mr-damon/agriculture

There's always been a White House Chef... Now is the time for a White House Farmer... Nominations OPEN!

Joe and Chris Miller's fields were picked so clean Saturday that a second day of gleaning -- the ancient practice of picking up leftover food in farm fields -- was canceled Sunday.

"Overwhelmed is putting it mildly," Chris Miller said. "People obviously need food."

She said she expected 5,000 to 10,000 people would show up Saturday to collect free potatoes, carrots and leeks. Instead, an estimated 11,000 vehicles snaked around cornfields and backed up more than two miles. About 30 acres of the 600-acre farm 37 miles north of Denver became a parking lot.

Links to organic seed vendors

Fertilizer companies commonly add melamine to their products because it helps control the rate at which nitrogen seeps into soil, thereby allowing the farmer to get more nutrient bang for the fertilizer buck. But the government doesn't regulate how much melamine is applied to the soil. This melamine accumulates as salt crystals in the ground, tainting the soil through which American food sucks up American nutrients.

A related area of agricultural concern is animal feed. Chinese eggs seized last month in Hong Kong, for instance, contained elevated levels of melamine because of the melamine-laden wheat gluten used in the feed for the chickens that produced the eggs.

To think American consumers are immune to this unscrupulous behavior is to ignore the Byzantine reality of the global gluten trade. Tracking the flow of wheat gluten around the world, much less evaluating its quality, is like trying to contain a drop of dye in a churning whirlpool.

More ominous, the United States imports most of its wheat gluten. Last year, for instance, the F.D.A. reported that millions of Americans had eaten chicken fattened on feed with melamine-tainted gluten imported from China. Around the same time, Tyson Foods slaughtered and processed hogs that had eaten melamine-contaminated feed. The government decided not to recall the meat.

Only a week earlier, however, the F.D.A. had announced that thousands of cats and dogs had died from melamine-laden pet food. This high-profile pet scandal did not prove to be a spur to reform so much as a red herring. Our attention was diverted to Fido and away from the animals we happen to kill and eat rather than spoil.

Frightening as this all sounds, the concerned consumer is not completely helpless. We can seek out organic foods, which are grown with fertilizer without melamine -- unless that fertilizer was composted with manure from animals fed melamine-laden feed (always possible, as the Tyson example suggests).

We could further protect ourselves by choosing meat from grass-fed or truly free-range animals, assuming the grass was not fertilized with a conventional product (something that's also very hard to know).

But as all the caveats above indicate, these precautions will only go so far. Melamine, after all, points to the much larger relationship between industrial waste and American food production. Regulations might be lax when it comes to animal feed and fertilizer in China, but take a closer look at similar regulations in the United States and it becomes clear that they're vague enough to allow industries to "recycle" much of their waste into fertilizer and other products that form the basis of our domestic food supply.

Today most government farm and food programs are designed to prop up the old system of maximizing production from a handful of subsidized commodity crops grown in monocultures. Even food-assistance programs like WIC and school lunch focus on maximizing quantity rather than quality, typically specifying a minimum number of calories (rather than maximums) and seldom paying more than lip service to nutritional quality. This focus on quantity may have made sense in a time of food scarcity, but today it gives us a school-lunch program that feeds chicken nuggets and Tater Tots to overweight and diabetic children.

Right now, the government actively discourages the farmers it subsidizes from growing healthful, fresh food: farmers receiving crop subsidies are prohibited from growing "specialty crops" -- farm-bill speak for fruits and vegetables. (This rule was the price exacted by California and Florida produce growers in exchange for going along with subsidies for commodity crops.) Commodity farmers should instead be encouraged to grow as many different crops -- including animals -- as possible. Why? Because the greater the diversity of crops on a farm, the less the need for both fertilizers and pesticides.

The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved, not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in the United States but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in places like Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world's best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer. Or, for that matter, many pesticides: the weeds that afflict pasture can't survive the years of tillage, and the weeds of row crops don't survive the years of grazing, making herbicides all but unnecessary. There is no reason -- save current policy and custom -- that American farmers couldn't grow both high-quality grain and grass-fed beef under such a regime through much of the Midwest.

A farmer and a miller surveying fields of russet wheat would not have been an unusual sight here on a late-summer day 200 years ago. Gristmills once dotted the banks of streams and rivers throughout New York, mapping out settlement just as subway stations today chart New York City's migratory patterns.

Today, nearly all of the nation's wheat is grown on vast fields and milled in factories in the Midwest. Over the past few years, though, farmers and millers like Mr. Earnhart and Mr. Lewis have begun restoring wheat fields and reviving flour mills around the country.

In New Mexico, a cooperative of Native American and Latino farmers produce a boutique local flour. In Western Massachusetts, a baking couple has persuaded their customers to plant front-lawn wheat patches. In Vermont, a farmer whose homegrown wheat flour was a curiosity when he began growing it in the 1970s now can't keep up with demand. And in Pennsylvania, a venerable pastry flour brand from the 1800s has been resurrected, made with local organic wheat.

Similar movements have started around the globe, including in Japan, where some udon noodle makers are using local wheat instead of the Australian wheat they had relied upon, and in Israel, where a group of Jewish and Arab farmers are trying to grow native varieties of wheat to supplant the American wheat that dominates the market there.

The winner of the Stockholm Water Prize criticized the growing use of biofuels Monday and urged people to eat less meat to help cut the amount of water used in food production.

British professor John Anthony Allan said the effect of the growing use of biofuels "is too frightening to even begin to realize."

Allan, 71, of King's College, London, was awarded the 2008 water prize for his concept of "virtual water," which measures the amount of water used in industrial and food production.

He said meat consumption was bad for the environment.

"Non-vegetarians consume five cubic meters (176 cubic feet) of water per day; your bath is a tiny puddle compared to that. It is the water for food that is the big problem," Allan told The Associated Press. "Be rational and eat less meat."

This eye-opening documentary was produced for French television by Marie-Monique Robin. It hasn't been shown to the American public yet (will it ever?) - which is too bad, because this documentary will blow your mind. Try to watch it as soon as possible (now is a good time!), as no one knows how long the video will be online before it's pulled again. The Hemowai Bros. are fighting corporate America and risking lawsuit in order to try to get everyone this information.

If you drag your feet and the video (below) is no longer available, please consider ordering the DVD from the filmmaker and hold screenings for your friends. Spread the word - M0ns@nt0 must be stopped, and can be stopped, but it will take the efforts of lots of ordinary citizens to do it. The future of the planet is in your hands!