We Can Feed the World from the Gorge, but Can We Feed Ourselves?

By Kathy Watson. June 1, 2017. Feeding ourselves is a messy business. Food production is one of the most environmentally destructive human activities on earth. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says that 33 percent of the total global warming effect can be attributed to the food system alone. Add to that the degradation of air, water and soil from food production, and it’s enough to make you rue your own metabolism. In a self-defeating irony, the process of getting dinner on the table depends on the health of the very ecosystem our daily hunger is destroying.

Short of putting ourselves on starvation diets, what can we do? In 2016, more than 75 people from both Oregon and Washington sides of the Gorge met together for six months to answer that question, and more: Why are so many Gorge residents hungry? Why are we buying only about 2 percent of the food we eat here from local sources? But before we look at their work, it’s worth examining what makes food production such a destructive force to be reckoned with.

The food system as we know it acts in primarily three destructive ways:

1. Transportation: Miles to go Before we Eat

The most recent research pegs the life-cycle greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions attributable to food transportation at about 11 percent of the total emissions caused by the food system. In the early 2000s, research by Rich Pirog at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, determined that on average, food travels about 1,500 miles from farms to our tables. The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) says that the typical American prepared-meal contains ingredients from five countries in addition to the U.S. When those imported foods arrive by air, the impacts are staggering. In ag-rich California in 2005, the import of fruits, nuts and vegetables by airplane released 70,000 tons of CO2, about the equivalent of 12,000 cars on the roads.

2. Waste: The Food and Other Things We Never Eat

Combine an inefficient food distribution system with American’s eating habits and the result is food waste. Probably not a surprise. What is stunning, though, is how much waste: 40 percent of the food we produce in the U.S. goes uneaten. That’s the equivalent, says the NRDC, of $165 billion, and the single largest component in our landfills.

Animals grown for food, produce waste of another kind. Ruminant animals alone—cows, sheep, goats—produced 164 million metric tons in CO2e of methane in 2014, just through digestion. In an opinion piece in the Oregonian on March 24, 2107, Dr. Nathan Donley, senior scientist with the Center for Biological Diversity said the 70,000 cows at Three Mile Canyon Farms (near Boardman, Oregon) produce three times the waste as the entire human population of Oregon.

3. Chemical Fertilizers and Pesticides: The Price of Farm Automation

Of the 2 million tons of pesticides used in the world in 2010 for food production, 25 percent were used here in the U.S. According to scientists Tim Lang and Michael Heasman, in their book about the earth?s food systems, say the use of pesticides worldwide has created 1,000 species of pesticide-resistant insects, plant diseases and weeds.

National Geographic calls naturally occurring nitrogen the “key to plenty in our crowded, hungry world.” Learning how to harness nitrogen was initially a good thing: without fertilizers, humans would destroy an ever widening-swath of forest and grassland in the hopes of better yields in un-depleted soil.

But the use of nitrogen and other fertilizers, in the quest for ever-increasing yields, has led to vast overuse, destroying fresh water, fish and wildlife and leading to a raft of diminished capacity in humans and other animals, including interrupted endocrine systems and birth defects.

Food Security Coalition: A Local Food System Approach

Ask almost anyone who studies our broken world food system, and they will tell you the solution starts with local food systems.

WHAT EXACTLY DOES ‘LOCAL’ MEAN? Ask the USDA, and they will say food grown within 400 miles of your kitchen. Ask food system thinkers, and they might tout the ‘100 mile diet’ based on food grown within that circle around you. Ask Sarah Sullivan, executive director of the Gorge Grown Food Network (GGFN) and she’ll say, “The five-county Gorge region.” Klickitat and Skamania in Washington and Hood, Wasco and Sherman in Oregon.

That definition puts us all within the ‘food shed’ of Mt. Hood and Mt. Adams. Our farmland is watered by mountain snows, the mountains’ west flanks capture rain as it moves east from the ocean, and their east flanks create a rain shadow on wheat, grain and wine grapes on the high eastern plateau. Together, the land around the mountains is rich, and according to a 2016 study, could probably feed all Gorge residents.

Up to 90 percent of Americans could be fed entirely by food grown or raised within 100 miles of their homes according to Professor Elliott Campbell at the School of Engineering at University of California, Merced, who recently completed a nationwide farmland mapping project.

So why is the Gorge providing less than 2 percent of the food we eat? [See Table 1]  And if that changed, would it have an impact on the destructive impacts of food production: transportation, waste, and use of chemicals?

Table 1. Percentage of farm sales, direct-to-consumer (farmer’s markets, CSA, farm stands)

In 2015, a study conducted by 40 non-profits of thousands of Gorge residents discovered that one in three people here are food-insecure, meaning they sometimes worry about having enough food or run out of food. The group asked Oregon Governor Kate Brown to fund an Oregon Solutions project here. The resulting Food Security Coalition met for seven months, exploring how to create a local food system.

Gorge Grown Food Network was a key player in the process. It’s been around since 2006, and while it’s known for managing ten farmers markets in the region and working directly with 150 farmers, its mission is to build an inclusive regional food system that improves the health and well-being of the community. It is now staffing the Food Security Coalition action plans and shepherding them forward. While the primary focus is attending to the region’s extensive hunger problem through a local food systems approach, if they are successful, the results will have a significant impact on the three environmental hazards of the industrial food system. Here’s a look:

1. Transportation: Shortening the Distance between Farm and Fork

It’s the equivalent of a Homer Simpson “Doh!” moment: if you reduce the amount of distance your food travels to get to you from 1,500 to say, 15, you will have a significant impact on GHG. A study in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada estimated that replacing imported food with the same items grown locally would reduce CO2 by 50,000 metric tons in a year. In the US, a 2008 study estimated that by buying local only, the average household would achieve a 4-5 percent reduction in GHG emissions.

But, not so fast, say some researchers within the USDA. We are wading into a murky world of what-ifs here. It’s not just miles, it’s the kind of miles. For example, trains are ten times more efficient at moving freight than trucks. So potatoes that arrive in Bingen by train from 1,000 miles away produce as much GHG (green house gas) emissions as potatoes that arrive from 100 miles away by truck.

“I would not focus on that,” says GGFN’s Sarah Sullivan. The tradeoffs are not as simple as miles in-miles out. “It requires us to look at things in a holistic way,” she says. Where did the water come from that grew the potatoes? How much pesticides or fertilizer produced the potatoes? What are the farmer’s practices?

 

It’s hard to know, from 1,000 miles away. Christopher Weber in an interview with Worldwatch Institute, says that these sorts of arguments about trucks versus planes versus rail miss an important point: “One of the reasons I buy locally is because you can actually know your farmer and know what they’re doing.”

2. Waste: Local is Less.

One important effort in the Food Security Coalition’s work is the reduction of food waste. