Why Urban Farms Will Save the Economy and Lives

No longer are we preaching to the choir!  The word is out and people are piling on the bandwagon:  urban agriculture is in and will empower us to move forward into a new paradigm where food is grown within a few miles and not a few thousand miles of where it is consumed. 

We are on the tipping point and our world is changing.  This article sums up nicely what we've been saying for years now! We are grateful to see this kind of encouraging news in print!  

david

Lies I've Told My Students

Do You Know What Variety These Big Yellow Tomatoes Are?

You cannot grow large, beefsteak-style tomatoes close to the ocean - the cool off-shore flow and lack of heat will not allow the fruit to set.  So, if you try to grow beefsteak tomatoes near the ocean (Sunset Zone 24) you are wasting your time! This is what I read, this is what my experience has proven over and over again. And this is what I have taught my students for about 7 years.

BUT... 

These tomatoes were picked yesterday from The Learning Garden in a year that was not one of our warmest!  Beautiful and delicious tomatoes.  These were grown by the Venice High School students in their gardens without tags.  If I had known those vines were supposed to produce this size of tomatoes, I would have yanked the vines back in June.  But I didn't know and look at this.  Now, if I only knew what variety they were, I'd be saving seeds from them.

david

Join David For Growing Food Class This Saturday

This Saturday, 06 August 2011, The Learning Garden presents: Growing Food In Southern California with David King. This 9 to 12 workshop centers on what to do in the coming months as Southern California heads into our 'other Spring' and one of our best, and least understood, growing seasons! You'll learn what to plant and how to plant it, what varieties go best here and why and all about getting the best garlic you will ever have! Dress to get into the garden and get dirty, The Learning Garden can be cool even in August, so dress in layers. Coffee and garden-made mint tea will be served please bring your own cup! Email greenteach@gmail.com or call 310.722.3656 for more information. No need to RSVP – class goes on no matter what!  $25 at the gate...

david 

Bees: An Essential Part of Our Food System

Ms Bee, Lacking a Horse, Pollinates a Borage Plant

A recent LA Times article detailed the death of a horse and the owner being severely stung by bees has drawn enough attention to warrant a reply.

The reason such a story becomes news is that it is uncommon. For some reason, unclear in the story, the bees attacked this man and his horse. It was doubtful that the attack was unprovoked and, because the man has a reason to not disclose anything he might have done to provoke the attack, we may never know the truth. But, from my personal experience of working with hives of bees and the many years of experience with bees by the people I associate with and our collective memory, we, to a person, allow that this is not consistent with the way we know bees to behave without some serious provocation. Because most Americans simply regard bees as something to be feared and really know very little about them, even preposterous stories about their behavior invoke no intelligent scrutiny.

But, OK. So the bees got pissed off – we don't know why – and they stung the horse to death and sent the owner off to the emergency room. This is only 'news' because it is rare. A horse killed on the freeway would be rare too, but a man sent to the ER because of injuries sustained on the freeway wouldn't be such a big deal – it wouldn't eve make a back page entry in the LA Times on a slow news day.

Bees are wild critters and they will attack anyone deemed to be threatening their hive. That's what they do. Our reaction to bees is, sadly, overwhelmingly based in fear born of ignorance. A healthy respect for all forms of life is imperative when dealing with the various forms of life we encounter – the more a person knows about bees, bears, wolves, or any form of wildlife, the better a person can deal with it and usually the more appreciation they will have for whatever species we have in mind.

My interactions with bees have been almost always positive. I have had two run-ins where I screwed up (both times) and got stung. I do not blame the bees. Each bee that stung me lost her life (all honey bees with stingers are female and the action of stinging disembowels her) and she lost her life protecting her hive with determination and skill. My work with bees has taught me so much about myself and has shown me some of my faults. I have come to admire these wonderful, essential creatures. The bees and the hive are like two living entities – as much as the cells in my body and two different entities – and the cell cannot live without the rest of the body, but the body needs a minimum number of cells to survive. So it is with the hive.

