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Leave a Comment We are glad to report that Slow Money Northwest is organizing an event in Portland, and that Farmland LP will be presenting.
The date is April 11th and you must contact the organizers to register for attendance.
Craig and I look forward to meeting local investors and other progressive food and farming enthusiasts.
My mood has been elevated of late, probably because of the longer days, stronger sunbeams, and the obvious signs of spring, such as emerging flowers and leaf buds.
So I thought now would be a good time to review the winter in images, both as a way of saying goodbye to the season and letting readers know what it’s been like in the Willamette Valley of Oregon these past few months.
Dec. 7, Fern Rd Farm. Though technically late fall, on this day of frozen fog it felt like winter had arrived. In this image the epiphytic lichens on an Oregon Ash tree are weighted down by the ice crystals. Lichens are able to fix nitrogen from the air and are a major source of soil nitrogen in a forest.
Dec. 7, A2R Farm. This large but still juvenile hawk spent weeks hunting along the northern border of the farm and was often perched on fence posts.
Dec. 12, A2R Farm. A clear afternoon and the sheep graze with the Three Sisters volcanoes as a backdrop. The forage is after harvest re-seeded annual rye grass (foreground) and small grains (background).
Jan. 17, Fern Rd Farm. Lichens, moss and snow on an old fence board. These amazing organisms are shriveled dry in the summer and come to life again each winter.
Jan. 18, Fern Rd Farm. Mac Stewart wades through flood waters. As I described in this blog post, the Marys River set a new record high in January.
Jan. 20, Fern Rd Farm. Squash from neighbor’s compost pile moves across our field during flood (but it’s organic so that’s okay).
Jan. 27, A2R Farm. Moving ewes across the road to fresh grass.
Feb. 2, A2R Farm. The sun burns off patchy morning fog. Many clear winter days begin with fog in the valley.
Feb. 2, A2R Farm. A curious ewe approaches the fence. This breed is a Horned Dorset.
Feb. 18, Fern Rd Farm. OSU students plant native riparian trees along an exposed bank of the Marys River.
Feb. 19, Wattenpaugh Farm. Young pasture, irrigation risers, and snow on Marys Peak.
Feb. 19, Wattenpaugh Farm. Fowl in flight: Seasonal ponds on this and a neighboring farm attract several species of water fowl.
Mar. 8, A2R Farm. Signs of spring in the blossoms and emerging leaves of a small tree along the edge of a field and Muddy Creek.
The rich soils in Oregon’s Willamette Valley are a gift from the Missoula Floods at the end of the last Ice Age. Between 15,000 and 13,000 years ago as glacial ice sheets melted and retreated, the valley was flooded about 40 times–essentially becoming a temporary lake hundreds of feet deep, over and over again.
For 13,000 years now, rivers have sculpted this once flat, lake-bottom landscape into well-defined channels that don’t meander frequently like they would in a delta zone. But over the past several thousand years Willamette Valley rivers have jumped out of their main channels hundreds of times and occasionally even found new routes, leaving behind clear signs of their movements in features such as oxbow lakes.
When looking over farm fields in the area, the best soils are adjacent to rivers that jump their banks. River-flooded fields tend to have undulations across them, which signifies the deposition of silt, and possibly sand. By contrast, clay is a sticky substance that doesn’t settle out fast during a flood, but will come to rest in calm waters at the bottom of a lake. A good loam is a balance of silt, sand and clay, conditions typically mediated by active river deposition. This means that if we are going to farm on the best soils, we should expect the sporadic flood.
Farmland LP manages three properties in Willamette Valley south of Corvallis. This particular area, and our farmland, was recently subjected to the highest flood waters in about 100 years. The river that set a record wasn’t the Willamette, but a tributary called Marys River.
Seeing what happens at high water is very instructive. We now know where the river may jump the bank with force and can design mitigation strategies accordingly.
For example, our new fence is made with flexible posts that can take the weight of a tree or the impact of rushing water and debris and stand back up after the force is removed–something metal T-posts don’t do.
