This pond in Texas dried out by late June.Photo: agrilifetoday

Since April, the mainstream media has offered occasional sound bites about how the drought in Texas was affecting food production. Ironically, these early alerts occurred even as that state’s presidential hopeful, Rick Perry, insisted that climate change was no more than a hypothesis. But most reporters failed to notice that the Rio Grande and its tributaries had gone dry from southern New Mexico, through west Texas, clear down to the Sierra Madre. By early fall, so many of Perry’s home state farmers and ranchers were in peril that their governor requested federal aid for disaster relief, as if drought and climate change were always two separate issues, and federal relief were not a federal intervention in state affairs.  

But what mainstream media has failed to cover is the drought’s more pervasive, international effects. For starters, many subsistence farmers in northern Mexico have had barely enough maize left to feed their families this year, let alone enough surplus corn to sell. While this single but pervasive drought cannot be firmly linked to longer-term global climate change, it may nevertheless be a harbinger of what is to come in terms of the disruption of food security. Summer 2011.To be sure, there are many factors that affect the prices of staple foods, including irresponsible speculation in the agricultural commodities markets, and the shunting of 38 percent of the American corn crop into the subsidized production of ethanol. But when I interviewed farmers and livestock producers in New Mexico and Texas near the Mexico border recently, it was clear that nearly a year of unquenchable drought was wreaking havoc on both the economic and ecological stability of the borderlands food system.

After 40 years of living in the borderlands, I was stunned to see, for the first time ever, a completely dry riverbed where the Rio Grande usually flows. Chile, pecan, and alfalfa growers who normally receive five to seven deliveries of diverted river water for irrigation purposes received just one this summer. Near Las Cruces and El Paso, so many farmers had to rely on pumping groundwater to save their crops that groundwater levels dropped to half their normal depth after just one year of additional extraction. Both the states of Texas and New Mexico received an unprecedented number of requests for permits to drill more wells and pump from already-vulnerable aquifers. And just having to pump water from wells rather than receive gravity-fed deliveries cost vegetable and hay farmers an average of 30 percent more.

When pasture is too dry to provide nourishment, ranchers resort to alternative feed, like these protein cubes — an expensive option.Photo: agrilifetodaySmall and midsize ranchers and sheepherders may have lost even more; as their rangelands dried out, they could simply not sustain their herds and flocks. One well-known New Mexican sheepherder had to sell off his entire flock and went out of business. Texas and Oklahoma ranchers prematurely sold off more than 600,000 head of cattle because they could not maintain them — neither on the range nor by feeding them supplemental hay. And, to top it off, alfalfa hay prices have risen from $100 to $400 a ton since last October, placing most of the quality hay out of reach for all but the wealthiest dairymen and stockmen. 

As one rancher explained to me, “You can’t really save the value of your herd during a drought by purchasing emergency feed … it will never pencil out for you to make a profit.”

Ironically, if the drought had not occurred this year, ranchers on both sides of the border could have sold beef at higher prices than they have for decades, since there is less meat being produced in North America than there has been at any time since World War II. This shortage will keep beef prices high for at least the next three to five years. But on the Mexican side of the border, the opportunity to benefit from this bubble has already been lost. Tens of thousands of cattle have died of hunger since March, because there is no supplemental feed to be had.

With a modicum of black humor, Mexican-American alfalfa growers have put handmade signs up on their gates that simply say “No hay” (meaning “There is none” in Spanish).

The effects of just one year’s worth of aberrant weather in the U.S./Mexico borderlands — both severe freezes and prolonged drought — may again remind us how vulnerable our own food security is.

Since 70 percent of the fresh vegetables eaten in the U.S. during the winter months comes from northern Mexico, and our beef and corn markets are highly dependent on one another, American consumers will surely face higher food prices over the next year.

And while many consumers don’t feel like they can afford to pay more for food, perhaps it’s up to those who have that capacity to pledge to farmers and ranchers that they will pay for the true costs of producing our food. It is, of course, farmers and ranchers who bear most of the brunt of the vagaries in our food system. Helping urban residents gain affordable access to healthy food may be only one part of the food justice picture; rural food producers will increasingly need to spread the risks they currently shoulder across the entire food supply chain. From now on, land health and human health at both ends of the chain need to be more strongly linked. That may ultimately be the only way we heal the urban/rural divide that has made so many of America’s food systems dysfunctional over the last half century.