Most, if not all, hype that pumps up the fear about bees and other wild creatures is conscious fear mongering by those who profit from our fears. I have heard interviews with pest control companies where the president of one company vehemently admonished the radio personality to “very afraid of Africanized honey bees.” The purpose of which was nothing more than to drive listeners to the telephone to call his company every time any bee showed up at their property. After all, who can tell if it's an African bee or a European bee – I mean, I haven't been able to check passports on them. The intention was to frighten people to get ALL bees sprayed.

Never mind that the honey bee is in crises and lack of honey bees will severely impact our food supply. Honey bees have been dying at an alarming rate that has already impacted some crops and threatens shortages of many more. One of every third bite we eat comes to us through the pollinating efforts of honey bees. Mind you, there are other pollinators, and it is increasingly evident we will have to employ them in greater numbers while the honey bee populations plummet, but the honey bee has been the revered pollinator of choice for over a century because we have learned how to work with them and they have proven to be reliable partners even when we have abused them.

It appears to me that the survival of the honey bee is dependent on finding refuge in our cities. Our government has no backbone to contest the chemical and GMO farming lobby, so the honey bee is almost certainly doomed in our farmlands. In the city, where GMOs are not raised and pesticide application is confined mostly to lawns (is that sick or what?), honey bees stand a chance to become viable again. Actions taken by brazen law-breakers like Backwards Beekeepers are probably the greatest hope to keep viable populations of honey bees alive.

Got bees? Do not kill them! Contact a person who will keep them and insure those bees survive to breed more bees. Our way of life is dependent on the honey bee and her pollination of crops from apples to zucchini. Let's not take almonds, peaches, apricots, plums and many other fruits and vegetables away from the children of the future by compromising the honey bee's numbers to not be of service to mankind. Let's legalize beekeeping in all our cities and let's learn about the bees and be of service to them as well.

Monsanto News Round Up...

A non-GMO tomato destined to be a Greek salad in a minute or two.

On Facebook, via the Community Alliance with Family Farmers (CAFF),  there is the news of the Good Food Awards, something we believe is important, because good, edible food is probably one of the most important allies we have in our fight to preserve old varieties of seeds and against Monsanto and agri-biz.  Mass produced stuff will never come close to clean, local food in winning the stomachs and taste buds of people.  The more people who are exposed to wholesome food, the more folks who are willing to stand with us and pay a little more for the food that is healthier and less destructive to the planet.  

The ground swell against genetically modified organisms (GMO's) seems to be growing world wide, even as the United States government rolls over and plays dead doing anything about GMO regulation. Farmers in Hungary are caught in the middle with their crops being plowed under because they planted GMO corn. We hope something will mitigate the destruction of their crops and income, but we applaud Hungary for taking a stand against the evils of GMO plants that are wind pollinated.  

The United States Department of Agriculture head,Tom Vilsak, a former employee of Monsanto, on the other hand has all but abdicated any consumer or environmental protection according to what we read today. This is especially hard to take in an administration that many of us had assumed would be less GMO friendly and more environmentally conscious.  The approval of GMO alfalfa almost certainly means that non-GMO cattle are going to become much more difficult to grow, putting GMO's in our meats and milk products, because the GMO pollen will infect adjacent fields, the same way GMO corn spreads its pollen far and wide. 

 

Monsanto has lied repeatedly about pollen spreading out of the fields planted with GMO corn - their estimates as to how far corn pollen can spread have been mere wishes in the heads of accountants, there was no corroborating evidence to back it up and current studies have proven that pollen contamination is a reality.  A reality that we can't turn back.  We will all eat GMO corn from the grocery stores for decades to come even if GMO corn is permanently pulled from the farmers fields today.  If you buy prepared foods from any supermarket, including the likes of Whole Foods, you will find it is created using GMO corn and soybeans.  If you read 'corn' or 'soy' on the package, simply know it is GMO - we don't get the luxury of choosing because marking 'GMO' or 'non-GMO' on a package isn't legal and if it is from a chain store, there is not enough non-GMO corn and soy being produced to be used consistently across their distribution.

