This Is Why You Support Organic Agriculture

Albert Einstein said: "If you can't explain it simply, you don't understand it well enough." To me, it's quite simple why you support organic agriculture. I'll lay it out through a question and answer model.

Do you like eating food? Do you enjoy feeding yourself?

I do. I enjoy living. Without food, we'd die.

Where is the majority of our food grown?

In the Earth's topsoil, the top 2-8 inches of soil in the ground.

What is soil?

Soil is an incredibly complex ecosystem teeming with billions of microbes, large and small inverterbrates and fungi which build up the soil. It is living. And good soil, where this ecosystem is thriving, provides everything a plant needs to grow and eventually become food for our survival.

How much topsoil, land available to grow food on, exists in the world?

According to most trusted organizations, we have between 40-60 years of topsoil left to grow food on.
We've heard of the term 'peak oil', some say we've hit 'peak soil'.

Is this cause for alarm?

Yes, incredibly so.

What is causing the world's topsoil to disappear so rapidly?

The driving force behind topsoil loss around the world, lies in the way in which conventional chemical farming or industrial agriculture is practiced. Chemical fertilizers, chemical pesticides, monocrops where one crop is grown continuously year after year in the same place kills the ecosystem in the soil. When there is little life left in the soil, it's ability to retain water and to hold its structure is weakened. Once in a weakened state, topsoil easily washes away during rainstorms, from plowing, from winds, and more. Damage from topsoil erosion worldwide is estimated to be $400 billion per year!

How do we keep topsoil healthy and available for ourselves and future generations?

We don't use chemicals on the land where food is grown and we use sustainable farming practices which promote and generate new topsoil. Organic farmers farm the land sustainably by not destroying the life in the soil with chemicals, and instead use simple methods to promote the life in the soil and keep it healthy for ourselves and future generations to come.

In essence, by buying organically grown produce you are promoting a movement to maintain the topsoil we need to keep on living.

It's simple, support the people who are working to keep the life needed in our soil to continue feeding ourselves, friends and families.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs)

GMOs, maybe you've heard of them before, maybe you haven't- either way listen up, it's time to moderately inform yourself. If you ate anything today containing dairy products, or obtained your meal, snack or beverage from a box, can and/or plastic package there is a good chance you ingested some level of them into your body. If you find any of the multiple derivatives of corn listed in the ingredients on the package of your food or beverage, chances are it is a genetically modified variant of corn. The same goes for soya. If you buy your sugar from Roger's, the largest supplier of sugar in Canada, 15% of it contains a genetically modified variety of the sugar beet. If you cook with canola oil, almost 100% of the products offered in stores will have been made with genetically modified canola. If you find canola, soya and/or corn on any package, unless it says its certified organic, it will undoubtedly be a genetically modified variety. If you eat meat conventionally raised, i.e. not raised according to certified organic standards, you will have ingested GMOs. They also appear in major named brands of beer, bread, honey and vitamins. 

They are ubiquitous. 

50 countries, including almost all of the European Union, constituting 40% of the world's population label genetically engineered food. So, what's up? Why have we in North America not done the same? If 40% of the world has found cause for alarm for these new foods, should we as well?

I think it's important to first understand what a GMO is and how it is created. An organism is genetically modified through the process of shooting the gene (with a gene gun, seriously) of some desired bacteria or species into the DNA of another different species. It is a manipulation of another organism's DNA, its entire being if you will, through an entirely inorganic process, i.e. would never have occurred naturally in nature. This process differs from traditional plant breeding in that the normal biological barrier between plant and other kingdoms, animals and bacteria for instance, are broken. Take for example Bt corn. 

Bt stands for Bacillus thuringiensis, which is a soil-dwelling bacterium commonly used as a pesticide. Bt corn, a genetically modified variety of corn, contains a gene which codes for this toxin. When planted, the corn produces the insecticidal toxin in its tissues. Biotechnology companies like Monsanto and Syngenta, have designed the Bt corn to target the corn borer, who when having eaten it, its stomach will rupture and die. However, Bt corn is also fatal to harmless insects who frequent corn patches such as the monarch butterfly. So, on the outset how does this sound to you as a future consumer of this corn, eating something with a known toxin that ruptures stomachs of insects which will then be broken down and absorbed into your body? Nacho Libre couldn't have said it better... (check the video below)

 

Another variety of genetically engineered corn is called Roundup-ready corn, introduced to the market in 1998. Roundup is an herbicide developed by Monsanto. It is used extensively by farmers for its ability to kill many types of weeds. The Roundup-ready corn has been genetically altered to survive saturation of this weed killing chemical cocktail, while the unwanted plants growing around it die. Roundup works by binding trace minerals in the soil, making them unavailable to plants which then weaken their defenses significantly. It follows then, that the Roundup-ready corn itself is nutritionally deficient,  since it too is also unable to use any of the trace minerals in the soil. Trace minerals, like plants, are incredibly important in maintaining good health for us humans. 