A locally owned grocery in Pleasantville, Iowa. Photo: Ashton B Crew, wikimedia commons

Two years ago, when one of us (Gary) moved to the village of Patagonia, Ariz., he inadvertently chose to reside in what the USDA deems to be the edge of a food desert. Its maps show that Gary now lives more than 15 miles away from a full-service supermarket or chain grocery store that has 50 or more employees and grosses $2 million or more in food sales each year. Apparently, that’s bad. Gary and his low-income neighbors are now being told that if they were bright enough to reside within walking distance or five minutes driving distance of a Safeway, Alberston’s, Winn-Dixie, or Walmart, they would undoubtedly be more “food secure.”

Why? A USDA report [PDF] to Congress in 2009 suggested that the average food in such big-box grocery stores is priced 10 percent lower than its counterparts in independently owned corner stores, roadside stands, or farmers markets. What’s more, the USDA claimed that “full service” big-box stores offer more affordable access to food diversity than do other venues.

Those assertions may be the biggest bunch of road apples that the USDA has ever tried to force down the throats of low-income Americans. The fatal flaw of the Obama strategy to reduce hunger, food insecurity, and obesity in America is that it risks bringing more big-box stores both to poor urban neighborhoods and to rural communities. It categorically ignores the fact that independently owned groceries, corner markets in ethnic neighborhoods, farmers markets, CSAs, and roadside stands are the real sources of affordable food diversity in America. But in its 2009 report to Congress, the USDA conceded that “a complete assessment of these diverse food environments would be such an enormous task” that it decided not to survey independently owned food purveyors. Therefore, it decided to ignore their beneficial roles and focus on the grocery-store chains that now capture three-quarters of all current foods sales in the U.S.

Unfortunately, we will get what we measure. The $400 million that the Obama administration has set aside to create greater food access in these so-called food deserts will likely go to attracting full-service grocery franchises that heap upon our children megatons of empty calories like those in high-fructose corn syrup and corn oil — yes, the very products that emerge from Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s own great state of Iowa. But the profits made in those big-box stores will drain away from our neighborhoods and communities, bound for distant corporate headquarters, further impoverishing most food producers and consumers.

Instead, what we need is tangible support for rebuilding the rural and urban infrastructure that can enable more marketing of fresh, local foods by farmers, orchard keepers, and ranchers directly to neighboring consumers. The lack of a big-box store in our community may be an asset, not a disadvantage in keeping our children healthy and food secure. In Patagonia, we have a family-owned grocery, Red Mountain Foods, that uses its 900 square feet of indoor space and seasonal roadside displays to provide our 800 residents with a great diversity of nutritious whole foods, including both local and organic options.

Food stamp or “SNAP” purchases made by low-income residents currently account for more than 5 percent of Red Mountain’s $300,000 average annual food sales, and have allowed a doubling of local access to healthy foods in the last couple years. Red Mountain also provides $3,000 of healthy snacks annually to the Patagonia Schools, which have a high percentage of children from low-income families in its classes. In addition to Red Mountain Foods, Patagonians have access to two summer farmers markets within a 10-mile radius, a year-round community garden, and direct sales of grass-fed meat and apples from local ranches and orchards.

Ironically, the USDA’s Food Environment Atlas already offers a far more complete picture of food access on a county-by-county basis than does the new Food Desert Locator. Borderland communities like ours may still suffer from undeniable poverty, but if supported, not obstructed, their informal and local food economies may keep them from becoming true food “dead zones” where locally produced nutrients fail to reach those who need them the most. Nevertheless, we do indeed need help in rebuilding meat processing plants, grain mills, and community kitchens to make the best use of our locally produced beef, mesquite, fruits, and chiles. What we emphatically do not need is a Safeway or Walmart in our midst.

As a result of the chronic lack of USDA co-investment with rural communities in food security–enhancing local infrastructure, this country now has fewer farmers than it does Department of Agriculture employees. It is a sad sign of the times when a misguided bureaucracy has grown to a size larger than the constituency it was originally charged to help: the farmers and ranchers of America. If there are to be cuts to the USDA budget, let it be to the bureaucracy itself and not to the sustainable agriculture and economic development grants that go directly to farmers, ranchers, and small-scale growers in urban community gardens.