A paper in the AgBio Forum postulates:  "Another aspect of the GM debate concerns implications of GM pollen drift. Pollen drift takes place when the pollen (and, subsequently, genes) of one plant is transported, via wind, water, sun, or pollinators such as honey bees, to another plant (Dafni, Kevan, & Husband, 2005). Although pollen drift often occurs in nature and plants have been swapping genes for centuries, it has become a matter of concern in the GM/non-GM crop debate because this type of genetic transfer can lead to "introduction into ecosystems of genes that confer novel fitness-related traits…[and] also allows novel genes to be introduced into many diverse types of crops, each with its own specific potential to outcross" (Snow, 2002, p. 542). Results from this could range from minor to catastrophic and could potentially have major impacts on (a) agriculture, such as the elimination of non-GM seeds from the seed stock; (b) health, if mingling occurs unwitting ingestion of allergens could transpire, and; (c) the economy, since there may be fiscal or legal liabilities associated with selling incorrectly labeled products."

Of course, we believe that this GMO experiment will fall of its own weight - the problem is, how much of a disaster will that be when it does happen?  

 

There are several reasons to believe that it will be a disaster, not the least is the results of the Green Revolution which was always seen as some massive success; a film on the continuing legacy of that disaster is available here.  The problem is how measure success - and when.  If one looks into the data for the years when the Green Revolution was initiated, the success is so overwhelming that we should be able to rejoice that hunger was solved for all time - of course, we know that isn't the case.  The use of chemical fertilizers and pesticides was so overwhelming that farmers laden with new hybrids could not afford these inputs and the loss of diverse plantings of their own local foodcrops (because FAO was only measuring output in commercial crops, crops that could be commodities on the world market, not crops that could actually be eaten by the farmer or traded in the local market) destroyed the local agriculture.  The result is that after a five year window, production is not only nothing near the levels we were led to believe, but the lives of the farmers are compromised.  We took independent farmers and made them slaves to the same system that is bankrupting our farmers (and has for centuries), giving rise to the lie that you have to 'get big or get out.'  The truth is a small farm (or garden) is much more productive per acre than a big farm! (Sourced from Robert Rodale's "Save Three Lives" which should be required reading for anyone interested in solving world hunger.)

Monsanto has proven, secondly, that they are one of the world's biggest and most unfair bullies.  The cases against many farmers are a matter of record at this point and are far too numerous to discount.  (I heard some Monsanto apologist deride Percy Schmeiser as being a 'scumbag,' and you can say that about an individual farmers, but after a point, how many farmers are scumbags and who's pointing at whom?  For the record, I heard Mr. Schmeiser speak once and found him humble and sincere - if he is as bad as Monsanto wishes he were, he deserves an Emmy or something.)  There are too many farmers sued or hushed up to take this lightly; Monsanto seems to follow the Church of Scientology's lead on pro-active suing of nay-sayers.  Now the Securities Exchange Commission has begun an investigation, of course an investigation proves nothing until the verdict is made.  Still, if their past is any indication, Monsanto's own ruthlessness may come home to roost.

Thirdly, the health implications to humans of GMO technology has not been investigated let alone proven one way or another. There are NO long term studies on any aspect of GMO pollution in our bodies or our world.  One has to suspect a supposed 'wonderful new technology' that has yet to be vetted in any way long term.  If our fears are unfounded, then allow long term testing to go forward FIRST and prove us wrong! 

And finally, GMOs are just plain wrong.  Even if you can find ways to wiggle out of the environmental damage they will surely create (see the BioAg paper above), they will fail because they can't do what they claim they can do. Already reports are in about failed harvests, harvests that fail to attain anything close to parity with existing crops  and now the new super weeds have arrived on the scene - weeds that are immune to Monsanto's RoundUp and that spells doom and gloom for this current formulation.  Monsanto's scientists are already working on RoundUp Two, or RoundUp 2012 or whatever they will call it, but it doesn't take an agronomist to see the futility of this conundrum; better herbicides equal better weeds and that's all, with ever increasing pollution and ever increasing questionable health out-comes for the planet and those eating the products of these seeds.  

