How Fresh is Fresh? (From farmer to family)

From farmer to family

As a general rule, most of our larger food chains either buy direct from farms and markets or use agents who buy on their behalf and distribute to their stores.

One exception to this is Woolworths, which buys nothing on the open market. All their fruit, vegetables and salads are grown for the group by selected farmers who follow specified growing programmes. The farmer delivers direct to one of two distribution centres (in the Cape and Transvaal), which operate 24 hours a day. Woolworths distributes to stores from that point and on average, produce is on the shelves the day after it is picked.

Most of it is transported in refrigerated trucks (with the exception of course of produce that must not be chilled - potatoes and bananas, for example, must not be refrigerated because they deteriorate). But all produce that requires it is refrigerated and the 'cold chain' remains unbroken from the time the produce leaves the distribution centre to the time it is unpacked onto the shelves. Produce is not treated with any synthetic preservatives after being harvested.

Another food store group moving into mass refrigeration of fresh produce is Pick 'n Pay. Their buying policy centres predominantly on the independent farmers, with 85% of produce coming direct from the farms and only 15% from the markets. It goes from either of these to a central distribution centre, then into the stores. So carrots picked this morning would be through to some stores by this afternoon, or tomorrow morning at the latest. The supermarket chain buys all its greens, carrots and so on fresh on a daily basis from the farms. In July 1990 Pick 'n Pay opened a new distribution centre in the Cape which is temperature-controlled at 12 ^°C internally. Their next step will be to refrigerate all their trucks and maintain the cold chain to stores especially vital during the long summer months.

Refrigeration may seem unnecessary if the vegetables are in fact reaching the stores so quickly - after all, a day between field and trolley doesn't sound like much. But in the summer months, average day temperatures can be between 26-28^° and in an ordinary metal- sided truck, they can soar to over 30° - which creates a distinct danger of products becoming over-ripe or wilting. This is often the reason why we see tired-looking lettuces and other produce in stores - it's apparently more a case of wilting due to excessive daytime temperatures than having sat on a supermarket shelf for days. In fact, no-one seems to deny that cold-chain transportation is essential in a country which has a summer lasting six months and where long distances have to be travelled from distribution centres to stores.

Another factor to consider is that produce is becoming significantly more expensive. The growing cost to the farmer has increased enormously in the last few years and in order to recoup those prices from the consumer, the stores have to offer good quality in return. There has been a massive expansion in the consumption of fresh produce in the last few years and it looks set to continue growing.

Some chain stores - such as Pick 'n Pay and OK Bazaars - buy both direct and through an agent while many others, notably Checkers, buy everything through a supply company which in turn buys from farms or through the markets. Produce is transported in cooler trucks to central refrigerated depots in either Cape Town, Johannesburg, Port Elizabeth, Durban or Bloemfontein and from there out to the differentstores.

But what about the smaller food stores? The giants have sophisticated infrastructures to keep their shelves filled so how does the smaller retailer compete, and how does his produce rate by comparison? Surprisingly, many small country supermarkets compare very well. In agricultural areas a lot of produce is bought straight from the farms, which means theoretically it can be picked in the morning and in the store by the afternoon. What can't be bought locally is purchased at the municipal markets, usually through an agent. (This also applies to small shopkeepers in more urban areas.) In these instances, the foodstuff is usually a day old when it gets to market, is probably held another day by the agent while transportation is arranged, and may be in the local store on the third day.

However this is the 'best possible' scenario. Where some small stores come unstuck is that they may buy through an agent who delivers, say, twice weekly. If we take as an example a small store where the agent delivers on Tuesday and Friday, when you walk into that store

on the Thursday not only are you seeing produce that has been in-store for three days but you must also allow for the preceding few days between farmer, market and shop. This goes a long way to explaining why 'country fresh' is sometimes more of an ad-man's dream than a reality!

Of course, if freshness is your top priority, the many farmstalls dotted around the country are a good option. Their seasonal produce generally comes straight from the farm, and only out-of-season fruit and vegetables are bought from markets.

In summary, it seems we can assume that the cauliflower or beans or lettuce we buy today has taken an average of 2 days to make its journey from farmer to consumer. And the prime reason for differences in freshness rests not so much with the time-lag after harvest as with what happens to the crop once it is picked. Retailers who can offer cold-chain distribution, or who are small enough to be able to coordinate fast delivery from source to shop, are the ones who appear to be coming out best.

