Yet Hope Grows in Nebraska

What we did not discuss, when I met with the farmers, was the glimmer of hope offered by the Slow Food movement, known by some as the food revolution. But the Slow Food movement has taken hold in Nebraska.

When I visited Lincoln in 2004 to give a talk at the university there, I had not heard of John Ellis and his Centerville Farmers Market—a store that he opened with other local farmers. It is stocked almost entirely with food that represents fifty farmers from within fifty miles of Lincoln. It was a brand-new, revolutionary idea when he first sold his farm and equipment to start it up. I read about John Ellis in Brian Halweil's Eat Here. The venture epitomizes the resilience of the human spirit—in this case linked to the resilience of nature.

John started his store even though he was well aware that there was a Wal-Mart Supercenter on the other side of town, with twenty-eight aisles of food. He believed that customers would buy from the Centerville Farmers Market because they wanted locally grown food. And in the Wal- Mart he knew that almost all the food had traveled thousands of miles to get there. Even a lettuce farmer just outside Lincoln must, if he wants to sell to Wal-Mart, send his produce 225 miles to North Platte to be inspected (each lettuce must comply with strict regulations concerning quality control and appearance). After which it is sent 225 miles back to be sold in the store in Lincoln.

In North Platte, the regional distribution center for Wal- Mart comprises a series of sprawling, hangar-sized warehouses containing the giant freezers, ripening rooms, and packing stations for all the "fresh" food—vegetables, fruit,meat, milk, and so on—that will be sold in the giant supermarkets throughout the whole of the American Great Plains region. How can John Ellis hope to compete? Only by helping to raise the awareness of the ordinary people, the consumers. And he, and others like him, are working hard to do just that. At the back of his store is a "commercial kitchen" where farmers can mingle with shoppers, where chefs demonstrate how to create mouthwatering dishes from the local produce. The walls of the store are devoted to paintings and drawings from local schools creating an art gallery where children can learn about food.

John Ellis is not the only one. Many other such stores are springing up. And more and more farmers markets are appearing in Lincoln and surrounding areas. Farmers are banding together, so that more people can be supplied with a greater variety of produce. There is growing support among politicians and voters for measures such as conservation easements and tax credits that will protect the farmers and their land—measures that also help to preserve the beauty and biodiversity of the countryside. Many farmers markets have become venues for social gatherings, music, and exchange of news, adding to their popularity. People get to know the farmers who grow their food, and sense that these farmers will be more responsible in their production methods.

Within the city limits of Lincoln is Shadowbrook, a thirty-six-hectare certified organic farm that serves seventy families. Community gardens are springing up, here as in so many places around the world, where city people can find the inner peace that comes from working with the soil, marveling at the growth of life that they have planted, hearing the song of birds and the humming of the honeybees. The harvests from these community gardens, and those of the farmers growing for their local communities, are truly liar- vests for hope. And the more people who support these efforts, who use their hard-earned dollars to buy produce from farmers markets, and their political power to vote for measures to protect the source of this produce, the more crop diversity will return to the despoiled land. Nebraska is even growing grapes and making its own wine today.

On the last evening of my stay there was one of the most amazing sunsets I have ever seen. Palest shell pink turning an unreal crimson, then purple, then fiery red. Tom, my sister, and I sat on a rise overlooking the river and watched and listened as the cranes came in, skein after skein. Their wild voices filled the air, a great volume of sound drowning out the trucks on the interstate. There was still enough food, still enough water, to sustain this ancient migration. Somehow, together, we must ensure that our grandchildren are not denied the opportunity to marvel, in their turn, at one of nature's most spectacular scenes. The last glow of the sunset was still smoldering against the almost dark sky as we walked back to the cabin, silent with the magic of the evening. The pale stubble of the corn harvest stretched away from the river into the distance; the dark shape of a center pivot loomed against the sky; a truck thundered along the highway. And the cranes were still calling.

