Michael Pollan, Author, CA (CORRECTION)

NOTE: On a whim, I decided to e-mail the blog post below to Michael Pollan, and it is a good thing that I did. His assistant replied to me and told me that he does not live in Connecticut and California. He lives only in California. I replied to her and told her that she should have the people over at the Food Declaration correct Pollan’s entry on the endorsements page. Please note that I would like my critique of the movement, especially its “leadership” to stand. The Michael Pollan thing was just a spring board for the critique. What I should do is rewrite it using Alice Waters’ recent comment in response to the high prices of sustainably produced food that basically, and I am paraphrasing here, poor people should stop complaining and just give up their “third pair of Nikes” and their IPods if they want to eat sustainably produced food.

This morning I was introduced to the Food Declaration by one of the blogs I was reading. I am subscribed to a pretty extensive list of blogs, and the link to the Food Declaration opened in another window, which I didn’t look at until I was finished reading the blogs, so I don’t know which blog referred me to it. Sorry.

Anyway, as I was looking over the list of people who have endorsed the Food Declaration, I came across this entry: “Michael Pollan, Author, CT/CA.” For those of you who do not know, Michael Pollan is an author and professor of journalism. His most famous book to date is The Omnivore’s Dilemma, an excellent book that everybody should read. Pollan is not only an endorser of the declaration; he is one of the thirteen “original framers” of the declaration.

I do not doubt Michael Pollan’s commitment to the principles of the declaration. Nor do I seek to undermine the value of his extremely important, timely, and necessary contributions to the ongoing conversation about our farming and food systems. However, what I would like to point out is the degree to which there is for the movement a potentially deadly blind spot on the part of many of its “leaders” and adherents, and that blind spot appears in stark relief at the end of Pollan’s endorsement entry: “Michael Pollan, Author, CT/CA.” That is Connecticut and California. Michael Pollan lives in Connecticut and California, two states separated by 3,000 miles.

How can it be possible for a movement for just, humane, and ecological farming and food systems to be successful if some of its most visible advocates are mired in a culture in which it is not just acceptable, but ordinary to “live” in two places, separated by a distance of 3,000 miles? This is a culture that cannot see through its blind spot to the reality of the ways in which such behavior in fact makes the acquisition of the goals of the movement impossible. The social, political, economic, and ecological relations that underpin such a thing are relations that militate against the success of the movement. Such a thing requires social inequality. Such a thing requires political inequality. Such a thing requires economic inequality. Such a thing requires the subjugation of ecology.

The blind spot, then, is the ways in which the question of farming and food systems cannot be disentangled from the infinity of our social, political, economic, and ecological relations. It is impossible to change our farming and food systems to bring them in line with the principles of the declaration without at the same time recognizing the infinite interconnections between those systems and the total horizon of our individual and collective experiences.

If it is possible, not just possible, but more or less ordinary, for a person to live in Connecticut and California, then it can only be ordinary for a pepper to be grown in California and sold in Connecticut; it can only be ordinary for urban slums to be devoid of fresh produce; it can only be ordinary for inequality in our schools; it can only be ordinary to have huge numbers of poor people and tiny numbers of rich people; it can only be ordinary for the continued rampant mining of the planet’s resources; it can only be ordinary that we have nothing but lip-service masquerading as a movement.

Michael Pollan and the rest of us must choose between paying lip service and making change.

 

A Trail of Feathers

Yesterday when I went to feed and water the animals at noon, I discovered two piles of feathers right up against the bottom of the outside of the poultry netting, and a distinct trail of them leading into the hedgerow. At first, I thought two chickens had been killed, but when I counted them, only one was missing. I think there are two piles because during the chase, the chicken, which either had escaped from the poultry netting sometime in the morning after I opened the coop or had been making an effort to reenter the poultry netting after spending the night in the hedgerow, ran into the poultry netting as it attempted to get away from whatever was chasing it, which of course just made it easier for the predator to pin the chicken down. However, I think the chicken escaped from that initial pin, leaving behind a pile of feathers. The second time the chicken ran headlong into the netting, however, the predator was able to get a good hold of the chicken and the chase was over. The predator picked the chicken up in its mouth, turned, and carried it into the hedgerow.

Curious, I followed the trail of feathers into the hedgerow. At first, the trail was very distinct, with lots of feathers littering the ground. But, after a while, the feathers started to get more sparse. Perhaps at first the chicken was still struggling, or the many feathers that were loosened in the struggle were the ones that were falling off. Once inside the hedgerow, two things were clear, the predator was small and it was traveling along a well-worn path down the middle of the hedgerow. It was clear that the animal was small because the path was only about six inches wide and the brambly branches grew together above the path only about a foot high. As I moved forward, crouched down, along the path, I had to pull the branches apart in order to keep moving. Initially, I had assumed it was a coyote, but once on the path, I realized it was something smaller. Another reason I realized it was something small is that in spite of the fact that there was some pretty soft exposed dirt along the path, I never saw one really distinct foot print. There were a few scuff marks and I thought a few times I could see the indentation of a few claws, but not once could I make out a clear foot print. For some reason, I never thought of a fox, which is what Jen suggested when I told her about it last night. It was almost certainly a fox.

Without thinking about it, I assumed that the predator would run with the chicken into the hedgerow and quickly eat it. Instead, it ran with the chicken in the hedgerow and went all the way down the hedgerow, quickly across the farm road at its end, and into the woods. I was able to follow the trail for about 150 feet into the woods before losing it. The last bit of the trail that I saw were three small brown and white feathers a couple of feet from the base of a tree. I looked up into the tree, but there were no nests or anything, and I figured that if the critter had climbed the tree with the chicken and eaten it up there, the base of the tree would be littered with feathers. No, I realized that all that had happened was that the distance between the last pile of feathers that I had found and the next was too great for me to follow, or that the next feather or feathers were simply too hard for me to find amongst the shadows and light colored leaf litter. I walked a half circle about ten feet out from the feathers, scanning in all directions, but couldn’t pick the trail back up, so I gave up and went back to feed the animals. All in all, I followed the trail about eight hundred feet. There is no telling how far the animal carried the chicken before getting wherever it was going.