The one over-riding factor, of course, is the seasonality of the foodstuff - if you are buying, say, apples out of season, then it's commonsense to accept that they will have been held in cold storage for a prolonged

One question that often bothers consumers is why produce appears to be much fresher in one branch of a national chain than in another and why there are instances when some of the fruit and vegetables on display look 'tired' to say the least! Theoretically there should not be any difference because all the produce comes from a centralised depot, the same standard of produce goes out to all stores and the time factor is roughly the same in each case. Occasionally, however, there is a weak link in the chain and sometimes this weak link is the individual store manager.

Most stores have an in-store produce manager who is responsible not only for the ordering of stock but also for its handling, display and presentation and for the length of time it is left on the shelves before being replaced by fresh stock.

While research suggests that the majority of stores order only what they need for each day - thus ensuring that stocks are swiftly cleared ready for replenishment by a new delivery - in some instances where the in-store manager is inexperienced (or possibly inefficient) stocks may well be less than perfect. Over-ordering could result in produce staying on the shelf until it is past its prime and any canny marketer can tell you that that even if there is fresh produce to hand, it probably won't be put up for sale until the 'old' stock has been cleared. At the same time, it's important to realise that a carrot is not ready to be discarded just because its green top is wilted.

Saving Family Farms

In poor urban areas, in both the industrial and developing world, families typically have to spend more than half their income on food, since they cannot buy in bulk. And often the areas where they live are underserved. In the Anacostia section of Washington, D.C., the people were without a single supermarket for years, just fast food outlets and convenience stores. When a farmers market, with produce from urban gardens, was established it gave them their first reliable source of fresh food in years. In Havana, the U.S. embargo, followed by the Soviet collapse, forced the government to step in to help the residents, and today about 90 percent of the city's fresh produce is grown in its own urban farms and gardens.

Urban farms protect watersheds that supply city water and they enable people to reestablish their contact with the land as well as grow their own food. They also provide a use for food waste that would otherwise end up in landfills. And, very importantly, they provide meaningful work. Halweil describes the imaginative project of Wally Satzewich, onetime cabdriver, and his wife, Gail. Between them they manage twenty residential garden plots in Saskatoon. They either pay rent or barter a food basket in lieu of rent. They farm organically, frequently rotating crops to minimize damage by insect pests. They have built up a twenty- member CSA and they also supply some of the best known restaurants. Moreover, they make enough money to live comfortably: From one of his plots he earned $3,900 in one season. Wally is enthusiastic, sharing his project on his Web site. How hopeful it feels, thinking of all these people, all over the world, rolling up their sleeves and reconnecting with the soil. It makes me smile.

SAVING FAMILY FARMS

Every time we buy locally grown food we are supporting the beleaguered small family farmers, like Joel Salatin and Mike and Heidi Peroni. Each year more than 8,000 square miles of U.S. iand is swallowed up by the vast suburban sprawl of strip malls, convenience stores, and housing developments—land that is often ideal for agriculture. Farmlands that don't get developed are often taken over by large corporate farms. Conservationists worldwide are starting to believe that preserving sustainable, local farms is almost as important as protecting our wild lands.

Of course the obvious benefit of preserving family farms is that they give us access to diverse, nutritious, and regional foods. But local sustainable farms also support the healthy characteristics of our communities. In rural areas where the family farms are protected and still producing, we often find higher employment and more thriving local businesses, schools, parks, churches, and community organizations, according to the Institute for Food and Development Policy. But when there is a dearth of local farms, rural communities tend to die off or struggle to survive.

Brian Halweil, a leading voice in the local foods movement in addition to being the author of Eat Here, speaks of rural "food deserts" where isolated households have not only lost their community services, they don't even have access to grocery stores or farmers markets because corporate grocers don't find it profitable to serve these poor outposts, and local farms have been lost to industrialization. Many of these households wind up feeding their families the highly processed food at convenience stores placed beside highway gas stations.

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 Organic Wave Worldwide Part 2

HELPING WOMEN TO TAKE CARE OF THE EARTH

In Tanzania, the Jane Goodall Institute has originated the TACARE (Ta(ke) Care) project in thirty-three villages around Gombe National Park. This has hugely improved the lives of more than 150,000 people by introducing fuel- efficient stoves for cooking, tree nurseries, methods of farming most suitable for the very steep rocky slopes bordering Lake Tanganyika, and ways to prevent or deal with soil erosion. All of our methods are, of course, based on organic, sustainable land use.