Traditional Foods are the Healthiest

The diverse foods of the world's regions also serve another purpose—besides offering us biodiversity and wonderful flavors, researchers now believe that a diet based on traditional, indigenous foods is often healthier for us. For instance, East Africa's Masai people are cattle herding pastoralists, with a diet that's primarily based on milk and meat, meaning 66 percent of their calories typically come from fat, primarily saturated fats. To put that into context, most North American dietitians recommend no more than 30 percent of our daily calories come from fats. Timothy Johns, a Canadian ethnobotanist at McGill University, studied the Masai diet and lifestyle and discovered they also ate a vatiety of wild, indigenous plants that are high in antioxidants and other properties that tend to reduce cholesterol levels. His research concluded that balancing the diet with indigenous plant foods is one of the main reasons the Masai people typically have no health problems related to the consumption of so much saturated fat.

The people of the Tohono O'odham tribe of southern Arizona are trying to bring back their traditional wild foods to help address their soaring heath problems. Prior to 1960 diabetes was unknown on the Tohono O'odham reservation. Since then, the tribe began to adopt the typical North American diet with an emphasis on saturated animal fats, processed foods, and a lot of sugar. By 2004 the tribe had one of the highest rates of adult-onset Type II diabetes in the world, with 50 percent of all tribal adults diagnosed, and even some children being diagnosed with diet-related diabetes.

Researchers eventually concluded that the tribe's traditional, indigenous diet of wild foods—such as tepary beans, mesquite beans, cholla (cactus) buds, and chia seeds— helps regulate blood sugar and can actually reduce the incidence and impact of diabetes. So with the help of a USDA food security grant, the Tohono O'odham Community Association began sponsoring outings in the Sonoran Desert to collect the tribe's wild foods. They also distributed more than 1,000 packets of traditional seeds. Now gardeners on the reservation are restoring the traditional foods as well as the wild ones. Ultimately, it is hoped that the tribe will dedicate more of its 10,000 acres of cultivated land to traditional food crops, reducing the amount of land that is now used for cash crops such as cotton and hay.

When the tribe moved away from its indigenous diet, it wasn't just the people's health that suffered. They also experienced a decline in those cultural practices that were associated with traditional foods. With this renewed commitment to eating wild foods, the youth are once again learning the customs surrounding harvest. The tribe even brought back the rain dance ceremony, which had not been performed for thirty-five years. Now when the tribal mem

bers dance beside the new crops of traditional foods, asking or rain to sustain them, there is renewed hope for their harvest as well as their tribe.

Wendell Berry, the well-known Kentucky-based author who often writes about the ethic of contemporary agriculture landscape, laments the loss of so much agrarian knowledge—wisdom that took generations of family farmers to acquire. Imagine the fate of the Tohono O'odham people if the knowledge of traditional foods and customs had died off with the tribal elders?

Slow Food Picks up the Pace

The Slow Food movement recently found momentum at a conference, Terra Madre, held in Italy early in 2005. There 5,000 farmers from 130 countries met to discuss the future of food and how the individual farmer—and the local delicacies they produce—can survive amid the commercialization that is so dishonestly promoted by governments and multinational agribusiness.

This gathering was in part a response to meetings of the WTO, the World Trade Organization, and other organizations that seek to determine how foods are produced and traded. It was attended by a diverse cross section of international food producers, including rice farmers from Benin, beekeepers from Azerbaijan, Maori potato producers from New Zealand, and Vermont cheese makers from the U.S. It served as a powerful reminder that determined farmers can survive amid the globalization of today's marketplace. And by banding together, these small Slow Food producers are succeeding in raising the profile of the movement and strengthening their markets. Most importantly, they are finding a collective voice, having realized that individual voices are all too often silenced by the power of international corporations and the political parties they support.

But there is strength in numbers. As one conference attendee said, "It's so good to know we're not alone."

Changing the World one Hard Hat at a Time

"Hope cuisine, not haute cuisine."

Barre, Vermont, is a small, working-class town and the center of the state's granite industry—a place known for quarries and tombstone carving. Here on Main Street, in a small fifteen-foot-wide building that has been feeding residents for over seventy years, is one of the most revolutionary and progressive businesses in the nation—the Farmers Diner. In this tiny diner with its green vinyl booths and white Formica countertops, we find proof that a more hopeful harvest is already under way.

