Local Food

Local food and sustainable production are topics that are being touched on several places I participate in around the web. I think about these issues a lot. Solving them for my small farm is what I spend most of my time working on. Here are some thoughts from my experience for people and groups also working on these issues.

Barriers to local food systems -

1. Regulations.- Most locations with larger populations prohibit any kind of “farming, particularly livestock” within their jurisdiction. Keeping chickens, goats, meat rabbits, or having a market garden in the city or the suburbs is prohibited more places than not. If the production can’t be close, it isn’t local.

2. Costs - Land in or near the city is expensive. Setting up processing facilities, buying equipment, paying laborers for the first few start up years all costs money. Many of the people with the passion and skills to be local producers don’t have and can’t get the money to do it. In many ways we are like a third world country when it comes to developing local economies. There is a vast need, no infrastructure, and no one with money to do it. Micro loan programs, co-ops, and other micro scale development efforts that have worked in the third world should be applied to local programs here.

3. Knowledge - there is no organized education or mentoring aimed at developing and enhancing the skills needed in a local economy.

4. Market - Locally produced food is not cheaper. Especially starting out it could even cost more. If producers can’t make a living doing what they do they will do something else. Educating the consumers, supporting marketing, building incentives will help.

5. Eco-warriors - There are many activist types who think doing battle with the government or big business must be a part of this kind of effort. Resources get wasted trying to fix an unfixable system. We need to start building a new system rather than wasting time, energy, and money on the broken one.

This conversation is happening lots of places. Get involved in your area. Explore ways to live more locally and share your experiences with as many others as you can.

Champagne d' Argent Rabbits

The past few days I've been on my soapbox, ranting about sustainability and local food. If you want the latest on that issue it is on Bioneers. The rest of my time has been tied up with finishing 4H projects (evaluations for Archery are tomorrow at 9am.) and getting our Champagne babies settled.

Five weeks ago our Champagne doe kindled (I think that's the right term). She had seven beautiful black, silky babies. Six of them made it through the rigours of growing up to weaning time. I must admit I didn't do much other than putting the nest box and materials in and making sure they had plenty of good feed and water. Everyone looks great. The plan was to butcher them in a few more weeks, and have at least one more litter (is that the right term?) before winter. Now half of them are sold. At $35 each (registered) it is hard to justify eating them. We still have three left (two does and a buck) with one other interested person. We will be having another litter in the fall and be keeping one of the does (that means changing bucks soon, genetics in rabbits is a bit strange.) I still hope to have some of them in the freezer in the near future. I'm very pleased with the way they have reproduced and raised their young, even in the heat.

We are exploring ways to make them more sustainable by including some grazing options in their care. More on that later.

What is sustainable anyway?

Monsanto as a player in the sustainable agriculture world is still bouncing around in my head. It boggles the mind to think that anyone could take that seriously. And yet, I know quite a few people who have a very different view of sustainability than I do. For some more sustainable means less harm is done. Much of large scale organic farming falls into this category. It uses less of certain things "damaging products and techniques". I had a discussion about no-till farming a while back and the farmer was touting the use of Roundup Ready seed (and the Roundup spray that goes with them) as being the key to his no-till, sustainable approach to farming. He said it was better for the environment because he used less fuel on weed control, and damaged the soil less by not plowing. (He did say he would have to disk in some of last years corn stubble because it hadn't broken down. Guess there wasn't enough life left in the soil to break down organic matter.) He was adamant about this making his farm more sustainable.

One of the problems is in the definition of the word. Making a business more sustainable means it will be able to continue to operate into the foreseeable future. It has nothing to do with the environmental costs. As far as I can tell there are no businesses (including any of the current agricultural models) that are built on an ecological sustainability model. By ecological sustainability I mean it operates by the same rules that a natural system (free from humans mucking about) operates. It is a closed resource loop. Everything that lives in the range of that eco system is part of and is dependant on the resource pool available in that place. Everything is returned to that pool to continue the cycle. All the populations in that place are limited by the resource pool. This kind of system is sustainable indefinitely. When we talk about, and work toward sustainable models of living and of production that is the only model that works. Monsanto's definition of sustainable doesn't come close.