Grange We Can Believe In
Somewhat conflicting, somewhat orthogonal takes on pasture husbandry:
* Richard Manning makes more sweeping claims for the practice than I’ve yet seen;
* Historian James McWilliams comes close to pooh-poohing the whole idea;
I’ve written to primaries to try to resolve discrepancies between the two pieces. I’ll let you know what, if anything, I learn from the process. Meanwhile, if you have access to Scientific American, you can read about a related issue: the effort to breed perennial replacements for our major annual cereal crops. Environmentalists and animal-rights activists have lately focused on the carbon-footprint of raising livestock in the current regime of finishing them on government-subsidized grain, but the greenhouse impact of annually tilling row-crop fields is also massive. Then comes the topsoil loss (discussed by Manning), and diverse other problems.
One thing that struck me during our spring-break drive to Illinois: how few ranchers in the belt from Pennsylvania through Ohio seemed to be using rotational grazing and polyculture (moving multiple food animals through pasture in succession). It’s a practice that seemingly has only begun to catch on. I don’t know how much of this stems from lack of information, how much from conservatism, and how much from rotational grazing being impractical for some farms in ways I don’t understand. From the road, a lot of the pasture in Western PA looks ideally suited to rotational grazing – you sure don’t want to plow those hills and plant them – but instead you see golf-course-sized fields with comparatively few beeves spread across the area, with more than a few straying into riparian zones where current thinking holds they should never enter.
Comment by bbartlog —
May 11, 2009 @ 10:57 am
First link is broken.
One counterpoint to James McWilliams, at least in a US context: he cites water concerns as something that locavore priorities would make worse. But in the US, California produce is probably the biggest individual problem when it comes to wasting water, and moving agricultural production back in the direction of the population centers would generally mean moving it into areas where water is in greater supply. Worldwide of course this may not be true, since it’s basically a perverse artifact of how we do things here, and *should* really fly in the face of economics.
If by ‘conservatism’ you really mean a blend of stupidity and sheer cussed laziness, you’d be on the right track. My wife deals with a lot of farmers in PA (in the context of reselling their products, see here). And mostly they want to do things the way they do them, and aren’t interested in whatever fancy methods you have in mind, especially if they would require building a new fence or two.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 11, 2009 @ 11:02 am
Yeah, I meant the sort of “conservatism” one finds in NFL coaches.
Comment by GinSlinger —
May 11, 2009 @ 3:18 pm
You mean population centers like Phoenix, Denver, Atlanta, Oklahoma City, And pretty much all of Texas? The California example is rather flawed as it was government policy that located that much produce production there. We’re not talking about a case of competitive advantage, but that doesn’t mean that competitive advantage doesn’t exist.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 11, 2009 @ 3:59 pm
Well, I wouldn’t say all of Texas. East Texas has a lot more water and, IIRC, more crops. The water circumstances of the Houston area are starkly different from San Antonio’s.
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 11, 2009 @ 4:07 pm
GinSlinger brings up a good point. One limit to locavorism is going to be the ecological conditions around any given human settlement area. Two points in response would be:
1. Yes, but it’s like any other ecological issue – you can still make marginal gains by restoring local foodsheds where it IS viable;
2. In areas where water supply makes agriculture grossly impractical, human habitation is probably an environmental stressor anyway, isn’t it?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 11, 2009 @ 4:11 pm
Where isn’t human habitation an environmental stressor?
Comment by GinSlinger —
May 11, 2009 @ 4:13 pm
Yeah, gotcha on it, The coastal plains were largely what I was excepting when I said “pretty much all.” The big bulk of TX is not conducive to produce cultivation. Last time I was in the Valley, the Rio Grande had ceased flowing. San Antonio, Dallas, large swaths of the Valley, DFW, Lubbock, Abilene, M/O, El Paso, those are “population centers” whose produce production would put severe stress on the existing water supplies. Heck, even the coastal plains aren’t perfect insofar as there’s not a tremendous amount of ground water to tap into, so seasonal fluctuations and whatnot (assuming that desalination remains off the table).
.