The Farmers Diner is the brainchild of owner and organic farmer Tod Murphy, who one day wondered if it would be possible to create a restaurant with good old American diner food at good old affordable prices but have most of the food come from local and sustainable sources. He took over the landmark diner in 2002 and since then has turned it into a prototype for a national franchise that may someday put Mc- Donald's and Starbucks to the test. More than a meal, the Farmers Diner represents the cutting edge of the local foods movement. So far, the Farmers Diner is spending 70 cents out of every dollar on products from farmers and small-scale producers who live and work within seventy miles of Barre. You'll find milk shakes, burgers, and omelets on the menu, but the burgers and milk will come from local grass-fed cows, the omelets from the eggs of free-range and small-flock hens. And if the season is right, you're likely to find a few surprises, such as a slice of green zebra heirloom tomato under your burger bun or a dish of local organic strawberry ice cream.

The way Tod Murphy sees it, he's building a bridge between the sustainable local foods movement and the everyday customer who may not be able to afford a meal at Alice Waters's Chez Panisse in California, but would still appreciate the riches of local, seasonal fare. (In fact, the diner's tomatoes are grown by one of the farmers who used to supply organic tomatoes for Chez Panisse.) Many of the residents who first started coming to the diner in 2002 didn't really care much about local sustainable. foods, they just wanted good, reasonably priced diner fare. While customers have come to appreciate the local connection, it is the food that keeps them coming back.

Murphy speaks fondly of his regulars, such as the elder Vermont ladies who come from the assisted living retirement housing two blocks down from the diner. "They almost wept when they tasted our sauerkraut," he said. "It's not cooked, it's just chopped cabbage with sea salt, and for a lot of these ladies over seventy this is the sauerkraut they remember from when they were little girls." They have the same reaction to the diner's beet salad made of four different varieties of local, organic beets. "For many elder customers, the resurgence in local fresh food gives them a chance to remember and retaste the food from childhood, before industry got in the way," said Murphy. "And hopefully the desire and the commitment to pay what is needed to taste it again."

Sometimes it's not until customers start reading the menu and place mats, profiling all the local farmers who brought them their breakfast, lunch, or dinners, that they are even aware that the diner offers local riches. The customer literature explains that the diner only sells animal products that have been raised without antibiotics and hormones, and all livestock has access to the outdoors and pasture as a principal part of their feed ration, thus explainin_gwhy the butter is bright yellow. "That's the way butter is when the cow is outside eating fresh grass, not chained up in a barn," said Murphy. The literature also gives the history of the diner's hamburger, how it made a seventy-mil_e route from farm to plate instead of the almost 2,000-mile journey of most industrial beef.

Tod Murphy may be an organic farmer with an idealistic vision, but he is also a savvy entrepreneur. It certainly hasn't escaped his attention that just about every food and travel magazine now includes a favorable feature about local foods. He also noted that food trends, such as gourmet coffee, seem to first appeal to consumers in the top upper 10 percent income bracket, but eventually become popular among the middle class. He sees the local foods movement eventually becoming a mainstream mandate.

His vision is to create a national franchise of Farmers Diners—with about five to ten diners working with a central pod of local suppliers. So far his sights are on a pod in the Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, another one in the Hudson Valley/New York City area, and eventually moving on to the San Francisco Bay area and Portland, Oregon. According to Murphy, each pod will help eighty to 200 local farms become secure in their economic viability. For now he's seeking investors while he continues to infiltrate the working class of Vermont. He likes to recount the time a crew of construction workers came into the diner for some hamburgers. They had come to Barre from another part of the state to work on a local gas station.

"One day at a quarter to twelve in walks a whole crew of construction guys looking for burgers," Murphy recalled. "They have Dallas Cowboys stickers on their hard hats, and they immediately take over two booths with their cement^- covered boots sticking out in the aisles."

When the burgers were served, one of the guys declared, "This is the best hamburger I've had since I was a kid inMontana. This has got to be Black Angus from Colorado or Montana or Wyoming."

But his friend said, "What the hell are you talking about? Can't you read the menu? It's from right around here—in Starksboro, Vermont."

The other guy got mad. "No way did this come from Vermont. I'm telling you I grew up in the West and this is Western beef." For a while it looked like a fight might break out.

