Not too long ago, we turned some of the most productive agricultural land in the world into suburbs. The business of building homes has slowed since the 2008 recession, but it continues to be true that no matter how well-suited a spot was to growing food, if a developer wants to make money, they’ll cover farmland with houses.

In the aftermath of the housing bubble, interesting signs have begun to suggest that the economics of dirt may be shifting. In fact it might one day be more valuable to grow food on a plot of land than to plop a house down on top of it. A few farmers recently made a killing buying back the farms they’d cashed out on. Meanwhile, the value of farmland in Iowa has increased by 33 percent, setting off speculation that farmland could be the next bubble. (It’s a bubble fueled by corn for ethanol and therefore food for cars instead of people, but still, it holds promise.) And then there is the matter of the failed shopping mall in Cleveland that began doing double-duty as a greenhouse.

All of this raises the question: What about those farms that have already been converted into subdivisions? Once someone has thoughtfully poured concrete over most of your neighborhood, should you try to un-concrete it and make it a farm again? Could the McMansions of Brentwood become fertile fields again?

Science says yes, absolutely. You wouldn’t want to tear up asphalt (it’s regrettably full of carcinogenic hydrocarbons), but concrete is a different story — and it’s fairly non-toxic. According to Garrison Sposito, chair of the soil sciences division at the University of California-Berkeley, the soil underneath can be unearthed, and put to work. But it will take time before it really comes back to life, he warns. Much of what makes soil grow plants well are creatures like worms and microfauna that would not have hung around under the sidewalk once most of the air and water disappeared. They would have hightailed it out of there.

That said, Sposito adds, the top foot of dirt in any urban area is never going to be great for farming at first. It could be filled with trash, construction debris, weedkiller, and lead from automobile exhaust. All these things require different levels of remediation; for instance lead is often treated with ground-up fish bones [PDF].

People looking to farm in urban areas say that smashing concrete and making way for food is possible, but with qualifications. “Most of the time you can simply use a sledgehammer and break it into chunks,” writes Patrick Crouch, who farms at Earthworm Farm in Detroit. “Then use a large steel bar to get underneath and pry it up.” Concrete, he adds, is heavy. “I have spent hours, no, days, breaking it up, and I can tell you that while there are certain enjoyable aspects of the process, most of it is back-breaking work.” The high alkalinity of the soil in Detroit is a direct result of being surrounded by so much concrete, according to Crouch. Quicklime, which is used in making cement, has a way of harshing the soil around it.

The largest lot Crouch has ever cleared, he says, was about two-thirds of an acre. The crew took a bulldozer and scraped the site down to the subsoil. They grew food the first year it was planted, but it took at least 12 years of composting and cover crops to get close to approximating anything like Crouch’s ideal of a good pile of dirt.

So, can it be done? Yes. Should you try it? That depends on how much you like hitting things with a sledgehammer. Or how effective you are at persuading other people to hit things with a sledgehammer. Either way, you won’t have to break up a layer of concrete more than once to gain a whole new appreciation for the importance of keeping fertile soil from being paved over in the first place.

Like many of the people in this warehouse, Gaingalas used to work at the airport, in the international terminal of San Francisco-Oakland (SFO). She went through people’s luggage all day. Now, as a U.S. Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) agricultural specialist, she mostly hunts for bugs, though she finds the occasional plant as well — like the time she found two rare orchids hidden inside a piece of furniture being imported from Asia. But she and CBP chief supervisory officer and public relations liaison Edward Low aren’t strangers to bizarre customs discoveries: Low rattles off a list of things found in SFO Airport luggage with the practiced air of a man who gets asked this question a great deal. “A cow intestine with the grass still in it,” says Low. “A human hand stuffed with straw. Penises galore. Pick an animal — we’ve found its penis in someone’s luggage.”

The greatest threat at America’s borders, however, doesn’t come from smuggled penises. The greatest threat — at least in the food security sense of the word — is a nondescript brownish insect about the size of a lentil. It’s called the Khapra beetle (aka Trogoderma granarium). It’s the only insect that the CBP has zero tolerance for.

For reasons not fully understood, the Khapra beetle has been appearing at U.S. ports in dramatically increasing numbers. In previous years, it showed up at border crossings, in shipping containers at ports, and at international airport terminals about 15 times a year. Six months into the 2011 that number had already reached 100. News of the dramatically increasing Khapra beetle interceptions began to appear in CBP press releases, running next to tales of migrant workers caught by aerial drones and businessmen smuggling erectile dysfunction drugs.

What’ll it do if it gets here? Eat all our food. The Oakland CPB team leads the nation in Khapra beetle interception (52 busts in 2011, with New York running a close second with 48), but it’s also just a few hours away from the Central Valley, one of the most productive agricultural regions in the world.

Unlike most beetles (but like most humans), the Khapra beetle never bothered to specialize in what it eats. At last count, the number of potential food sources it can survive on topped 75, most of them foods that we like to eat, and most of them also foods that we like to sell to other people and ship long distances, like oats, corn, wheat, soy, and beans.

Khapra larvae in rice.

When the Khapra discovers a new food source, it does not pause to think about how it might live harmoniously and sustainably in this new ecosystem. Instead it lays its eggs in everything. A single female can lay 500 eggs, according to Andrew R. Cline, senior insect biosystematist at the Plant Pest Diagnostics Branch of the California Department of Food & Agriculture. The insect is so small that it can hide behind a fleck of paint on the inside of a grain silo, but eyewitness accounts of infestations describe looking down into grain stores that seemed to be alive, they were so thickly coated with wiggling larvae. The Khapra beetle doesn’t leave much behind. Other insects will maybe take 30 percent of a crop, Cline says. The Khapra will take 70 percent. Or all of it.