Finally, let’s junk the term “food deserts” forever, and change government policies that have inexorably fostered food dead zones in both rural and urban areas. It’s time we quit intensifying the inequities in the globalized food economy and start investing in a food future that creates true food justice by wedding relocalization with fair trade between regions.

Not-so-great wall: Palestinian farmers say the real problem is the way water flows beneath this brutalist structure.Photos: Gary Nabhan

The environmental-justice issues surrounding the extravagant use and abuse of shared aquifers were what most concerned farmers from Ramallah, Nablus, and Jericho with whom I spoke. For decades, Israel and Palestine have struggled over how to share the same aquifers for domestic water use and for irrigated agriculture. Israel currently pumps roughly 82 percent of all the water extracted from the shared western aquifer, but it used to do 95 percent of the pumping only a half century ago, a fact that allows its defenders to claim that Israel has indeed allowed Palestinians more access to water. But the western aquifer is largely recharged under the West Bank, where Israel no longer agrees to let Palestinian farmers drill more wells. In defiance of this unilateral ban, Palestinians have clandestinely drilled more than 3,500 wildcat wells in the West Bank, which, once found, end up being contested in the courts. Prohibiting more wells in the West Bank, one Palestinian farmer told me last week, would be the equivalent of committing “environmental genocide.”

There are many reasons why Palestinians in the West Bank consider access to uncontaminated groundwater to be the most critical environmental-justice issue facing them. For starters, the average Israeli consumes at least two and a half times the water used by the average Palestinian in the West Bank. But averages do not tell the entire story. In Hebron in the southern reaches of the West Bank, many Palestinian and Bedouin families must get by on as little as four gallons of water per day, far less than the 26 gallons recommended by the United Nations as the minimum daily water requirement to maintain health. By contrast, the average Israeli per capita consumption is somewhere between 79 and 106 gallons per day. While more affluent urban Palestinians have inched their average consumption up from 18 to 76 gallons per day over the last couple decades, they still pay more than three times as much for water as Israeli settlers occupying the West Bank.   

View of of Israeli settlements in the West Bank from the Palestinian side of the wall: In an arid region, water politics are paramount.But the most haunting water issue facing both Palestinians and Israelis may involve quality, not quantity — that is, access to water that has not been contaminated by endocrine-disrupting chemicals and antibiotic-resistant microbes. Despite recent claims by Israel’s Environmental Protection Minister Gilad Erdan that his nation is a world leader in saving water and recycling sewage, Israeli’s own environmentalists have dispatched repeated warnings of current and impending “gastrointestinal and reproductive health nightmares” because of the way Israel manages its nearly 66 million cubic yards of sewage. It places sewage — including all that it can obtain from Palestine — in reservoirs and uses 70 percent of it to irrigate its food crops. This sewage has irreparably contaminated the western aquifer, leading to high volumes of emergency room treatments in both countries for gastrointestinal tract disorders resulting from drug-resistant microbes. Worse yet, Israeli scientists Dan Zaslavsky and Alon Tal contend that the endocrine disrupters resulting from pesticide contamination of the aquifer may be a key factor contributing to the 40 percent reduction in human sperm counts in the region registered between 1994 and 2004. If these problems are not resolved by having the two countries work together to change the way they are managing sewage and farming, both Palestinian and Israeli families stand to suffer from a tragedy of biblical proportions, wall or no wall.

Currently, Palestine derives about a third of its gross national product from agriculture, while farm crops contribute less than 3 percent of Israel’s gross national product. The World Bank recently chastised Israel for not allowing Palestine to develop safer supplies of groundwater from deeper, larger, uncontaminated aquifers that Israel itself is already tapping. If Israel did so and let Palestinian farmers pass a portion of its harvests across the Red Line without the current harassment and bureaucratic interference that Palestinian farmers routinely face today, both countries might end up being more food secure.

