NEWSFARMING

This is a guest post written by Nora Pouillon, a chef a restauranteur. Her Washington, D.C.-based eatery, Restaurant Nora, is the first certified organic restaurant in the U.S. Nora is an advisor to National Food Day.

Putting food on the pedestal it deserves has been my goal for the last 40 years. Food is my medium. I started Restaurant Nora in 1979 with the goal of sharing healthy, wholesome food with my family, friends, and customers. In doing so, I have sought to demonstrate the importance of organically grown and raised food as a means of not only nourishing our bodies and souls, but also of preserving and improving our environment.

On October, 24, Food Day will draw attention to the dire straits of our global food system and set in motion a grassroots movement to inspire individuals to make safe, sustainable, and healthy food a priority—if not the highest priority—in their lives. Which is exactly what is urgently needed.

The statistics for lifestyle-related disease in the United States alone are staggering. A remarkable 68 percent of adults are considered overweight and 30 percent are obese. One in three children is considered overweight. Some 25.8 million adults and children in America have diabetes. And 26.8 million adults have been diagnosed with cardiovascular disease, which is the number-one killer in the United States. Food has a direct link to both disease prevalence and prevention, especially in tandem with other lifestyle measures. We need a national day like Food Day to bring awareness to the fact that whatever we put in our mouths—and the quality of what we put in our mouths—is of utmost importance.

In addition to its role in sustaining or degrading health, food is inextricably linked to our lives as citizens of this planet. How we grow and raise food, starting with how the environment is treated in the process, will dictate our ability to continue to sustain life on Earth. Producing safe, healthy food is the ultimate goal of our agricultural system, which also links animal and worker welfare, social issues like food access and affordability, and again, the maintenance of environmental health.

More than 16,000 people have called and emailed California Governor Jerry Brown in the last 24 hours urging him to immediately revoke the approval of the carcinogenic pesticide methyl iodide. Scientists say the safety of California’s food, farmworkers, and residents is at stake.

Three farms have already started fumigating their fields with one of the most toxic chemicals on earth. With peak fumigation season mere weeks away, environmental organizations like Pesticide Action Network of North America (PANNA) are worried that other farmers will follow suit. It's likely that more farmers will start using this dangerous pesticide unless Governor Brown takes action immediately.

"We are at a critical point,” said Kathryn Gilje, Executive Director of PANNA. “Fumigation season is nearly upon us, and though there have just been a handful of methyl iodide applications so far, there could be many more in the next 30 days unless Brown takes action now."

PANNA created an online petition on Change.org asking Gov. Brown to reverse the approval of methyl iodide before it is too late. The campaign asks the governor to immediately ban the use of methyl iodide in the state and to appoint a director of the Department of Pesticide Regulation who will allow science rather than corporate interests to guide policy decisions on pesticides.

Nick Maravell of Maryland's Montgomery County has run Nick's Organic Farm for the past 31 years. Maravell leases the site from the Montgomery County Board of Education (BOE), which plans to eventually build a public school on the land once the region's schools become overcrowded.

Year after year, the BOE renewed Maravell's lease — until this year. Beginning in 2012, the BOE will lease the land to the County, which plans to partner with a private organization, Montgomery Soccer Incorporated (MSI), in order to build soccer fields on the site. There was no public hearing on the issue, and no one even informed Maravell that his farm could get taken away until two weeks before the decision was made.

Fans and supporters of Nick's Organic Farm are understandably upset, and they started a petition here on Change.org. We caught up with Maravell to talk about why Nick's Organic Farm should become a food education hub — not soccer fields.

SP: Tell me about your farm.

NM: I started in 1980 as a vegetable farmer. Over the years as I’ve expanded my operation, Nick’s Organic Farm in Potomac has become primarily seed production. I am in a location where I’m not near other agricultural fields, so as an organic farmer, I produce seed that is free of GMO contamination. I have another farm about 30 miles away, and I use my seed there to produce corn and soybean and other crops. I also use some of the seed to mix into my feed that I use for poultry. We have free-range chickens and turkeys.

With Mother's Day coming up, it seems an appropriate time to hear what moms have to say. With that in mind, the Pew Charitable Trusts just released a study that looked into how moms feel about antibiotics used in meat production. An overwhelming 80 percent responded that they are concerned about antibiotic use on factory farms. In fact, when the moms interviewed were presented with seven proposed regulations to control antibiotic use in livestock, 78 percent supported implementing all seven rules.