Woody vegetation in the riparian zone and along edge spaces has economic and ecological values, including acting to absorb, deflect, and spread the force of flowing water. Our riparian restoration project at Fern Rd Farm (funded by a state OWEB grant through the Marys River Watershed Council) was too young to protect the farmland this year, but will provide a stronger buffer in the years ahead. A hedge row north of the gravel drive at Fern Rd Farm may have protected it from erosion, for example. A thick riparian forest at Wattenpaugh Farm may prevent an overflow channel from down cutting and forming a gully in the farm field.
Our pasture-sown land greatly reduces the risk of erosion. Organic farmers, even if they are not planting pasture, tend to do a good job getting a cover crop on fields to keep soil from washing away and to build organic matter and nitrogen stock. This is both a discipline and a necessity since the soil IS the fertility and synthetic inputs can’t be used to make-up for poor land cover and soil loss. Whereas our land is becoming more resilient over time, the downsides to the shortcuts taken by chemical-based farming are revealed most clearly in times of extremes, such as floods or droughts.
A very unusual sequence of events led to the flooding. Snow began falling on the valley floor Jan. 15th. It stuck around and accumulated through Jan. 17th. And although snow depth was shallow in the valley proper, the surrounding foothills and colder, outlying valleys had several inches of heavy, wet snow on the ground.
Then came Jan. 18th and the beginning of record rainfall. The rain gauge at the Hyslop Weather Station just north of Corvallis recorded 2.55 inches on Jan. 19th and a record-breaking 4.05 inches for Jan. 20th. Nearly 3 more inches came down over the following seven days, which kept the water near or above flood stage for almost a week.
The water level gauge for the Marys River is situated near Bellfountain Rd, which is between two of our properties. Observation and forecast hydrographs are updated regularly and this one shows the river near its peak on Jan. 19th.
I visited Fern Rd Farm prior to the flooding and while snow was on the ground. I wanted to check on the status of trees planted this fall in the riparian forest, and remove any equipment that may be carried away with high water. Below is an image showing the river level and snow cover on Jan. 17th.
And this was taken about 24 hours later. The river is at flood stage and all the snow is gone. River levels crested over a foot higher than what is shown here.
It is helpful to see where the rivers are in relation to the farms and how the landscape copes with so much water.
Below is a map of the three Farmland LP properties in the area, which are outlined in dark blue. Fern Road Farm is in the northwest of this image, Wattenpaugh Farm is northeast, and A2R Farm in the south. The Marys River creates the northern border of Fern Road Farm, and a southern and eastern border of Wattenpaugh Farm. Muddy Creek, which joins the Marys River at the southeast corner of Wattenpaugh Farm, cuts through the A2R property. Both rivers flow, in general, towards the north and east, with the Marys River entering the Willamette in downtown Corvallis.
Normal river channels are revealed in dark green, which is tree cover. With light blue lines I have traced the approximate additional paths the rivers took when the flow rates exceeded the main channel capacity. For scale, the N-S blue line representing the Muddy Creek overflow route runs just over one mile through the A2R Farm.
Here are some images of what these overflow channels looked like.
Muddy Creek spills across Airport Road the morning of Jan. 20th. Buildings of A2R Farm are visible about a mile in the distance to the left. Any tree or hedgerow plantings along Airport Road should leave ample room for water passage at this location.
Marys River crossed Fern Rd Farm in a braided swale complex (as opposed to a single, wide channel for Muddy Creek at A2R) and took paths that went different directions, including southward to Evergreen Creek. The above image shows where a large ditch adjacent to a gravel road is insufficient for the record flows. The top layer of gravel washed off and will need to be re-applied. In the background it is clear that the well pump and irrigation pipe are on high ground.
The south field at Fern Rd Farm has over a foot of water on it while flowing slowly towards Evergreen Creek. Litter on the wheel line indicates it had been higher. In the foreground is a tall stand of forage brassica, which shelters a fall sown pasture.
The riparian forest is absent from a portion of the Marys River as it passes along the south-eastern edge of Wattenpaugh Farm. Here is where the river jumped the bank and flowed vigorously northward across the field. Planting trees here would slow this flow.
The properties held up well to the record flood with very minimal impact.
Some of the gravel roads need to be topped off and graded. We lost a few of the trees planted in the riparian zone this fall. Our infrastructure and management plans in the works will make these farms even more resilient in the future.
This is the first question from many concerned friends and colleagues. During the floods the entire flock was at A2R Farm. This was an ideal place as the flooding was restricted to an impressively wide and deep, but single, channel with plenty of high ground on both sides.
So, as you can see below from a picture taken a week ago, the ewes and their babies took the weird weather in stride and are as happy as, well, lambs.
from -> Local,Methods,News,Sustainability
With the holiday season behind us many are feeling the effects of eating a bit too much and are working on a New Year’s resolution to shed some pounds. This reminds me of a question I have been asked numerous times, i.e., “How much land does it take to feed somebody for a year?” To rid you of any suspense, I usually give the answer as about one acre when referring to the U.S. today.
For those who want to understand why, what follows is an explanation.
A precise answer is impossible because so many variable factors are at play, including the productivity of the agricultural land. But actually, the first step in answering this is to know the diet being considered (including any big holiday turkeys consumed).
The current U.S. diet is shown nicely in the graph below from Visual Economics.
To summarize, the average American consumes about 2000 lbs of food per year, which works out to about 5.5 lbs and 2700 calories per day–or nearly your entire body weight in food per month. Divide those daily 2700 calories by 5.5 lbs and you get 490 calories per pound of food, on average.
There are differences in the quality of various parts of the diet that are important to appreciate, including caloric density. Fruits and vegetables are abundant in the diet by weight and give us the flavors, fiber, vitamins and minerals we crave, but only typically provide 50-150 calories per pound. By contrast, a single slice of my favorite bread (pictured below) has 110 calories and only weighs a tenth of a pound. Oils and fats are about three to four times more dense, calorie-wise, than bread. Meat tends to have slightly fewer calories per pound than high starch foods. For example, boneless lamb chops without the edge fat are around 976 calories per pound, according to the USDA’s Food-A-Pedia, which I could peruse for hours. Low-fat milk, which is mostly water, still has about 200 calories per pound (about a pint).
If we take the average U.S. diet as our starting point, we can convert each component of this diet into the area needed to produce it by using average U.S. harvest yields. For example, the USDA reported recently that the average corn harvest was 147 bushels per acre, or about 8250 lbs. It takes a true professional to sort out how much of this corn gets into the human food supply, since corn is normally eaten in highly processed and modified forms. The vast majority of corn is roughly split between ethanol factories and animal feed, with perhaps 10% or less used for food directly (e.g., polenta) and via food processing (e.g., gummy bears).
This sort of complexity is why I must rely on others to make the diet to area conversion. The most recent studies I am aware of were done for the state of New York by a team of Cornell scientists led by Christian Peters. Here’s a link to one of the published papers, but a more accessible review is also available and highly recommend for those who hunger for more information.
Below I have posted a key summary graphic from the paper. Along the Y-axis is land area in hectares needed to feed one person for a year, which is dependent upon the model diets shown along the X-axis. Each model diet is labeled by two dietary factors: meat and fat.
The finding that gained headlines from this study some years ago had to do with the fact that adding some meat and dairy to the diet, while increasing land area, actually fed more people. This is because much land is not suited to annual crops but can be sown in pasture (most of the “perennial crops” shown in the bar graph are pasture). Cutting the average meat consumption roughly in half, which would de-emphasize hogs and poultry in the diet as these rely on grains, actually feeds more people than a vegetarian diet.
