The Next Farmer in Chief

There has been a lot of chatter lately about the need to change food policy in the United States. For years the policies of the government have been designed to subsidize the production of certain kinds of crops (notably corn and soy) which has resulted in cheap calories (why is a burger often cheaper than a salad?) Besides the obvious ill-effects on the health care system, the other problem has been ecological:

Subsidized monocultures of grain also led directly to monocultures of animals: since factory farms could buy grain for less than it cost farmers to grow it, they could now fatten animals more cheaply than farmers could. So America’s meat and dairy animals migrated from farm to feedlot, driving down the price of animal protein to the point where an American can enjoy eating, on average, 190 pounds of meat a year — a half pound every day.

But if taking the animals off farms made a certain kind of economic sense, it made no ecological sense whatever: their waste, formerly regarded as a precious source of fertility on the farm, became a pollutant — factory farms are now one of America’s biggest sources of pollution. As Wendell Berry has tartly observed, to take animals off farms and put them on feedlots is to take an elegant solution — animals replenishing the fertility that crops deplete — and neatly divide it into two problems: a fertility problem on the farm and a pollution problem on the feedlot. The former problem is remedied with fossil-fuel fertilizer; the latter is remedied not at all. (source)

That's from an article by Michael Pollan in the NY Times, but I've been hearing these kinds of discussions elsewhere. We really need to change food policy in North America to encourage a return to local food, less reliance on oil-based fertilizers, and healthier eating. It's getting absurd, but if Pollan is right, the current economic crisis may bring an important correction.

Most intriguing of his ideas, to me, is the notion of turning part of the White House lawn into a model farm.

I don’t need to tell you that ripping out even a section of the White House lawn will be controversial: Americans love their lawns, and the South Lawn is one of the most beautiful in the country. But imagine all the energy, water and petrochemicals it takes to make it that way. (Even for the purposes of this memo, the White House would not disclose its lawn-care regimen.) Yet as deeply as Americans feel about their lawns, the agrarian ideal runs deeper still, and making this particular plot of American land productive, especially if the First Family gets out there and pulls weeds now and again, will provide an image even more stirring than that of a pretty lawn: the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community. The fact that surplus produce from the South Lawn Victory Garden (and there will be literally tons of it) will be offered to regional food banks will make its own eloquent statement.

He points out that something similar was done by Eleanor Roosevelt to promote the Victory Garden movement in World War II. It would, indeed, be a powerful message about the priority that food should take in our lives.

-t