I chose Bt and Roundup-ready corn as examples for genetically engineered food because they are pretty much in everything. Fructose, dextrose, maltodextrin, corn syrup, sucrose- these are familiar corn products we find on many processed food labels. Animal research has shown many adverse health effects as result of being fed these foods: higher cancer, infertility and abortion rates; damaged organs. As for humans, there has never been a single test done to see whether GMOs pose a risk to our health. Yet, the U.S. government approved their sale for human consumption, despite warnings from scientists citing the potential for allergies and immune system disorders as a result of eating these foods.

 Since we are dealing with an entirely new class of organisms never before encountered in the enitre span of mankind, it takes a while for changes to be noticed. It's genetic, which is dynamic and always changing. Unfortunately, we've played the role of guinea pigs, where only now after two decades can doctors begin to understand the damage genetically engineered foods incur on the inner workings of our bodies. If the animal studies are any indication, which they are, we should stop eating anything which has a GMO in it. We should also ask why we as consumers have been kept out of the dark on this information, and why our government doesn't think we should label food products which contain GMOs. Isn't Health Canada supposed to craft policies with our health in mind? 

My source for this information comes largely from a great movie called "Genetic Roulette" by a man named Jeffrey Smith. He has been an outspoken advocate on the dangers of GMOs and tracked the corrupt relationship between the biotech industry and government. Go see it for yourselves, you won't be disappointed. Well you probably will be, because it's all very angering and saddening information, but you will be informed. Here's the trailer for the movie:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EeewlOBHPR4

Easy solution to avoiding all this GMO garbage available in sweet and salty treats- don't eat it, buy organic, grow your own food, shop at farmer's markets or find a CSA to get involved in like my friend's Taylor McPherson, he'll hook you up on some very tasty vegetables. Here's his website with his info: http://www.ferndalefarms.ca/

Delayed Update

And 6 months later the farming adventure has ended... for this year of 2012, but the bigger adventure and dedication to a lifestyle/profession in farming has only just begun. My gosh I've meant to write about what's been swirling around in my head for far too long now. The last 4 and a half months I have been working on a farm in Chilliwack- Forstbauer Family Natural Food Farm, http://www.forstbauer.com/Farm/Welcome.html, a family who's been farming for roughly 30 years in British Columbia, legends in mine and many others eyes. You can find their delicious produce, dairy, berries and beef at at least 8 farmer's markets throughout the lower mainland at the height of the growing season, and then at at least one in the winter, possibly two.

So, if you haven't been going to farmer's markets, why not start this year by checking out the winter market at Nat Bailey stadium in Vancouver starting this November 3rd. Tell em' I sent you (this will not get you any deals, but why not try and see what happens?). For your information, everything they sell is Biodynamic/Organic certified and of the utmost quality and flavour.

Let's backtrack now. I left Duncan at the end of May on good terms with John and family. It was a very positive experience living and working there. I met some pretty neat people, discovered visionary writers, grew a deeper appreciation for nature,  learned much about growing, cultivating and taking care of vegetables and ultimately myself. When you're staying in a new place away from friends and family doing something you're not used to, it will always be for the better in the end on many levels. You may not realize it initially, but with quiet reflection, hopefully you do.

I think the most important thing I've absorbed from staying on these farms is the appreciation for the amount of work that goes into growing organic food. Do you enjoy carrots? When you pick up a bunch of carrots for say $3 at the farmer's market, are you aware of the amount of time that was spent tenderly weeding them, harvesting, bunching and then washing them? The answer: alot. Since no chemical sprays are used to combat weeds, weeding is done the old fashioned way with two hands and an endless amount of patience. There was one four day stretch where all I did was weed carrots. And they don't get weeded just once; typically a row- a 140 foot row, 3 to a bed, 20 rows wide- of carrots will be weeded 3 times over the season. And there were plenty of carrot patches that got weeded over the summer.

Sometimes the weeding can be enjoyable and almost zen-like. Other times you are cursing the demands of these sweet vegetables and their need to be weeded. Weed control is huge. It is almost like a magic trick that nature plays on you- one day you see a few tips of weedy greens poking out of the earth, your desired crop looking strong amongst them, the next day those tips have bolted and are now jockeying for territory, threatening the livelihood of your favoured veggie. Plus, to boot, weeding is very taxing on your muscles. You have to rotate the positions- alternate left then right leg crouching, walking like a crow; sitting on your bum; on hands and knees; sometimes just on knees. That's weeding. I'd say carrots demand the most love and attention, the other crops will put up with a little neglect at first.