But, you’re right, perhaps I should have changed the phrase “pretty much all,” to “most of (geographically speaking, not to mention where population actually is).” A hundred mile locavore dream doesn’t get San Antonio or Dallas fed from the coastal plains.
Comment by GinSlinger —
May 11, 2009 @ 4:15 pm
Could be in one sense, and simultaneously make good environmental sense in another. Lot’s of alternative energy available in areas with less rainfall (solar and wind in particular, but also geothermal).
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 11, 2009 @ 4:23 pm
Definitely not to mention, if you look at where the bulk of the population of Texas is – ie, the East, in and near the coastal plains.
Don’t know why you’re looking to be snarky; noting that the Piney Woods and the Hill Country are distinctly different doesn’t invalidate anything you’ve said about West Texas.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 11, 2009 @ 4:29 pm
No, it doesn’t. Of course, I wonder whether that even allows Houston and surrounding counties to be fed. This is why I get a little leery when people actually go to the step of talking about how locavorism could work on a society level. It start sounding a little…well, “Year Zeroish” might be a bit strong, but “vaguely fuedal” might fit.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 11, 2009 @ 4:40 pm
To be fair to East Texas, I’d like to hear a plausible gloss as to how, say, New York City or Chicago could be fed from sources within 100 miles.
Comment by Kolohe —
May 11, 2009 @ 5:12 pm
Aquaculture!
(only 3/4 kidding)
Comment by mds —
May 11, 2009 @ 9:26 pm
New York City might not be able to do it with conventional agriculture, but other NYS locations like Rochester might manage it. There remains a fair amount of smaller-scale agriculture upstate, and Rochester’s downtown farmers’ market was pretty extensive, as well as rather egalitarian in its appeal and pricing. (One of the many irritations about southern Connecticut is so many of its farm markets are much more frou-frou and $$$.) And NYC still has some potential, esp. if northwestern CT can be included, though it would have been nice if people had been on to this locavore thing before the number of farms in Dutchess County shrank to one.
I have a soft spot for the guy who advocated using stacked shipping containers for vertical farming in Manhattan, but that’s probably because it sounds like something that should be in a Ken MacLeod novel.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
May 12, 2009 @ 10:17 am
+1 for “beeves.”
Also, it is possible to talk about moving in a certain direction to be desirable – buy more local food – without necessarily adopting the most radical, absolutist version of that argument (no one can buy any imported food even, anywhere!)
Something that critics of localism often miss is that localvores aren’t arguing that people continue to eat the same nationally-uniform diet that requires so much importation. They aren’t saying that Massachusetts should be planted with the wheat grown in Kansas. There are crops that are better-suited to local egosystems that have been largely replaced by the products of crops grown far away. The localvores are saying we should increase the consumption of those regionally-appropriate crops.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 12, 2009 @ 11:55 am
Really? The thing I always hear from random locavore critics is variations on I wouldn’t want to live on just the stuff that grows here.
Comment by mds —
May 12, 2009 @ 12:23 pm
I spy a market correction on the horizon. Never mind peak oil, the First Great
TimeWater War, fought over the right to, e.g., keep growing cotton in the desert, will be awesome.The solution? Supertrains, bitches! Just whisk those Chilean starfruit up the Andes on a solar maglev at zero cost!
(Seriously, this is a primary barrier to locavorism. The guy who set up a Vermont diner that relied on local agriculture? In February, they were digging turnips out of the root cellar for mashin’. Mmm-mm.)
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 12, 2009 @ 1:03 pm
I’ve never had mashed turnips, but I’ve had good turnips. I’ve even gone to a good locavorish restaurant, though it had the advantage of not being in Vermont.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 12, 2009 @ 1:29 pm
Not to give short shrift to this, Joe. I’ve been pondering this, and the thing that strikes me about moderate, personal, voluntary locavorism is that it doesn’t bug me.
The problem is when people start talking about somehow shifting all of society’s eating habits, the entire agricultural sector, etc. to suit their beliefs on the subject. That sort of thing doesn’t happen voluntarily, and that sort of plan isn’t moderate (by definition).