TACARE has established nine small microcredit banks (based on the Grameen Bank model) so that now small groups of women can start their own environmentally sustainable projects. Bright schoolgirls can apply for scholarships to enable them to go on to secondary school. And TACARE also offers women's reproductive health counseling, including family planning information and HIV-AIDS education. There is an emphasis on educating girls and women partly because, traditionally, their lives have been unacceptably harsh, but especially because it has been shown, all around the world, that as women's education increases, family size drops.

All the TACARE villages can now collect their supply of firewood from their own woodlots where fast growing species have been planted close by. And when they stop hacking at the tree stumps growing on the bare mountain slopes a new tree springs from the seemingly dead wood—within five years it will be twenty to thirty feet high. Now "TACARE forests" have sprung up around many of the villages. We are now taking the first steps to replicate TACARE in other parts of Africa.

IT ALL BEGINS AND ENDS WITH SOIL

More than 90 percent of the world's food comes from the soil. If you take into consideration that the food animals are sustained by plants, then everything we eat originates in the soil. Thus it is disturbing to learn from a recent U.N. report that each year more than 10 million hectares (25 mil- lion acres) of topsoil are swept away from cropland by rain and wind. Three hundred million hectares, an area that could potentially produce enough to feed the whole of Europe, have become so degraded that they cannot be used for agriculture, at least in the foreseeable future. "Farming," as Dr. Ward Chesworth of the University of Guelph said, "has produced an agricultural scar on the planet affecting one third of suitable soils."

This degradation is largely due to the clearing of woodland and forest for growing crops and gathering firewood to feed mushrooming human populations in the developing countries. In Ivory Coast, West Africa, for example, the loss of topsoil before clearing the trees was about .03 tons per hectare per year; after deforestation it was some ninety tons per hectare per year. India is losing some six billion tons of topsoil per year, again mostly due to deforestation. China, about the same size as the United States, and with three times as many people, has only one eighth as much good farmland. And this precious land, in many places, is turning into desert ever more quickly. The process has been going on for hundreds of years, but has intensified in the past fifty years, as population growth has led to the attempted cultivation of increasingly marginal land. There the thin soil soon dries up and blows away. The amount of land available for food production per capita dropped by half between 1950 and 1990, and since then, despite major efforts, the problem has only intensified. It often results in major dust storms: There were twenty-three in the 1990s. And in 2001 a dust cloud blew off China so massive that it briefly darkened the sky over North America.

And now China's farming problems are compounded as new urban and industrial developments radiate out from the cities. Farmers are losing their land, so that the percentage of the country suitable for agriculture is continually decreasing. In view of this, it is clearly desperately important to regenerate as much despoiled farmland as possible, as soon as possible. It is no longer appropriate for people, however rich or poor, to continue to destroy the planet's future. Yet it is easy to understand how this happens. In many places population growth has led to more people living in an area than the land can support, and as they struggle to scratch a livelihood they cut down more and ever more trees, often in places unsuitable for cultivation. This was the situation in the once forested hills outside Gombe National Park. By the early 1980s virtually all the trees outside the park were gone and cultivated fields stretched up toward the hilltops and to the boundaries of the park. During the wet season each heavy rain washed precious topsoil into the valleys and often directly into Lake Tanganyika. Once the trees from the higher slopes had gone, there were often flash floods. I visited one tiny lakeshore village where half the houses had been washed away and fifteen people killed during such a flash flood. The people around Gombe, like so many across Africa, were too poor to buy food from elsewhere. Some moved away, leaving family and friends to try their luck in the less crowded areas to the south. The others continued, desperately, to try to coax food from the increasingly barren land.

One of TACARE's most exciting projects helps people repair overused land, and to reclaim farms that were abandoned after deforestation, overuse, and erosion left them seemingly dead. Two demonstration farms, now lush, green, and with many trees, serve as models, and are popular with local farmers, who arrive in large numbers to learn new techniques. This fantastic ability to regenerate quickly is typical of many kinds of trees in the tropics, and there are methods of building up soil even in the most arid places, provided there is some rain.