It's apparent our government will not do anything constructive to at least gain us some sort of testing of this technology before foisting it on us.  The things we CAN do are limited, and imperfect at best, but we need to try to eat as little of this stuff as possible.  That means limiting our eating out to a very small select eateries that buy from small farmers that avoid GMO seeds and eating mostly from our own gardens and the gardens of our friends.  That, of course, means, we have to grow gardens - larger gardens and learn to garden for most of our own calories.  OK, so we can't do that today?  Move in that direction and keep moving in that direction.  Learn how to save seeds so we preserve the heritage seeds of the past that are free of GMO technology and will reproduce in your garden.  Gardening this way is the way we preserve a future and is the surest way to strike back - it's a duty to the generations behind us and it's revolutionary.  

We all need to eat.  I think I'm making myself a Greek salad - GMO free!

david

Time To Kiss My Amazon Goodbye...

Dear Amazon,

I think you goofed badly. I don't know of any business model that suggests you terminate your very large sales force that worked hard for you for practically nothing and give them over to your competitors to work against you. And it's a sad thing because many of us were not wanting to switch, we wanted to keep working for you for next to nothing.

But you forced our hands.

The loser in the tax standoff with my state of California is you, Amazon. Because I'm going to move EVERYTHING to Barnes and Noble - not just my referrals, but my wish list and my gift list and all of my business because having one bookstore simplifies my busy life and I don't need anything more complicated. Besides, Amazon, I think it's more than fair that you collect the tax and forward it to my state which is in some financial difficulty - you might have heard about this in the news.  I personally believe we should pay our taxes and I believe the country we call the 'best in the world' must be paid for - it is as good as it is because someone paid taxes as much as someone fought in a war.  It is more patriotic to pay taxes than it is to wave the flag or suck down beers while watching fireworks.  For this and many other reasons, Amazon, you are on the wrong side of history and the shady side of 'right.'

And sooner or later, Amazon, you WILL be collecting sales tax for each state and it won't be nearly as onerous as you claim today, but when that happens, I'll be happy with the Barnes and Nobel interface and I'll not want to come back to you and relearn how to do things your way.

I'm sure I'm not alone. I think you have done one of the most idiotic things a business can do; give thousands of devoted customers to your competitors - customers that have proven they read and they read a lot, customers that are willing to suggest others to go to your site and buy books (or whatever) from you. And, you collect sales tax on purchases for some of the 'stores' inside your corporate umbrella - so you know how to do it and it's not the big smelly dead fish you want us to believe it is.

So, Amazon, I don't get it. You've pissed me off enough to set up my account with Barnes and Nobel - in the coming days, I'll remove my wish lists and all the other bonds I've had with you since 1998. And it'll be goodbye. No more boxes in my mail from you. It's a very sad day for me.

But I'm sure me and my new bookstore will soon understand each other and in a few months, I'll be well on my way to building a twenty year relationship with them and not you.

You see how stupid you were?

david

Garden Rant agrees with me, read Amy Stewart's response to a similar letter.

The Forsaken Garden: The Food Humanity Forgot, Part 3

The diversity of F1 Two Mary Corn

Years ago, when I first started teaching plant propagation for UCLA Extension, I bought a book called, Breed Your Own Vegetables by Carol Deppe. It proved a bit daunting and I put it down. I didn't care for the lessons in Mendelian genetics. I had taught Mendelian genetics before in a general botany class and, though I understood it, it wasn't my cup of tea and so I put Deppe's book down and it collected dust on my shelf.

Last year, with the seed library idea singing it's siren song in my ear, I pulled the book off the shelf again because of it's full title, Breed Your Own Vegetable Varieties: The Gardener's & Farmer's Guide to Plant Breeding & Seed Saving (this is probably about the tenth time I've written about this book in one of my blogs, you get the idea that my copy is well worn!) I pulled the book off the shelf and was immediately impressed with Deppe's writing, filled with warm and engaging descriptions of the seeds and stories she told that illustrated her points. After getting through the seed saving half of the book, I began to stick a toe filled with trepidation in the breeding half.

As I studied seed saving, it was obvious to me that a seed saver is already a defacto plant breeder: It may not be an overtly dedicated breeding program, but simply by saving the seed from plant A (it was taller and had more fruit) instead of plant B, one has bred in favor of the genetic make up of plant A vs. plant B. So all seed savers are plant breeders, even if only 'passive' plant breeders.

