Philip Brasher.

Journalism is necessary to inform the public and maintain our democracy. The agriculture beat was once an important area of coverage at all major outlets, delivering information about rural areas as well as policymaking on food in Washington. But the “agriculture beat” has been dying a slow death for five decades.

As I have written before, this issue area is currently evolving to engage consumers about where their food is coming from. Food-focused stories often go viral on the internet, and even win Pulitzer prizes. Unfortunately, while there is a growing hungry readership for this reporting, editors haven’t all made that connection. Agriculture reporting has often been the first to get the axe during these times of austerity, and most major outlets have yet to dedicate anyone to the consumer-oriented food policy beat.

Reporters covering this newer food beat in some capacity include William Neuman at The New York Times; P.J. Huffstutter and Russ Parsons at the Los Angeles Times; Mary Clare Jalonick at the Associated Press; and Lyndsey Layton at the Washington Post; Charles Abbott at Reuters; and Mark Bittman, on the op-ed pages of The New York Times. In addition, this beat has been covered skillfully online by Tom Philpott at Mother Jones; Barry Estabrook at Politics of the Plate; Helena Bottemiller at Food Safety News; Tom Laskawy at Grist; Sam Fromartz at Chews Wise; among many others — in addition to our talented writers at Civil Eats.

Uniquely, however, Brasher wrote for a Midwestern audience about food policy. It has become increasingly rare for a Midwestern paper to keep an agriculture reporter in Washington, and in fact he was one of the last reporters left reporting solely on national food and agriculture policy for a major media outlet.

Brasher was one of the only reporters who was not working for agriculture industry-sponsored outlets in the room at Senate and House Agriculture Committee hearings, and played a key role in informing the public about these as well as the inner workings of the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration. For the most part, the agriculture industry will now have a free reign over coverage of national food policy issues in the Midwest.

As Thomas Pawlick writes in his book on the death of farm news, The Invisible Farm, “The paucity of resources made available by the major media to cover agriculture and rural affairs, and the ignorance of most journalists regarding rural issues, has rendered the farming and food distribution systems that feed the people of the globe effectively invisible.” This invisibility has allowed corporations to get ever bigger and call the shots in Washington.

Twitter lit up when the news of Brasher’s layoff hit. The timing of the move was called into question by food policy reporters like Maryn McKenna, who tweeted:

Gannett closes Iowa paper’s *entire DC bureau* in advance of Iowa caucuses AND Farm Bill?? That’s a joke, right?

Other users passed on the tweet and attached the hashtag #hirebrasher, hoping to inspire another outlet to benefit from Gannett’s bad decision.

Gannett made the decision to layoff 700 employees, Brasher among them, due to budget cuts. But firing their only national agriculture reporter is a clear sign that food as an area of focus at Gannett is undervalued.

Tom Philpott was among those responding to the news via Twitter. He tweeted: “too bad DM Register is owned by a faceless nat’l corporation w no stake in ag policy, not by people in Iowa.” In a follow-up email, he added, “This decision represents a classic market failure — and a tragic one heading into a farm bill/election year.”

Responding to a request for comment, Laura Hollingsworth, president and publisher of the Des Moines Register, said, “While we made the difficult decision this week to close our Washington, D.C., office, we maintain a 45-year reporting veteran in Des Moines who covers the agricultural issues that affect Iowa and the Midwest. We also are augmenting his coverage with resources from Gannett’s ContentOne team. Fully leveraging our resources in Iowa and Washington allows us to still provide comprehensive political and agricultural coverage for our readers in Des Moines and beyond.”

After about two hours of tweets mentioning the layoff, Philip Brasher broke the silence, also with a tweet: “Saddest part: DM Register opened bureau nearly 80 yrs ago to cover ag policy when Wallace became ag secy.” This was followed by another tweet: “Years with @DMRegister were wonderful. Real pros have lost jobs they loved — and still working their butts off there.”

In a follow-up email, he wrote, “This is a critical time for food and agricultural policy because of the deep budget cuts that are coming and the choices that Congress
is going to have make … about what money there is available. It’s vital that the public understands the impact of those policy choices and the tradeoffs they involve.”

We will have to wait and see if another outlet snaps up Brasher, recognizing the value of a talented food and agriculture journalist. Meanwhile, I fear that without journalists like Brasher to shine a light on food policy, the public will remain critically uninformed and policy decisions will continue to be dominated by industry players in Washington.

A version of this post first appeared on Civil Eats.

Joan Gussow in her garden.Photos: Chelsea GreenFew would argue that Joan Dye Gussow is the mother of the sustainable food movement. For more than 30 years, she’s been writing, teaching (she is emeritus chair of the Teachers College nutrition program at Columbia University), and speaking about our unsustainable food system and how to fix it. (This excellent article by journalist Brian Halweil showcases her work in detail.) Now more than ever, her ideas have wings. Michael Pollan, for example, has said, “Once in a while, when I have an original thought, I look around and realize Joan said it first.”

Gussow lives what she teaches, growing most of her own food year-round in her backyard. The New York Times profiled her last spring as she was rebuilding her garden after it was destroyed by a flood. When I asked her about her newly rebuilt garden, she said, “It’s given me 10 additional years of life, at least!”

I spoke to her recently about how far we’ve come, the future of the food system, and her new book, Growing, Older: A Chronicle of Death, Life, and Vegetables.

Q. You’ve been talking about food, energy, and the environment for decades. Do you have hope we might finally see big change in the food system?

A. I must say that compared to the reception my ideas got 30 years ago, it’s quite astonishing the reception they’re getting now. I am excited to see the kinds of things that are going on in Brooklyn, for example. People are butchering meat and raising chickens — it’s become the sort of “heartland” of the food movement. But whether or not there’s going to be sea change in the whole system is so hard to judge. I am politically very discouraged, because of what happened in the [last] election and what’s happened with our president, whom we elected with such hope. He seems completely unable to get really, really passionate about anything.