Since the area of production needed is most sensitive to meat and fat consumption, we can see which of the model diets in the Cornell study is closest to the typical American diet to estimate the per capita area given current habits. To gauge the average, look at the middle of the chart above the 190 grams of meat per day and you’ll see that this converts to about 0.45 hectares, which is just a bit over one acre.
It is fair to ask if New York is representative of the U.S. in terms of agricultural potential. I actually think it is pretty “average” having a mix of both good and poor soils, mountains and plains and a climate that is neither the most benign nor most extreme. Certainly California and Iowa are not average so we shouldn’t be extrapolating from those best cases.
It would be nice, and possibly critical, to have this sort of research done more extensively. To that end, the Cornell group has a grant to develop a Local Foodshed Mapping Tool. It is being created for New York but the methods should be applicable anywhere.
Those who are savvy about how food is produced will have many follow-up questions to this direction of thought. For example, crop yields are no longer a simple function of Nature’s endowment of soil, the blessings of good weather, and irrepressible seed germination. Nearly all farmers rely on a steady stream of outside inputs in forms such as ammonia-nitrate and super phosphate. These derive from concentrated below ground sources of energy and raw materials deposited over geologic time. As I’ve explored before on this blog, food supply is over-correlated for my comfort zone with oil supply. Over the past few years I’ve also written about techniques for de-linking food production from massive external inputs. But that is a long discussion that has no easy answer either.
I’ll just add that addressing the outside inputs conundrum makes one consider the role that well-managed grazing systems have in an agriculture that can sequester carbon, clean water, and build soil fertility more endemically. And for those who claim we don’t have the land area to do this, take a look at the acres of corn sown each year (about 100 million acres) and how much of that is used for direct human consumption (about 10 million acres) in the U.S. Looking at the numbers clearly shows we have a problem of too much artificially created demand. Why not put pasture on 90 million acres of cropland and let the ruminants eat their evolved diet?
Most people are not looking forward to a 10 minute lecture when they ask me a supposedly simple question. So while there are many variables and lots of imprecision when answering “How much land is needed to feed a person,” for today’s American diet, with today’s agricultural system, I’ll stick with about one acre.
Today was a fine first fall morning. As I stood around talking to John Neumeister and Mac Stewart about sheep forage and breeding plans, the early fog cleared and the sky became wonderfully blue…and noisy.
The geese are back.
I don’t know which goose species is pictured above as I am no ornithology expert and the Willamette Valley hosts four species and nine total subspecies each winter. If we add ducks and swans to the bird list that later number goes up to 28 according to surveys from local wildlife refuges.
Area farmers have mixed feelings about these feathered friends. Large flocks damage grass seed fields, but many farmers also install ponds to encourage water fowl to land on their property. They may receive income from hunting clubs, or just appreciate having wildlife around.
This is the official end of summer but we continue to have summer-like weather. I hope it lasts a while longer as the wet, cold spring delayed that summer feeling. But I can’t control the weather so will accept whatever comes and adapt as needed.
Farmland LP is getting a decent amount of press lately. The most recent was last week in Sustainable Business Oregon.
Here’s a bit from the article:
For Cody Wood, a sheep farmer near Harrisburg, the appeal is financial.
By leasing from Farmland, Wood is able to spend more on his flock.
“I’m leasing 125 acres; it’s got $40,000 or $50,000 worth of irrigation equipment on it. I wouldn’t have been able to swallow that cost,” Wood said. “And I can produce a lot of animals on this farm.”
What he pays for his time on the land will depend on what he gets paid for his sheep. Farmland LP shares the risk with farmers, betting that their land will produce higher yields.
“One way or another we have to get farmland available to younger farmers and this is one way to do it,” said Harry McCormick, a Corvallis farmer and co-founder of Oregon Tilth, who served as an adviser to Farmland. “I like that the fact that it’s money coming out of the banking sector.”
Cody and I are in the middle of setting up the irrigation equipment right now and it is indeed quite an investment. But the payback is also very good as lambs will grow out quickly, to be ready for market in the fall and therefore not need over-winter care.
