Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is, Part I (The Big Unveiling)

UPS came today with the shipment I’ve been eagerly awaiting. Here’s the story.

People often ask me (because so much of my stock is used books), “Do you buy books?” Yes, I do, both new ones and old ones--it's impossible to have a really good collection without making at least occasional good purchases--but I buy, of necessity, very, very selectively. No bookseller lasts 21 years in the business by buying everything. Dog Ears Books was originally Dog Ears Used Books, and it was only after half a dozen years of sending potential customers elsewhere when they asked for new nature field guides that I set up my first account with a new books distributor. Guides to birds, wildflowers, trees and such, then, were the first new books I stocked. Next came specific Michigan titles and children’s books. After a few more years I connected with a second, larger distributor, giving me the capability to order almost any new book anyone wants.

As for which new books I order for store stock—“on spec,” as it were—I'm still careful. Demand for hardcover bestsellers usually sends people to cut-rate online sites, and paperback bestsellers are available at grocery and big box stores. So I’m careful. Buying inventory is an investment, and deciding where to put the money in a business is an important decision, regardless of how small the business may be.

One of my personal interests for decades, however, has been agriculture. My fascination may go back as far back as childhood, when one Ohio grandmother had a cow and chickens (and an outhouse and pump for plumbing), and at home in Illinois we watched the sun set behind the cornfield—soybeans in alternating years—across the road. Oh, yes, and I yearned for a horse, too. But whenever that farming seed was planted in my soul, it took hold early and stayed strong. I’m always happy to recommend Louis Bromfield’s Malabar Farm, the books of Gene Logsdon, and anything by Wendell Berry. I have old Yearbooks of Agriculture in stock, and just the other day a customer came along for an old copy Forage Crops. I’ve also (and have written about this before) subscribed for a couple of years now to AcresUSA...

...And so (flourish of trumpets), meet my new distributor, AcresUSA, and the first order I've received from them:

I am very, very excited to expand my new book offerings in agriculture this way. Added to what I was already carrying, the section is looking very good indeed. 

But poets, never fear! New poetry books, already a mainstay, will continue to be prominently featured in the front of the store.

Farming and poetry. Poets and farmers. I stand behind them. I support them by putting my business money where my mouth is.

Part II of "Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is" will have nothing to do with books. Stay tuned for that surprise project, to be announced as soon as I get it together.

One More Market Day in Northport -- etc., etc.

Friday mornings in summer and early fall are special, thanks to the excitement of a colorful farmers' market with lots of local fruits, vegetables, flowers, bread, cheese, meat, jams and jellies and lots more, all set up down by the marina parking lot, just out of sight in the photo at left. The weather on the last Friday in August was a challenge for all concerned -- driving thunderstorm, horizontal rain, and hailstones, too! -- but September 6 gave us a beautiful morning. 

I like to get to the market early, before long lines form at my favorite vendors' stalls. It has been greatly expanded from the previous year's already wonderful array and is a social occasion for many local residents, along with a weekly shopping trip. Isn't that what a traditional market day is all about?

I had already bought green beans and tomatoes before making a beeline to Kathy's display for a bunch of onions, and it was a good thing I remembered those onions and went after them, because her cucumbers were on the same table, and what would my gazpacho have been without cucumbers? She threw in a couple of small tomatoes, saying they needed to be used right away.

From the Northport events calendar sent out from the NCAC (Northport Community Arts Center), it looks as if Friday the 13th will be our last market day of the 2013 season. I'd love to be wrong about this, but either way you don't want to miss this coming market day in Northport, if you're anywhere near. It is definitely the place to be in our small town on Friday morning.

Report of my Gardening and Gathering

It was a good year for strawberries and rhubarb in my garden. Delicious pies resulted, and there is still rhubarb in the freezer waiting to be canned as sauce. Later summer and early fall have brought wild raspberries and blackberries in abundance, with the jam-making ready now to move into its final phase.

Collards did well. Tomatoes were late but prolific. Sweet little orange cherry tomatoes have a growing habit much like the berries on deadly nightshade, accenting the mysterious family relationship between the edible and inedible. Acorn and butternut squash and pumpkins are looking good. But eggplant? What do you say to eggplant that doesn’t blossom until September? And my pretty little plum trees definitely need to be pruned this winter, branches eliminated so that the trees will put more energy into fruit and less into wood and leaves. It will be worth it. The small golden fruits with rosy skins are delicious.