Do I have hope? Yes, I have hope because, as Michael Pollan wrote in The Omnivore’s Dilemma, what it means to say that something is “unsustainable” is that it will stop. And we have an unsustainable food supply. I believe the short-sightedness of both national and international leaders and their inability to do anything useful politically is so stunning that we’re going to come to a crisis period much sooner than anyone expects. But what I really believe is hopeful is that there are so many experiments going on on the ground now all over the country, everything from [Growing Power's] Will Allen to what’s going on in Hardwick, Vermont, and the Slow Money movement putting money into agriculture and the food system. There’s going to be models out there when we need them.

Q. What do you think went wrong the first time around with the “Back to the Land” movement? And how can this generation get things right this time?

A. Seeing young people in agriculture is so promising. However, I also know people who’ve hung in there, who are in their 40s or 50s, who have no retirement and no health insurance, and don’t know how long they can continue to farm.

We’re only set up right now for those people to make a living in a situation where there are enough rich people to buy their food at a decent price. I know there are all kinds of groups working to make good food accessible to poor people, but the reality is that you can’t go into a supermarket for the most part and get anything good for someone in that situation to eat. And there is still a class divide, an economic divide between the foodie movement, if you like, and the reality of the world.

In 1980, they had just brought out a report at the USDA that studied organic foods. There was so much hope. There was an alternative energy center in the upper Midwest, and I remember getting a newsletter from them that was dated January 1980, and showed all of the things they were trying, and I wrote at the top, “The End.” Because it was clear that Reagan would just kill it all, and he did. He took the solar panels off the White House roof, he fired the one person at USDA focused on organic agriculture, and he sent us back 20 years. And it was very hard at that point to keep the momentum going because there was no money in it. At least now there is money around the fringes. The thing that is different now is that it’s got publicity, it’s caught the eye of the press — which is of course dangerous, too.

Q. How so?

A. We’re such a faddish country. And of course you’ve noticed there is a real blowback. These attacks on “local” saying how naive it is, how its better to import your lamb from New Zealand. And then you have the corporations gathering together to do a publicity campaign. The last one I saw was that the meat industry is getting together to push back against this notion that this way that we’re raising animals is not healthy.

Q. Do you think this is the last gasp of industry, or do you think they can mobilize that other 80 percent against this growing movement?

[Laughs] Oh they have many more gasps left. I believe that’s the reason that you have to keep hope alive, you have to keep moving along the way you believe in and keep telling the truth and trying to get the word out. Because the reality is that the pressure is on the other side. There’s a lot of money at stake, and they’re not giving up their livelihoods.

Q. How is the field of nutrition different now from when you first started teaching your “nutritional ecology” course?

A. The existence of farmers markets, CSAs, all these things have in a sense forced the profession to move. [But] there’s a huge resistance. I gave the keynote address at Teachers College, in which I talked about giving up nutrients [because] we don’t know enough. Like, what is the ideal mix of fat, carbohydrates, and protein? We don’t even know that. And when it comes to micro-nutrients, we are really up a tree.

The fact of the matter is that we’ve allowed people to be led astray. Michael [Pollan, in In Defense of Food] identified that moment when the FDA said that if a food is essentially equivalent, you didn’t have to call it imitation. Once you could restore the nutrients and say something is nutritionally equivalent, we allowed ourselves to be lulled into thinking that as long as it met nutrient requirements, it was healthy. [Yet] here we have this abundant food supply … and this incredibly unhealthy population. The level of obesity, the level of diabetes — all these things are shocking.

Michael [Pollan]‘s advice in th
at book, which is to get off the Western diet, is really the right advice. And if I had tried to say that 20 years ago, it wouldn’t have been possible. There was no place to go to buy foods that were not so processed, to get meat that was raised right, or many types of fresh fruits and vegetables.

Q. In Growing, Older you write about how “having possibilities” means freedom from despair in the face of climate change, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, soil loss, etc. Could you explain how that works for you?

A. Temperamentally, I’ve never been the sort of person who looks ahead in my life and gloomily assesses the future. Maybe at this point I should be doing that a little bit more. [Laughs.] I have to say that [I have possibilities] because I don’t know what the answers to anything are going to be. Like when my garden was totally destroyed last March, people were sort of astounded that I didn’t fall apart. And I spent the whole summer rebuilding it two feet higher.

If someone had told me that I would look upon what happened [in 2010] as a blessing, I’d have thought they were out of their mind. I am not a religious or superstitious person, but I honestly believe that Mother Nature took care of me in the spring. She looked down and she said, “Joan you’re not getting any younger, this yard is getting worse and worse. It’s getting wetter all the time because the tides are rising. You have access to your land from the north for the first time in 100 years because someone has torn down a house and isn’t going to build until April, and you have the first ever advance that you’ve ever gotten on a book, so you can pay for it.” So, wham. And that’s what it feels like, it feels like I was given this gift. Now I couldn’t have forecast that, I couldn’t have wished for that.

If there’s anything that worries me, really worries me deeply, it’s how we’re going to overcome American and modern peoples’ detachment from the natural world, and how we’re going to get them connected again. Unless we’re connected, we’re never going to be able to save the planet. I mean we can’t isolate ourselves in these boxes that are artificially maintained by energy that we don’t even recognize as maintaining us, and save the planet. We have to be in touch with what the planet is calling out for us to do.

Q. What is it about gardening that inspires you?

A. It provides so many rewards. There is so much beauty out there and there is so much interest out there, and there are so many wonderful plants and animals sharing your life with you out there. Katherine Hodgson Burnett wrote that “to have a garden is to have a future, to have a future is to be alive.” That’s my theme for my old age.

Q. In a chapter called “My Obituary,” you write about how you would like to be remembered. What do you want your legacy to be?

A. I’d love to be remembered as having a sense of humor. I was most pleased when some of my students told me I should go into stand-up environmental comedy. I would like to be remembered as having tried to tell the truth.

Q. I feel like the food movement has difficulty in trying to explain to people that reducing their consumption is actually a net benefit for them, that it’s not about deprivation, but about life improvement.

A. I obviously feel that the life that I live, in which I attempt to consume minimally, and don’t waste things and don’t buy things often, I consider it very life-affirming. I really do believe that people would be so much happier and creative if they had some limitations and if they acknowledged their limitations. What I love about the way I eat, for instance, is that basically I eat what is available. Going to the supermarket to try to figure out what to eat is so deadly to me. It doesn’t feel good at all. What does feel good is that you don’t have to go out and shop, you can make do with what you have.

Q. The common wisdom says that if we don’t buy stuff, the economy will collapse. How do you respond to that?

A. My brilliant young friend Jennifer Wilkins, who writes a monthly column up in Ithaca, was at my house at Thanksgiving and was looking at the paper about Black Friday. And she decided to write about the sudden changeover from these Thanksgiving values, which is the only really non-commercial holiday we have, where you’re not asked to buy cards or go shopping for gifts, you just buy food and you eat.

She wrote about how Black Friday is the opposite: get out there and spend. And when you don’t spend, you aren’t helping the merchants, and the economy doesn’t recover. She also talked about “Buy Nothing” day, and she goes on and says that the answer is not to buy nothing, it’s to invest your money in things that make a difference, and that help grow the things that matter to you, like local food and local merchants, or having a meal with friends. Something that promotes your values, which is sort of the premise of the Slow Food movement. When you put your money down, where is it going to go? What is your money doing out in the world? If we need to keep spending to keep the economy going, we just have to start deciding which economy, which parts of the economy do we want to grow? And if what we want to grow is a sustainable local food system, then we need to put our money where our hearts are.

Jenga Mwendo has lived up to her name -- Jenga means "build" in Swahili. (Photo by Lizzy Cooper-Davis.)

In 2007, searching for a way to rebuild her hurricane-devastated neighborhood in New Orleans, Jenga Mwendo reached for seeds and a shovel and became an urban-agriculture community organizer.

The Lower Ninth Ward was the hardest hit by Hurricane Katrina, with floodwaters surging over the nearby Industrial Canal. Mwendo calls the Lower Ninth a “community of survivors.” Only an estimated 25 percent of residents have returned. As a result, a sort of stand-off has occurred: businesses won’t come until the population increases, but the population won’t increase without even basic amenities. There is currently only one school and not a single produce-stocked grocery store there.

Mwendo, 32, was living in New York City and working in computer animation when Katrina struck in 2005. She moved back to rebuild her house, and then started on the neighborhood. In the past few years, she’s revitalized and built two community gardens, launched the Backyard Gardeners Network, and facilitated the planting of 175 fruit trees for homeowners throughout the Holy Cross historic district in the Lower Ninth. She’s also launched a vegan catering business. I spoke with her recently about her work organizing around community gardening.

Q. Why’d you decided to move back to New Orleans?

A. When Katrina hit, my entire family was dispersed around the country and had lost most of their belongings. The only person who lost her life was my grandmother. And that really hit me hard. I sort of became a network — I kept everybody in touch with everybody else. I did fundraising for my family, collected clothing and supplies. It was just a really chaotic and trying time.

A situation like that could bring anybody to a point where they decide to take a risk. I’d been saying for a while that I wanted to live in a way that is fulfilling to me and that is an example to my daughter. In that way Katrina presented me with an opportunity. So I quit my job and I sold everything and I moved out to New Orleans.

My concrete goal when I moved down was to fix up my house — I had actually bought a house [in the Lower Ninth Ward], which was intended to be investment property in July 2005 [a few months before the storm hit]. I had always wanted to work with my hands. So I decided I was going to fix up my house, and I spent about a year and a half doing that. And during that time, I was looking for ways to be a contribution to my community.

Q. How did you get involved in community gardens?

A. It was really by happenstance. One thing about me, is that I think I can do anything [laughs]. Which is a good thing and a bad thing. So I decided that I was going to single-handedly revitalize my block, and I wanted to start a community garden. But when I called Parkway Partners, which is a local nonprofit that helps people start community gardens, one of the first questions they asked me was, Well, who will be the gardeners? They said they wouldn’t help unless I had a team, because it doesn’t make sense to put a garden somewhere if there’s nobody to take care of it.

So they directed me to a garden that was already in existence, and I said OK, let’s work on revitalizing that. It was a little further from my house, but it was still in the community, so I decided that that would be my focus. And I started organizing folks in the neighborhood. We had an initial meeting where about 15 neighbors came out and we cut down the weeds, which were above my head. We cleared that out and started planting and over the course of a few weeks we formed a garden committee, and met on a regular basis, and just started planning what we wanted for the garden and for our community. That just led to other projects that I started doing around urban agriculture in the Lower Ninth Ward.

Q. What kind of an impact have the community gardens had?

A. Community is my focus; the gardens are a means to build community.

We’ve been planting food from the beginning, but these gardens are too small for the focus to be on food access. I think it’s a good example to show what can be grown. And I think it’s been helpful on a small scale for the community — people come by to cut herbs for their food, or whatever we might be growing, like collards or broccoli right now. It’s definitely not enough to feed the entire community. But the focus is on community building, bringing the community together. Giving people the opportunity to grow together if that’s what they want.

I don’t believe in creating gardens just because, or that gardens take precedent over the needs and will of the people. The gardens should be in service to the community, and should be fully utilized and controlled by the community.

Q. Tell me about the Backyard Gardeners Network.

A. It’s a database of [around 100] people who garden or are interested in gardening [in the Lower Ninth Ward]. The idea was to find ways to link experienced gardeners with inexperienced gardeners and to link gardeners with resources around the city.

Currently, the Backyard Gardener’s Network manages two community gardens. In 2011, I’ll be organizing community organizations and individuals to join the BGN and fully participate in creating multi-use community garden spaces. That will include churches holding functions at the gardens;, youth groups maintaining, growing and harvesting; artists presenting their work, residents hosting birthday parties and other events, gardening workshops taking place at the gardens, and community groups hosting meetings, lunches, conferences, and tours.

Q. What kind of role do you see agriculture playing in the Lower Ninth Ward?

A. What surprised me when I came back was that the more people that I spoke to, especially the elders, the more I realized that [agriculture] was really an integral part of the history of the Lower Ninth Ward. At one point, almost everybody had backyard gardens. People still do. There were fruit trees everywhere. A lot of trees were taken down during Katrina.

Agriculture is going to be a binder, a tool for bringing people together. I see the gardens as opportunities to come together, work together, and do things that are going to be beneficial for our neighborhood. Because so much of our energy and resources go out of the neighborhood, we need to find ways to build social capital, and keep money in the neighborhood, that are made by and for people in the neighborhood. To sort of fortify ourselves as individuals and as a community.

Q. Have you always been interested in food?

A. I have always loved to eat. [laughs]

Q. You’re a raw-food caterer. How did that happen?

A. I’ve also always been interested in health — I grew up vegetarian. Somehow I gravitated and got interested in eating raw. I just can’t describe how ene
rgetic I felt: my sinus problems disappeared, my skin was clear and beautiful, and I felt really calm and positive all the time. I’m not 100 percent raw now, but I do eat mostly raw.

This year I tried to do it as a business, because urban agriculture and community organizing doesn’t pay. [Laughs.] It’s something that I strongly believe in. I like to introduce people to the concept of eating food in the most natural state.

Q. Company drops by unexpectedly around dinnertime. What do you do?

A. Invite them in!

Q. What would you feed them?

A. Well, last night I made spicy basil soy “chicken.” And I made a kale-seaweed salad, that’s really good and a big hit with all my clients. And I made a marinated vegetable wrap with mushrooms, tomatoes, bell pepper, onions, garlic, tarragon, and rosemary wrapped in a kale leaf.

Q. What’s your earliest food memory?

A. I remember sitting on the steps of my house [in the Lower Ninth Ward], I was under five years old, and I was eating a ‘frozen cup’ with my brother. My parents never gave us any candy or sugar. They made this mix of orange juice and grape juice, and would make ‘frozen cups’ by pouring that into cups and putting it into the freezer.

Q. Who do you look to for inspiration?

A. My mother. She has been an ongoing example for me of community service and working toward making the world a better place.

Q. What books do you have on your bedside table?

A. Right now I’m reading a book called Radical Homemakers, which is about taking your life back and making your home life, relationships, and communities the focus — as opposed to making money and putting all of your resources outside your home and outside your community. In other words, bringing it back to what’s really important and what makes life worth living for you.

Even though the University caved under pressure and allowed the scheduled premiere of the film to take place on October 3 and on October 5 on a local television station, the story of Troubled Waters has developed into a debate on academic freedom and the role a university’s donors should play in its research priorities.

Farmers at the center of the solution

Upon watching the film, I was surprised by what I saw. This is because a large portion focuses on farmers introducing new techniques to their fields that are reducing run-off and increasing soil fertility on their land. Instead of “vilifying agriculture,” it seems the filmmakers worked hard to focus on farmer-based solutions — like those of brothers Dick and Jack Gerhardt, who utilized a tool that assesses how much nitrogen is needed in a given field by reading chlorophyll levels. The “GreenSeeker” allows them to apply one-third the amount of nitrogen as in previous years. Because farmers often apply excess nitrogen to ensure yields, much of which ends up as run-off in local waterways (see Tom Philpott’s reporting on this topic), inventions like these have the potential to empower farmers to save money while reducing the environmental consequences of agriculture.

The film also gives a platform to farmers like Jack Hedin, who discusses using cover crops in winter on his vegetable farm to reduce soil erosion and run-off; Tony Thompson, who employs perennial grasses and wetlands that soak up run-off on his 4000-acre soybean and corn farm; and Dan Coughlin, who raises grass-fed cows instead of keeping them in confinement (which produces excess nitrogen-rich manure that often ends up in waterways).

Looking closely at the federal agriculture policies, the film specifically cites those promoting ethanol production as a large contributing factor to the dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico. In particular, the 2007 Renewable Fuels Standard, which mandated that 15 billion gallons of corn ethanol be produced by 2022 — therefore spurring farmers to grow more corn and use more nitrogen fertilizer. (Just yesterday, the EPA raised the amount of ethanol allowed in gasoline from 10 percent to 15, showing there is still strong support for these policies.) The film notes that ethanol remains controversial partly because it is seen as a means to lower dependence on foreign oil, but requires oil to produce the fertilizer that goes into growing the corn needed to make this alternative fuel. One researcher notes that it takes eight gallons of fossil fuel to produce 10 gallons of ethanol. Indeed, the film raises tough questions — many of which are not new to the discussion. So what motivated the university to call out the dogs?

Funding versus research

Not long after the news broke that Troubled Waters was being held up, it came to light that Vice President of University Relations Karen Himle was behind the film’s purgatory. This information was notable because her husband John Himle is president of Himle Horner, a public relations firm that represents the Minnesota Agri-Growth Council, a group that promotes both ethanol production and industrial agriculture practices. More troubling, as El Dragón at Fair Food Fight points out, is the fact that Cargill — which is a key player in ethanol production — has its VP on the University of Minnesota’s board. And that the U of M also has a building on its St. Paul campus named for Cargill. In addition, the university has had funding put at risk by its research before, and so could be trigger-happy. Minnesota Public Radio reports:

In 2008, two Minnesota Soybean groups threatened to pull $1.5 million in funding after the U of M released a study that said using soybeans and other crops for bio-fuels could worsen global warming.

Where research funding originates has become a major issue for deciding what will be researched. Currently, as I’ve written before, matching funds from outside the government are required to get USDA research grants — which allows corporate interests to affect the research taken on. And when USDA has performed ground-breaking research that has the potential to change policy, it has often been played down by those in high places. This influence bought by agribusiness has particularly been a problem at land-grant universities, where a lot of the agricultural research is taking place.

Controversies around agriculture at universities are not new, but it has become more frequent in recent years, as the public becomes more aware of food production methods and industrial agriculture groups feel threatened by the pressure to change. Just last fall Michael Pollan was scheduled to give a solo lecture at California Polytechnic State University in San Luis Obispo when Harris Ranch Beef Company Chairman David E. Wood threatened
to cut off $500,000 in funding to the university if he was allowed to do so. In response, the university changed its program to a panel discussion, which included industrial agriculture-friendly professor Gary Smith of Colorado State University and large-scale organic farmer Myra Goodman of Earthbound Farm. Pollan’s book The Omnivore’s Dilemma was also the source of ire for industrial agriculture proponents when it was selected as “common reading” last summer for incoming freshmen at Washington State University.

All of this added controversy is doing one thing that cannot be denied: bringing more attention to the issues at hand by driving interest in reading the books and seeing the films at the eye of the storm. As for Troubled Waters, I highly recommend you take the opportunity to see it for yourself. It is unique in that it puts a face on the farmers at the heart of the discussion, gives a broader picture of the issues at hand, and outlines options — including one community’s thriving alternative to ethanol — for building a more sustainable food system.

The film can be purchased from The Bell Museum. Watch the intro here:

Basket case: Annie Novak prepares to harvest some of Eagle Street Farm’s bounty.Photo: Yann Mabille

In our New Agtivist interviews, we talk to people who are working to change this country’s f’ed-up food system in inspiring ways. For the next few weeks, as part of the Feeding the City series, we’ll be focusing on urban agtivists.

Urban farmer Annie Novak is on a mission to inspire New Yorkers to grow, cook, and eat good food — and to nurture the relationships that make it all possible.

Born in Chicago, she is the oldest daughter of an artist mother and a father who worked for the Chicago Board of Trade, where he dealt with corn and soybean futures in the marketplace. After college, farming became central for Novak, 27, who is now a passionate advocate for sustainable practices. She helped start Eagle Street Rooftop Farm in Brooklyn, New York — a test farm utilizing green roofing materials for growing vegetables. In its second growing season, the farm has become a center of community, with a weekly market, a popular volunteer program, and farm talks on subjects like composting, artisanal food businesses, and chicken-raising. It has also already inspired similar projects. (See Grist’s previous coverage.)

Somehow, Novak finds time to run an education program she also cofounded, called Growing Chefs and work as the Children’s Gardening Program Coordinator at the New York Botanical Gardens. She participates in triathlons, and can be seen zipping around town on a bike that she built herself.

I spoke with her recently about her passions for growing food in the city and community organizing.

Q. Have you sown seeds in all five boroughs?

A. Almost. I’ve composted in Staten Island, but I haven’t planted anything there yet.

Q. How did you first get into farming?

A. When I was an undergraduate in New York, I went to Ghana. I was working [with chocolate farmers there], and I realized that I had no idea how chocolate grew, and that many of the cacao farmers had never had chocolate bars. That disconnect made me realize how far apart we are from our food.

Right when I graduated college, my father passed away. Everyone in my family — we’re all women — was faced with this moment of truth about our own choices moving forward and how we were going to provide for ourselves. Shortly thereafter, I started at the New York Botanical Gardens working in the children’s education department, teaching kids how to grow food. I decided that [USDA Plant Hardiness] Zone Six was the best growing climate, because you can grow tomatoes and kale. So after I’d finished the summer season, I moved upstate to begin farming in a series of apprenticeships. In the winter, I would choose crops that I was interested in and then go to the country I thought grew them best, to meet farmers at the market and negotiate a work exchange.

Q. What led you to farm in the city?

A. A big reason I like to grow food is to share it. Also, I like the idea that New Yorkers are so well-educated on one side of the spectrum of food. But, like when I was studying chocolate, and I would go on and on about the taste, and the cacao farmer would say to me “No, this is a treat,” I feel like it’s sort of my role here to say “Pay attention, this is a carrot.” Meaning all food, as a plant or organism, has its own history and ecological importance besides being delicious.

Q. How did Eagle Street Rooftop Farm get started?

A. The farm was the brainstorming product of Goode Green, a green-roof installation company here in New York, and Broadway Stages, a production company and the building owner. I came on board as a farmer. In New York City, we have many issues with storm water runoff, and Broadway Stages has access to many warehouses with flat roofs as well as a history of community support and involvement, so it was this perfect trial space to put up a green-roof vegetable farm.

‘Can the city feed itself? Maybe, but do you want the city to feed itself? I don’t think so. Having the consumer protection of upstate land is one of the most important things the city can do for the state.’