The article includes a few good pictures, including this one of a baby lamb and ewe taken on May 18th. Healthy lambs on their mother’s milk may gain about a pound per day. The newborns will often be walking within an hour of birth and be running around, quite agile and fast, in a couple of weeks.
Thanks to Christina Williams for writing this piece. It is nice to get some coverage in the regional press.
The Willamette Valley is famous for its grass seed production, and can even boast supplying the World Cup soccer fields in South Africa. The dominance of grass seed began to wane with the collapse of the housing bubble a few years ago. And while the major shift has been towards wheat, much more is going on.
I promised in a past blog post to review the regional resurgence of an edible and more diversified seed crop industry and will do so now. Prompting comes from recent front page coverage in the Oregonian, namely an article by Eric Mortensen titled “Flax returns to the Willamette Valley in fertile land that once grew grass seed” which happened to profile the same farm I did in my January 2011 blog post titled Local Grains. It is a good article and I encourage folks to read it. I will also show that wheat and flax are parts of a diverse, tasty mix of culinary staples. First, I’ll highlight a couple of quotes from the Mortensen piece:
This is a changing state that romanticizes its farms but doesn’t understand its farmers. Two-thirds of its farmers and ranchers are older than 55. Ownership of 9 million acres, more than half the state’s farmland, is projected to change hands in the next decade. The next generation has to do more than master the multiple skills farming requires: They’ll be hard-pressed to fend off development pressure while connecting with an urban population intensely, sometimes intrusively, interested in what they’re doing.
What a great summary paragraph of the complex social and demographic situation in agriculture. This is why 30 something year olds like the article’s protagonist, my friend Clint Lindsey, get so much attention: More of them are needed if we are all going to eat 20 years from now. And these young farmers are entering the profession during one of the most tumultuous periods in the past few decades. Again from the article:
Lindsey and his father decoupled the farm from the international commodities market. With their partners, they plan to install a small grain mill. From now on, they intend to sell grain, seed and flour to bakeries, restaurants and specialty stores within 150 miles.
It is less a revolution than a throwback. They are at the forefront of restoring an infrastructure that grows, processes, markets and consumes food locally.
So not only are these farmers trying to grow a diversity of edible seeds—from wheat to chick peas to flax, but they are working to re-localize processing and distribution. There are several reasons why, but mostly you will hear it is about niche marketing opportunities catering to the locavore craze, growth in the organic food industry, capturing the margins of processing and distribution, and developing strong and stable relationships with buyers to avoid the ups and downs of commodity markets.
A crowd of local eaters gathers at the edge of a flax field at A2R Farms near Corvallis, OR. Clint and Mike pose for cameras and answer many questions.
But I also know that there’s something else going on. Nearly all farmers by now have connected the dots between the cost of energy and the cost of their inputs. This means a rise in food commodity prices often doesn’t improve net farm income because modern farms have their inputs priced by commodity markets too. I wrote earlier about the tight correlation between the price of oil and the price of food. Oil prices are also a good proxy for farm input costs. Therefore, some farmers have decided there’s a long-term advantage in cutting the distance between themselves and their customers, and by reducing the volatility of input costs by using organic, or quasi-organic, methods.
A few months ago Clint gave me a call while in my neighborhood. He wanted to make sure I was home so he could stop by with something. A loaf of bread… “his” bread. We shared a few moments of excitement and praise before Clint had to go. Then I started making sandwiches with it and haven’t gone back.
Some people have their livelihood riding on building a regional food system and that motivation seems to be getting it done, one slice at a time. But beyond the economic and food security issues that come up, I must say that watching this happen, and really working to do my part, is also a lot of fun.
My first loaf of Oregon Grains, by Nature Bake, which uses wheat, oats and flax from A2R Farms.
Okay, there’s been plenty of talk about wheat and flax. Let me showcase more of the contenders for our newly appreciated regional seed crops. Almost none of these are sold by commercial seed dealers around here. Farmers are buying seed stock from other parts of the country (or world) and seeing what can be locally adapted. A few seeds are even sourced directly from the bulk bins of grocery stores!