This story especially delights Murphy. "These guys didn't come into the diner because we offered local food. They came in to get hamburgers and get back to the job. But suddenly they are having a discussion about local food. You now have a guy sitting there thinking holy smoke this tastes different and better than anything else because it's local and you got another guy who's now got emotionally involved in defending the position that this is local. This is what the victory for our side really looks like."

Another encouraging trend is Burgerville, a chain of thirty-nine fast food restaurants in the Pacific Northwest that was dubbed "America's Freshest Fast Food" by Gourmet magazine. Their menu is nearly identical to Mc- Donald's, but the mini-chain buys the bulk of its ingredients from farmers in Oregon and Washington. Some of its big sellers are local Tillamook dairy products. This may not be remarkable for a restaurant that features local sustainable foods—but what is remarkable is that McDonald's is catching on. Drive by the Seattle McDonald's that serves the Space Needle tourists, and you'll see a brightly lit sign, boldly advertising its exciting new menu item—local Tillamook ice cream.

They Have the Water Crisis

The looming global water crisis—nowhere is this illustrated better than in Nebraska and the surrounding states. At the present time (spring 2005), Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming are in the fifth year of a drought cycle and there is growing concern about sinking levels in both surface water and the underlying aquifer. Water is used not only for agriculture, but increasingly for domestic use in fast growing towns. Already, in some parts of Nebraska, moratoriums on drilling new wells have been introduced, and plans to impose similar regulations in other parts have led to a frenzy of well drilling— indeed the pace of drilling has been more than a match for drilling restrictions—the number of new wells in the last three years accounts for more than 44 percent of the overall total for the last ten years. In 2004, for the third year in succession, the statewide total of new wells topped 1,000. So far, there are no restrictions on the amount that can be pumped, but this is likely to change, as it has in other states. The major problem is that both corn and soybeans require a great deal of water—in 2003 alone farmers flooded 8.5 million acres to a depth of one foot. Some of this was drawn from surface water, but most was pumped from underground sources.

I first learned that the Platte River was endangered in 2003. This was such a horrifying thought that I asked Tom if he could arrange for me to meet with some of the local farmers and conservation groups. The following year, thanks to the efforts of Tom's friend Paul Johnsguard, we attended such a meeting and heard about the problems that faced both groups. At first the farmers were reluctant to talk, but once they had relaxed it became clear that they were facing tough times. They felt threatened by the big corporations that could control corn prices. Each farmer, to make ends meet, was working an area that used to be divided into four or five farms. They were plowing their land right up to the road, destroying the last bits of natural habitat for wildlife, because every extra foot counted. And they resented the visitors who came once a year to watch the crane migration and just walked over their land without a by-your-leave or thank-you. They also resented the conservation groups that bought up land, because they paid inflated prices and this drove up the value of all land in the area so that the farmers then had to pay increased taxes.

I told them about the problems faced by the farmers around Gombe, and some of the ways in which we tried to help them so that they, in turn, would help us care for the chimps. How could we help these farmers in the Platte Valley, I asked. We discussed the various solutions that have been proposed.

First, there are conservation easements. If a farmer signs on to this program he agrees not to develop certain parts of his land, and not to allow developments on it, in perpetuity. This entitles him to a variety of tax breaks. Another scheme pays farmers along the Republican and Platte Rivers, all the way from the Wyoming border, not to irrigate. This is designed to preserve water and return some 100,000 acres of cropland to grass. The program began in 2002 and so far 19,818 acres have been protected. All the farmers said they would certainly take advantage of this offer, but were skeptical that the money would be forthcoming. And there were a few small schemes where conservation groups paid farmers not to harvest their crops, thus leaving more grain for the birds.

One old farmer began to talk about the old times. He remembered waking in the night as a child to the roar and thunder of the Platte River in spate. The spring melt of snow in Colorado sent the water racing down from the mountains, clearing out the sand and silt and creating new channels. "Too many dams and reservoirs now," he supposed. And he remembered drinking water from the family well when he was a child. Cups full of clean, cold water. "I won't let my grandchildren drink even one teaspoonful of that water now," he said. "It's all those chemicals we've put on the fields for the corn that's done it."