At a Friends of the Earth training center near Jericho, Palestinians grow crops in biologically treated sewage — an important skill, given that many of their other water sources have dried up.It was their preoccupation with having their human rights to food and water met that I heard most clearly from Palestinians on the “other side” of the wall. It reminded me of recent reports from Mexican border towns just south of Arizona and California that 44 percent of school students are living with the risk of hunger, and 82 percent of the households can be considered to be food insecure. Clearly, if Americans wish to be of service in helping Palestinians and Israelis resolve their conflicts, perhaps we should better model the behaviors we wish to see along any border by ensuring that Mexican and Native American children at our own back door have sufficient quantities of nourishing food and clean water. And if you believe that the water and food injustice along our border is any less severe than that being suffered along the wall that cuts the Holy Lands in two, come and see us down in southern Arizona, which barely ranks above Mississippi in its dismal levels of poverty and childhood food insecurity. If that’s not shocking enough for you, we’ll direct you on a tour to barrios just south of the wall where hunger and poverty are ramped up to a ferocity I’m certain you won’t be able to forget …                       

Chile crops just couldn’t take the heat from the February cold snap.Photo: Demetri Mouratis

This binational region normally produces well over 90 percent of all winter vegetables eaten in the United States. The cold snap damaged fruits and leafy vegetables from the Imperial Valley of California and the Yuma area of Arizona, clear to Los Mochius and Culiacan in Sinaloa, Mexico.

Open fields in the region suffered damage on 85-90 percent of their peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, and melons, while those in hoop houses and greenhouses varied in levels of damage from 60 percent to 80 percent, depending on the local microclimate.

And in Florida — the other winter source of these vegetables for American eaters — abnormally cold weather had already disrupted crop production over the previous two months prior to the freeze. As Gregg Biada, vice president of Global Fresh Import and Export told The Packer, a leading reporter of agri-business trends, “Things got really crazy … prices went through the roof.”

As a result, restaurants, grocery stores, food services, and salsa processing plants are having difficulty getting enough products within price ranges they can afford. And of course, the people who now have less access to and buying power for these vegetables are the poorest of the poor stranded on both sides of the border.

These vegetables and fruits normally provide Americans with vitamin C and other nutrients they require to stay resistant to illness during the winter and spring months. But if the crop varieties we plant on tens of thousands of acres lack resistance to the stresses generated by shifting weather patterns, our own bodies’ defense mechanisms may be compromised as well.

There is a deeper lesson to be learned from the out-of-season, unexpected freezes, unseasonable hailstorms, and recording-breaking heat waves that have prevailed these last few years: Farmers are facing ever-greater climatic uncertainty, and the chronically food insecure families hidden in our rural communities are the ones most likely to bear the brunt of these catastrophes causing seasonal food scarcity.

The February cold snap may have been the worst since 1957 in the desert borderlands, but it has reminded me that farmers must always prepare as best as we can for uncertainty. And one way to buffer ourselves from such extreme weather events is to diversify the varieties of peppers and tomatoes we grow, and places in which we grown them.

As an orchard keeper and chile grower, I lost hundreds if not thousands of dollars of trees and other perennials that I had selected for “normal conditions” in my region. I am relieved that most of my trees made it through the freeze, and this week, have even begun to show signs of new buds. However, I will be replanting with hardier varieties of fruit and nut trees this year, and more importantly, placing my chile peppers in the partial shade of larger “nurse plants” which can buffer them from both extreme heat and cold.

Most importantly, I am increasing the water-holding capacity of my soils to foster deeper rooting and less stress on the entire suite of plants I keep. Like all gardeners and farmers, I cannot predict the weather, but I can take steps to make my food production — and the larger food system — as resilient as it can possibly be.

Climate change is scrambling where the most optimal conditions for each vegetable variety will occur in the future. We now need to diversify our food production strategies and broaden our crop diversity if we ourselves are to “weather” such stresses.

Photo: Stuck in Customs

“This has been the strangest year for apple growing within my memory,” orchardist Dan Bussey conceded. The apple crop ripened nearly two weeks ahead of time, and due to a late frost, several late-season windstorms and most orchards, the crop in southern Wisconsin was quite sparse, he said. “Most orchards I know ran low or even out of apples by early October,” he wrote to me a few weeks later.

Bussey and his family have been using the same cider press in their community of Edgerton, Wis., for decades; ever since he purchased it in 1989, he has pressed cider for as many as 16 neighboring apple orchards during the harvest season. This year he’s run the press weekly, but for only a small fraction of what he normally does.

No wonder. Wisconsin not only had the wettest summer on record, but growers in the state have already suffered 40 tornadoes in 2010 — twice the average annual number that have been experienced since detailed records began to be taken.

All hail Nature

When I returned home from Wisconsin to the grape-growing region of southeastern Arizona, I sat in on a meeting between wine makers and congressional legislative aides hoping to assist them with disaster relief. A mid-August hail storm wreaked a half-million dollars of damage to grape-laden vines in less than two hours, resulting in a projected loss of more than $2 million of income among 10 of the area’s vintners. My neighbor Kent Callaghan of Callaghan Vineyards in Elgin, Ariz., called the damage “unprecedented,” but nevertheless reminded me that the August tempest was not the first hail storm that had hit his vines.

“We’ve had nine hail storms in the last six years. But get this — in the previous 19 years, we didn’t have a single one … Go figure that one out for me!”

Not long after that last hail storm, I called up another neighbor of ours, Mark Douglas, who has tenaciously maintained a mixed orchard of dozens of varieties of fruits and nuts for more than a quarter-century. The hail had defoliated most of his fruit and nut trees. Then, in late August and September, many of them broke into bloom, months after their normal season of blossoms!

The weather anomalies that North American farmers and orchard keepers have experienced over this past growing season may be part of what journalist Thomas Friedman has dubbed global weirding, a far better catch-all term than global warming.

Major fruit-growing states such as Virginia and North Carolina did indeed experience their warmest summer on record, while many other states had subnormal temperatures. Wine regions on the West Coast experienced the latest, coolest, and most peculiar vintage in nearly 50 years, but vintners near the East Coast — from the Finger Lakes to Niagara — had one of their earliest and best vintages on record.

The hallmark of global weirding is increasing extremes in variability, which scientists evaluate with a metric called “the coefficient of variation.” Wine geographer Greg Jones has observed that week to week, variability in temperatures in wine regions globally has increased. “The coefficient of variation over vintages has gone up in nearly every wine region I have analyzed. There’s much greater variability around the mean than at any other time in the past data record.”

There’s another measure of climatic instability that’s far more telling for the North American continent as a whole. The Climate Extremes Index (CEI) integrates the occurrences of several types of extreme weather, such as dry spells, torrential rains, and unusually warm nighttime temperatures. The National Climatic Data Center recorded that for the summer of 2010, the CEI was roughly 1.5 times its historic average.

Normally this Louisiana boat would be trawling for shrimp, not oil(Photo courtesy Juanita Constible via Flickr)

With more than 20 million gallons of oil already let loose in the Gulf of Mexico, fishermen, gator hunters and even farmers are waking up to the fact that the diversity of foods they depend upon for their livelihoods is imperiled. This month, the Renewing America’s Food Traditions (RAFT) alliance will release a comprehensive checklist of over 240 place-based foods of the Gulf Coast that are now at risk — 138 of them directly affected by the oil spill.

In particular, of some 136 species or stocks of fish and shellfish from the Gulf that have been historically featured in regional seafood markets and restaurants, 125 are projected to have been directly impacted by oil contamination. Because Gulf Coast communities harvest well over half of all oysters eaten in the U.S., as well as generate much of the wild-caught shrimp, grouper, redfish, and crawfish produced in North America, the oil spill is likely to diminish the overall diversity in the American food system.

Unfortunately, this crisis is not just an environmental one, but a food justice one. The spill is economically devastating to some of the most marginalized ethnic communities in the United States, including Cajun, Houma Indian, “Creole” Black, Vietnamese, Cambodian, and Latino communities in and near the Mississippi delta. And while most U.S. agencies and media have sidestepped this issue, Cuban and Mexican fishermen are just likely as Gulf Coast residents to be have their livelihoods disrupted by the oil spill.

“Many fishermen worry they may lose their livelihoods, as well as the livelihoods they intended to pass on to their progeny. Untold numbers of plants and animals — not just single lives, but possibly entire species — are now in danger and dying,” says Sara Roahen, author of Gumbo Tales. “And yet, an urban New Orleanian like me can’t help but also worry for the boiled crabs, speckled trout amandine, char-grilled oysters and, especially, seafood gumbo. I fear for the recipes, for the dishes and for the unchecked joy that hovers over every inch of the Gulf Coast as its citizens prepare and eat them.”

While most observers understand that fish, shrimp, oysters, and clams are being threatened by the Deepwater Horizon disaster, RAFT is warning of longer-term impacts that affect not only the seafood industry, but farmers, market gardeners, gator hunters, crawfish harvesters, and sassafras foragers as well. Some of the rural parishes of the Gulf Coast have already lost five out of ten residents in their communities due to out-migration following Hurricanes Katrina and Rita; if the current closures of fisheries trigger further out-migration, then rare heirloom seeds, fruits, and tubers will be abandoned in gardens, orchards, and storage sheds without anyone to grow or eat them.