In 1953, the beetle was discovered to have established itself in California, at which point it took millions of dollars and 13 years to remove. Among its other skills, the Khapra beetle is able to enter something called “diapause” — a sort of hibernation in which it stops growing and lowers its oxygen intake — making it much more difficult to find and kill. Other, less-established colonies were taken out in 1968 (New Jersey) and between 1980 and 1983 (California, Maryland, Michigan, New Jersey, New York, Pennsylvania, and Texas).

While it is the responsibility of customs agents to actually search for and identify invasive insects, if an agricultural pest like the Khapra beetle does get loose, responsibility for getting rid of it shifts to the states. This is why Alameda County, which surrounds the Port of Oakland, has 7,000 pheremone traps laid across it as a second line of defense in case anything manages to make it through the port and out into the world. It’s also why last year California State Senate Agriculture Committee Chair Anthony Cannella held a hearing in which he announced that he certainly hoped that funding for combating invasive species wouldn’t be cut as California confronted its epic budget deficit.

By July of 2011, the USDA and Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) were seriously alarmed at the rising numbers. Some countries, like Vietnam, began to outright ban imports of rice — the grain in which the beetle was most frequently found — from countries known to have the Khapra beetle.

But doing such a thing in the United States would be complex. The same countries that have the beetle also happen to be countries that we have delicate diplomatic relationships with, including  Afghanistan, India, Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia, as well as Senegal, Sri Lanka, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates.

So, the CBP altered its rules instead. Now, all rice imported from countries known to have the Khapra beetle needs to be accompanied by a certificate saying that it has been inspected and found to be beetle-free.

Have the new inspection certificates made a difference? Shipments, even certified ones, are still examined in the same way they always have been — by taking samples of the rice and sifting through them by hand. (Technology has brought us many wonders, but the ability to reliably detect a small insect in a sack of rice isn’t one of them.)

Agriculture was one of the first global industries. Crops planted far from the places where they originally evolved, but in climates similar to the ones they were from, did phenomenally well, often until they became weeds. This is why most of the world’s bananas are grown in Latin America, rather than Southeast Asia, and why most of the world’s almonds are grown in California, not the Middle East. Comparative advantage is rooted in plant biology.

Invasive pests are the hidden whammy folded into this scenario. When separated from all of the creatures that have evolved to eat it, a crop flourishes — like Superman shot out of Krypton and into the American Midwest. When a crop is reunited with one of its worst pests, though, it’s like Superman meets Kryptonite all over again. The Khapra beetle evolved somewhere in South Asia, in the same region where rice was first cultivated. USDA-APHIS estimates that 67 percent of the continental U.S. also has a climate suitable for the beetle.

Countries trade food for a variety of reasons. Some countries do it for purely economic reasons — India grows some delicious rice, in a country where wages are cheap. Other countries trade food for diplomatic reasons — Japan has warehouses full of American rice, for instance, because they promised to buy it years ago in World Trade Organization negotiations .

As more food crosses borders than ever before, biology is complicating both finance and diplomacy. The number of invasive plants, insects, and pathogens intercepted by CBP has nearly doubled in the last decade. It’s an upswing that prefigures a more complex economics of the future, and one that takes into account such questions as “How much do we stand to gain by importing this rice? How much do we stand to lose if importing this rice brings over an insect we have to spend millions of dollars to get rid of?”

As of January of this year, Sen. Canella had created his own Subcommittee on Invasive Species, and the Rice Exporters Association of Pakistan was meeting with the USDA in Karachi to figure out just how much of the grain is currently being sent back. And that year-end total? It turns out just as many entered the country since the restrictions were passed as had come before — and then some. The final count was 217.

Photo by DChris.

There are people around who remember the days when squirrel was a more commonly served meat on the American table than chicken. The Kentucky Long Rifle, with its long barrel and small caliber, was designed for squirrel hunting (the smaller the caliber, the more squirrel left to take home after shooting one.)

The ideal shot was aimed not at the squirrel, but at the tree branch directly below it, so that the animal would be killed by the concussion of the bullet instead of the bullet itself. Historians say that this is what won the Revolutionary war; even the most highly trained British soldiers were no match for squirrel killers trained by hunger.

Until recent decades, Americans ate squirrel meat because it was cheap, plentiful, and there, according to Hank Shaw, author of Hunt, Gather, Cook: Finding the Forgotten Feast. Domesticated animals may have been easier to catch, but, in the days before the industrialization of farming, they were expensive to raise and feed. “When Herbert Hoover promised a chicken in every pot, that was a big deal,” Shaw adds. The first edition of The Joy of Cooking, published in 1931, was heavy on the squirrel. As it moved into later and later editions, Hoover’s promise was fulfilled (by other politicians, if not Hoover himself) and chicken gradually replaced squirrel.

Shaw shot his first squirrel when he was working as a reporter for a daily paper in Minnesota. He’d made it through an underpaid stint as a cub reporter in Long Island by catching and eating his own fish. When he arrived in Minnesota, though, he could not help but take note of the squirrels. The state has such a vibrant squirrel scene that a cottage industry has grown up around trapping and removing ones that have moved into people’s homes. Shaw bought a few books about squirrel hunting off the internet, applied for a license to hunt them, and got to it.

In doing so, he placed himself on the vanguard of the re-squirreling of the American diet. Squirrel-eating has been trendy in Great Britain for half a decade now — spurred by a nationalistic fervor to kill as many as possible of the invasive American gray squirrel, which is outcompeting the domestic red squirrel (the latter had the good fortune to star in a Beatrix Potter book, one of the best ways to cement your status as charismatic megafauna).