After my week long immersion in seed school, I am convinced more than ever that breeding plants for organic food production has got to be the next frontier for me and I hope I can convince a lot more folks to join me. I mean the active kind of plant breeding – the kind that starts at the beginning of the growing season with intention to create a new variety and goes through season after season to achieve the goal of a new variety.

Two Mary Corn

A couple of years ago, we had two Mary's volunteering at The Learning Garden. They met there and became roommates for a time – both were good solid gardeners. One year, they started seeds of corn and after the corn had germinated, found they needed to move and had no place to plant it. They gave about forty growing corn plants to me. I grew them out and the diversity was astounding (first picture, above). I saved that seed, but I was intimidated about breeding corn and never took it forward. Now, I know what to do and I am eager to pull that seed out again and begin to breed it out to be true. That is project number one. It is only to breed out some of the more beautiful corn seeds for a gorgeous corn. The picture of one of the ears can be seen as a heading (L A Garden Blog) or back drop (Record of The Seed Library of Los Angeles) on two blogs I help author. The working name for this corn is Two Mary Corn. Still looking for a good name, but that'll do for my notes.

'Purple Maize''

The one that has totally captured my imagination has a working name of Purple Maize. Sorry, I can't help it. If I am successful, don't worry, it will not be released as 'Purple Maize.' I'll find another name for it before then. This is a corn from the collection of Native Seed/SEARCH, unfortunately an unmarked ear, that is a purple colored dent corn. Dent corn is a combination between a flour corn and a flint corn. I just learned the difference this last week at Seed School. Flour corns are softer and are preferred as the source for flour. Flint corns are harder and can be used like flour corns but they are harder to grind and are therefore not the first choice. However, that hardness insures that they will keep better so most folks dealing with subsistence agriculture were inclined to grow both.

The two come together in a 'dent' corn. A dent corn has the interior of a flour corn with the exterior of a flint. The two dry differently with the flour giving up more moisture than the flint causing the kernel to have a 'dent,' a rather pr0nounced dimple, at the top of the kernel. They have a reputation for being highly productive corns – in fact, from the 1890's to the 1920's, THE corn American farmers grew was Reid's Dent, a charming story I'll write down one day soon. Reid's Dent was superseded by the beginning of the hybrid era which continues through today. This corn, collected from the Native American gardens of America's south west is most assuredly a drought tolerant corn and only a chance cross between a flour and flint corn, in other words, not a stable cross and the resulting seeds are as likely to be a flour or flint as well as a dent.

There is no listing for a purple dent corn in the Native Seed/SEARCH database, but here was this one ear. Purple can be equated with higher levels of anthocyanins. If one could breed a corn that was high in anthocyanins, stored well and produced abundantly, one might have a hit on his hands. Or, in the words of the Tucson gardening community, spoken with a tongue firmly in cheek, “Rich, Rich, Rich! It's going to make us Rich, Rich, Rich!” Of course, nothing in plant breeding does these days and I would be happy enough to breed a useful plant that helps us actually assuage hunger rather than sell more herbicides.

Corn breeding is harder than tomato or pepper breeding, because corn cannot be inbred too much before one gets a very negative feedback from the corn in weak and unproductive plants. I am starting with only a few seeds, so the first year is to grow out enough seeds to begin to experiment – of course, I will only select to plant corn seed that continues to exhibit the purple dent characteristics. It is important to note that I will need 200 or more plants in the second year in order to not experience the negative effects of inbreeding. The good news is that the plants can be located in different gardens. So, I'll be looking around for places I can plant something like forty plants in to achieve my 200 plant minimum.

But we need more plants being bred – we need plants that can survive drought, hotter temperatures (many pollens die at higher temperatures, we need to find look for pollen with more tolerance to heat), plants that remain upright despite harsher storms. All these are likely scenarios in the coming decades because of global climate change. These are plants that will produce the food the world will need in the coming years.

This is the work that will prevent hunger and starvation – not the work of Big Ag and their dependence on oil and patents. If I get a new variety of corn, yes, I WILL patent it. But I'll patent it so it cannot be patented by someone else. I'll give the patent to the Seed Library of Los Angeles or some other philanthropic conscious group.

What would you breed if you had the chance? You probably can do it! And remember, if you fall short, you can still eat the results! I hope you are excited too!

david