Factory meat farm operations use antibiotics not just when animals become ill, but also to promote extra growth and simply to guard against the filthy conditions inherently present in a factory farm system. These sub-therapeutic doses lead to resistant strains of bacteria that end up in our food system. An appalling 80% of  our antibiotics go to the livestock industry.

Surprisingly, according to the Pew study, this is not a partisan issue either. In fact Republicans—a group routinely in favor of deregulation—interviewed supported regulation even slightly more so than Democrats interviewed.

Despite its relative absence in the media, the U.S.'s pending free trade agreements (FTAs) with Columbia and South Korea have been getting a lot of attention in Washington. Both Democratic and Republican lawmakers  have been heavily urging Obama to submit the deal for approval as soon as possible.  Unfortunately, like NAFTA before it, the Korea FTA is a terrible deal for family farmers.

Big Ag corporations stand to make a lot of money by increasing exports into the South Korean market, but it will drive down prices in both countries and severely thin the ranks of all but the biggest farmers. That's why the U.S. National Farmers Union, the National Family Farm Coalition, and the Family Farm Defenders have registered their opposition to the deal, along with several other labor and trade groups, both American and Korean.

Meanwhile on the other side of the globe, South Korean farmers are busy rallying against a similar trade deal with the European Union. More than one thousand farmers showed up in Seoul recently to loudly register their opposition.  They are worried that the increase in competition from big, industrialized nations will cripple their agricultural industry. If the history of NAFTA is any indication, they're right.

Monsanto's genetically engineered (GE) alfalfa is going to Washington. Again.

Attorneys with the Center for Food Safety and Earthjustice recently filed a lawsuit against the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). They contend that if fully deregulted, GE alfalfa, which is engineered to live through regular dousings of Monsanto's Roundup herbicide, will contaminate non-GE alfalfa and bring down the organic alfalfa, dairy, and beef industries. This lawsuit aims to have the USDA rescind its decision to completely deregulate GE alfalfa.

Opponents of GE alfalfa claim that the new crop infringes on consumer and farmer rights. The USDA's latest stats show very little use of any herbicide on alfalfa. The decision to deregulate GE alfalfa would dramatically change that.

Oregon's Friends of Family Farmers Act (HB 2222) may be only a bill and not even close to sitting on Capitol Hill, but it's poised to shake up the state's local food system.

Small farmers face huge obstacles, struggling to jump through hoops that industrial-scale agricultural operations pass with ease. Getting started on a farm or ranch oftentimes requires a lot of dough, and maintaining that land can cost a pretty penny in property taxes. Small-scale, family farmers simply lack the capital that Big Ag behemoths possess in abundance.

Many of these small farmers are also burdened by regulations designed for industrial farms. For example, some laws require farmers to ship their animals to a slaughterhouse or processing plant to be killed and transformed into meat products. Due to corporate consolidation of said slaughterhouses, trucking animals to these facilities is both expensive and time-consuming, presenting insurmountable challenges to cash- and time-strapped family farmers.

The obstacles facing small farmers go on and on, and these hurdles thwart local food systems from growing and thriving. That's where Oregon's Friends of Family Farmers Act comes in.

In January, the Worldwatch Institute released its report, State of the World 2011: Innovations that Nourish the Planet. The report showed through several case studies in Africa that the world can feed itself through agro-ecology, the application of ecological principles to agricultural systems (read: the antithesis of industrial farming). In fact, the report demonstrates that agro-ecological innovations are crucial to addressing hunger worldwide.

This past Tuesday, the United Nations released a report with the same findings. Olivier de Schutter, the U.N.'s Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, presented his new report “Agro-ecology and the right to food” before the U.N. Human Rights Council. For those who love to defend conventional farming through the much-touted "scientific evidence," this is a resounding rejoinder. The report sifts through recent scientific literature, including the research not funded by large corporate interests (e.g., most of our GMO research) and concluded that "small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions by using ecological methods."

This is not about nostalgia, and it's not about romanticized notions of farming days of yore. The U.N. report up-ends what has been conventional wisdom for the past century and challenges us with a new paradigm. As De Schutter says, “To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available. Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agro-ecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live — especially in unfavorable environments.”