Agriculture Archives - Page 5 of 5

O Christmas Tree, Toxic Christmas Tree!

December 14, 2016 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

*Christmas tree farm (public domain photo from USDA*)

In early December in Portland I saw my first live Christmas tree of the season strapped to the top of a car. I was saddened. Not because I don’t celebrate Christmas (even though I don’t) but because the Christmas tree industry is so harmful.

In the days that followed, I saw tree lots springing up all around town. Many had signs reading, “Local,” which I thought was pretty funny because what else would they be? Oregon is the biggest grower of Christmas trees in the US, with 42,000 acres producing five to seven million trees per year. Clackamas county, which grows the most in the state, is right next to Portland. So, local? Yeah. But, sustainable? Nope.

I first became aware of the toxic nature of Christmas tree farming in 2011 when I was farming in Polk County with my Nikki Hill, in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. Though not as prevalent as grass seed farms (which take up fully half of the farmland in the valley) Christmas tree plantations were a common sight, often on slopes that are less suitable for other crops. Our concern—since we were organic growers coming into this zone of conventional agriculture—was what chemicals were being used nearby and in our watershed that might taint our own crops. We didn’t like what we found and only planted there one season.

Chemically speaking, conventional farming is a dirty business, and when the crop isn’t food, it’s even worse. With Christmas tree farming, synthetic chemical use is virtually ubiquitous, with organic trees making up just 1% of the market. Aesthetics are obviously of paramount importance with this product, and a sleigh-load of toxic substances are used to kill pests, strike down diseases and accentuate their color. Six to ten years of this damaging activity goes into making a decoration that is displayed for a few weeks and then usually sent to the landfill.

Is Urban Farming Viable in the US?

April 21, 2016 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The author, in 2010, with a full load of produce. (Photo courtesy of Naomi’s Organic Farm Supply)

Multiple, intertwined crises face the human race in our times, among them resource depletion, economic dissolution, and ecological degradation, including global Climate Change. Though most people in the US respond to the news of these crises by putting their fingers in their ears and singing, “la la la,” a small number of others are (and always have been) offering solutions, or at least brainstorms for how we could collectively change our lifestyles to address them. Among the many, many ideas batted around are renewable energy, income redistribution, carbon-trading and sequestration, and alternative approaches to conventional farming including organics, “permaculture” and urban farming.

The viability of all of these concepts is a matter of debate, though in general the facts reveal that none are capable of either maintaining levels of production and consumption at anything close to their current levels, or, more importantly, of healing the hurts suffered by the world and its multitude of creatures. In short, the concept of “sustainability” is a false hope, at least in reference to perpetuating business-as-usual in a recognizable form. I have come to this conclusion not only by studying these ideas, but through my own personal experience, most notably with urban farming.

“Adventures in Urban Bike Farming” – Order Here

December 6, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

Hardcopy: still-life with a Dandelion

Now available in hardcopy and four digital formats!

Equal parts historical document, confessional memoir and social critique, this book tells the story of “Sunroot Gardens,” a bicycle-based urban farming operation that I founded and cultivated in Portland, Oregon, in the early 2000’s. Made famous by the local media—including the Willamette Week, Sellwood Bee, Portland Monthly, KBOO, Oregonian and In Good Tilth—Sunroot Gardens blazed trails and pushed boundaries. The text is drawn from my voluminous writings at the time and has been supplemented with freshly composed narrative and commentary. Click here for an excerpt.
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“Adventures in Urban Bike Farming” – Excerpt

October 24, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

To give readers an idea of the content and flavor of “Adventures in Urban Bike Farming,” here is the Introduction to the book, followed by the Table of Contents. Order a hardcopy or a digital download here!