Last summer a few of the local farms gave public tours and I have pictures and notes that I am drawing from. Also, I have attended some meetings of the Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project and have these notes. Dan Armstrong has written well about these discussions on his web site.
While the public tours were on the larger farms, with the area being managed ranging from 900 to 9000 acres, a few small farms are also involved in the development of grains and beans and alternative edible seed crops. The most well-known small farm is Sunbow Farm, one of the founders of the Bean and Grain Project, and newcomers such as Adaptive Seeds are trying many species and varieties. A number of the small farm varieties won’t work on the large farms because they can’t be mechanically harvested. Much of the discussion revolves around harvesting issues, and the big farms need plants that can be field dried, cut and combined efficiently. For the most part, I will restrict myself to what the larger farms are doing.
I will briefly discuss three categories of edible seed crops: grains, legumes and “others.”
Grains are grass species (family Poaceae). These are usually cool season crops, known broadly as small grains, planted in fall or spring for mid-summer harvest. Soft white wheat is the main grain in the valley, but farmers are now growing hard red wheat (which has higher protein levels and can be used in leavened breads) hulless oats and hulless barley for human consumption (as opposed to the more common feed oats and barley varieties). There is excitement over a six row malting barley being developed by a breeder at Oregon State University. Cereal rye and triticale get some mentions, but the market for them is less certain. The most common summer grown grain in the area is corn, but it is all sweet corn for processing. Small farms are trying other types of corn but none of the big farms are. I was surprised to learn that a couple of farms are now growing teff for sale to a local food wholesaler.
A table display at Stalford Seed Farms near Shed, OR highlights their flour products. This farm has been key in the development of locally adapted hard red wheat and beans, and in the formation of Willamette Seed and Grain LLC, which processes, markets and distributes for local farms transitioning out of conventional grass seed and into edibles.
Legumes (family Fabaceae) fix nitrogen and are part of a healthy crop rotation. Historically this area has produced clover seed. The edible newcomers are lentils, chick peas, pinto and black beans. Lentils and chick peas are probably better for our cooler climate as they can be sown before the last frost and mature quickly to be harvested in dry summer conditions. Pinto and black beans are warm season crops that have had some success, but during the past couple of years the harvest has gone poorly as we’ve had cool summers and the beans didn’t dry in the field well enough before fall. Something to keep an eye on is chickling vetch, which is being tested by farmers. Soybeans like it hot, so nobody is sure they will be a good fit around here, although small farms are growing edamame varieties.
Rows of pinto beans at Stalford Seed Farms.
Flax (family Linaceae) has uses for food, fiber and industrial oil. The cool climate here is perfect for flax, which can be either fall or spring sown. Buckwheat is a very quickly maturing plant (family Polygonaceae) that is used as a summer cover crop and for its edible seed, which is usually made into a flour. Cool season oil seed crops (family Brassicaceae) in the area may eventually be used for human food, and farmers are interested in these as they add to the crop rotation potential. Canola grows well but is semi-banned since it can cross with vegetable relatives grown commercially. Another member of the same plant family, Camelina, is better accepted. Locally it has primarily been promoted for biofuel production, but is used for food in Europe. Sunflowers, which have varieties developed for either seed or pressed oil, are being tried but may be marginal because of potentially cool summers.
The tour included a stop and delicious meal at Tom Hunton’s place near Junction City (Tom also owns SureCrop). Pictured here is a field of buckwheat in flower. I was also impressed by the diversity of commercial scale field trials on this farm, such as teff, and varieties of chick peas and lentils. Later in the year Tom reported a yield of 1800 lbs/acre for variety Dillon chick peas on his Malabon soil.
If you read this blog it is obvious that we are mainly doing livestock production on the farmland we manage. This is because growing seed crops organically during the transition period from conventional farming is very difficult, which the Oregonian article touches upon. By contrast, livestock grazing prevents weeds from going to seed, builds soil fertility, and provides us with a steady income before we are certified organic.