In America, though, a surge in the deer population, especially east of the Rockies, has led most hunters to drift towards larger prey. “Our farming practices are ideal for whitetail,” says Shaw, who says that the whitetail in particular is becoming so habituated to humans that it is verging on domestication. “So are subdivisions.”

Squirrel meat may have its charms but hunting deer appeals to people on a primal level, says Shaw. “If you look at human evolution, people think that humans developed skills like running, big brains, and motor skills to hunt large animals. We’ve been hunting deer since before we were fully human.” That, says Shaw, and “if little Susie’s first animal is a whitetail deer that makes a hell of a better picture.”

The shift has left the squirrel hunting to the immigrant populations like the Hmong, who hunt squirrels in America because they’re the closest thing to the ones they hunted in the mountains of Southeast Asia. And it’s left them to people like Shaw — idealists who believe that, if you’re going to eat meat, it’s more noble (and thrifty) to kill whatever protein happens to be closest to home.

It’s hard to imagine more sustainable local game — squirrels are abundant, far from endangered, and don’t even require refrigeration the way that big game does. The standard rule of thumb is that one squirrel = enough meat for one dinner for one person. The squirrel is road food — the kind of prey that fed cross-country hikers, in the days before MRE and freeze-dried lentils. Squirrel is like the drive-through cheeseburger of the forest — albeit a cheeseburger that needs to be gutted first.

They’re also delicious, mostly because they eat nuts. “Rabbits — they’re grass eaters. The flavor is milder. Squirrels taste like something,” says  Shaw. “It’s gamey in a good way.”

Biologically speaking, the squirrel family is an old one. According to the fossil record, it originated in North America around 36 million years ago, and then proceeded to scuttle across land bridges and conjoined continents to settle in Eurasia, Africa, and North and South America. That’s an impressive amount of territory to settle without human assistance, especially over millions of years of significant climate fluctuations. In other words: Squirrels are badasses.

Photo by Chrissy Wainwright.

Some parts of the United States never lost their taste for squirrel. In the mid-’90s, about 11 people in Kentucky came down with a disease called Creutzfeldt-Jakob. The cases temporarily illuminated a still ardent regional love of squirrel brains — one that cut across all levels of society.

“Someone comes by the house with just the head of a squirrel,” Erick Weisman told The New York Times back in 1997, describing the scene. Weisman is clinical director of the Neurobehavioral Institute, where the patients were treated. The gift giver, Weisman continued, gave it to the matriarch of the family, who “shaved the fur off the top of the head and fried the head whole. The skull was cracked open at the dinner table and the brains were sucked out.” Alternately, he added, the brains were often scrambled with white gravy, or eggs.

Squirrel brains aren’t the only thing that most hunters avoid. Ground squirrels — like prairie dogs, and chipmunks — can carry the Bubonic Plague. “And that’s not,” says Shaw, “good eatin’.”

What does the future hold for squirrel eating? On Shaw’s book tour this autumn, he was pleasantly surprised to find that squirrel eating was still alive and well in the South. And squirrel was not the only rodent either to persist as a regional delicacy. In Delaware and Maryland, people wanted to talk muskrat, so much so that he thought he was being set up, until he read that it was for sale at local markets. He hasn’t caught much squirrel himself since moving to northern California — the squirrels aren’t as plentiful but the ducks are many. Still, once or twice a year, he’ll catch one for nostalgia’s sake. He cooks it in a simple braise, with white wine and chicken broth.

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Tree sparrows have seen large declines in western Europe, in part due to changes in farming practices.Photo: Nutmeg66

Why put so much effort into attracting birds to farms? Well, the steady decline of most birds in the world and the increase of the human population are related — and, idealism aside, there’s only so much that wilderness conservation can do to alter that trajectory. And so a fascinating and pragmatic branch of science is developing. It asks the question: Is there a way to feed wildlife, while feeding ourselves?

One recent study took a close look at this question. A team of four scientists in the United Kingdom spent a year collecting dirt from all over an organic farm near Bristol, which grew mostly clover, oats, wheat, and barley. Their goal? To determine just how much food a farm that grows crops to feed humans also provides for wildlife. What they found: that weeds play a surprisingly important role in attracting and feeding birds — in fact, they might be key to farm biodiversity.

The soil sampling was a complicated operation. “You know you can get those leaf blowers?” says Darren Evans, the lead researcher on the project, during a recent phone interview. “We modified one so that it sucked rather than blew.” The group sampled 250 spots around the farm and, after drying and sifting the dirt collected, found themselves with 171,000 seeds. “We counted and identified every single one,” Evans adds, sounding a bit weary. “It took a long time.”

The team managed to identify 156,000 seeds from about 125 different plants. They tallied the energy content of each seed species and estimated that the 300-acre farm contained 33 metric tons of biomass and 560 gigajoules of energy that could be ingested by local wildlife — most of it in the form of seeds and berries.

However, most of the seeds also happened to be from plants that the farmer in question never had any intention of growing. The two most energy-rich sites on the farm were areas where crops hadn’t been planted, either. What this meant was that most of the high-quality bird food on the ground was coming from weeds.

This is not a huge surprise. Most plants in the world exist because someone likes to eat them. Our favorite crops have spread all over the face of the earth because we like them enough to plant them, water them, and interfere in their sex lives. And some believe weeds spread far and wide because they provide food to animals and insects, who carry their seeds with them on to their next destination.

When we view weeds as important to wildlife, however, it creates a complicated scenario for biodiversity researchers. “Weeds are the farmer’s number one enemy,” says Evans. “They know weeds will choke their plants and cause all sorts of problems.”

But, he adds, “over 100 species depend on the seeds they produce.” More research is necessary, he says, before farmers and scientists will know exactly how to balance both needs. “There are trade-offs going on, basically. A farmer is going to have to decide: How many weeds am I going to have before it becomes a problem for our crops?”

But the findings had an encouraging side as well. If further research bears this discovery out, relatively minor changes to farming incentives could have big effects. If farmers were given incentives to stop cutting or spraying the weeds growing around their hedgerows, in their tractor yards, and in other areas around the margins of their farms, it could have a disproportionately large effect on food for wildlife. And hedgerows — wild borders of shrubs and trees left around farmland as a living fence or as a boundary marker, once ripped up so that farm equipment could turn around more easily — are now historically protected in England. And because of their reputation as valuable habitat for wild birds and pollinators [PDF], they may now be further encouraged. Hedgerows are also returning in California’s Central Valley, where populations of wild pollinators are also in rapid decline.

And there’s another potential benefit. Of the 300-plus animal species who feed on the seeds recorded on the test farm in the U.K., 53 were birds and 10 were mammals. The rest were arthropods — a group that includes several insects whose presence would be alluring to farmers, such as pest-controlling wasps. The wasps are drawn to the seeds of common weeds like yarrow and Queen Anne’s lace, but also help control aphids. If connections like this were made clearer, farmers might have more of an incentive to tolerate weeds — or at least, certain kinds.

Ninety-eight percent of the land in the U.K. is managed by humans in one way or other. Seventy-seven percent of the country is farmland, and that is where most of England’s biodiversity is found. And so England’s remaining wilderness depends largely on how the nation decides to grow its food.

But the U.K. — and the European Union, and the rest of the world — is also thinking about how agriculture will change in the years ahead, as global climate change continues to add even more uncertainty into the business of farming. Weeds, in particular, are a source of hope and anxiety, since they are adapting to climate change more quickly than domesticated plants.

The next step, says Evans, would be to replicate this sort of research across a variety of farms — around Europe and across the world. “We know so much about the natural history of our countryside but almost nothing about how the species interact. They’re like engine parts; they’re all components. To find this — it’s an exciting time.”

2011 was a record year for liability, with drought in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, and Hurricane Irene taking out crops along the Eastern seaboard. Photo: Bob Gutowski

Direct payments are admittedly a lot harder to defend than they were even four years ago. Introduced back when commodity crop prices were rock-bottom enough to crash the economies of several non-subsidized agricultural markets, these payments continued at the same rate, even as grain prices climbed to a record high, cotton became more expensive than it has been at any time since the Civil War, and farmers began actually buying back land that they’d sold to real estate developers.

Just how crop insurance will expand is a critical question. Here’s how federally subsidized crop insurance works now: The feds contract out to a small group of corporations (the same corporations that insure crops across the world), the feds also help farmers pay some or most of the insurance premiums, and they pay out reimbursements when things go south. Meanwhile, the insurance corporation gets money for administering the program, as well as commissions for the policies it sells, and reimbursements for losses.

Federal crop insurance has been around since the 1930s, but it’s grown dramatically in recent years. In fact, participation actually tripled in the last two decades. 2011 was a record year for the industry; $12 billion were paid out in premiums, with the feds subsidizing about 50 percent of the cost of those payments. “We never dreamed in the 1980s of having a program of this size,” Tom Zacharias, president of the trade association National Crop Insurance Services, told the Ag Journal.

As it turned out, 2011 was also a record year for liability, with drought in Kansas, Texas, and Oklahoma, and Hurricane Irene taking out crops along the Eastern seaboard. The record profits made by some farmers were due to others’ record losses. And so the saga known to all who have ever bought insurance kicked into gear — the cost of insurance went up. So did the feds’ contribution.

The insurance industry doesn’t have a great reputation, as a whole, but it does have a record of changing human behavior though financial incentives. In the early days of fire insurance, for instance, insurers refused to cover communities until they built a fire department. In 2006, Lloyds of London wrote a memorable report that strongly advised its members to begin factoring global warming into its calculations [PDF], a move that came off like a warning shot across the bow of a business community that until then had seen environmentalism as a moral rather than a financial issue. “Failure to take climate change into account will put companies at risk from future legal actions from their own shareholders, their investors and clients,” the report read, and went on from there.

Last year’s crop losses weren’t entirely due to climate change — disasters and farming go way back — but they are occurring at a frequency and scale that implies that American farmers now have to work with a new type of weather. According to a report produced by the Congressional Research Service [PDF] in December of last year, government outlays for crop insurance rose from $2.1 billion in 2000 to $3.6 billion in 2006 to $7.3 billion in 2009 — and, over the next 10 years, federal spending on crop insurance is projected to outpace spending on traditional commodity programs by about one-third.

The Farm Bill shapes American agriculture, so it seems irrational to protect farmers trying to maintain their profits on farmland no longer suited for the crops they’re growing. The policy can work to make sure that insurance helps diminish the risks inherent in growing food and trying to sell it to people — but most advocates believe this should happen in a way that applies to everyone, not just a few individual farmers.

When it looked like the Farm Bill might still be passed by the supercommittee, farmers who grow commodities like corn, soy, and cotton were “going for the maximum of what they could possibly dream of,”  says Ferd Hoefner, Policy Director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. Farm lobbies raised the amounts they would get for each crop lost “to unimagined levels” in the form of what has been called shallow loss coverage.

Now that the bill will be considered by the entirety of Congress, Hoefner adds, crop insurance will “most likely get seriously revisited.”

“We’re entering unknown territory,” says Julia Olmstead, of the next phase of the Farm Bill process. Olmstead helped write a report on global warming and the Farm Bill for the Intsitute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP).  “Creating a federal crop insurance system, with no limits on federal outlays, without simultaneously giving farmers the tools to adapt to the effects of climate change is incredibly irresponsible from both a food security and fiscal perspective,” she said. “It’s like offering a home owner a fire insurance policy, but not even requiring the most basic preventative measures, such as smoke alarms or fire extinguishers.”

Olmstead’s report advised an insurance policy that encourages farmers to plant multiple crops; a farm that grows a diversity of crops is less vulnerable to disasters (two programs in the farm bill, AGR and AGR-lite, already encourage these practices, and they could be expanded). The report also advises the expansion of programs like the Conservation Stewardship Program, which incentivizes farmers to protect the water, soil, and air. (It’s been so popular that only 57 percent of eligible farmers have been funded. With the proposed cuts in the supercommittee report, that percentage would go down to 46 percent.)

In other words: Expect a lot of wrassling over the issue of insurance over the next few months. As the cash cow in the Farm Bill, it will also be the star to which hopes and dreams are pinned.

“We never get what we want,” says Olmstead, who envisions a Farm Bill that would give more support to sustainable farming and less to agriculture that requires heavy inputs of fuel, fertilizer, and cash. “If 2008 was about new programs, this one is about holding on to what we can. And I think we’ve made a lot of progress.” 

Photo: Frank Kehren

But today — just a few years from the banana’s supposed demise — one can walk down the street and find bananas in the nearest corner store, hanging out between the cash register and the lottery tickets. What gives? Are we still heading toward bananapocalypse? Or has it been cancelled? And what can the banana tell us about the evolution of our global food supply?

It turns out that the Race IV fungus does cause a true bananapocalypse. It just hasn’t spread everywhere — yet. Once it shows up on a farm, the land around it can’t be used to grow the same variety for another 30 years. And, given that there’s only one variety of banana — the Cavendish — that ships well enough and tastes good enough to be sold everywhere in the world, this is bad news for banana growers. The arrival of Race IV on your property is a sign that you’ve officially left the international banana trade.

But — to use a horror movie analogy — Race IV moves more like a zombie horde in a ’70s movie than like the sleek, fast-moving zombies of today. In other words, smarter pathogens travel on insects (which can hop rides on ships and airplanes) or float on wind currents like Black sigatoka (the banana’s main nemesis in the Americas), while Race IV travels by dirt, weeds, and water. Twenty years after the first plantations began to fail in Southeast Asia, the fungus has yet to be found in India and the Americas, which remain the most productive Cavendish growing regions in the world.

“It’ll get there,” says Randy Ploetz, a pathologist who researches tropical fruit diseases at the University of Florida. “But it’s really overblown.” In fact, he adds, “We’ve got a banana glut right now.”

A little banana history

Photo: Andrea GuerraSoutheast Asia was never an ideal place to grow bananas commercially, says Ploetz. Because the banana evolved there, every parasite and pathogen that evolved alongside it is also hanging out there, waiting to attack it.

Success in the globalized food trade has come to mean planting crops far away from where they evolved, in a climate as similar as possible, and then sitting back and collecting the profits until the pests show up. In the case of the banana, arguably the first globalized fruit, new markets have led to new growing regions. As Japan began to globalize, a few plantations were laid out in Taiwan. And when Saudi Arabia began to import bananas, residents made it clear that they would really prefer their bananas grown in an Islamic country — and suddenly there were plantations in Indonesia and Malaysia too.

Race IV had probably been around for a long time, but it wasn’t until these plantations went in that it had the expansion opportunity that a monoculture provides. It takes anywhere from nine months to several years for plants infected with Race IV to start showing signs of disease. And by the time the plantations in Malaysia began to fail, Race IV had been carried all over Southeast Asia — on weeds, through irrigation channels, and on the tire treads of trucks and the boot soles of workers. It only took five years after Race IV first appeared in Malaysia for the banana industry there to completely collapse. From there it spread to Taiwan, Indonesia, and Australia — though it has yet to reach Cambodia or Vietnam.

It’s all about the variety

The Cavendish came about in the 1960s, when Dole and Chiquita were faced with a milder form of Panama Race IV. The Gros Michel — or “Big Mike” banana — which was the industry standard then, was being undone by what is now known as Panama Race I. So the industry giants made the unprecedented choice to sell the world on a new banana.

It was widely agreed that Big Mike was the better banana. “If you look at old photos,” says Ploetz, “you’ll see workers throwing entire bunches of [Big Mikes] into the back of a car. You can’t do that with a Cavendish.” Also, he says, Big Mike tasted better. But Cavendish was ridiculously productive, and tasted good enough. It cost Chiquita and Dole millions of dollars to rip up and replant their plantations with Cavendish, and to re-engineer their boats, railroad cars, and packing systems to handle the new fruit — but it ensured that the banana would continue to lead the global fruit market, as the *cough* top banana.

Gros Michel of “Big Mike” bananasPhoto: Wiki Media CommonsBut, here’s the thing: There is no new banana variety waiting in the wings to replace the Cavendish. The E.U. has made it clear that it has no interest in buying a genetically engineered (GMO) banana. Another variety [PDF], produced by cross-breeding samples from more than 350 banana types, was given the astonishingly awesome name of “Goldfinger.” It has sold well in Australia, but doesn’t travel well after harvest in the tropics.

On top of it, the Cavendish is “reproductively-challenged.” So the quest to produce a variety that is resistant to Race IV but tastes, looks, and grows like a Cavendish, is a somewhat Quixotic one. (After putting 400 tons of Cavendish through a sieve, a research team in Honduras managed to extract only 15 seeds.) Since Race IV takes out not only Cavendish, but many other related varieties, the odds don’t look good. Another research team in Taiwan stresses Cavendish plant tissues until they mutate slightly, then grows the resulting plants. They’ve managed to produce a Cavendish which can withstand the Race IV for four years (most banana plants live for about 15 years).

Yes, we have no bananas

In other words: so far, scientists have had no real luck. And unless they do, bananas will stop haunting corn flake bowls and fruit salads around the world. When Race IV reaches today’s prime banana-growing regions, it’s likely to be some combination of homesickness and air travel that does the industry in — a person who takes a shoot from a banana tree in their home country, puts it in a suitcase, and smuggles it into their new home. “It’s going to be some idiot,” says Ploetz. “Someone who goes home to visit their family and says, “Oh, the tree in my parents’ backyard always had the most delicious fruit.”

That said, even if bananas disappear from supermarkets of Ohio, it won’t mean the end of the fruit all together. After all, the Cavendish is only 50 percent of the world banana market. No one is quite sure how many other varieties make up that other half, but it’s estimated to be 1,000.

The 20th century was the era when we saw a few species — the Cavendish, the Russet potato, the Holstein cow — come to dominate world agriculture. The 21st century looks to be the era in which those great monocultures are gradually becoming undone. And while the hordes of other banana varieties may not be as productive, as easy to ship, nor as smooth and unblemished, their sheer difference from one another has the potential to shield them from pathogens carried by the humans who, in this century, travel as far and as readily as crops began to travel in the last one.

Ploetz knows the Gros Michel tastes better than the Cavendish because he’s eaten one. Not in a tightly controlled banana research center, but in a market in Costa Rica, where they’re still grown on small farms and in people’s back yards. The taste is sweeter, he reports. And more complex.

“Crickets,” says a towheaded youngster, who would look like a character in a Mark Twain novel, were it not for the fact that he is digging into a cup of ice cream sprinkled with toasted mealworms. “Those are the first bugs I ate. I bought them at a candy store in Napa.”

“A scorpion is a good beginner bug,” says one woman, biting into a taco. She ate one at a night market in China. “They look pretty badass — but they’re so dry that there’s no guts. It tasted like a potato chip.”

Behind them, Monica Martinez, RISD graduate and bug pusher, rings up “PreHispanic tacos,” bugs on ice cream, and lemonade (no bugs). She’s a fan of the wax moth larvae herself. “They’re pure fat,” says Martinez, and make a good starter bug. “But they’re the fat that you want to eat. Not Burger King fat.” They’re also cute, she says. “Mealworms still look a little evil to me.”

Among the small but devoted band of ecologists and entomologists who promote eating insects (the technical term is entomophagist), Don Bugito is notable for its low-key populism. Some entomophagists will pose in front of a fish-eye lens with a wriggling scorpion held over their mouth in order to get attention. Others, like retired entomology  professor Gene DeFoliart, will write beautifully detailed papers on how foreign aid projects that encourage bug-eating cultures to stop foraging and start raising chickens, pigs, and cattle may deprive them nutritionally.

Monica Martinez, proprietor of Don Bugito, left.It is a widely held belief among the entomophagists of the world that, eventually, we’re all going to eat bugs. It may take a while; even a casual student of the dietary habits of modern humans is likely to conclude that most of them are likely to wait until they’ve eaten most of the fish and mammals in the world first. But some see bugs as livestock waiting to be discovered — like an understudy at a Broadway musical. Crickets are twice as efficient at using feed as chickens and pigs and nearly six times as efficient as cattle. Edible insects also produce much less in the way of greenhouse gases than cattle.

Martinez was pulled into the world of bug munching by social connections — while living with the artist Philip Ross, the two became preoccupied with the idea of urban agriculture, and began raising mealworms in their apartment. Martinez designed a series of sleek white Bauhaus-inspired apartment complexes for the insects — one half for beetles, which lay the eggs that turn into mealworms, and one half for the mealworms themselves.

After several redesigns (it turned out that the beetles had specific ventilation needs in order to work up the initiative to reproduce), she had working prototypes. Those prototypes turned into a gallery show, and Martinez decided it would be a neat idea to drum up publicity for the show by asking the restaurant around the corner to throw a bug dinner in conjunction with the opening.

Wax moth larvae tacos.The dinner was so wildly successful that it nearly eclipsed the show itself. And it taught Martinez a lesson. If you’re interested in broadening people’s perspective of food, handing them something delicious-looking on a plate is more persuasive than providing them with a box filled with wiggling larvae — no matter how pretty the box happens to be. 

Suddenly, she was drafting a business plan for the small business incubator La Cocina, and filling out applications for food handling permits. What had started as social practice art began shaping up into a strange hybrid. In Mexico, where people skim lake fly eggs off the surface of Lake Textoco and lay them out to dry (they taste just like shrimp, says Martinez), where the state of Taxco has an entire festival devoted to eating Jumiles, a small stink bug, and where the larvae of ants of the genus Liometopum are harvested and served as a delicacy, Martinez’s work did not go unnoticed. She was invited to join Numina Femina, a group exhibition focusing on Latino women in the arts. It asked her to, among other things, set up a larvae taco stand in front of the Mexican consulate in San Francisco.

She refers to her business as a “PreHispanic Snackeria.” “There was no lactose before the Spaniards came,” she says, “and so we used to eat insects. They provided all the things milk would have provided, plus fiber.”

In the meantime, the mealworm apartment complex remains in Martinez’s apartment, somewhat neglected. The charm of eating them has worn off. When asked which bugs taste better than mealworms, Martinez sighs and answers, “All of them.”

“I take care of them,” she says. “I feed them. Even though I’m getting sick of them.”

It’s an interesting transition: from art project, to livestock, to pet. At what point do you cut loose from an early concept that becomes progressively less delicious? “It’s like when you raise any living organism,” says Martinez, with a shrug. “I’m attached to them.”

Rigoberto Bucio, 25, selling his own organic produce at the North Oakland, Calif. farmer markets. Photos: Bart Nagel

The strawberries, purchased in November, in a rainy parking lot behind a community clinic, feel like they’ve traveled in time from summer to here. Out of season, strawberries usually taste like rainwater. These have a taste that is sharp and unexpected.

The North Oakland farmers market is almost deserted — it’s a new one, just getting off the ground. The people here selling their wares look soggy and wan and not especially thrilled to be here. Nor does the wet goat that a couple in rainproof anoraks are trying to coax onto a milking platform.

But Rigoberto Bucio, arms folded, flanked by an army of beets, carrots, chilies, chard, kale, and baskets of the surprisingly sweet strawberries, surveys the scene with equanimity. He’s encountered all kinds of weather working in the fields. At least here he’s standing under a white plastic tent and selling what he grew himself, at Bucio Farm.

Bucio got into farming out of a certain pragmatism. “It’s the best thing that I know how to do,” he says. “And I don’t want to work in a closed space. And I love it when people tell me my produce is very good.”

Although he looks older, until he cracks one of his shy smiles, he is just 25 years old — astonishingly young compared to the average age of U.S. farmers, which is 55. He is also in a distinct minority: not only does he farm organically, but only 2.5 percent of all U.S. farm operators are Latino (or Hispanic, as the USDA’s 2007 Census of Agriculture records it [PDF]).

Bucio is one of a growing number of young migrant workers who, thanks in part to changes in the Farm Bill that freed up funding to train and otherwise assist beginning farmers, are no longer making pennies per bucket picked but working for themselves, running CSAs, and introducing new blood into American farming.

Bucio is still getting used to the changes that this occupational switch involves. As a farmworker, he was part of a class of people that is culturally invisible in America — abstract because to think of it too closely makes people feel uncomfortable. Organic farm work is arguably healthier than conventional farm work, but it’s still work that not many people fantasize about doing. Now, he’s something else, the Farmer — that archetype revered by many Americans. More so than a politician or a lawyer or a plumber or an executive director of marketing, the small-time farmer is America as America would like to see itself.

Pick your poison

California supplies more than half of the country’s produce, and unlike corn and soy, fruits and vegetables have proved one of the most difficult crops to mechanize.

The Salinas Valley produces a lot of cool-season, high-value crops like strawberries, and these attract a largely low-skilled and low-paid labor force. Over a quarter of the population of the surrounding county works in agriculture or processing, but the area itself is a food desert — food is shipped out as soon as it is picked or processed, and is often too expensive for the people who work farming it. (Look for the next story in the California series, on te food desert in the middle of the Central Valley.) 

Rigoberto Bucio.Bucio dropped out of middle school in Mexico to come to the States and work in the strawberry fields of California. Americans eat 75 percent more strawberries than they did 20 years ago, but the plant itself has remained stubbornly resistant to attempts to mechanize its production. It wants to be picked by actual people. The closest thing to industrialization the crop has seen is the conveyor-belt system that radiates out from the center of the field to the edge, so that workers don’t have to carry the full flats of berries to the trucks parked nearby.

As a farmworker, Bucio only worked on organic farms. “Because I like to eat the strawberries as I harvest them” is what he says, but it’s also well known by farmworkers that the people most at risk from pesticides are not people buying their produce at the supermarket, but the person working in a recently sprayed field.

In the last 10 years, Bucio has learned a lot about strawberry plants, and almost nothing of English. He hasn’t really needed to — in California, the language of farming is Spanish. As the number of overall farms in Monterey County, the area around Salinas, has dropped due to consolidation and development, the number of Latino farmers has increased by 70 percent since the late ‘90s, according to the USDA census.

Bucio would seem like an unlikely candidate for the tangle of regulatory obligation, self-promotion, and epic paperwork that is modern organic farming. But he’s ambitious, and he was lucky enough to get help from Agriculture and Land-Based Training Association (ALBA), a business incubator that works with people — mostly Latino, mostly low-income — to set them up as independent organic farmers. ALBA is funded by the EPA, the USDA, a patchwork of nonprofits and corporations, and through the sale of the produce grown by its members, under the name ALBA Organics. Four out of five students enrolled in ALBA’s free six-month training program make $32,000 or less in yearly income. 

To get into ALBA’s program, Bucio had to fill out a five-page application that asked, in English and Spanish, questions such as “Can you operate a tractor? Can you weld? Can you read and write? What would you plant if you could plant anything?” Classes at ALBA cover not only farming, but how to navigate the business culture around it: How to start up a CSA. How to sell to restaurants. How a certain kind of customer is more likely to buy produce if it’s displayed in little wicker baskets.

“There’s a whole spectrum of knowledge,” says Gary Peterson, deputy director of ALBA. “There’s harvest. Post-harvest handling and packing. When should you harvest that bok choy? In the morning? In the afternoon? If you’re packing a box for the wholesale market, what is it supposed to look like? Is it going to make a person at a market take the box, or just reject it outright?”

During the course, each student has to write a business plan, and present it before a panel of farmers in what Peterson describes as “American Idol for small-time farmers.”

The land that Bucio farms is part of an 110-acre spread that is shared by about 40 ALBA farmers — a parcel bought originally from a local judge for a program that was part of Lyndon Johnson’s War on Poverty, defunded during the Reagan administration, and ultimately taken over by the organization that became ALBA.

Seen from the air, the ALBA parcel looks quirky. Surrounded by a plain of flat, monotonous rectangles, the land is a patchwork of more than 50 crops flanked by hedgerows — a technique that most farmers don’t use anymore, because they take up farming real estate, but which provide habitat for insects that can bo
ost pollination.

Managing an area farmed by novices is complex. It’s a tricky business to keep them from accidentally flooding each others’ land and up to date on the paperwork for the 11-plus different regulatory agencies they need to be in compliance with — including (but not limited to) the water board, the agricultural commissioner, and the California department of food and agriculture.

Paperwork, it’s emphasized, is critical. Not all of the farmers can read and write, in Spanish or English, but paperwork still needs to get done, even if through an intermediary. Once, a farmer who couldn’t produce the paper trail to prove that his stakes weren’t treated with pesticide had to pull them all up. One of the first homework assignments is to go down to the Monterey County office and register as a farmer.

Maria Catalan (right) is one of ALBA’s success stories. She sells at 13 farmers markets.

Ground breaker

Maria Catalan, one of ALBA’s greatest success stories, once started like Bucio, at a few farmers markets. Now Catalan Farms cultivates 14 acres and sells at 13 farmers markets as well as to high-end restaurants in San Francisco.

A few times, Catalan has been invited to dinner at these restaurants. “It’s sometimes very luxurious and it’s free, but at one of the restaurants they gave me a small tortilla — very small. And it had zucchini and it was so small and I thought, ‘This is zucchini?’ In my house, when I make zucchini, I make a huge pot of them,” she tells me, through a translator. “The only thing that I like about the restaurants is the wine.” 

When she crossed the border into the United States 22 years ago, she became a third-generation migrant farmworker — an occupation that began when her grandparents first crossed the border to pick vegetables in Texas.

Catalan has the air of toughness you might expect from someone who once worked for as many as 12 different companies in a single year, cultivating broccoli, spinach, parsley, and anything else that needed cultivating.

Maria Catalan.“When you start working as an immigrant, you become a number instead of a person,” she says. It is an exponentially more difficult job for women, too.

These days, when someone accidentally calls Catalan a farmworker, she corrects them kindly but firmly. A farmworker, in her opinion, is someone who doesn’t have control over their own life. She wants to make it perfectly clear that she is not that person anymore.

The people on her farm, she says, work without supervisors. This management style owes something to her years of being supervised, but it also has more than a little to do with the fact that most of her staff is related to her. The attrition rate at ALBA can be high at times — the training may be free, but farm work doesn’t pay well, and often people who would be taking classes are financially supporting other family members.

Several people in Catalan’s family, including all of her siblings, wanted to become farmers themselves but dropped out before the six months of classes were finished. Catalan had a boyfriend while she was in the program who was helping her with the bills, though he left in a fit of pique after he realized that the classes were making her less inclined to listen to his farming advice.

Catalan’s farming style is a mixture of what she learned at ALBA, and her family’s own folklore and hard-won knowledge about how to make plants grow. She grows varieties of corn that are mostly grown in Mexico. But she also grows kale, which she’d never seen before she came to California. She decides when to plant by following the phases of the moon, because that’s the way that her family has always done it, and because, in her opinion, it makes the crops grow better.

Catalan grows organically because that’s how her grandfather, who once owned a farm in Guerrero, Mexico, grew his peanuts, corn, cotton, beans, chilies, and sesame seeds. Everyone in Mexico did back then.

“Organic,” Catalan says, “That’s our farming. We know how to do that already.”

Loan rangers

It’s been said that 90 percent of being a farmer is figuring out how to get your crops to the people that eat them without going completely broke. Catalan credits her success to working, relentlessly, to get a spot at the Berkeley farmers market. Bucio believes it’s about working hard, but isn’t sure if he’s going to be a success.

ALBA’s funding has increased, and beginning and low-income farmers now have access to a few loans and benefits like conservation incentives that were previously only available only to large farmers. Loans, such as they are, exist in very low amounts. In some ways, this is just as well, says Peterson, as micro-loans prevent beginning farmers from getting into more debt than they can handle.

It’s unlikely that any of these farmers will ever own their own land. For all of our image of farmers as rugged, property-owning American individualists, over 40 percent of American farmland is rented [PDF]. And California has some of the most expensive farmland in the world — the going rate to rent an acre near where Bucio farms ranges from $1,300 to $2,000 for an acre, for a year. Since this is his first year, Bucio is paying $250 per acre, per year, to ALBA. Each year, that rent will increase slightly.

Ana and Eleazar Juarez, who graduated from the program seven years ago, are now paying full rent on the land for their farm — Rio De Parras Organic. They’re counted as one of the program’s successes — Eleazar now farms full-time and Ana, who worked full-time as the stock-room manager at the Salinas Target while she was taking classes at ALBA, now only works at Target during the winters.

Seeding the Salinas Valley with small farmers is another one of ALBA’s eventual goals. Most organic farmers don’t look like Bucio and Catalan, and organic food, rightly or wrongly, is seen as unaffordable by agricultural workers in the valley. Would those workers buy more fruits and vegetables if the farmers looked like them? Could those people who farm on the 110 acres make a good living selling to the people in their own community?

They’d like to. ALBA just carried out a strategic planning process with the farmers that it has been training. Ana Juarez was one of the people at the table. How, ALBA wanted to know, would its success be measured? When you’re training people for one of the hardest, least well-paying gigs in America, what does success look like?

The answer was this. The farmers got together and decided that they would know they were successful when they had enough to give away — to the food bank, to the community. Once they’re able to give back to Salinas, they’ll know that they’ve arrived.