As we have seen, the corporate-dominated, global food markets have a tendency to create plantations and industrial farms that degrade and pollute precious resources, such as the topsoil, water, and forests. Community projects such as TACARE can create a vast landscape of worldwide farmers who won't be bought out or compromised by the dangling carrot of immediate cash. Instead, the main incentive will be creating sustainable farms that best serve the farmers and their families, the land, and the consumers who are nourished from them.

LOCAL FOOD FOR LOCAL PEOPLE

Projects like these give us great hope. They restore degraded soil and safely increase crop yields all over the world. But one of the most inspiring outcomes of the growing interest in global, organic agriculture is that it emphasizes the importance of local food economies. Some skeptics might dismiss the local foods movement as a bourgeois food trend, serving those who have the resources and leisure time to eat delicious organic meals. But eating foods from local, sustainable sources is far more than a luxurious choice. It is our global mandate. Currently, 38 percent of the earth's land area is cropland or pasture and that amount is only increasing as the human population continues to grow. Some predict our supply of food will need to at least double and possibly triple over the next several decades to accommodate the planet's population growth. The use of toxic synthetic chemical fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, growth hormones, antibiotics in animal feed, food irradiation, and genetically modified organisms to increase food production has been justified, in part, by the rationale that without these products the world will not be able to feed itself. This is not the case—and even if it was, would a plentiful supply of contaminated food be the solution?

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.

Put our Harvest on Hope: Harvest for Hope

"If you lose hope, somehow you lose the vitality that keeps life moving, you lose that courage to be, that quality that helps you go on in spite of it all. And so today I still havea dream."

We live in troubling times. The giant corporations control much of the world's food, as well as the patents on our seeds. Billions of farm animals live in conditions of utmost deprivation and misery. Humans and animals are increasingly becoming poisoned from the chemicals that have been lavishly sprinkled over fields, crops, and food produce and that have contaminated the earth's water, soil, and air. Disease-causing bacteria are 'building up resistance to the antibiotics that are routinely administered to livestock in factory farms. Genetically modified organisms, GMOs, have escaped into the environment and who knows what that will mean? Billions of tons of fossil fuel are used to transport our food from one end of the planet to the other—and often back again—contributing significantly to the changes in global climate. And the soil of our planet is being not only poisoned but swept away by the wind from areas cleared for agriculture. Monoculture crops subsidized by governments provide fuel for the manufacture of hamburgers and T-bone steaks. Thousands of children die of obesity and its attendant ills in the West, while millions more die of starvation in the developing word. Family farms are going out of business and asphalt and concrete is spread over more and more good arable land. Water is becoming terrifyingly scarce as well as polluted.

I learned more and more about the unethical conduct of some of the largest multinational corporations. They are so powerful, and they can break down those who oppose their will with lawsuits that only they can afford. Many corporations contribute large amounts to the campaigns of politicians: They are repaid by support for their programs. Money and power are falling into the hands of fewer and fewer people on the global stage.

In 2005 the United Nations issued a rather daunting "Millennium Report." After a five-year study, a team of international scientists came to a sobering agreement: Unless we stop the pollution and degradation caused by industrial farming and seriously address overfishing and global warming, we will literally run out of enough resources to feed everyone by the year 2050. The scientists used the analogy of people overspending their bank accounts. Meaning, to put it bluntly, that if governments and industries continue to allow and actually subsidize farming methods that destroy our planet's resources, for the sake of immediate profit, we shall eat everything edible to the point of human population collapse—and we shall take many other species with us.

Fortunately, the report indicated that the situation is not utterly hopeless. Not, that is, if we take steps immediately to reduce fossil fuel emissions; bring to an end government and consumer support for industrial agriculture, including animal factory farms and fisheries that harm the planet; and start subsidizing and supporting more sensible and sustainable ways to feed human beings. "Take immediate steps"—that is addressed to each one of us.

There has never been a time when it is more crucial for us to carefully consider where our food is coming from and how it was grown, raised, and harvested—so that we can make informed efforts to purchase the right things. For our choices will affect not only our own health but also the environment and animal welfare. And, too, our choices will affect small family farms. I have told the stories of several farmers who have returned to more traditional farming methods, working—usually very hard indeed—to have their produce branded organic and to become once more wise stewards of the land. It is desperately important that we support them by buying their produce whenever possible. And persuading our friends to do the same.