What we will do once our land becomes certified organic and the soils are in great shape is offer sections to organic seed farmers. We will be looking for those with experience and the ability to plan and implement a diverse crop rotation. After a few years in annual seed crops the land will go back into pasture, and the seed farmer may be given new areas to sow. This pattern is expected to reduce the management costs and risk to the farmer while increasing yields, which should increase profitability for all of us.
We have an official press release, but I’ll make the blog post less formal.
I am very pleased to announce that Farmland LP just closed on another property, 100 acres in size, in the Willamette Valley.
The parcel is about one mile long and in this eastward looking image you can see how it slopes down to the Marys River. On clear days high volcanic peaks of the Cascades are visible.
The newly purchased parcel consists of high-quality soils with irrigation rights. This is ideal for our management plan of rotating between pasture, seed crops, and vegetable farming. After allowing the existing conventional seed crop to be harvested this summer, we will begin transitioning the new farmland to organic and sowing pasture in the fall.
The upper portion of the farm is gently sloping with class 1 Willamette soils. The crop shown here is soft white wheat.
This property is near our existing farm, which makes it easier for us to manage the movement of equipment, animals and people, as may be necessary between parcels.
A mature and largely intact riparian forest is a fantastic feature. Seen here are Delphiniums at the edge of a field and beneath Big Leaf Maples.
We are thrilled by this new property and the opportunities it provides to increase the supply of healthy, organic food in the area. I expect to be writing more posts like this in the near future.
I have been visiting A2R Farms outside of Corvallis Oregon all year. They are a former conventional grass seed farm transitioning to organic seed crops, primarily for local distribution. I watched as they planted the fields and as the crops grew—flax, chick peas, sunflowers and wheat. And as harvest season approached I looked over at the combines and asked my friend Clinton Lindsey, “Which one am I driving?”
So I was delighted to get a call one morning in August. Over the hum of a motor Clint told me, “Hey Jason, I’m harvesting the field north of our office today if you want to visit.” Heck yeah! And I could bring the whole family. It was Saturday and we all would get a turn in the cab.
It is the middle of August and time to harvest wheat in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Clint lets my 11 year old son steer a John Deere combine.
The combine performs tasks that replace an enormous amount of labor in a reliable and timely fashion. It cuts the stalks of seed crops, threshes the heads to dislodge the seeds, and then separates the seeds from the straw and chaff. Without the combine (and a series of intermediate technologies), harvesting grains involves manually cutting stalks, bundling them, transporting the bundle to storage, threshing and winnowing.
The labor efficiency of the combine is extreme. Over the course of a long and somewhat boring 12 hour day in his air conditioned cab (made a little better by listening to audio books on an iPod), Clint can harvest about 25 acres of wheat. We visited while he was in a field with a hard red variety that yields about 2400 lbs per acre (soft white yields are 2-3 times higher). In one day, Clint and his machine will collect 60,000 lbs of hard red wheat, or 1000 bushels.
Each pound of wheat contains about 1500 food calories (i.e., kilo calories), and a person needs about 2500 calories per day. A year’s supply of calories for a person is in the neighborhood of 900,000, which in wheat units is 600 lbs. In simple terms, during a day of work Clint can supply the annual food needs of 100 people. Of course he and his dad Mike also spent days prepping and sowing the field, and there are hours planning, maintaining equipment, and marketing, etc., but in total the amount of time actually spent with machines on that 25 acres is probably only a week or so. And since Clint and his family manage to farm several hundred acres it all works out to about 100 people fed by one guy like Clint, which is typical for the US food system.
One of the main enablers of a demographic shift away from a rural-agrarian population to an urban-industrial one is the combine. The combine removes most labor from agriculture for the most critical crops: edible grains, legumes and oil seeds. Seeds are a highly portable, storable and versatile class of food, allowing civilizations to trade and buffer against shortages. Most calories now consumed derive directly or indirectly from seeds.
