agriculture

by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

Farming in the Northeast, in some ways, looks more European than American.  Farms are small.  According to the USDA, the average farm size in the Northeast is about 105 acres, 194 in New York State, while the average farm size nationally is 418 acres.  By comparison, the average farm in California is 312 acres, with 5.5 percent over 1,000 acres.  In New York State, about 2.9 percent are more than 1,000 acres.  But the difference is not just size: 84 percent of farms in New York State are family owned, compared to 79 percent in California.  Farming in our region is basically a relatively small, family affair.

Farming is not a simple proposition. Besides hard work, it is science, art, luck and, to be successful, no small amount of shrewd entrepreneurship.  It is a profession that affords practitioners the ability to be far more independent in their chosen endeavors than many of us who labor in complicated social structures, like corporations and government.  If the great American personality trait is rugged individualism, then I think family farmers are where it is vested mostly these days. 

Farming seems like big business.  It added about $183 billion to the US economy during 2008, according to the USDA.  But is it?  According to the USDA, in terms of annual farm sales revenue, 75 percent of our New York State farms earn less than $49,000, 82.2 percent less than $99,000.  Only 18.8 percent of our New York State farms bring in more than $100,000 per year.  However, according to the American Farmland Trust, 125,000 of 2.2 million farms in the United States produced 75 percent of the value of US farm production in 2007.  In fact, farming overall is big business, but most farmers run small, family businesses. Nonetheless, where there is big business, there is big government.

by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

On January 11, 2010, at the International Culinary Center (ICC) on Broadway in SoHo, an historic conference on the state of wheat in our New York foodshed was sponsored by The Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), The Northeast Organic Wheat Project, and Greenmarket.  Farmers, millers, bakers, and distillers got together to talk about the state of New York wheat production, with a view to starting a New York State wheat Renaissance.  Once New York State was a major wheat producer; however, according to the USDA, in 2009, 2.22 billion bushels of wheat were produced in the United States.  Of that, about 6.83 million bushels were produced in New York State, making it 32nd in American wheat production, according to the New York State Department of Agriculture and Markets. 

by Leslie Boden, Community Health & Sustainable Food Systems Planner

What lies at the very foundation of food production? Healthy soil. Dirt. Teeming with myriad forms of life, generative and renewable, essential for plant growth and sustainable ecosystems. And yet, all over the world, it is under attack by industrial agriculture’s methods, which deplete fertile topsoil and produce climate change-contributing greenhouse gases. Common Ground Media’s Dirt! The Movie describes the importance and vulnerability of dirt and the devastating global effects on agricultural production and our adaptability to climate change that will result from the continued assault on it.  It also highlights instances of hopeful actions large and small that are being taken to halt the destruction and replenish soil worldwide.  The movie features Vandana Shiva (physicist and environmental activist) and Wangari Maathai (Nobel Laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement), both of whom addressed the recent NYC Food & Climate Summit. 

by Leslie Boden The Glynwood Center, a Food Systems Network member in Cold Spring, NY, is working to build a thriving regional food system by reviving farming and revitalizing farm communities throughout the Northeast. Filmmaker and FSNYC member Sara Grady’s beautiful new film about Glynwood illustrates the challenges—high costs, low profits, land use development pressures, and inadequate infrastructure among them--that Hudson Valley farmers face, as well as the value that farms bring to their own communities, and the tremendous importance of those farms for an environmentally sustainable regional food system. Glynwood, it becomes clear, plays a critical and respected role in empowering communities to support farming and conserve farmland. Glynwood recently announced the 2009 recipients of its Harvest Awards, which honor farmers, organizations, and businesses from across the United States for innovation and leadership in sustainable agriculture and regional food systems. For more information about Glynwood and this year’s award recipients, click here. Glynwood Vision Statement: "Glynwood envisions a revival of farming and a revitalization of rural communities throughout the Northeast. We foresee harmonious working farmscapes supporting energetic local economies and vibrant communities. We anticipate that consumers throughout the region will have ready access to fresh, healthful food produced by local farmers who practice good land stewardship and environmentally sustainable agriculture. We intend to continue exerting thoughtful and energetic leadership in helping communities to realize this vision." For a higher quality viewing experience, visit Sara's website: http://www.saragrady.net/glynwood.php

by Matthew Chan, Just Food Food Justice Associate

Food is frequently ignored as a topic when it comes to climate change, despite the fact that nearly a third of our greenhouse gases come from food production, and 60% of our nitrous oxide (N2O), a gas 300 times more potent than Carbon Dioxide in trapping heat. That's why Just Food, the Manhattan Borough President, and NYU, in collaboration with dozens of food and climate justice advocates around the city, are proud to present the NYC Food and Climate Summit: Creating a Platform for Change on December 12th at the Kimmel Center, NYU.