That makes two laying hens lost to predators, which considering that the chickens are living in a field surrounded by woods on three sides at the base of a big hill about a quarter of a mile from the nearest human presence, isn’t that bad. I refuse to kill predators (although I kill pigeons in the barn and mice in my house — go figure my inconsistencies and contradictions!). It is my responsibility to come up with or adjust the management of my animals in ways that don’t encourage, or actively discourage, predation, without resorting to killing or harming the predators. I suppose the reason I don’t kill predators is not so much that I think it is cruel, after all, I kill the animals that I carefully raise for months and months. The reason is that predators, of which there are relatively few, population-wise, serve an important ecological function, and I am committed to ecological farming. If I kill all of the predators, then the ecological balance of the local ecosystem within which I am farming gets thrown all out of whack and I end up with all sorts of other pests that do things like eat all of my corn. Take deer for example. We have such a deer problem because the wolves were killed off years and years ago. Coyotes, of which we have plenty, will kill fawns of course, but they only kill adult deer occasionally. A coyote is much happier to kill smaller mammals. So, on the land I farm, predators are welcome, sort of.

One thing I did find in the hedgerow were a lot of the eggs I have been missing. Here was a pile. There was a pile. There was one egg. There was another. Damn chickens! So far, setting up the poultry netting around the coop that provides the the chickens with a small grassy paddock to run around in during the morning, which I leave closed until the noon feeding, has solved the egg problem. I am now getting about forty three eggs a day from fifty, now forty-nine chickens, minus one super broody hen that is driving me nuts. That is up from twenty four eggs when they were laying in the hedgerow.

 

Dung Beetle!

Over the last few billion years, nature has worked itself out into a pretty neat and stable system. There is of course much havoc and mayhem as extreme weather rages, and life can be pretty nasty due to predators, disease, and injury. For the most part, however, everywhere in nature there are mechanisms in place to maintain balance and order, unless of course, nature’s most indomitable creature, man, is part of the equation. Many natural creatures destroy their habitat, especially large ones like elephants. However, every single one of those creatures moves on after having done so, and slowly, nature rebuilds, often with a different character, what the creatures destroyed. Man, however, having decided somewhere along the way that the only force of nature that it is subject to is the weather, lingers, ensuring that the damage done remains. However, in spite of humanity’s hubris, this lingering is but a blink of an eye, and when we are gone, nature will return in spite of our best efforts to dominate it.

One critter that is essential to the ecological balance of fields and woods is the dung beetle. Anyone who has seen nature shows on television is probably aware of the giant dung beetles of Africa that roll great balls of elephant dung along the rich red African soil before burying it in a choice spot. What most people don’t know is that dung beetles are everywhere in the world that there is not permafrost. Well, they were everywhere, anyway. Where they are no longer, or where they are in exceedingly short supply, is in the fields where we graze our livestock, exactly where we need them the most. In the two thirds of a century since the end of World War II, after which we turned the chemicals we used to brutally and viciously kill each other on nature in the pursuit of profit for a few large corporations, our shortsighted use of toxic chemicals, from natural gas based nitrogen-rich fertilizers to herbicides and insecticides, to strong synthetic chemicals used to manage intestinal parasites in livestock we have poisoned the dung beetle practically to oblivion, and in so doing, have lost perhaps the most important actor in maintaining the ecological balance of our fields.

The dung beetle is nature’s solid waste management system. The dung beetle roams about the countryside (not really) looking for tasty morsels of dung, and when it finds some, it carves out a small ball, which it then rolls along the ground before burying it. The buried ball serves as food for itself and the next generation of dung beetles. The activity of the dung beetle serves the essential ecological purpose of ridding waste. As the dung is removed from the surface of the field, a number of things happen. First, the nutrients contained in the dung are deconcentrated and distributed as the balls are buried about the field. Second, as the balls are buried, the dung is incorporated into the biologically active soil humus where the dung is rapidly broken down. Third, as the dung is carried off, so too is the breeding ground and nursery for pathogenic bacteria, intestinal parasites, and flies.

In the four years that we have lived here, I have scanned the surface of the soil and looked carefully over the great rotting piles of shit, hoping to see some sign of a dung beetle. For four years, I have been disappointed. Yesterday, I finally saw one. It was, however, not in one of the fields on the home farm. It was across the street on my neighbor’s land near the pig field. As long as my wife has horses on the home farm I will see no dung beetles there. Horse people use synthetic chemical dewormers with reckless abandon, and the residues that are passed through the horse in its dung kill and/or discourage the beetles. No, this lone dung beetle, three quarters of an inch long, that was meandering along the border between field and farm road, was on land that hadn’t had any chemicals directly sprayed on it in ten years and hadn’t had any chemicals indirectly applied to it for two years, since I started composting all of our and my neighbor’s horse manure (the composting process is hot and long enough that it breaks down the chemical residues from the de-wormers).

That lone dung beetle was a sign of hope that if we stop killing them the neat and stable system of nature will repair itself and the dung beetle will return to do its essential work, which will enable us to farm in partnership with nature instead of in opposition to it. The fertility of our fields will increase. The number of flies will decrease. The prevalence of dangerous intestinal parasite infestations will go down.

Welcome back, dung beetle. I was so happy to see you!