The mirliton is a rare Louisiana heirloom squash variety.(Photo courtesy of Tim in sanhazzay via Flickr)Case in point: the traditional Louisiana mirliton, the rare heirloom variety of chayote squash, which is often stuffed with shrimp and featured in Cajun and Creole restaurants, feasts, and music festivals.

Lance Hill of the Adopt-a-Mirliton project based in New Orleans explains how the impact on the mirliton demonstrates the complex relationships between technology, food, culture, and community: “The dearth of shrimp will help put the mirliton out of business. The loss of coastal land will reduce the available land for commercial growers. The decline of the bayou life, where fishing and mirliton-growing went hand in hand, will diminish as well.”

The mirliton is only one of three dozen heirloom vegetables now at risk in the Gulf Coast. Louis Michot of the Cultural Resource Institute of Acadiana (CRIA) is now organizing workshops for Cajun and Houma gardeners and farmers to organize community seed banks so that these garden crops may remain safeguarded as part of their cultures and diets.

CRIA has already succeeded in obtaining quantities of some of these varieties to preserve in its Acadiana Seed Bank, but many more have yet to be collected.  “While we are continuing efforts to seek out the keepers of these imperiled food resources, the crude oil leaking into the Gulf of Mexico is likely to make this time-sensitive task even more difficult,” says Michot, who is also a Cajun fiddler and lead singer for the Grammy-nominated Lost Bayou Ramblers. “The oil spill directly affects these communities by severely impacting their ability to continue farming or gardening on coastal lands, and making a living off the once sustainable but now endangered seafood industry.”

Because of these potential cultural and ecological losses, food activists are now preparing to nominate New Orleans as a World City of Gastronomy, appealing to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) to recognize that the widely celebrated heritage of the Gulf Coast’s food communities is in “urgent need of safeguarding.” The goal is to use a UNESCO designation as a means for the ecological restoration and market recovery of the most unique foods of the Gulf Coast region, so that its fishers, foragers, and farmers may economically survive the third major onslaught they have suffered in fewer than five years.    

One tangible step that consumers can take to help Gulf Coast communities recover is to commit to purchasing the seafood and vegetables that the region’s food producers are able to get to market. 

“Society at large needs to know now, more than ever, that Louisiana seafood is safe and available,” urges Christina Gerica of Gerica Seafoods in New Orleans. “Sure, some fishermen have chosen to work with the oil rigs and some fear that even temporary closures may put them out of business, but the majority are still working hard to supply the market. Like with our responses to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita, those of us that are still able to harvest, will. Our favorite traditional harvesting locations may not be as accessible, but there is still plenty seafood out there to be caught.

Slideshow: Eat Gulf Seafood to Save It(Photo: Blissful_Bee/Flickr)“Fishermen still need to provide for their families, and that’s how all of you reading this can help.”

As Slow Food New Orleans activist Poppy Tooker has proclaimed, “Now more than ever before, ‘Eat it to save it’ should be our rallying cry!”

You can download the RAFT Checklist of Gulf Coast Foods at Risk from Grist [PDF] or via my website. By the start of July, a full publication with essays by some of the sources quoted above will be available from the RAFT Alliance and an updated link on this post.

The Calville Blanc d’Hiver, an heirloom variety dating from 15th-century France, will not be showing up in your supermarket, nor will the others in the slideshow below. Photo: Michaela/The Gardener’s Eden

When Joe Twine of Richmond, Ky., was growing up, “It was a must to have an orchard. [My father] had orchards…he had apples come in at all times of the year,” he recalls. “You don’t see ‘em anymore.” 

Of the 15,000 to 16,000 apple varieties that have been named, grown, and eaten in North American, less than 3,500 remain commercially available. Of the surviving varieties, nine out of ten are currently at risk of falling out of cultivation, and falling off our tables.

The drivers of these declines in apple production and diversity are many. There is no single man-made or natural cause. Changing land uses, tastes, and market pressures (far fewer varieties can be found in grocery and big-box stores, which value shipping resilience and item consistency, than in America’s 5,000 farmers markets) have all had their impacts, but even they do not fully explain the long-term decline in the number of orchard-keepers and apple varieties out in the landscape.

