In revising the syllabus for this course this past winter, I
consulted several students who’ve spent significant time and energy engaged
with agriculture and food systems issues. Each offered insights into the type
of course they felt would be most valuable to K seniors. Two elements came
across as especially important in our conversations. First, that the course
focus on solutions to agriculture/food systems problems, and second, that each
student bring their own experiences and knowledge to bear on our exploration of
these solutions.
In order to facilitate this, each week during this course,
two students will each individually choose an issue to present to the class for
exploration and discussion. Each of these students will write a blog post
detailing the problem they would like us to consider, including links to
reference material that will help us understand the depth and complexity of the
problem. They will also include information about or links to material that
describes attempts to solve this problem. Though these blog posts will contain
lots of factual information (and please make sure that this factual material is
coming from sources you deem reputable!), they should also be written from a
personal perspective. Why are you concerned about this problem? When did you
first learn of it? How does it affect you personally and how might you
personally engage in solving it?
Your blog posts should end with a question or two that you’d
like the class to respond to. Each student who is not facilitating that week
will respond to your post with a comment that addresses the question(s) you’ve
posed (and please spend a little time composing thoughtful comments—probably a
good length to shoot for is 200+ words). Then you will have fifty minutes of
our Thursday morning meeting to facilitate a discussion or activity that
further explores the issues and solutions you’ve raised.
Blog posts will be due Wednesday evening the week prior to
the week you will be facilitating discussion. Comments will be due prior to our
Thursday class meeting time.
With those logistics out of the way, I’d like to start us
off with my own post on the state of our agricultural systems and my
relationship to them:
My first friends were farm animals. Cows, mostly, because my
parents were dairy farmers and so I was surrounded by them. We had chickens
too, but they pecked me when I tried to collect their eggs and the roosters
flew at my head with their dusty wings and sharp talons whenever I entered the
chicken yard. I preferred the cows. I remember one old cow who always chose the
same stall in the middle of the barn. I liked to sit next to her and stroke the
soft underside of her neck as she calmly chewed her cud and waited her turn to
be milked. I was pretty young then, too young to be of much help in the barn,
but I loved being around the cows, touching them and smelling their sweet
breath.
As soon as I was tall and strong enough, I was given chores.
My first responsibilities were feeding the cows and young calves, then cleaning
stalls and milking. In the summer there was field work as we grew and harvested
the crops that would feed the cows through the winter. It was hard, physical
work but I enjoyed it. I loved being outside, working with my family. We were a
team, working together to take care of the cows, who in turn took care of us by
giving us milk, meat, and money. Neither of my parents had off-farm jobs, so
everything we had came from those cows. If they flourished, we flourished.
No childhood is perfect, but my first ten years were pretty
satisfying. I determined that I wanted to live on a farm forever and planned to
marry a farmer when I grew up. (That it didn’t occur to me that I could be a
farmer myself should give you an indication of the gender dynamics in my
family.) It was when I was about twelve that I started to realize that
something was amiss in the world of agriculture.
In the mid-80s, a decade after former Secretary of
Agriculture Earl Butz (read about his legacy here: http://grist.org/article/the-butz-stops-here/)extorted farmers to “get big or get out,” the dairy industry hit a crisis.
Production, bolstered in part by government price-supports and buy-ups of
surplus product, rose to unsustainable levels. As part of an attempt to reduce
the surplus milk flooding the market, the federal Dairy Termination Program
offered a buyout option which paid farmers to stop milk production.
I imagine that a conversation similar to the one my family
had one February evening took place across many farmhouse kitchen tables that
year. My father explained the terms of program. We’d have to sell the cows and
agree not to produce milk for a certain number of years, which meant we’d be
done dairying, since it wasn’t feasible to get back into the business after
being out for several years.
“Well, family, what do you think?” my father asked, looking
from my mother to my brother to me. “Should we take it?”
“No!” I yelled, shaking my head vigorously, eyes wide,
shocked that we would even consider such a thing. I couldn’t imagine life
without the cows, without the farm. What would we do?
I don’t know how much my reaction actually figured into my
father’s decision not to take the buyout. Many of the small dairies in our
county did. And though my parents didn’t stop farming when I was a kid, they
determined that they would be the last generation of my family to farm. “Go to
college,” they told my brother and me. “Get a good job off the farm. You can’t
make a living doing this on a small scale—it’s too hard.”
The agricultural policies promoted by Butz and others who
shared his interests (and the fallout from these policies) have changed the
landscape and ecosystem in which I live. Once my township and those surrounding
it were dotted with small, diverse farms. My father remembers the days when
every family had a garden, a pig, a cow, and some chickens. Now a few large
farms dominate the area with corn, soybeans, and dairy herds which contain
thousands of cattle (at its biggest, my parents’ herd was a couple of hundred).
“Plant fencerow to fencerow,” Butz said. Today, even the
fencerows have been cut and plowed, destroying precious buffer zones and ecologically
diverse habitats. In the effort to get maximum yields per acre, erodible land
is tilled and soil washes into our rivers and streams. Chemical fertilizers and
herbicides have destroyed the life in our soil and they also wash into our
watershed, wreaking havoc in our aquatic ecosystems. Livestock, also, are
pushed to the limits of production through breeding, feeding, and confinement
practices that leave them with shortened and unpleasant lives. And farm workers
share that same fate as they put in exhausting workdays which frequently
include dangerous working conditions and exposures to toxic substances.
If asked what I think the biggest problem in our current food
system is, I’d answer that it resides within our relationships—our
relationships with ourselves, each other, and the non-human beings who sustain
our lives. We have, in this country, a system of relationships based on
exploitation in the name of maximum production and profit. For the most part,
we accept this as the normal state of things. We accept that shoppers are going
to try to get the most/best goods they can for their shopping dollar, that
employers are going to try to get the most work out of their employees for the
least compensation, and that farmers will try to get the most production out of
their soil with the least amount of care expressed as labor and expense. It
doesn’t matter so much to us that our shopping dollars support employers who force
workers to labor in unsafe conditions for poverty wages and we have entirely
forgotten that the health of the soil has anything to do with us. We have
forgotten that our health and our fates are intertwined with both our human and
our biotic communities.
When we are enmeshed in dysfunction, it can be difficult to
envision what true health might look like. I think it’s worth remembering that
there are cultures that have lived and continue to live with very different
types of relationships to land, community, and food. Here are two TED talks by Anishinaabe
women who describe their cultural relationship to the food species that sustain
their people. Listen and let me know what you think. What would our
agricultural system look like if it were based on the ethical principles
described by LaDuke & Kimmerer rather than those proposed by Earl Butz?
What steps are you taking or could you take to strengthen the health of your
relationships to the beings (human and non-human) that provide your food?
Winona LaDuke, “Seeds of our Ancestors, Seeds of Life”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHNlel72eQc
Robin Kimmerer, “Reclaiming the Honorable Harvest”: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lz1vgfZ3etE
Also, I would like to learn from each of you when and how
you became aware that things are amiss within our agricultural systems. In your
comments, please also describe your first memory of learning about a problem
within our food & farming systems. How did you react?
