused by Reps. Blumenauer and Kind (and, for that matter, Sen. Dick Lugar, R-IN). I've also noted that, despite Farm 21 being marketed by these Democratic reps as a progressive plan, there seemed to be a fair bit of progressive opposition to it. In the interests of fairness (as well as the interests of still-making-up-my-mind), here are some strongly expressed arguments against Farm 21's "reforms":

Farm Bill Girl, again at Daily Kos, has been fighting hard against what she sees as a misinformation campaign selling Farm 21 to progressive bloggers. She directed me to this analysis from the Blog for Rural America, entitled "Ron Kind's Farm 21-- Friend or Foe?" The post lists off its main points at the beginning:

· While FARM 21 would change the basic structure of farm programs, it does little in the way of making sure that farm program benefits flow to small and mid-size family farms;

· FARM 21 does not close the loopholes used to avoid farm program payment limits;

· FARM 21 shifts large amounts of money to conservation programs- a laudable goal- but invests most of that money into the Environmental Quality Incentives Program, which subsidizes enormous manure lagoons and the concentration of livestock production;

· FARM 21 places much-needed resources behind some rural economic development programs, but others receive inadequate amounts;

· FARM 21 does not include any crucial livestock market competition reforms;

· Despite our criticisms, every farm bill proposal should receive equal consideration.

Please see the post itself for expansions of the above points. I have seen this objection in several places: that the Environmental Quality Incentives Program (EQIP), by providing funding that helps large livestock operations comply with environmental standards, is thereby subsidizing giant facilities when it should be assisting the small operator. While I agree that farm assistance should be targeted to small farmers in general, some of these large animal facilities are such environmental disasters that I can't help but be a little grateful for anything that might help clean up their act, though of course I'd prefer tough legislation requiring them to maintain environmental quality or get out of the business.

I also liked this discussion for its even-handedness. The post makes clear that any Farm Bill proposal would be just as diligently vetted.

All of this criticism should not be taken as a complete denunciation of Kind’s proposal and his concepts. We can and have subjected the legislation of many others to the same level of scrutiny, and we’re looking forward to the House Agriculture Committee’s final version of the farm bill with some amount of vicious glee. It is our goal to provide the fullest picture possible of various proposals, as the proponents of various proposals inevitably shade the truth about what their legislation would do, who it would benefit, and who it would hurt.

The same blog, today, has a post entitled "This is NOT Reform," regarding Committee Chairman Collin Peterson's payment limitation reform proposal, raised yesterday in the Agriculture Commitee.

The Ruminant defends Farm 21 (I think) with faint praise.

A couple of good round-ups:

FarmPolicy.com, from a week ago. This piece mentions that Sen. Tom Harkin (D-IA) "…plans on writing a 6- to 7-year farm bill rather than the 5-year farm bill that has been discussed in the House and Senate. ...In a telephone conference call with reporters, Harkin said he was firm about writing a longer bill because he needs budget savings from the 2013 to 2017 period to write the kind of bill he wants.” Inadequate funding for all the provisions architects would like to include is a common refrain during this process, and Harkin apparently anticipates future sources that would make a more ambitious bill possible.

And a good update as of yesterday, from More Deliberate Every Day.

The same blog is also featuring an op-ed by Alice Waters on the Farm Bill from the Sacramento Bee (subscription only): here's the blog post. Waters is unfortunately rather vague, at least in the quoted bits, and returns us where we started with the worthy ideals, but she remains an icon for the foodie crowd.

There's one point I haven't got any confusion about. Country-of-origin labelling on our food is a good thing. The always alert OrangeClouds115 of DKos warned us yesterday about an amendment afoot from Rep. Goodlatte (R-VA) that would gut attempts to enforce mandatory country-of-origin labelling-- actually signed into law with the 2002 Farm Bill, but never fully implemented. The National Farmers Union action alert is here.

Advice, ideas, links, opinion more than welcome.

The Dambuilders

2007-07-16T22:34:00.000-06:00

You often hear it said that there are only two species which deliberately alter their environment by the damming and/or diversion of streams: one, of course, is the beaver.

