Our problems

While I continue to try to catch one last source for my interview, I'll post a few more things this week. One is from a book I finished a while back and have had sitting by my computer since then for the very purpose of sharing here.

It's called The Blueberry Years: A Memoir of Farm and Family and it's by Jim Minick, a local to our part of the world. I have a copy if anyone would like to borrow it; I enjoyed reading it and learning from it.

This "blue interlude" from his book is one I doggeared to exerpt as another layer of reasons "why" a community garden:

Our problems

Whether we farm blueberries or beans, deal with late freezes or drought, our country's problems with agriculture are amazing in their complexity and number. And because we all eat and thus are members of this culture, we all are also implicated in these many problems and necessary in their solutions.

Take our assault on the very elements that sustain us. Iowa, for example, is one of the flattest and, at one time, topsoil-riches places in the world. Now, though, it has become one of our most eroded and eroding states, all because of how we farm. Plus, all the tons of dirt that float down our rivers carry petroleum-based fertilizers and pesticides, which in turn create river-delta dead zones visible from the moon, yet too big to imagine.

So we mine the dirt, failing to replenish it with sound farming practices. Then we pollute the water and mine it as well. Irrigating desert lands to produce soybeans only will last as long as the freshwater in the ground and the petro to pump it. We're quickly running through both.

Other problems, of the many we face, include a loss of diversity in natural habitats and crop seed genetics, a loss of land to development (Virginia lost twelve acres an hour between 2002 and 2007); a loss of experienced farmers as the old retire and the young don't take their places; a loss of rightly scaled farms, replaced by factory 'farms' with their pigs, cattle, and chickens no longer creating fertilizer for fields, but now industrial 'waste,' something once unknown on a farm; and a loss of food security as fewer and fewer farms grow more and more of our food. The 2007 USDA Census, for example, states that though the total number of all farms increased since 2002, only 125,000 farms grew 75 percent of our food. And that number was down 21,000 from 2002.

On the other end of this agriculture table are all of our health problems related to how we eat: cancer, diabetes, and especially obesity. We live in a country where it is now normal to be sickly fat, and even Reader's Digest has noted this. There, Andy Simmons writes, 'Americans are a collective 7,223,637,522 pounds overweight (give or take a million).'

Though few see the connection, our treatment of the soil is not separate from our treatment of our own bodies. They are the same.

Organic agriculture and local food movements are great alternatives, but still they only account for a miniscule amount of all our food.

What to do? Value health over wealth. Push for legislative change. Eat less or even fast once a week. Help feed your neighbor. Grow your own.