Recent Photography Experiments

Overcoming shyness about photographing people, I have lately been doing just that – always and only with willing subjects, of course –and have been so pleased with the results that I asked a couple of friends if I could post their portraits on my photo blog. The first two, once they saw their pictures, said yes with no hesitation, and so, far from feeling as if I’ve “stolen their spirits,” I feel I’ve given them a mirror to see their beautiful selves and have shown those beautiful selves to others now, too. I would never do this without the okay of my subjects, but they seem very pleased, and that makes me happy.

Happy P.S. to this subject: A third friend said yes to my request!

One Sad Note

A poor young robin, adult size but still speckled, smacked into our front porch window early on Sunday morning. I’d gotten up early and was out there reading when I heard the telltale THUD! and went out to see what kind of bird had had the accident. Tried to feel for a heartbeat, but such a tiny heart it would be! I was clueless. Left it for an hour, hoping it was only stunned and would revive, but -- no such luck. Picking it up with a paper towel, I saw that the young bird had been feasting on late summer blackberries, and I hoped its short life had been a happy one.

The Land Beneath Our Feet, Part II

Books that figure in this, the previous and the next post to follow are:
Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, by Lisa M. Hamilton (Counterpoint, paper, $15.95);
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery (Univ. of California, paper, $17.95);
Sacred Trusts: Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility, ed. by Michael Katakis (Mercury House, 1993)

The hopelessness a reader may feel reading Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations and the despair that may come upon a viewer of “Life and Debt” are at least in part counteracted by Lisa M. Hamilton’s book, Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agriculture. Hamilton spent time with three American farm families—a small, family-owned dairy farm in East Texas, a cattle operation in New Mexico, and a North Dakota business run by a family who grow almost their own food and also develop their own high-quality vegetable seeds, both for their own use and for sale. These three farms all manage to be “modern” without losing the farmers losing direct connection with the land. All face a certain amount of skepticism, even hostility, from surrounding farmers and ranchers who have bought into larger, more expensive, “efficient” and debt-necessitating practices, but there are also signs that farm neighbors as well as the general public is starting to catch on.

Healthy dairy cows and beef cattle graze. Fruit, vegetable and field crops with ability to adapt to local environment must be developed locally. Factory methods produce high yields for a while, with livestock or plant crops, but they also bring increased vulnerability to disease and fluctuations in weather, threatening long-term food security for the immediate region and the larger world. And they almost invariably lead to deterioration of soil, the basis for all agriculture.

Hamilton, not much of an enthusiast for milk drinking, hesitates to accept a glass of milk during her visit to Harry Lewis’s dairy farm. Immediately after drinking it, she wants more. When Harry tells her the milk she just drank is less than two hours from the cow, she has an epiphany:

After he says that I look at the barn again. It’s still old and cramped, with more than its share of flies. The white walls are still messy. And yet, I realize, what milking barn is attractive? What cows do not shit? ... The true measure of right and wrong here is not one of manure or mud, but rather of the details. The calmness of the cows and the people. The pace of the work and the attention it allows. Even the shit: most dairy cows have a sticky coating of manure on their backsides and tails. It’s the result of replacing pasture with an unnatural diet of grain and the ill health of confinement, both of which lead to perpetual diarrhea. Harry’s cows, on the other hand, defecate solidly. Their feet may be muddy, but their rears are clean.

Too graphic for you? Then don’t go into dairy farming. The truth of it, though—that’s something anyone who buys and consumes dairy products should think about long and hard.

Virgil Trujillo introduces Hamilton to alternative beef cattle ranching. He grew up ranching but wanted to learn more and went on to study Holistic Resource Management (HRM).

...One of the first steps is to see the ranching system as based on solar energy: the sun’s energy grows plants, then cows [and bulls and steers; “cows” understood in the context of Western ranching to apply to cattle in general] harvest that energy and transform it into energy that is edible by humans. HRM still make their money by harvesting the cattle, but their strategy for success is to take care of the land that grows the plants.

The most basic of HRM is a system of rotational grazing. It is meant to make cows replicate herds of heavy ruminants such as bison, whose sybiotic relationship with the flora was an integral part of grasslands ecosystems for millenia. The herds would concentrate in one area, eat its plants down to the ground, then move on and not return until the forage was sufficiently regrown. Had they returned sooner, they would have compromised the plants that they depended on for survival.

If you are skeptical, consider the “exclosure,” an acre and a half of land that has been fenced off and protected from any kind of grazing for over 75 years. Hamilton reports on what she saw inside the fence and how it compared to what was outside.

The main difference is that the plants inside the fence are shaggier: the clumps of grass are denser, with pointed ends drying out in the sun; the shrubs are a little taller, but woodier. Yet even these differences are slight. By looks, the fence could have been installed last year, just before the cattle came through.