Recent studies have suggested that orchard keepers face a new challenge to supplying a variety of apples to their customers. Shifts in weather patterns may be reducing the number of winter chill hours that apple and other trees require in order to bear abundant fruit. If trends continue as predicted, most California orchards are expected to receive less than 500 chill hours per winter by the end of the 21^st century. Most apple varieties require 1,000 chill hours per winter to yield harvests large enough to keep orchards economically viable, although some require as little as 800 hours and a few can get by on just 500 chill hours.

In its “high emissions scenario” for climate change, the Union of Concerned Scientists has predicted that orchards in southeastern Pennsylvania will receive 1,000 or more chill hours in just 50 to 60 percent of winters. Because Pennsylvania is the fourth-largest remaining producer of apples in this country, and because much of its $60 million annual crop comes from the southeastern region, these predictions have generated considerable anxiety among orchard keepers. But no one knows how many of the varieties currently being grown there can actually tolerate fewer than 1,000 chill hours — the meteorological projections have not yet been tangibly related to the specific responses of particular varieties. And of course, no one knows for sure how much of the perceived weather shifts are due to global warming or to more localized urban heat-island effects of changing land uses.    

Nick Botner grows more than 3,500 varieties of apples in his southern Oregon orchard — and is always looking for more. Photo: Bob Weimer/Looking for Hope blogFortunately, many talented orchard keepers and cider makers are evaluating now which varieties grow best and produce quality fruit under current conditions. One ambitious octogenarian orchard keeper — Nick Botner — is testing how some 3,000 varieties of apples fare on his seven acres of land in Yoncalla, Ore. Not all of those heirlooms may make it into the next century, but at least Botner can never be accused of putting all his apples in one basket. We may be entering an era when utilizing the diversity of fruits still available to us is the best strategy we may have for facing uncertainty.

The Renewing America’s Food Traditions Alliance, an organization I cofounded, is promoting 2010 as the Year of the Heirloom Apple. For further information about how to help preserve America’s fast-disappearing varieties, download RAFT’s newly released Forgotten Fruits Manifesto and Manual (PDF).

Slideshow: For a look at some soon-to-be-forgotten fruit, check out this slideshow of heirloom apple varieties being grown on picturesque Scott Farm in Dummerston, Vt. The photos and text are adapted with permission from a post by horticulturalist and garden designer Michaela of The Gardener’s Eden. 

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Dazzling diversity under threat: a woman sells peppers in a Central Asian bazaar. Most Turks live on the water’s edge in the far western reaches of their vast country. But many of the spices that perfume the air in Turkey’s famous urban bazaars come from the nation’s southeastern farming areas of Sanliurfa and Kahramanmaras. In fact, spices from this region rank among the most highly prized condiments and herbs you can find in any spice emporium anywhere.

As I wandered through the Misir Carsisi Spice Bazaar in Istanbul, and the Kemeralti Bazaar at the western terminus of the Silk Road in Izmir, I could see the chile powders, pastes and dried fruits from Sanliurfa and Kahramanmaras proudly and prominently displayed.

Urfa and Maras peppers from Turkey have the same international fame that Aleppo (Halaby) peppers do from Syria, Tabascos do from Louisiana, or Habaneros do from the Yucatan. But their prices are soaring and supplies are becoming scarce–not merely because of international demand, but because of drought and agricultural water scarcity triggered by global climate change.

The same climate-driven pressures are affecting the survival of the Halaby pepper and its traditional farmers near Aleppo, Syria. In the past three years, 160 Syrian farming villages have been abandoned near Aleppo as crop failures have forced over 200,000 rural Syrians to leave for the cities. This news is distressing enough, but when put into a long-term perspective, its implications are staggering: many of these villages have been continuously farmed for 8000 years. As one expert puts it, this may be the worst long-term drought and most severe set of crop failures since agricultural civilizations began in the Fertile Crescent many millennia ago.

One of Turkey’s gifts to the globe’s cuisine: ground Maras pepper at the celebrated Misir Carsisi bazaar in IstanbulThe thousands of tourists and residents who purchase Urfa and Maras chiles in Istanbul’s Spice Bazaar may not yet realize it, but their access to these world class spices is being disrupted by climate change. Since 2007, rains in some forty Turkish provinces, northern Syria and eastern Iraq have been 30 percent to 40 percent of their normal levels. The drought in southeastern Anatolia has reduced harvests by 80 percent. In Syria, 60 percent of the agricultural lands have been affected by these droughts.