The other is us. One estimate suggests that there are 800,000 manmade dams worldwide. Of these, perhaps 14% are in the U.S.; nearly half are in China. Most are small; but the mere 40,000 large ones manage to have profound impacts on nearly every river system on earth.

I spend a certain amount of time-- not a large proportion, but some-- thinking about dam removals. I work in fisheries biology, partly with salmonids, and it is hard not to maintain a consciousness of dams as a constraining force on fish populations. On the other hand, this is the West, where water is scarce and precious. The stockpiling of water is not an unreasonable impulse on its face, though its effects are often far more damaging than originally anticipated.

So, I've certainly considered dam-building as an enterprise which attempts to meet human water resource needs-- whether it is successful or not, worth the cost or a form of expensive, wanton destruction.

What I had not considered, until yesterday, was the possibility that the joy of water diversion was ingrained in us instinctually as a species, becoming a source of interest and pleasure beyond its utilitarian purposes.

Many sources claim that the sound of running water, itself, is the instinctive cue for beavers to build dams; for instance, such a recorded sound will cause a beaver to initiate damming behavior.

I began to think about this as I watched the children at my six-year-old daughter's birthday party, which was held at a city park with a tiny creek running through it. The creek is shallow, with irregular grassy banks, and narrow enough to jump in many places. While it has a muddy bottom, it also contains a number of large cobbles. The kids gravitated quickly towards this creek-- it was a hot day-- and throughout the party the streambed proved a more compelling location than any of the play equipment or the shaded picnic pavilion under which we occasionally convened to eat cake or open presents.

My own daughter, in fact, was the first to ask to "be excused" from cake-eating and return to standing ankle-deep in the water. Others quickly followed. And what were they doing in there? Building a dam, of course. A fortuitous spot had been chosen, where there already existed a (very) slight drop-off. Large cobbles had at first been lined up, to form a primitive and very porous stone wall. But the children were not satisfied with this. They worked on and off all afternoon, and stayed late to finish, filling in the gaps between the big rocks with small ones, packing the spaces with mud, adding sticks at angles for strength and stability. The water behind the dam got deeper; we had to be careful of the youngest attendees. People were bathing in the "pool." The stream widened, and there was visible downstream dewatering. The grownups began to gravitate towards the stream too.

The question is, why? These children did not need to impound water for residential use, agriculture, or power generation. They made a dam because making a dam was pleasurable. It was fun to make, and fun to watch. It was neat, the way the stream got deeper, the way the course of the water changed.

Wow, said the children and the adults. That's so cool. I felt guilty for damming the stream, but it was cool. And everybody was so happy.

The larger question, of course: what is it about our species that finds environmental manipulation intrinsically cool, whether or not any rationally-developed aim exists?

Before we left (but after most of the kids had gone home), one dad partially disassembled the dam, so the water could flow freely again. As I carried bags and coolers across the park to my car a mere five minutes later, I saw a new group of children in the stream, in close to the same spot, laughing and splashing about in their excitement.

They were carrying rocks.

A Few Saturday Night Links

2007-07-14T20:43:00.000-06:00

Corporate power is corporate power whatever the product: how big is too big in the organic market? Scandals erupt in the FTC’s suit to prevent Whole Foods from buying out Wild Oats on antitrust grounds.

The Washington Post writes about tensions among Democrats over farm subsidy reform.

A solar-powered electric car, albeit with so-far limited application.

Check out guerrillagardening.org. Says founder Richard, “This blog began as a place to record my acts of illicit cultivation around London. Now it’s a growing arsenal for anyone interested in the war against the neglect of public space.”

Sorry to Disturb You; Have a Nice Evening

2007-07-14T19:58:00.000-06:00

I owe Maccabee at Daily Kos a hat tip for calling attention to this article, from The Nation's 7/30 issue.

I've had no intention whatsoever of trying to write about Iraq on this blog, and I won't write much now. But this incredible new long piece, synthesizing interviews with dozens of U.S. soldiers on the treatment of Iraqi civilians in our ongoing occupation, simply must be read by everyone who can possibly read it.