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 12, 2009 @ 2:03 pm
Freezers! Grottos! They exist!
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 12, 2009 @ 2:17 pm
Isn’t that what a root cellar essentially is – a cool place you store food so it won’t spoil?
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 12, 2009 @ 3:00 pm
Yes. But storage technology works for other foods too!
Comment by mds —
May 12, 2009 @ 3:22 pm
Hmm, speaking of Blade 3, most vampires are locavores almost by definition, aren’t they?
And perhaps I indulged in mild hyperbole for the humorous effect that is my trademark. (No, not the profane ranting; the other trademark. Shut up.) But if I recall correctly there were supply bottlenecks, so that it was not simply a matter of laying in unlimited stores of arugula for Vermont’s seven months of winter. I don’t actually foresee this as a likely long-term sticking point, but it does go with Mr. the .5b’s observation.
By the way, I thought I was kidding about the solar supertrains.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 12, 2009 @ 4:12 pm
Yup. And you can even set it up in railways cars and such…
Comment by joe from Lowell —
May 12, 2009 @ 4:45 pm
The stuff that grows in any given “here” right now, with the predominant import-intensive food distribution system, is much less diverse than the what was grown “here” a century ago. As local eating picks up, the diversity of products in any given “here” will expand just through the re-introduction of locally-appropriate crops that already have a long history, before their production fell off in the middle of the 20th century.
A good example is apples. In Massachusetts, there would often be a different variety in every town, sometimes on different sides of town. Hundreds of these varieties went away, and were replaced by a few national varieties that were chosen primarily for their ability to travel well and sit on shelves longer.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
May 12, 2009 @ 4:47 pm
And this is relevant to a discussion of a movement meant mainly to address the additional environmental footprint produced from transportation because…?
Comment by Jim Henley —
May 12, 2009 @ 4:55 pm
Well, 1) Eric was being witty. For the record, I gave it an appreciative grin. 2) The additional environmental footprint from transportation is pretty marginal. That probably goes up if you take into account the effect of scale – raising a million hogs in Veracruz can have a bad impact from being a ginormous industrial hog facility in a corrupt third-world country, frex, that has at least the chance of dropping if you raise a thousand hogs sustainably in a thousand locations closer to market. But relatively little of the environmental value of foodshed restoration comes from reduced transpo costs.
Comment by mds —
May 12, 2009 @ 8:07 pm
Um, what were my comments about vertical farming and Supertrains? Chopped liver from humanely-raised livestock?
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 13, 2009 @ 3:59 pm
Good deal.
It can and does, but there are other distributions that work, too – and there are costs to all of those distributions.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 13, 2009 @ 4:10 pm
I have to be skeptical here; I don’t see evidence that the trend will expand far enough to spur this sort of re-organization of regional agriculture beyond the boutique food niche.
Agreed…though, very pointedly, a lot of the success that Jim and others have noted in various forms of boutique organic, grange, etc. outfits has been through finding ways to ship their produce and cuts of meat to people 100+ miles away with
root cellarsbig freezers. Or, on the no-big-freezer front, by selling to grocery chains that extend well out of their local area.Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 13, 2009 @ 4:17 pm
Meh. That’s a bland, pointless remark, and I only realize now it was provoked by a very specific irritation I’ve had about locavores and people talking about locavorism that nobody in this discussion has ever caused. Please disregard.
Comment by joe from Lowell —
May 13, 2009 @ 9:46 pm
Well, obviously, it’s never going to get to 100% of the food provided at the grocery store, but even a 10% jump can make a difference.
I don’t see why you insist on mixing up the points about scale and “boutique” products, though. Yes, early adopters of a technology are often people with a lot of extra money, looking for something special. This is the way it was with horseless carriages, too. The point is, as the early adopters grow in number, the producers’ operations can expand in scale to where they aren’t suffering a competitive disadvantage merely from their size.
Comment by Eric the .5b —
May 14, 2009 @ 12:04 pm
But not a fundamental restructuring of food production in the US.
In return, I don’t know why you insist on conflating niche products with things-that-will-take-over-the-market, even when you start out acknowledging that they won’t.