In Iraq, 2 million rural residents have been left without water. Many irrigation canals remain dry, as the only water reaching rivers like the Euphrates is being usurped by cities upstream. Downstream on the Tigris-Euphrates delta, saltwater intrusion is making domestic water unpotable. Between the three countries, perhaps five million people have been directly affected.

Peppers are perhaps the most widely-used spice, condiment and vegetable in the world, but the devil is in the details. Many folks cannot tolerate the heat of a Bhut Jolokia or Habanero, but prefer the milder, smokier aroma of a Urfa or Chilpotle. And yet, we can no longer take unrestricted globalized access to such culinary treasures for granted. Our own patterns of consumption and proliferation of greenhouse gases are endangering the very things that give us pleasure.

Think about it. The loss of farmers from Saliurfa, Kahramanmaras and Aleppo–far away places you may have never heard of before–is our own plight. Our food security and access to treasures of world food culture are linked to their water and land security. One heirloom chile pepper blinking out may not be all that great of a loss, but the cumulative loss of food biodiversity driven by climate change will touch us all.

Peregrine falcon, happy and DDT-free.

I felt a certain elation at hearing that there are now more than 1,600 pairs of DDT-free peregrines. At the same time, I realized that endangered butterflies face threats similar to what peregrines faced in the 1960s, before DDT was banned. One threat is a toxin that can be found in the pollen of new varieties of corn. This toxin can kill the caterpillars of butterflies, including six federally listed endangered species as well as the monarch (whose spectacular migration is considered an endangered phenomenon), when they feed upon milkweed plants at the edge of blooming corn fields.

The toxic pollen comes from several new genetically engineered crops known as BT corn, planted this summer on more than 20 million acres in America’s heartland. The agrochemical industry claims that BT corn can save farmers from suffering losses caused by several crop pests, including the European and Southwestern corn borers. But though BT corn is temporarily effective in repelling these pests, it does so at a high price to both farmers and wildlife.

You wouldn’t know that from listening to the agrochemical industry. When scientists from Cornell University first confirmed that BT corn poses a real threat to monarchs and other imperiled butterflies this spring, the industry responded in much the same way it did when Rachel Carson shouted the first warning cries about DDT. It claimed that lab studies had little significance in the real world and that monarch caterpillars would hardly be exposed to the BT corn toxins because most milkweeds do not grow in or near cornfields.

Pollinating pals.

On a recent trip to St. Louis, I wondered if the industry’s publicists who live there ever go outside. Over a 150-mile stretch between Chicago and St. Louis, I saw 45 miles of cornfields where milkweeds were extremely common within 10 feet of the corn itself. At least along this one corridor frequented by migratory Monarchs, caterpillars can be easily exposed to the toxic pollen raining down on them.

The agrochemical industry has also tried to discredit the scientists’ report, which was published in Nature magazine, as sloppy work. Curiously, it then attempted to hire some of the same scientists who published the report, announcing that it took concerns about monarchs seriously. At the same time, biotechnology advocates whined that BT corn was being given a bum rap: Toxic BT corn pollen kills far fewer monarchs than what pesticides would kill if BT corn were not available, they said. But to date, there is no indication that the presence of BT corn in the field corn market has markedly reduced the total amount of pesticides being dowsed on field corn. It is agribusiness as usual down on the corporate farm.

The EPA should have consulted with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service long before permitting Monsanto and Novartis to release BT corn for planting on millions of acres. Now that the cat is out of the bag, the EPA and the U.S. Department of Agriculture should at least conduct their own field studies of BT corn’s effects on endangered butterflies. But they continue to stonewall, saying they are waiting for the agrochemical industry’s proprietary studies of BT corn and monarchs before they announce any policy changes. As one Fish and Wildlife Service employee anonymously warned, the EPA is letting the wolves tend the hen house.

Crops genetically engineered to produce toxins require as much scrutiny as do other kinds of pesticides, especially when some of the non-target organisms exposed to them are federally protected. The EPA must be urged to suspend permits for BT corn until it can show that the crops do not pose additional risks to endangered butterflies.

I’m glad the peregrine falcon has soared off the endangered species list. Now let’s help our magnificent pollinators do the same.