Our
little farm gets gardening waste from a local gated community, and a surprising
amount of plastic waste comes along for the ride. Dog poop, cat litter— all
things that can’t be composted safely in a small farm system (and also can’t be
composted at the local dump). I wonder how this came to be. As I pull bits of plastic and dog poop
out of the pile while I’m building it, I feel tired, sad and worried.
It
got me thinking about where our food comes from, and how things are connected
in surprising ways. When we try to buy local food, these connections are all
the more apparent. I’d argue even when we’re eating non-local food, the
connections are there in significant ways.
The
primary different between organic and non-organic farming, relates to the soil,
and thus to the scale of the farm. If a farm is using inorganic fertilizers,
it’s a lot easier to scale up because you can calculate and purchase the exact
number of kilograms of N-P-K you need for your farm, and it’s basically infinitely
scalable until your soil is destroyed or gets blown away. That is, while fossil
fuels are cheap and plentiful: so not forever. The quality of that fertilizer, and the food chain in general, is important-- we have fairly good evidence to say that food that is grown on poor quality soil is not as nutritious.
Attention
to soil health and to the circular nature of all our existences is a central
driver for farming and a central driver for small scale farming. Soil health is
what keeps organic farms small, if labor is valued correctly.
So when
it comes to organic operations, it’s not simply that we don’t use pesticides
(often the focus of people’s interest.). It's all about the soil: we require fairly vast quantities of
compost. For example, our small 1 acre (probably only ½ acre actively
cultivated) farm makes 15- 20 tons of various kinds of compost a year.
Getting
this compost adds either a very significant cost or a tremendous amount of
labor, depending on one’s circumstances, and I wanted to talk a bit about this
process, and how it relates to the cost of vegetables and fruit, as I think
organic produce is still hugely undervalued and unsustainable at the prices you
often see— at least in the sense that it is impossible to adequately value the
labor of workers at the current costs.
Right now people are willing to
pay more to avoid pesticides— which has reached the public consciousness as
important. That is, I am not sure we have not necessarily made the connection
back to soil health, or to hugely increased labor costs, or to relatively
smaller farm sizes, and the ways these are valuable and important, but not
accounted for in a free market economy.
When
I think of leveraging for change at the local level, I feel it may be valuable
to keep picturing, imagining, enacting a different economy. This is what we do,
to an extent, when we sell our produce for the same price as the supermarket:
we say, perhaps we are the ones who have been given much and so are also the
ones who can sacrifice a little. Or maybe we are simply going along with market
economics where consumers are overwhelmingly the beneficiaries: you get to have
your organic cake and eat it too.
Anyway,
back to the compost story:
Firstly,
in a highly specialized farm there is more likely to be waste. In a family farm
with a little of everything, all the parts can stand a reasonable chance of
working together. For example, waste from the kitchen can be cycled through the
small number of chickens, whose waste is an asset, not a toxic waste. Tree
branches and leaves are similarly an asset, not a waste product. In a family
scale farm, the family is eating what you are eating- we have every incentive
to grow the best possible food we can. In a smaller scale business, the success
of the staff are up close and personal, not distanced from our reality.
There
are a few ways to get the quantity of compost we need to grow food:
1) Buying it in: Here, the cost
of the compost will be part of the cost of the vegetables. The advantage of
this is that the quality of the compost is not your responsibility in the same
way. But the more I compost, the more I feel that large scale operations are
either using a lot of fossil fuels to produce their compost (e.g. through large
chippers or turners), or are having to pay people poor wages to go through and
try to remove plastic and poop. There are simpler possibilities for compost out
there (particularly in more rural areas): horse or cow manure. While these are
great sources of compost, it’s unlikely that most sources can vouch for the
horses or cows’ own feed, at least in South Africa, where most farms are
informally organic rather than certified as such. The challenge with buying in
compost is not only that the quality is often quite poor, it is that it also means you have to grow much more intensively to make sure
you recoup your costs.
And/or
2) Make your own compost using
farm waste (I.e. cycling back kitchen scraps, humanure, animal manure): I think
this works as long as you are not exporting any food off site— ie it only works
your soil is starting from a relatively good place, and if you aren’t selling
anything to anyone.) The advantage to this is that you can vouch for the
quality of the compost based not only on making it, but also based on knowing
the quality of the individual components (e.g. you know the chickens and humans
were healthy and not fed anything that would impact their manure).
3) I think most organic farmers
try to make their own compost in order to try to price their produce more
competitively. I make lots of different kinds of compost, and I think
ultimately this will contribute to much better produce than if I just used
horse manure, for example.
This is where it comes back to the gated community I
mentioned at the beginning: either the families or their gardeners do not think
it is a big deal to put plastic or dog poop into landscape waste, but when they
do, a few things might happen:
1) I might pay someone to set up the
compost pile for me, because I can’t afford a higher wage given low prices. I
cannot expect that that person will carefully remove plastic and paint chips
etc, no matter how much I pay them: it is simply very undignified work.
2) I might make the compost pile myself, carefully removing the plastic,
because I’m not quite sure how to navigate talking to a worker about
encountering dog poop etc. When selling the produce, I’d either have to vastly
undervalue my own time, or increase the cost of the produce still more
“artisanal” comes to mind.
The easier option: For the resident of the gated community to realize that their landscaping waste comes back as their organic, local produce, and they have choices that will help enable the organic farmers’ work. That is: it truly is a circle, whether a small local one, or a huge global one: what you do matters. How you pay your workers matter, but honestly no worker, however well paid, will remove small pieces of plastic chucked into your waste stream. How attentive you are to issues of plastic waste matters, matters for a long time.
I
struggle with concepts of artisanal food, because sometimes it seems like
shorthand for paying hipsters more than farm workers, for the same product. At
the same time, I want to suggest that in a family farm, the level of skill
required to farm in an ecological way is extraordinarily high. I think there is value to farmers
laboring on their own land, and selling the same food they eat and labour for,
even though they could produce food more cheaply if they paid someone else to
do the labour for them. I have read as
much about permaculture and about small-scale farming as I read for my PhD, and
still farming challenges me in significant ways. So while I don’t expect an
academic salary as a farmer, there’s no way minimum wage will work for new
urban farmers, even frugal ones. So it’s something I’m pondering— not
necessarily with clear answers. Perhaps there is something in there for finding
ways to respect all work?
In
practical terms, I dream of using our farm, and the Good Food Club Valley, as a
place to experiment with a wellness economy. To grapple with our needs and
wants as farmers with skin in the game, while thinking practically about what
it means to access nourishing food. Perhaps it looks like bartering, perhaps it
looks like something else. But definitely, imagining a future in which food is
nutritious and sustainable involves some fundamental shifts in how we relate to
one another. Maybe it involves getting into uncomfortable situations— I know I
am in the midst of this as we grapple with how to pay our staff when we are not
yet making any money at our nursery.
No
farm is an island— even the most holistic family farm needs inputs, and a
network of supporting structures. We all specialize a little bit: for example
it is impractical to simultaneously grow seed, seedlings, trees, full grown
vegetables and fruit, eggs, and meat (I don’t even consider grains here, as I
think on an urban scale grain is largely impractical) compost, and then market
and sell all of these directly. .
The
immediate issues of how we pay an individual farmer for a set of goods may seem
like a very tiny set of questions in a world of Takealot, Amazon and the free-market.
I’m not sure I have the answer for that, but I convinced that if we pay
attention to small, daily, actions related to food: where we’re willing to
change both our taste buds and our buying patterns, that this can make
significant local (though scary) changes.