He lapsed into silence. Thinking, I suppose, of a long- gone world. A world that was clean. A world that was hard for a farmer, but one in which he worked in the expectation that his children would inherit his land, and his love of the land. Now, the farmers told us, their children seldom stayed. They went to seek their fortune in the towns, away from the backbreaking toil, the struggle to make ends meet, the shrinking river that flows over the sinking, poisoned aquifer.

And we talked about the cranes and the other birds. But for the farmers the cranes would be in a sorry plight. The cranes depend pn the grain left on the ground after the harvest to give them sufficient body fat to migrate onward to Alaska and Siberia. This dependency has been caused by the destruction of the prairie and the animal protein of the wet meadows. Perhaps there is some way that the cranes, and the visitors they attract, can help the farmers as they struggle to survive. Some of the farmers have built little viewing blinds when their land is adjacent to the river, places where the increasing number of tourists can view the cranes arriving in the evenings.

Saving Family Farms (what we can do?)

There are many ways in which individuals, or groups of individuals, can make a difference.

Save Land

Recently I came across a story about a group of enlightened people in the town of Scrabble, in West Virginia, and their efforts to save their vanishing farmlands. As the town is only a one-and-a-half-hour drive from Washington, D.C., the farmland is prime real estate—perfect for developers.

The group began its efforts when a local 300-acre farm was offered for sale. It would be purchased by a developer and turned into two-acre plots, without respect or appreciation for the community and environmental assets around which they were developing. As a result, town residents banded together and cashed their stocks and retirement accounts, and mortgaged their homes in an effort to buy the farm themselves.

In a few weeks they had raised $700,000 but, although this was a remarkable feat, it was still less than the amount offered by the developer. However, although they did not secure that particular farm for their town, they are not giving up. They are now prepared and, with a financial network in place, are ready to fight to save other local farms as they are put on the market. And then, with the kind of options for farmers described in this chapter, the farms may actually be revitalized and help feed the residents of the town with locally grown, healthy food.

Buy from Local Farmers

Somewhere near you there are family farmers who are trying to do right by the earth—who are trying to feed their families as well as their community with integrity and respect. Aside from eating less meat, buying your food from a local farmer who is a good steward of the earth is one of the most effective contributions you can make to the health of the planet. The more we invest in these farms the more we build the world we want to live in. And the more likely we are to pass on the kind of world our children and grandchildren deserve to inherit.

Shop at Farmers Markets

Farmers markets are one of the most ideal sources of local, sustainable foods. You'll discover that almost all freshly picked vegetables from local farms taste phenomenally better than produce that's traveled thousands of miles before reaching your local supermarket. Be sure to ask stall operators what's the best and freshest produce. Farmers markets can be found in cities all across the U.S. The USDA has a complete listing of markets in all fifty states at their Web site (see Resources).

Become a Shareholder in a Farm

A share in a CSA costs about $300 to $500 for a twenty-four- to twenty-six-week growing season. In return, you receive weekly boxes of fresh seasonal fruits and vegetables. Many CSA programs accept monthly payments, and you may be able to buy a half-share rather than a whole share. (See the Resources section for a Web site that can help you locate a CSA near you.)

Join a Food Co-op

A food cooperative is a member-owned business that provides groceries and other products to its members, usually at a discount. Many of the products lining the shelves of coops are organic and much of the produce comes from local family farms. To find a co-op near you, check out Web sites such as Cooperative Grocer (www.cooperativegrocer.coop) and Local Harvest (www.localharvest.org). Joining a co-op is usually easy, typically requiring you to pay some dues.

Farmers markets, CSAs, and co-ops are probably the purest expression of the original vision of the organic movement because they offer direct contact with local growers and also offer direct support of their efforts: Detractors say that the commitment to eating local, sustainable foods is nothing more than a pie-in-the-sky utopian dream. But Joan Gussow, author of This Organic Life and one of the people who helped write the USDA organic certification standards, puts it this way: "I've often been told my vision for a food supply that is mostly based on local farmers markets and CSAs is completely unrealistic. But I believe that the current practice of food distribution is even more unrealistic, considering that we're running out of petroleum, and we will eventually be unable to ship our food all over the place."

An OrganicWave Worldwide Part 1

"Humans merely share the earth. We can only protect the land, not own it."