Q. Are there unique challenges to growing on a rooftop?

A. In a very literal sense, it’s unique because it’s on a roof and the layer of growing medium is very shallow. But you can actually still grow a lot of plants. For me, what was so interesting is that this is a really great way to connect with people directly about where their food comes from. Although it’s a lot less land than I’ve ever worked on, it’s certainly more involved than any other place I’ve farmed.

Q. You’ve said that you see the farming you’re doing in the city as directly supporting the farmers in upstate New York. How so?

A. In just one example, I run a Community Supported Agriculture program that only offers half-shares. One of my members told me that they belong to another CSA that’s based upstate. That’s exactly what I wanted. The quality of our air and water is protected by upstate organic growers. Can the city feed itself? Maybe, but do you want the city to feed itself? I don’t think so. Having the consumer protection of upstate land is one of the most important things the city can do for the state.

Q. What advice do you have for someone thinking of a career in farming?

I spoke with the editor of The CAFO Reader, Daniel Imhoff, who is also the cofounder, director, and publisher of Watershed Media, about recent legislation and the future of the CAFO.

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Q. Our last interview was before Obama was elected. How do you feel now that the USDA has the “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” program and we have a Secretary of Agriculture who’s actually discussing making changes in agriculture?

A. You can’t help but be thrilled about the discourse that is going on right now. You have the FDA coming out with guidelines saying is that we need to limit the use of antibiotics in animal food production only to medical need. Then you have the USDA issuing new nutritional guidelines that basically say we need to eat a lot less saturated fat, AKA animal products, and a lot more vegetables, nuts, and whole grains. Then you have the Department of Justice, the attorney general, and the USDA jointly looking into concentration within the agricultural industry. I think what it really shows is that these people understand their jobs and are not afraid to do them. We might be getting towards an age of clarity and urgency. You can’t help but look at the oil spill, and say there is an exact metaphor with the industrial food system — it’s uncontainable, and it’s unsustainable, and it’s inevitable that we have to get somewhere else. And that something else is pretty much the exact opposite of what we have right now.

Q. If CAFOs were called “factories” instead of being called farms, would they be regulated differently?

A. If the CAFO is legally considered a farm, or an agricultural enterprise, rather than an industry, then it is exempt from regulation of its airborne and land-borne waste. The industry has been fighting for many years to retain this agricultural status. Agriculture developed as this interaction between the appropriate number of animals creating fertility for a diverse number of crops. It was a whole closed production system. With this intensive concentration of animals it’s rare when the surrounding land can absorb the waste.

Q. What effect do you think a change in our policies around antibiotic use in livestock would have on the way the industry operates?

A. It cuts right to the issue of scale. If you take away the antibiotics, then you can’t cram so many animals in such unhealthy conditions with an unnatural diet. And so you suddenly have to reduce the concentration and intensification of agriculture.

Q. How does agricultural concentration affect farmers and consumers?

A. These companies want us to think that they are Smithfield “Farm,” and that they are taking care of their pigs. But they control the breeding facilities and production, they own feed mills and slaughterhouses. They are producing huge amounts of meat, and so the price stays low, but you either play their game or you have to make your own alternative industry from start to finish. At one of the Department of Justice workshops, a chicken farmer was saying that a bucket of fried chicken in his area costs $26.95, and he gets $0.30 for growing the chickens that went into the bucket. And in the meantime the CEOs of Purdue, Tyson, and KFC are making millions.

Q. Farmers often feel attacked when criticism is laid on the industry. Do you have any ideas for how to remedy this?

Cross-posted from Civil Eats.

Around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce, process, distribute, and consume the food we eat according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Meanwhile, farmers the world over will be the most affected by climate change, as higher carbon in the atmosphere and higher temperatures increase erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease occurrence, while decreasing water availability, disrupting relationships with pollinators and lowering yield and the efficacy of herbicides like glyphosate (aka Round-Up) — all detailed in a revealing new report from the USDA called The Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems [pdf].

We should all give the USDA credit for keeping the ties between agriculture, food, and climate change at the forefront of the discussion. Even in Copenhagen, where agriculture is getting less attention than it arguably should be considering its impact and potential for mitigating climate change, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke about the need for research, and seeing agriculture as an opportunity for climate change mitigation. He even said to the delegates in Copenhagen, “We need to develop cropping and livestock systems that are resilient to climate change.” While I agree on the surface with these statements, taking a deeper look reveals potentially problematic ideas for just how to do this.

Outlined in Vilsack’s prepared remarks are a few clues for how the U.S. is looking at adapting agriculture in the face of climate change. I find it valuable to do a little point-by-point debunking here, so we can look at the facts again, laid out so clearly in the USDA report above, and come up with real solutions. And since the U.S. is responsible for the most greenhouse gases, and we were the first to adopt intensive agriculture practices, we have an opportunity to lead the world to a more sustainable future.

No-Till. Here is a classic case of agribusiness co-opting a perfectly good solution and making it bad (and then whispering it into the USDA’s ear). Sustainable no-till practices involve building soil fertility with cover crops, which sequester carbon, and then turning them into a healthy mulch. No chemicals are used, and soil fertility increases. This practice is being studied at places like the Rodale Institute. The co-opted version, on the other hand, which I’ll refer to as chemical no-till, is the one touted by Monsanto with it’s Round-Up Ready seeds, which can be planted and doused with glyphosate — killing the weeds and not the soybeans. Aside from the fact that superweeds are more and more common as pesticides increase in use, the life in the soil is also being killed by these chemicals. What this means is that the earthworms, protozoa, ants and other decomposers that are actively ’tilling’ the soil are not there to do so. Furthermore, bacteria in the soil, like rhizobia, actively fix nitrogen. Without nitrogen-fixing soil life to intervene, a putrefaction process called denitrification results in lost soil fertility, as nitrogen is released as nitrous oxide into the atmosphere. What is totally not funny about nitrous oxide is the fact that it is 298 times more potent than carbon dioxide. Do you get where I’m going with this? Nitrous oxide may only represent 7.9 percent of our greenhouse gas emissions in total, but it is one powerful source, coming directly from synthetic agriculture fields.

