I kicked off the conference by participating in a "Young Farmers Mixer," followed by a lively performance from the band Hoots and Hellmouth, a foot-stompin' favorite of mine. The next morning the conference officially started with opening remarks from some key players in the sustainable agriculture movement.
Roger Johnson, the Farmer's Union National President, discussed the legislative challenges and successes for family farmers. His driving point is: "The economy is created for the people-- not the other way around."
PASA President Kim Sealy discussed the evolution of the organization's role in a world that is gradually embracing the values of sustainable food systems: "In the beginning, we were the extremists-- naive earthy folks who don't believe in progress." He says, "Ag is only sustainable when it connects with a healthy culture," and now we must ask the question, "Which foods will promote health and which will undermine our culture?"
Brian Snyder, PASA Executive Director, offered some statistics about the conference: More than 2,000 attendees representing more than 30,000 acres and 30 states. This includes 80 young farmers who received scholarships to attend the conference (and I am one of those grateful recipients-- Thank you PASA!) Snyder's take-home quote is simple: "Nature cannot be fooled."
Wes Jackson delivered the keynote address, which criticized our overuse of resources. He illustrated the excessive energy consumption within the timeline of a person around my age: "The 22-year-old has lived through 54% of all the oil ever burned. Average soil has changed from 6% carbon to 3%." He cites Jevons Paradox, which was posed in 1865 and states that as technology becomes more efficient, resource consumption increases. Jackson argues that it is time to move backwards towards a less energy intensive world, that we should follow the poetic words of T.S. Eliot in our approach to sustainability:"The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
And then the workshops began! The first and best workshop I attended all weekend was called "Dig This! Farm & Garden Tools that Work for Women & Why Fit Matters." This workshop was hosted by a company called Green Heron Tools, which was founded with the objective of designing farm and gardening tools that would be advantageous to women. Many people neither recognize the profound difference in the biomechanics of farming for women as compared with men, nor do they realize that that most farm equipment is modeled for a male body. Our speaker relayed an anecdote in which she pointed out to someone that "Women shovel differently than men," and his response was, "Well, why don't you teach them to shovel right?" As women, we simply have different bodies than men and the reality is that the "right" technique for a man may be the wrong technique for a woman.
The proportions of a woman's body have several relevant distinctions. Compared with men, we have wider hips, narrower shoulders, shorter arms, shorter legs, more adipose tissue, greater flexibility, lower center of gravity and smaller grips. Women are more vulnerable to musculoskeletal disorders than men and farming is the #1 occupation associated with musculoskeletal injuries among women, and is attributed to the 2nd highest severity of disability among women (according to the CDC). For all genders, musculoskeletal disabilities are "near epidemic" in agriculture and are taken for granted as an inevitable outcome of field work. But injury is not necessary and it is avoidable if we take proper care of ourselves-- that is the most important lesson I took from this workshop.
Sustainability is not also about caring for the earth, but also sustaining the vitality and longevity of the farmer. Improving farming methods for women's health is especially crucial as women are increasingly prominent in agriculture worldwide. According to the USDA, 75% of farms in the U.S. are owned or co-owned by women. In the last few years in the U.S., the number of farming operations managed by women has increased by approximately 3%, and in that same time frame the number of organic farming operations run by women has increased by 29%. Globally, rural women produce half of the entire world's food.
In a search for female-friendly farm tools, the ladies behind Green Heron encountered an alarming amount of products that projected the impression, "All women need is something pink." Many of the pink or floral-printed tools they found were actually less useful than traditional tools because they were more flimsy. So they set out to design their own and will soon release their first spade, but in the mean time they are educating women about how to use our bodies more safely and efficiently. The basics you should know are: stretch, tighten your abs, lift with your legs, vary your tasks, maintain a neutral spine, don't twist, keep loads close to your body, keep wrists in a neutral position, stretch more... Now's the time to get in shape for the growing season!
My next favorite workshop at the PASA conference was entitled, "Human-Powered, Low-Input Vegetable Production." The speaker, Kenneth Miller, is a teacher from Green Mountain College in Vermont, which was recently named the "Greenest School in the Country" by the Sierra Club. He runs a 12-credit summer program for students to work on a farm on the college campus, in which he emphasizes the efficiency of human powered operations.
Miller has a resource economics background, and he explains that using fossil-fuel powered machines is actually significantly less efficient, both in terms of material and financial input, than it is to pay humans to work the land. "The best fertilizer is the farmer's footsteps," he says. He advocates for treating yourself to really good tools because "a good tool makes you feel powerful," and even if it seems pricey it's still a whole lot less expensive than buying a tractor and filling it with fuel and repairing and maintaining it over the years...Miller is not strictly opposed to mechanization and does incorporate it, minimally, into his farm. His guideline is: "If you're gonna burn fossil fuels, do something cool." His approach to high productivity is aggressive inter-cropping and close plantings. He also says to know your weeds and let some of them stay. The most exciting innovation in Miller's project is a bike tractor! I am inspired to explore the possibilities of bike-powered farming and hope to incorporate a bicycle into the Local Food Project garden.
The other workshops I attended over the weekend were all interesting. These included:"Road to Reform in the 2012 Farm Bill," which was an explanation of the proposed upcoming changes to the Farm Bill and a forum for people to discuss their opinions on the bill.
Another presentation I enjoyed showed a UC Davis study of "Sri Lankan Home Gardens." In Sri Lanka, home gardens are ubiquitous and are very biodiverse, growing vegetables, fruit, trees and medicinal foods and herbs in a single space. The gardens provide income flexibility for residents because they can exchange surplus goods with neighbors or sell to farmer's markets that collect rural home garden goods and sell them in large cities.
The "Chesapeake Bay Pollution Diet" lecture revealed that the bay is actually at its cleanest in a long time, despite its unacceptably polluted current condition. The speaker used an insightful analogy, saying that if we consider the bay an obese adult, our goal is to change it to a healthy adult withe a few extra pounds to lose-- converting it to an Olympic athlete is unrealistic.
PASA hosted an excellent event that was informative and engaging, leaving me inspired to dive head first into the 2011 season at Local Food Project! I will end this (dreadfully long) bog entry with a fitting anecdote from Kenneth Miller, a speaker at the PASA conference: Miller was explaining his low-input food production system to a stockbroker, and the stockbroker said to him, "You can't feed the world that way." Miller's responded, "You can't feed the world being a stockbroker, either."
Cheers to the good work of PASA and friends!
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