The percent agriculture population is plotted in relation to per capita energy use. Nations with abundant use of exosomatic energy tend to have less of their population involved in agricultural production, presumably either because they can afford to import much of their food or employ labor saving devices in food production. For example, only about 1% of the US labor force is involved in farming. Data come from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Original article containing figure is here.
This is why I spend a lot of time studying not only pastured livestock, which we use almost exclusively on our land during the organic transition process, but the seed industry, which will feed us in the long run. Go back several decades and the Willamette Valley fed itself and exported a diversity of grains, especially wheat. In more recent times, most of the acreage has converted to grass seed for lawns. Still, the equipment to sow, harvest, clean and transport seeds is similar, whether it is used for turf grass, edible grains, or forage and cover crop seeds.
Shift to the years 2007-2008 and the beginning of a new era. Commodity prices are on the rise, promising great gross returns for farmers growing crops such as wheat, but taking away most profits by parallel gains in fertilizer and fuel costs. Meanwhile, the housing market is suddenly crashing, and with it much of the demand for lawn seed.
The same equipment is used for many purposes. In this image, Dallas Goracke loads a bag of pasture seed mix into his no-till drill at our Fern Rd Farm. He and his brothers grow a diversity of seed crops and have their own grass seed distribution business. Ten years ago they converted to no-till agriculture for all their acreage, saving about 23,000 gallons of diesel per year.
These two trends, a rise in basic commodity prices and a decline in the turf grass industry, caused many farmers to look for something else to plant. Almost all seed croppers shifted to wheat for some of their acreage. A few have also responded by transitioning to organic, which carries two obvious advantages—avoiding the costs of synthetic fertilizers and pesticides, and organic price premiums. Those going organic are also working on value added marketing and processing, such as selling locally, and selling wheat flour or rolled oats.
I have spent the past couple of years watching this happen and participating in some of the discussions. Keeping track of this shifting landscape, and shaping it to some extent, is the Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project.
The originators of the project were small scale organic farmers and citizens interested in food security. They foresaw that the large conventional farmers around them would soon have some troubles and they began conversations and experiments to provide alternatives—hoping these would be adopted when needed.
One of the crops now being grown in the area after decades of absence is flax. These seeds are just off the combine at A2R Farms.
What has emerged is a lose affiliation of farmers, food buyers, bakers and chefs, government representatives, non-profits and food activists. I would encourage a visit to the project web site, and I’ll write more about what I have seen and learned in future posts.
Yes Magazine recently had a short article on a grant by the USDA to study local food production capacity in the northeast.
How much of the food eaten in the northeastern United States could be produced regionally? The U.S. Department of Agriculture has announced $230,000 in funding to find out.
This grant is chump change compared to the approximately $17 billion in subsidies that went to corn farmers between 2003 and 2005, but it does mark a significant shift in policy. In early fall the USDA announced a new program called “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food” that is funding the local food study. In the press release about the program, Agriculture Deputy Secretary Kathleen Merrigan noted:
Consumer demand for locally grown food in the United States is expected to rise from an estimated $4 billion in 2002 to as much as $7 billion by 2012.
That the USDA recognizes the growth of local food sales and has a number for it caught my attention. Aside from planning grants and rural development grants and loans, drawing attention to a growing market is one way to create a positive feedback that builds momentum.
How do local food sales compare to organic sales? Here’s a graph Farmland LP made with Organic Trade Association data.
Current organic sales are over $23 million per year, so while local has a long way to go to catch up it is already a significant part of public choice.
Why? Because people are hungry for honest relationships and food is viewed as very personal by many–after all, it goes into our bodies and becomes part of us. When people can meet farmers and see the land where their food comes from they are more likely to trust in its health. It goes both ways. When farmers get to know the people who are eating their food, I believe they will take even greater care to make sure it is produced with the utmost care and integrity. Because they derive from direct human contact, these benefits are only possible by localizing the food system.
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