Read it when you have a little time, are sitting down, and maybe no one is looking and you have taken a few deep breaths.

One soldier describes the very common, routine raids made on Iraqi homes in insurgent-heavy neighborhoods:

"You want to catch them off guard," Sergeant Bruhns explained. "You want to catch them in their sleep." About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

"You run in. And if there's lights, you turn them on--if the lights are working. If not, you've got flashlights.... You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that's outside.

"You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you'll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there's no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

"You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you'll ask the interpreter to ask him: 'Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all--anything--anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?'

"Normally they'll say no, because that's normally the truth," Sergeant Bruhns said. "So what you'll do is you'll take his sofa cushions and you'll dump them. If he has a couch, you'll turn the couch upside down. You'll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you'll throw everything on the floor, and you'll take his drawers and you'll dump them.... You'll open up his closet and you'll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

"And if you find something, then you'll detain him. If not, you'll say, 'Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.' So you've just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you've destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes."

Most of what is described in the article is far worse than this.

Please read it here.

My Lunch at Target

2007-07-13T23:02:00.000-06:00

I find myself in the unfortunate position, today, of being in Target at lunchtime, hungry and with a half-hour to kill between morning and afternoon plans. I am with my young daughter. It is not the first time we have ever eaten at Target-- nor will it, I imagine, be the very last-- but nonetheless we do not frequently eat meals of that sort. We are still capable of feeling surprise when the "lemonade" is only offered in diet, the coffee is so pale it must be a mistake, and the hot dogs, which we plan to begin eating thirty seconds later, are individually swaddled in their foil wrappings.

I am still capable of feeling a numb horror when I look down at the table, littered with the inedible remains and packagings of a meal we took no pleasure in, and gather up a double handful of trash-- two hot dog foils, a coffee cup, a wasted lemonade cup with the half-inch of lemonade I poured before I read the label, the juice box I asked for in replacement, a paper ice cream dish, a plastic spoon, a potato chip bag, ketchup and mustard packets, two napkins-- and stuff it all in the garbage can, twenty minutes after we began eating.

Don DeLillo in White Noise:

"We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn't need light and space. We certainly didn't need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigor in this."

Actually consumed:

2 small hot dogs, contents unknown, with buns, ketchup and mustard-- minus half of one dog (the meat only) that went uneaten.
One very small scoop of Dreyer's (= Nestlé) strawberry ice cream.
1 portion Archer Farms (Target store brand) potato chips.
12 oz. weak Colombian coffee, doctored with 1/2 oz. Coffeemate
6 oz. fruit punch

My daughter asks me why "Thank You" is printed on the mouths of so many trash cans. I explain that they are thanking us for not simply leaving our filthy messes strewn about the tables for others to pick up. But in a sense, of course, we are.

The Most Important Environmental Bill

2007-07-12T21:40:00.000-06:00

"This is going to be the most important environmental bill of the entire year."

That's what Rep. Earl Blumenauer (OR) says about the 2007 Farm Bill in today's BlogTalk Radio program, in which he and Rep. Ron Kind (WI) detail their efforts to stimulate discussion of major farm policy reforms. Listen to the archived program here.

Topics included country-of-origin labelling; how to improve local food networks; redistribution of farm subsidies; strengthening of conservation programs and water quality protection; the problem of corporate consolidation in agriculture; increased aid for growers to convert to organic practices; and the congressmen's lack of enthusiasm for corn-based ethanol as a biofuel.

Even more interesting was talk about the nitty-gritty of congressional politicking in this area, and the difficulty of taking on special interests that are deeply invested in the status quo.

The Farm Bill may pass out of the Agriculture Committee (on which neither Blumenauer nor Kind sit) next week and so reach the House floor by the end of July.

Quite a bit of debate persists, even among progressives, about the usefulness of Blumenauer and Kind's approach, and I hope to return to that discussion in coming days. For now, however, if you like what you hear, please consider signing the Food & Farm Bill of Rights petition (also linked in sidebar), and/or contacting your congressperson to express what you'd like to see in this year's bill.