-CHIEF SEATTLE

Why should we be concerned about what is happening around the world? Don't we have enough problems at home without worrying about Africa or India or China? Unfortunately, as corporate globalization stretches its grasp ever further across the face of the earth, we find that the demands of the urban elite seriously and negatively impact the poor in developing countries. As when the Brazilian rain forest is destroyed in order that cheap hamburgers can be sold on the American market. Or when large areas of traditional farmland in Africa are sold to foreign companies to grow coffee or tea, the sale of which is unlikely to benefit those who live in the area.

Looked at from another perspective, the government subsidies for farmers growing corn in America, which result in flooding the U.S. market and lowering prices to the extent that small-scale farmers are going out of business, also means that cheap grain is available for famine relief overseas. And while this may be of the utmost importance—inmany cases saving thousands of lives—there can also be a downside in that local farmers in famine-stricken areas will be unable to sell their crops. Which may be devastating.

Finally, the amount of food shipped between countries has quadrupled since the 1960s, but this hasn't been a boon for the small local farmers in either the exporting or importing countries. Instead, it's perpetuated a situation where people in wealthier nations are consuming more and ever more of the food resources of poorer nations. We now have a global corporate structure where less developed nations are struggling with overpopulation, poverty, and hunger while they deplete their land and natural resources to feed people in other, wealthier parts of the world, and to put foreign exchange into the often corrupt pockets of government officials. And the small family farmers in the importing countries cannot compete with cheaper imported produce. Moreover, while the children in poorer parts of the world are often starving, even dying of hunger, the children of the developed world face an epidemic of obesity. Clearly something must be done.

SUSTAINING HOPE

All around the world we find hopeful examples of successful sustainable farming operations in poor, rural communities. And when we say sustainable, we mean, of course, the deep organic farming we've discussed, where the soil is nurtured through composting, biological pest control, and rotation of crops and livestock without the use of chemical pesticides or fertilizers. One such project linked farmers from the impoverished Makuyu community in Kenya with the Kenya Institute of Organic Farming. Before this partnership was established, the Makuyu farmers were using agrochemicals on depleted soil, and were struggling to grow enough food to feed their families. After learning sustainable, organic methods—similar to their old, traditional way of farming—they found that vegetable crop yields not only increased by 60 percent, they actually had a surplus of food.

But the good news didn't end there. The farmers decided to start a local food co-op, so they could sell surplus food and put the profits back into the community. As a result, the Makuyu co-op was able to buy dairy goats, beehives, rabbits, and poultry for community members as well as plant 20,000 trees, including 2,000 mangoes, to help revitalize areas that had been deforested. Meanwhile, the mood of the community shifted from despair to optimism. The Makuyu organic farmers have since gone on to teach other farmers in the region how to farm sustainably.

This is not an isolated example. Jules Pretty, director of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex and author of The Living Land: Agriculture, Food and Community Regeneration in Rural Europe, researched communities all over the world where farmers are replacing synthetic farm chemicals with sustainable, organic methods. He found that those who are no longer dependent on expensive imported farm chemicals can increase their yields while lowering their production costs. And because sustainable farming is often labor-intensive, it provides more employment for local and regional communities.

Pretty writes about projects that affect some 45,000 farmers in Guatemala and Honduras who now use organic farming and have tripled their corn yields. By also diversifying their upland farms, they created more local business and wealth, which helped spur a remigration back from the cities. He also reports that a million wetland rice farmers in Bangladesh, China, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Sri Lanka, Thailand, and Vietnam changed their farming methods to nonchemical sustainable agriculture, and increased their yields by about 10 percent.

But there is danger here. Increased food yield must be balanced by an optimization of the population in a givenarea. However carefully farmed, no land can produce enough food, by any method whatsoever, to keep pace with human population growth as it exists today in many parts of the world. When the number of people living in a given area is too great for the carrying capacity of that area they will try to move to new places. In many cases this is already impossible—there are simply too many people. If they are wealthy and can buy food from elsewhere, then they are depleting the natural resources in other areas. If we do not impose limits on our population growth, life as we know it, on this planet, will no longer be possible. Even if we could, theoretically, feed many more times the number of people than those on the planet today, how many of us would like to live on a planet where villages, towns, and cities meet and merge in one great urban sprawl across the face of the globe?