The harvesting, bunching, washing then boxing of carrots is also labourious but it comes with the rewards of freshly picked carrots to munch on while doing the work. Nothing tastes better than a fresh, sweet carrot plucked straight from the ground. Okay, you might find some examples to contradict what I just wrote, but when was the last time you got to enjoy this act? I'm not talking about store bought, flavour lacking carrots trucked from across the continent, obviously. There is a massive difference between those fellas and the kind that are grown on organic and biodynamic farms. 

So, send some love to the person you buy your food from at a farmer's market, CSA or even friend by chance who's sharing his homegrown food with you; they worked hard to to bring it to you, to feed you;
the most basic need we all require.

Photos! From a simple camera on a simple phone!

If you'll notice this photo shows two rows to a bed, nor is this patch 20 rows wide as I described earlier.This area was the exception that rule, and some of the greenhouses... However these rows are all very long and time consuming when weeding.

Leeks in flowering mode. They're fun to walk amongst and peer into the little hubs of insect activity taking place on each flower head.

This is somewhere I don't remember in the pole bean rows. You're looking at a bunch of buds who have yet to push out little beans. I hung out here, picking upwards of 200 pounds of them a day for close to a month.
I sorta resented doing the work at first, then came to enjoy it. Funny that.

My vantage point among the bush beans. Compared to pole beans, they are less enjoyable to pick; however with headphones on and bumping tunes to inspire you, they're not so bad.

A Brief Discourse On Our Friend Urtica Diocia
    
   Last weekend on the farm a festival was held honouring the stinging nettle. Yes, that plant that grows in the wild which you may have been stung by at some point in your life. Here's a little refresher on what it looks like: 

     It is highly nutritious; healing for a variety of ailments such as colds, arthritis and enlarged prostate; can be used as a fibre for rope or what have you; and it's culinary incarnations are just as varied. At the festival, the cafe was serving up stinging nettle pizza, stinging nettle pesto with pasta, stinging nettle spanakopita and there was even a workshop on making it into wine. The best part about this nutritious healing plant is that grows freely for you! It's in season right now and if you feel inclined to try it out here are some tips: wear gloves when harvesting, snip off the top 2 inches of the plant since this is where the tastiest, freshest part of the plant is, and look for it in farm pastures at the edges and roadsides (use your own judgement here). If you're in Mission, there's a little patch growing beside the dyke along the Fraser going east about 5 minutes from the parking lot.
    The festival was a lot of fun. I gave tractor rides to kids in the neighbouring field. Those over 2 years old were slightly unimpressed with the 2 km/h speed I was going at, hopping on and off it and yelling at me to go faster the whole time. Here's a picture of what I probably looked like, driving in the field next door (the guy driving here is named Mike, we split driving duties, he is
also a very cool individual) :

    There's more I'd like to write about, but sleep beckons me, so I'll just post a picture. This one is of the bull and his lady friend the day after she gave birth to a beautiful black calf who's camouflaged by the grass:

Catch Up

Well I wouldn't say I'm the first person to start a blog then fail to update it regularly. And it's not even for lack of time or inspiration; there's been plenty of both. I usually find inspiration at the start of my day by gazing out into the beauty of this landscape whilst doing my morning stretches:

 I start every morning after breakfast by feeding those two cows in the forefront a generous portion of hay. The one on the left, who fails to have a name, I tried milking for about a week. It was five weeks since she had given birth and we were already sorta pushing it in trying to get good milk production. So it wasn't to surprising when she failed to produce any more milk after the first week. The last day attempting to get milk from her was essentially just a 20 minute teet massage. She'd only been  milked for a short period in the past, so she wasn't yet completely broken in to the whole routine of walking to the stanchion to stand still while I fumbled around trying to get milk out of her. Getting her to follow me from her pasture to the milking station required basic classical conditioning: hold a bowl of tasty food in front of her face to lead her out, keep said bowl in front of her face till she is locked in her stanchion, then pour more tasty food in her trough to keep her occupied while I plunder her udder! Hopefully over enough time, the bowl won't be necessary and she will follow me willingly to her milking station. I didn't quite achieve that behaviour, but things did go smoother after this week of breaking her in, so to speak. I milked her for four days and in those four days I probably got the equivalent of half a cup of milk. I sipped some of it, it was kinda salty, and the rest went to Friskers and Bailey, the housecat and loveable family dog. I thoroughly enjoyed spending time with this cow though. They are very peaceful animals to be around. Here's a photo of Blacky, for lack of a better name:

A lot of my time on the farm has been spent inside of a greenhouse preparing beds, harvesting salad greens, sowing seeds, watering seedlings, thinning seedlings, mulching pea beds and watering. To till the beds we use a light, easy to maneuver small Japanese rototiller that operates at a low rpm, so it's gentle on the soil. I sowed somewhere in the vicinity of 6000 seeds over 6 weeks into many styrofoam trays. Transplanting tomatoes into bigger pots was a nice experience; the aroma of many very fresh tomato plants wafting through your nostrils as you give them a better home is quite rewarding. All the sowing for spring crops is finished, now its the waiting game. Well, its been and continues to be the waiting game. A lot of the seedlings are nearing their date with the mechanical transplanter where they'll be planted outdoors in big fields. At the moment we're waiting for a nice break in the weather to get out in to the fields for said transplanting. 

Ze Farm

There is a great divide between reading about and actually doing farming. This is something I've come to realize rather quickly since arriving on the farm. For me the experience so far has really highlighted how much one needs to know in order to farm properly and well. More on that later, first a brief description of my temporary home. Alderlea Farm and Cafe, the name of the farm where I'm staying, is owned and run by John and Katy Ehrlich who run both, as their business title implies, a farm and cafe. They sell their produce through a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) plan which is an agreement between the farmer and the customers who will pay in advance for a weekly supply of fresh vegetables and fruits. The cafe is open 3 days a week and supplies a variety of tasty soups, pizzas and other dishes that change on a regular basis, plus sweets and coffee. John has crops on 5 different farms, which are all a short drive away from their home, which in total make up about 5 acres of vegetable growing and another 20 or so acres of hay for his cows. Where I live plays host to the cafe, 2 greenhouses where the seeds are started and other crops are kept, the house, a smallish barn for 30 or so egg laying chickens and one cocky rooster, an acre or so for vegetable crops and a large sloping pasture for two lovely cows, one a jersey named Alderlina and the other a Dexter/Jersey cross who as yet remains unnamed. A short drive away is a parcel of land - McLay - leased by John where he grows about an acre of vegetables on. A slightly longer drive from there, is a place name Keating, where John farms another acre of vegetables on. From there, another 2 minutes or so away is the place where he keeps two cows and a bull, who is surprisingly very tame. 8 or so minutes from Keating, close to the Cowichan river, is a farm in the making, where John tends a raspberry patch and will be starting a new field to grow in, an acre plus in size. There may also be another spot where he'll be growing on this season too. I'll post pictures next week. I've been here two weeks and only managed to take one picture... of their cat, Friskers, who like her name would suggest, is quite frisky for a 23 year-old feline.

What's this blog all about?

For the next 5 months, starting February 6th, I will be working and living on a biodynamic farm on Vancouver Island in the city of Duncan. I'll be posting photos and stories about the experience on a regular basis for our collective viewing enjoyment and hopefully to garner some interest in a method of farming our Earth desperately needs more of. For those of you wondering what the heck biodynamic farming is, let me tell you.

What is Biodynamic Farming?

Biodynamic Farming is a form of agriculture that focuses on soil health and food quality.  In 1924 Rudolf Steiner, a remarkably gifted individual, gave a series of lectures on agriculture and this is where Biodynamics was born.

Rudolf Steiner

A biodynamic farm is an organic farm, but it goes above and beyond the simple practice of producing food without chemicals.  All of the most important practices of a well managed sustainable organic farm such as composting, crop rotation & cover cropping are carried out on the biodynamic farm.  On top of that, the biodynamic farm is viewed as a ‘whole farm organism’, and a series of preparations are used to nourish the farm and the soil health.  Biodynamic farming also uses cosmic rhythms when dealing with the day to day activities on the farm.

The biodynamic farm focuses on the health of the farm and the soil, not simply on the short term gains of a high yielding plant.  Through proper composting techniques and with the use of the preparations, the biodynamic farm as a whole becomes healthier and fully functional as a whole farm ecosystem.  Once the biodynamic farm is fully functional, one can achieve a greater yield on a healthier plant, which will result in better quality food.

I'm sure this definition will expand and be honed down as I my stay progresses, but that sums it up more or less.

Why I'm doing it

Simply put, I want to commit to a profession that will reflect my convictions. For the past two years I've taken a greater interest in where my food comes from, how it's produced, what kind of damage industrial farming does to our environment and what sort of future these trends are taking us towards. When you read the stats, it's bleak. It's pretty clear things need to change in a serious way. For me, getting into farming is just one way I can contribute in a meaningful way to continuing the change towards healthier, sustainable, environmentally friendly produced food.