Carbon Markets. Sure it sounds good to offer cash benefits to farmers who use more sustainable farming practices. But what would this look like? Would it encourage farmers to utilize fewer fossil fuels, or to transition to organic farming? A lot of Big Ag players would kick up dust if that were the case, even though these are truly the ways to draw down our agricultural footprint. Unfortunately there are some ugly manipulations of carbon markets to watch out for. And according to a report by Helena Paul et al and prepared for the Bonn Climate talks last June called Agriculture and Climate Change: Real Problems, False Solutions [pdf], getting this wrong could mean exacerbating global warming instead of preventing it. Paul told the Ecologist about a few worries: First, that chemical no-till might be one of the so-called “sustainable” practices that qualify. Second, that stipulating the use of biochar, or charcoal, as a soil remediation technique, could result in plantations as sources for the biomass, adding incentive to cut down forests. Thirdly, she mentions that some Big Ag players argue for further intensification of livestock operations, making the case for using manure to make biogas. We can’t afford such paltry solutions.

Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). If Monsanto had its way, our government would be paying farmers to grow GMOs. However, GMO manufacturers have been promising “sustainable” drought tolerant and higher yielding crops for decades now with no results. All these companies have figured out how to do in the short-term is to create herbicide resistant plants and plants that make pesticides. Meanwhile, these technologies have brought with them a whole host of new problems for the environment: genetic contamination; the addition of 318 million pounds of chemicals into our soils, water, and air; and a significant loss of biodiversity. There are agro-ecological solutions that could be employed now to build our soils and sequester carbon — because this is a new technology that hasn’t been tested in the long term, and we need solutions now, it is worth rethinking the billions spent on GMOs for twenty years from now.

Ethanol. Vilsack and President Obama talk about ethanol as if it had the potential to quench our thirst for oil. What you need to know is this: ethanol takes more energy to make than it produces. However, a cottage industry has emerged to get politicians to support ethanol — the growth in use of which helped fan the flames of last year’s food crisis. Unfortunately ethanol offers a talking point, and fulfills our desire to give a quick, silver bullet solution to a difficult problem: how to maintain our standard of living in the coming resource-starved era.

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) has said that we will need to double world food production by 2030 in order to feed 9 billion people. I often see this statistic: 14 percent of greenhouse gas emissions come from agriculture, while 17 percent come from deforestation, used by agribusiness to justify industrial farming as saving rain forests. In fact, it is the commodity market that encourages deforestation through increasing the size of farms and through over-production. Most of what is produced in this way is wasted or fed to factory-farmed animals. Since smaller, diverse, and well-managed fields are more productive, we do not need to cut down the forest in order to feed a growing population sustainable food. Indeed, there will have to be more farmers willing to do the work, eaters willing to eat less meat, and better policies that support farmers before agribusiness. And I agree with Vilsack, we need more research. We also need to nurture soil life, as that is where the real heavy lifting is happening in agriculture.

Here in New York City, we are hopeful that we can change the climate impact food has in our city. But without federal, agricultural solutions to these problems, we will all continue dog-paddling through the flotsam and jetsam of unhealthy, resource-intensive, climate damaging food-like substances.

Vilsack had this to say in his kick-off speech:

The opportunity to truly transform a field of science happens at best once a generation. Right now, I am convinced, is USDA’s opportunity to work with the Congress, the other science agencies, and with our partners in industry, academia, and the nonprofit sector, to bring about transformative change.

It is hard to reject the idea that our country needs more research on agriculture — specifically, more science-based knowledge from which to make political and regulatory decisions around food. But as his speech continued, Vilsack placed the focus on technology as our aegis. And while technology is not a bad thing, there are still many questions left unanswered that USDA could and should be focusing on — questions that the agribusiness lobby quite possibly doesn’t want answered, as the outcomes could force the public and our politicians to take a harder look at just what it means to build a truly sustainable food system.

NIFA will be headed by a controversial choice, Roger Beachy — formerly of the Danforth Plant Science Center in St. Louis, Mo., which receives funding from Monsanto, and was part of the lobbying effort to create NIFA in the mold of the National Science Foundation. Beachy joins a team that already includes Rajiv Shah, formerly of the Gates Foundation. The re-branding of CSREES worries sustainable food advocates who fear U.S. research priorities could shift with the private sector’s coaxing further towards a more biotechnology-oriented focus in an attempt to end world hunger, even though more viable solutions to hunger — a problem of distribution and not yield — exist on the ground that are both cost-effective and ready to implement now in the developing world.

The government’s job is to to give unbiased science center stage, so that we can assess and make informed decisions about agriculture moving forward — decisions that are in our collective interest as a nation, not just in the interest of one sector of our economy. To begin, the USDA must extend 100 percent funding to formula grants at land grant universities again, thereby replacing the current practice of “matching funds” [PDF] — requiring these institutions to find a matching donor for between 50 percent to 100 percent of the grant from outside of the government — which usually ends up being a private industry source. And what might the industry be interested in funding? Shareholders hope they will support things that have the potential to increase the bottom line, instead of research that investigates the way our food system is affecting us, which could detract from it. This is how the industry has controlled the types of research being conducted since matching funds were instituted in 1999 (as an amendment to the National Agricultural Research, Extension, and Teaching Policy Act of 1977).

Vilsack also stated in his speech that in creating NIFA, “we will be rebuilding our competitive grants program from the ground up to generate real results for the American people.” In thinking about how to better focus the government’s efforts on agricultural research in order to truly benefit the American people, I thought I’d reach out to some key thinkers on agriculture, and find out what they would like the USDA’s new research body, NIFA, should be focusing on. Here were their answers:

Biologically focused organic agriculture — which uses neither chemical fertilizer, pesticides, nor GMO crops — provides broad ecological services while it sequesters carbon to fight global warming. We need research that documents the greenhouse-gas mitigation aspects of organics, conducted at the whole-farm level to capture the cascading biodiversity benefits of organic systems. This work should be focused on the three most appropriate, farmer-identified organic techniques per bioregion in the 10 most agriculturally significant areas of the U.S. Tied to this multi-disciplinary, 10-year study should be data collection on soil water-holding ability, biological diversity, and productive capacity, in order to qualify and quantify the corollary benefits that come with increases in soil organic matter.
Tim LaSalle, CEO, Rodale Institute

Since I just spent more time than I care to think about sitting through hearings on the proposed Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement, I think I would say that USDA should be focusing its research more on scale appropriate food safety programs — and exploring what we really know about risks posed by wildlife, the use of vegetated buffers, and other practices that some private food safety programs have targeted.  It seems like USDA could serve a useful role in finding ways for diversified, organic, and small farms to prove that their methods can coexist with food safety requirements.
Patty Lovera, assistant director, Food & Water Watch

We need to be studying how best to protect agriculture from the effects of climate changes, which is to say, how can we make farming more resilient? — which is further to say, how can we successfully diversify our monocultures?
Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food and The Omnivore’s Dilemma

There are both areas of research that USDA is neglecting as well as a lack of investment in research examining agricultural systems and practices that are critical to addressing the research challenges that Secretary Vilsack outlined in his speech at the NIFA event on Thursday.  On the former, areas of research that USDA is neglecting include long-term agroecosystem trials; the characteristics, barriers, and opportunities for the growth and development of local and regional food systems; public plant and animal breeding (all the non-biotech plant and animal research); organic agriculture; the sustainability of biofuel and bioenergy production; and rural development, just to name a few. While several of these have dedicated funding streams, they pale in comparison to other research programs and the overall research budget at USDA.

On the latter, the Administration on Thursday defined a surprisingly narrow approach to addressing the challenges to overcome with the help of agricultural research. Vilsack laid out significant challenges — including ensuring global food security through productive and sustainable agricultural systems, mitigating and adapting to climate change, and improving public health and reducing childhood obesity — and NIFA is structured into separate institutes around these challenges and others. But the tools that Vilsack, Research Undersecretary Shah, and NIFA Director Beachy identified as key to solving these problems were extremely limited to biotechnology, nanotechnology, and computer simulations. Without investing in the development of technologies and practices of sustainable and organic agricultural systems, USDA’s research agenda will fall far short of meeting its objectives and will continue to support an agricultural system that contributes to — rather than mitigating — these challenges.
Ariane Lotti, who focuses on Agriculture Research Policy at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition

Organic and sustainable — systems agriculture is still woefully underfunded and misunderstood. Likewise, research and education directed towards regional food-system integration is still only getting a trickle of support. Good programs and projects do exist within the agency, but they are still marginal in the scheme of things. These commitments and investments by the research agencies have to be much more significant if alternative systems themselves are going to be scaled upward and outward.

The essential problem of the conventional wisdom is that ecosystem health and community/regional food systems are considered to be lifestyle amenities, not core requirements for sustainability and survival.
Mark Lipson, policy program director at the Organic Farming Research Foundation

I would like to see more research on the reasons for the general decline in nutrient levels in conventional foods, including the decline in protein levels in conventional corn and soybeans.

I would like to see more research done on the factors triggering proliferation in a cow’s GI tract of E. coli 0157, as well as one management practices like grazing known to reduce the risk of this bacterium reaching dangerous levels.

I would like to see research on how to design the most energy-efficient and soil-building cropping systems in the Midwest involving (1) a traditional corn-soybean rotation, (2) C-S-small grains rotations, (3) C-S-Small grains-Alfalfa-Alfalfa rotations. The goal would be producing maximum animal feed energy and food value for minimal fertilizer and pesticide input.  I would like to see the same work done with the goal of maximizing soil carbon sequestration.  Then, a comparison of the two sets of experimental results, and the management practices and strategies deemed most effective in achieving these two goals, would be both fascinating and valuable in crafting the farming systems of the future.
Charles Benbrook, PhD, chief scientist at The Organic Center

A few research priorities from my perspective: the conversion to perennial agriculture; replacement sources for nitrogen fertilizers; detailed continent-wide soils and climate mapping to determine priority areas for cultivated crops versus grazing areas; productive yet resilient breeds of animals beside the Cornish Cross, White Leghorn, Holstein, Hyper Lean Pig, and Angus and Hereford beef cattle — with regional emphasis immediately; and a detailed carbon analysis of pasture-raised versus grain fed livestock.
Dan Imhoff, president of the Wild Farm Alliance and author of Food Fight: The Citizen’s Guide to a Food and Farm Bill

The need for independent research at all levels has never been greater. We are living through the failures of much of the corporate dominated research agenda — whether on biotechnology, expanded production or the repercussions of a free trade model — when in fact having research that addresses the underlying causes of the food crisis would be truly beneficial here in the U.S. and around the world. Here in the U.S., our taxpayer funds should not be subsidizing more of the same; but building on the succesful on the ground models — whether focussed on reasons for reserve policies, community food approaches or on the ground conservation and sustainable agricultural practices. The recent results of the IASTAAD report should be reviewed and implemented by our USDA — not ignored.
Kathy Ozer, policy director, National Family Farm Coalition