Introduction

“When a well-packaged web of lies has been sold gradually to the masses over generations, the truth will seem utterly preposterous and its speaker a raving lunatic.” (Dresden James)

This book is about my experiences as bicycle-based urban farmer in Portland, Oregon, U.S.A., from 2004 through 2010 (with a brief reprise in 2013). The arc of the narrative begins with wide-eyed idealism and ends with disillusioned acceptance. If you’re looking for a message of “rah rah, look how sustainable we are!” you won’t find it here. If, on the other hand, you are genuinely concerned about our collective future and are interested in how urban farming could play a part, there are lessons here to glean.

How Green Is Your Pot? Questions for Conscientious Cannabis Consumers

April 19, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

How green is it?

It’s not news that marijuana is becoming mainstream in the U.S., and as legal restrictions loosen and social acceptance grows, the amount of marijuana being cultivated is rising rapidly. A big business is getting bigger. The cottage-days of the industry were left behind in the 1980’s and if anything holds true in the American economic system, it’s that larger scale brings lower quality and greater damage.

Conventional food agriculture is a case in point: it wreaks havoc on ecosystems, its products are unhealthy, and the farmwork itself is underpaid and dangerous. As these facts have been publicized, many people have become rightly concerned about where their food comes from. The same questions that can and should be asked about produce — Was it sprayed? Is it free of contaminants? Were the workers mistreated? — can and should be brought to bear against marijuana now.
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Your Money or Your Life: Can We Afford to Work for Peanuts?

March 16, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The author, with the giant peanut of Orick, California. Photo by Nikki Hill.

In Orick, California, there is a giant wooden peanut – over twelve feet long, six feet tall and weighing nine tons – carved from a single chunk of old-growth redwood. It was sculpted by local loggers in 1978, during the Carter administration, and brought to Washington, D.C., to protest the proposed expansion of Redwood National Park. Their message: “It may be peanuts to you, but it’s jobs to us.” To the loggers’ chagrin, the peanut was ignored and the Park expanded anyway, removing 48,000 acres from the reach of their axes. Now the rough-hewn sculpture sits unceremoniously at the south end of town, steadily wearing away under the effects of vandalism and the elements. No plaque tells its story; you have to know what you’re looking for, and even what you’re looking at.
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Who Will Feed the People? Obstacles to Small-Scale Agriculture in the USA

March 14, 2015 by Kollibri terre Sonnenblume

The author with a high-wheel cultivator

“In the future, more people will have to grow their own food” has become a truism among pundits and observers who are paying attention to the changing state of western industrial civilization, and of the U.S. in particular. Declining energy resources, ecological degradation, and global financial disolution are a few of the trends that are and will be impacting agriculture-as-we-know-it, and forcing agriculture-as-it-will-be.

That chemical-based farming is a failing experiment has been well-documented elsewhere; numerous books and articles have explored declining soil fertility, chemically-resistant weeds and pests, the tainting and depletion of irrigation water, the shrinking diversity of seeds, the dangers of genetically modified crops, and the plummeting nutritional value of fruit, vegetables, and grains. I will not reiterate these issues here, except through examples that address my points, which concern the future of agriculture.

The “need” for a smaller-scale, non-chemical-based agriculture is clear. So are the attributes that it must have. This agriculture will be regionally-based, because the means for shipping produce around the world will no longer be profitable. This agriculture will be based more on animal power (two-legged and four-legged), because machines will be few, and the fuel for them too expensive or unavailable. This agriculture will focus on soil-building rather than chemicals, because the chemicals are sourced from the same raw materials that make the fuel. This agriculture will break with monocropping over hundreds of acres and instead utilize small parcels intercropped. And, this agriculture will have to involve much more than 2% of the population, even if that population is in decline.

I must mention that, in my opinion, the forces at work in the world today — energy, ecology, economics — are of such a large scale and their inertia so powerful that we are being coy when we say we “need” to switch to a smaller-scale, non-chemical agriculture. I suspect that we “will be” making that switch, like it or not, planned or not. No need to rally for the ball that was tossed in the air to come back down. It’s on its way, like all things that go up. But the transition — the beginning of which we are living to see right now — is a very tricky one, to say the least!
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