The ungrazed land inside the exclosure is no better off, the grazed land outside no worse off. Virgil explains:

"The grass out here grows six inches to a foot every year. After seventy-five years, do you see that grass inside the fence seventy-five feet high? No. And is the grass outside the fence dead? No. I’m just harvesting it.”

The cattle grazing on rangeland are doing what suburbanites do with their lawn mowers. As I read this section of Hamilton’s book, I thought back to what Montgomery wrote about traditional cattle grazing in Africa, before strict national borders were put in place and cattlemen required to fence in their herds. The resting period, the time when it appears that “nothing” is happening on the range or in a pasture—that’s a key component to the success of grazing. Another, however, is the cattle themselves, enriching the range with the manure they leave behind on grazed land. Because of this natural fertilizer, many people believe that grazing improves the quality of rangeland grass.

I won’t try the patience of anyone who’s hung in with me this far (if anyone has) by trying to explain the complicated ownership of the land where Virgil grazes his herd. I do want to stress--and this seems as good a time as any to bring it in—that the Harry Lewis family in East Texas, Virgil Trujillo in New Mexico and the Podolls in North Dakota have more in common than wise land use, soil conservation concerns and care for the continued productivity of their herds and crops. All are, as Hamilton’s title suggests, deeply rooted in the communities where they live and work. None of these people looked around the country to decide where to live. None chose their home places using abstract, objective criteria. The Podolls are trying to keep going the legacy of their parents and grandparents. The same is true of Virgil. The Lewis family farming tradition does not go back quite as far, in terms of land ownership, but Harry Lewis is regarded as the patriarch of his little unincorporated community of Smith Bottom. All have known challenges and setbacks. All work harder, physically and mentally, than most Americans can even begin to think of working. But not for a minute did a single one of these people consider quitting and walking away. They are committed to what they do and to the places where they do it.

Trujillo and Lewis both, for different reasons, devote themselves to livestock. David and Dan Podoll’s parents in North Dakota pioneered raising turkeys by the thousands, paying off their farm in five years, but it was David who set out in 1974 to investigate the absurdity of organic agriculture and found himself converted by the evidence (he doesn’t call his kind of farming “organic” or even “sustainable” but enduring), and he doesn’t mind people thinking he’s crazy. He focuses on the farm as a whole rather than any single crop and its yield in any one year, and his brother Dan and sister-in-law Theresa and his own wife Ginger (a teacher who grew up on a Montana ranch) are with him all the way. It was in fact Dan’s girlfriend, a Minnesota farm girl herself, who first heard about organic farming in a college ecology class and couldn’t want to tell Dan about it.

Here is one example of how the Podoll farm is different from other North Dakota farms. Instead of wheat, the Podolls raise its cousin, triticale, a taller, bushier crop. It’s not as easy to harvest, and, like hay, there are problems if rain comes while the cut crop is drying in the fields. But it shades out weeds in a way that wheat cannot. Its roots are longer and deeper, meaning the crop can survive drought that would kill wheat in the field. Finally, plant matter disked back into the earth after harvest builds healthy, living soil.

None of this matters much to the guys growing dwarf wheat. They don’t need the plant to shade out weeds because they have herbicides. They don’t need biomass for the soil because they have fertilizers.

It’s as if, Hamilton observes, the different farming methods are occurring in parallel universes.

A big part of way the Podolls manage their farm has to do with growing vegetables, and a big part of that has to do with saving seed. Choosing which plants from which to save seed. Selective breeding. Developing their own strains of seeds and selling those seeds commercially. Again, the very idea of saving seed, once a necessity for every farmer the world over, is considered by many these days to be old-fashioned and unscientific. In cases where farmers purchase genetically modified seed, saving it is a breach of contract punishable by law.

Monsanto’s contract is called a ‘Technology/Stewardship Agreement,’ an ironic choice if you believe, as David does, that the patenting of plants is a direct assault on the very concept of stewardship. When farmers lose the right to save seed, they can no longer care for plant populations from year to year and adapt them to their land. The plants cannot evolve.

Again, I must digress from a book under discussion to recommend a film, this time “The Future of Food,” an in-depth discussion of genetically modified seeds, from what’s entailed in their development to what they mean for farmers and everyone on earth. Anyone who thinks genetic modification is just another version of hybridization or the kind of selective breeding the Podolls are engaged in needs to see this film or in some other way educate himself on the giant leap of technology from garden to laboratory.

The farm crisis seen by organic farmers and seed breeders in North Dakota is a small local echo of David R. Montgomery’s thesis in Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, discussed in my previous post.