The summit is orientated towards not only informing the public, but also creating actionable goals so the gains made during the summit move beyond discussion into tangible results that can be acted on by the participants themselves. To this end we have created nine policy workshops, ranging from ending enviromental/structural racism to strengthening our regional foodshed, which will allow participants to interact with experts on the subject and create workable and dynamic platforms for tackling each issue. In addition to this, we will also have several skills workshops teaching participants how they can make individual and community differences (e.g. composting, organizing around an issue, assessing and addressing hunger in communities) also running at the same time. We hope participants will leave the Summit feeling informed, educated, inspired and motivated to advance a NYC Food and Climate Platform for Action in 2010 and beyond.

What: NYC Food and Climate Summit: Creating a Platform for Change
When: Saturday, December 12th
Where: Kimmel Center, NYU

by Kerry Trueman, Eating Liberally

When Colin Beavan, aka No Impact Man, embarked on his experiment in low impact
living, he began to reassess just about every aspect of our daily lives: how we get around; how we shop; how we stay cool and keep warm; how we entertain ourselves; and, of course, how we eat. The production and distribution of food products requires an extraordinary amount of energy and has a huge impact on our environment. So, for the purposes of the project, Colin, his wife Michelle and their little daughter Isabella had to alter their eating habits radically.

Once his family switched to eating only foods produced within a 250-mile radius of New York City, the farmer's market became a regular ritual. Such American dietary staples as pizza, take-out chinese--even peanut butter sandwiches--became off-limits, either because they contained non-local ingredients or generated trash.

Introduction by Leslie Boden

Long before Henry Hudson and the crew of his ship, the Half Moon, arrived four hundred years ago on the shores of the river that would eventually bear his name, the Lenape people made their home on the small, lush, and ecologically diverse island they called Mannahatta.

Posted by Ed Yowell, Slow Food NYC

Posted by Lexi Van de Walle, lightheartedlocavore.com

The summer of 2009 is turning out to be the summer of seasonally cool temperatures with a bumper crop of rain, hail, and now blight.  These conditions have not been good for fruit and vegetable farmers in the New York area and especially in Long Island’s Suffolk County where summer weather is more typically hot and dry -- perfect for the potatoes and grapes and other bounty that the region is known for.   

Over a period of several weeks in July, New York officials have flexed their political muscle and repeatedly asked United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) Secretary, Thomas Vilsack, to declare 17 New York counties agriculture disaster areas. With particular focus on Western New York’s early summer freeze and Long Island’s rain, officials toured farms in the Hamptons and Long Island’s North Fork several times over a two-week period.  

Agriculture is a $3.5 billion industry in New York and Suffolk County is the largest agricultural county in the state contributing over 5% of New York’s receipts, primarily due to the high value of the country’s wine grapes.  

On Sunday, July 12th, U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand toured several farms. According to an article in the East Hampton Star regarding her visit to Babinski Farm in Wainscott, “The rain this year was a killer,” said Bill Babinski, the young farmer who has taken over the family operation, to the Senator. Shortly after her “field” visit, both US Senators from New York, Gillibrand and Charles Schumer, requested the USDA to provide relief to New York farmers with a low interest loan program.  

Posted By Kerry Trueman, EatingLiberally.org
Gardeners in our community have something new to celebrate this season: locally grown vegetable, herb and flower seeds from the Hudson Valley Seed Library. Ken Greene and Doug Muller, a pair of avid upstate gardeners turned seed-obsessed farmers, created the Hudson Valley Seed Library to give urban, suburban and rural home gardeners an accessible, affordable source for heirloom and open-pollinated varieties “rooted in the history and the soils of the northeast”.

The Hudson Valley Seed Library grew out of a seed-lending project that Greene created at the Gardiner Library in Ulster County a few years ago. Greene and Muller, who had no previous agricultural experience, have spent the last four years teaching themselves how to farm and run a homestead-based business at the Hudson Valley Seed Library farm in Accord.

Their current online catalog includes more than twenty varieties of locally grown seeds, some cultivated on their own farm, others from nearby farmers. It also offers home gardeners a membership that gives them the opportunity to become active participants in re-establishing a regional seed network. When you join the Hudson Valley Seed Library, your $20 membership fee is applied to the purchase of seeds at a discounted rate. The membership program also encourages home gardeners to save seeds from the plants they’ve grown to return to the library for credit towards the next year’s membership.