They Have The Corn

Today, the agricultural system in central Nebraska is considered one of the most productive in the world. But it produces mostly the same crop—corn. Nebraska is the third largest producer of corn, after Illinois and Idaho, much of it grown for cattle feed. The next most frequently grown crop is soybeans. The fertile soil of the Platte Valley can also grow other crops, such as sugar beets, dry edible beans, sorghum, wheat, and alfalfa. But because corn is the most responsive to applications of water and fertilizer, some fields have produced only corn for the past thirty years.

There are problems associated with growing this single crop over long periods. For one thing the lack of crop rotation means the potential for loss of soil as a result of wind erosion. For another, it encourages large populations of corn rootworms, corn borers, red spider mites, and others, and these gradually build up resistance to pesticides—requiring ever more chemicals to be used in attempts to eradicate them. These chemicals run off into the surface water, and seep into the groundwater. The aquifer has become increasingly poisoned. Also, with no alternative harvests, farmers suffer terrible losses when the price of corn drops. And this can be manipulated by the big corporations flooding the market, seeking to buy up and control ever more land as small farmers give up the struggle to survive.

THEY HAVE THE FACTORY FARMS

A facility with 40,000 hogs creates as much sewage as 160,000 people—nearly half the population of Omaha. But the distribution of feces produces more than just smell pollution; it also introduces bacteria and toxins into the air and groundwater and—because water sources are invariably linked—also to rivers and streams, where there can be devastating consequences to the local ecology. But all too often, by the time the effects of waste from these facilities are detected, it is too late for local plants, animals, and sometimes humans.

I met a man in Nebraska this spring who had lived and farmed in a small town since 1937. He remembered well the Nebraska hog farms that served an important role in their communities. Legislation for the dumping of hog waste was irrelevant then, because no hog farmer had more hogs than his property could carry. No one would have considered testing the groundwater for contaminants because no one was getting sick—adults weren't developing respiratory problems and babies weren't developing "blue baby syndrome"—and millions of fish weren't turning up dead in their streams.

But things began to change in the 1980s, he said, when big business came onto the scene and the first factory farms, or Confined Animal Feeding Operations, for pigs were established. As these began to raise large numbers of pigs that grew fast, due to hormones and antibiotics administered in the feed, the price per hog quickly plummeted from about $36 to $8. Local pig farmers found it difficult to make ends meet, and many went out of business.

Quite apart from the shocking cruelty of these factory farms, there is the problem of the disposal of pigs' waste. This is dumped in open "lagoons." Sometimes it is diluted and sprayed on adjacent (and often genetically modified) crops—fertilizer laced with residual antibiotics and often antibiotic-resistant bacteria. The stench of this waste is revolting. My friend Tom Mangelsen has his permanent residence in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, but he still maintains a cabin in Nebraska, the state in which he was raised. On one of my visits to Tom's cabin the nearby field had just been treated with the diluted pig waste, and the smell made us both feel quite sick. No wonder the value of properties drops when a hog operation is built within smelling distance. The dung of the pigs on the farms of my childhood did not smell like that, not in the least. No wonder the American pork industry targets poor rural towns where it is cheapest to win political favor and easiest to silence critics.

"You could never dump this stuff in New York City," said Laura Krebsbach, one of the nation's experts on state and federal regulations pertaining to Confined Animal Feeding Operations, "but it's hard to get a big outcry in Cherry County, Nebraska, where the population is one person per square mile."

THEY HAVE THE GLOBAL SUPERMARKET

Farmers here face many other problems. In his insightful book Eat Here, Brian Halweil explains how, as recently as the 1950s, virtually all of the fruits and vegetables consumed in Nebraska cities were grown locally. Then long- distance transport of food became possible with refrigerated long-haul trucks, cheap gasoline, advances in food processing that made long-term storage possible, and a federally subsidized interstate highway system. This heralded the arrival of huge supermarkets appearing in more and more cities and towns selling food from all over the country and from overseas. And so, as local farmland declined in profitability, thousands of family farms in Nebraska (and the surrounding states) went under and farming communities were increasingly replaced by subdivisions and concrete. And the remaining farmers mostly depend on good harvests of corn and soybeans for their survival.