Over the past century the industrialized world built an agricultural system using a scaffold of external supports: cheap fuel to run machinery; fertilizer manufactured from natural gas; imported water for irrigation; pesticides to eliminate insects, weeds, and diseases. With these inputs, fantastic yields were achieved, the likes of which the world had never seen. When turned into vast quantities of inexpensive food, those yields allowed the world population to grow exponentially. That, in turn, created greater demand for more food. The problem was that scaffold became inseparable from the system itself. Agriculture could not function—the world could not eat—without those external supports, yet they were suddenly running out.

Harry Lewis dreams of farmers taking back the country. When I read about him and Virgil Trujillo and the Podolls and compare their work, close to the soil, close to their communities, to the giant, corporate, engulf-and-devour seed and fertilizer manufacturers, I don’t have to think twice to know which world I’d rather live in, which future I hope generations to come will have a chance to know.

The Land Beneath Our Feet, Part I

The grower of trees, the man born to farming,
whose hands reach into the ground and sprout,
to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death
yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down
in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
His thought passes along the row ends like a mole.
What miraculous seed has he swallowed
that the unending sentence of his love flows out of his mouth
like a vine clinging in the sunlight, and like water
descending in the dark?

- Wendell Berry, “The Man Born to Farming,” from The Mad Farmer Poems

Other books that figure in this and following posts are:
Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness, by Lisa M. Hamilton (Counterpoint, paper, $15.95);
Dirt: The Erosion of Civilizations, by David R. Montgomery (Univ. of California, paper, $17.95);
Sacred Trusts: Essays on Stewardship and Responsibility, ed. by Michael Katakis (Mercury House, 1993)

Of these recent three nonfiction works on land use, it was Montgomery’s book that I read first. A farmer friend had ordered it from me, along with another book on agriculture, and when the order came in and he came to pick up his books, I commented that Montgomery’s looked fascinating. “Why don’t you read it first?” he suggested generously. “I won’t have time to read books until winter, anyway.” (He said “enna-way,” which is how a lot of farmers, Norwegian and otherwise, in this part of the country pronounce that word.) So I read the book and passed it along to him bristling with Post-It notes, much to his astonishment.

My friend wondered if the idea of soil erosion was new to me. No, not at all. Long before I worked for almost a year at the Soil Conservation District office, back during my undergraduate education when I did an independent study (readings) in agricultural history, I could have told you the loss of topsoil per acre per year in Barry County, Michigan, where I was living at the time. I’ve also read quite a bit over the years about flooding and soil loss in China. The picture Mongtomery presents, however, is a more far-reaching and much more complicated. At the risk of oversimplifying his message, here’s how I see the thesis:

1) The rise and fall of civilizations throughout history, as well as all migration of peoples from one part of the world to another and including all wars from time immemorial, can be traced to the story of topsoil, the skin of our planet.

2) Human populations have always increased and declined according to food available, such that an increase in yields will always predict a corresponding increase in population.

3) Therefore, a technology that seeks continually to increase agriculture yields at the expense of preserving or building healthy topsoil guarantees eventual environmental collapse.

Montgomery’s thesis is historical. It is as much for the academic historian in the Ivory Tower with no interest in farming as it is for the environmentally conscious alternative new farmer. At times, to be honest, I found the sheer volume of supporting factual detail somewhat overwhelming. Historians, I find, have a tendency to do this: they have a hard time leaving anything out, even when half as much would have made just as tight a case, but some of the details are also quite fascinating in their own right.

The earliest communities along the Yellow River were situated on elevated terraces along tributaries. Only later, after the area became densely populated, did people crowd onto the floodplain. [I have added emphasis to this sentence to make clear the contrast with Egypt that follows.] Extensive levees to protect farmlands and towns along the river kept floodwaters, and the sediment they carried, confined between the levees. Where the river hit the plains, the weakening current began dropping sediment out between the levees instead of across the floodplain. Rebuilding levees ever higher to contain the floodwaters ensured that the riverbed climbed above the alluvial plain about a food every century.

By the 1920s the surface of the river towered thirty feet above the floodplain during the high-water season. This guaranteed that any flood that breached the levees was devastating.

The contrast between China and Egypt could not be more striking. Until the building of the Aswan Dam, agriculture along the Nile was sustained for seven thousand years by periodic flooding that brought fresh silt from upriver, renewing the topsoil and keeping the land productive. The dam changed everything.

After advancing for thousands of years since sea level stabilized, the Nile delta is now eroding. Although the dam allows farmers to grow two or three crops a year using artificial irrigation, the water now delivers salt instead of silt....

As the renowned fertility of the Nile valley began to fall, agricultural output was sustained with chemical fertilizers that peasant farmers could not afford. Modern farmers along the Nile are some of the world’s foremost users of chemical fertilizers—conveniently produced in new factories that are among the largest users of power generated by Nasser’s dam. Now, for the first time in seven thousand years, Egypt—home of humanity’s most durable garden—imports most of its food.

The length of time that land along the Nile remained productive is unparalleled in the world’s history. In other countries, from one continent to another, successful food production led to increases in population that forced farmers onto less and less productive land. Often the less productive land was on hillsides or even mountainsides. Sometimes it was jungle land or prairies that had long sustained native plants. In all these cases, cultivation left topsoil vulnerable to wind and rain, which soon blew or washed it away. Montgomery finds similar histories on every continent except the polar Arctic and Antarctic, which have never been farmed.

Agribusiness and the research that supports it and enlarges its scope with ever more powerful products have been touted by many as the answer to world hunger. Montgomery is dubious. First, he reports that food production per capita has increased faster than world population since the 1960s.

World hunger persists because of unequal access to food, a social problem of distribution and economics rather than inadequate agricultural capacity.

One reason for the extent of world hunger is that industrialized agriculture displaced rural farmers, forcing them to join the urban poor who cannot afford an adequate diet. In many countries, much of the traditional farmland was converted from subsistence farms to plantations growing high-value export crops. Without access to land to grow their own food, the urban poor all too often lack the money to buy enough food even if it is available.

This reality is starkly portrayed in the film “Life and Debt,” which details the role of the World Bank in adding stranglehold stipulations to any loans they make to “developing” countries, such that the borrowing country is no longer allowed to put tariffs on food imports (this is called “a level playing field” by the large, wealthy players) but must allow its borders to be overrun by cheap food produced overseas, with the result that the food security of the population, as well as the self-sufficiency of native farmers, is sacrificed. Never mind that the United States in its early days had many protective tariffs in place to encourage our national agriculture and industry. Now that we’re big and powerful, we bring official international “complaint” against little countries like Haiti if they do not allow absolute “freedom,” i.e., pricing equality, with the rest of the world, even if means the downfall of their very last agricultural export crop. See the film!

Getting back to world hunger--. Reason #1: Industrialized agribusiness has displaced rural farmers. This, you should already be aware, is not a Third World problem only but a reality right here in the United States. Get big or get out! has been American agricultural policy since the days of Earl Butz. The idea was that modern technology on large holdings would be more "efficient" than small farmers who couldn’t afford to modernize.

Reason #2: Shockingly, unexpectedly, crop yields have not continued to rise to greater and greater heights with “modern” (industrialized) methods. The much-touted Green Revolution seems to be stalling out.

The introduction of fertilizer-responsive rice and wheat increased crop yields between the 1950s and 1970s by more than 2 percent a year.

Since then, however, growth in crop yields has slowed to a virtual standstill. The great postwar increase in crop yields appears to be over. Wheat yields in the United States and Mexico are no longer increasing. Asian rice yields are starting to fall. Crop yields appear to have reached a technological plateau.

What has happened with yields due to hybridization, heavy chemical fertilizer applications and chemical pesticides and herbicides is now, already, occurring with genetically modified, “herbicide-ready” seeds. Yields rise, plateau and then fall, fields requiring ever heavier doses of chemicals. Little of this news has yet reached the general public.

Reason #3: Every rise in food supply throughout history has been matched by a rise in population. In theory, it would seem that humankind could take this lesson seriously and limit population; in practice, every group population group (whether national, tribal, religious, ethnic or whatever) usually wants some other group to limit itself (or be limited). Americans in the 20th century, for example, usually pointed to enormous populations in China and India, ignoring the multiplying factor in natural resource use that meant every American child had an impact of something like 15 children in India. (I’m too lazy to look up the exact figure and can’t remember which book it was in, and anyway there have been different figures in different years, and 15 is one of the lower-end numbers I recall.) If the past is repeated into the future, and advances in methods ratchet up food supply, population will also rise, until all the earth’s topsoil has been washed into the sea. It didn’t start in New Orleans, and it didn’t stop there.

Given Montgomery’s argument and the weight of evidence he calls in to support it, the conclusion of the book is unsurprising:

Many factors may contribute to ending a civilization, but an adequate supply of fertile soil is necessary to sustain one. ... As odd as it may sound, civilization’s survival depends on treating soil as an investment, as a valuable inheritance rather than a commodity—as something other than dirt.

To be continued.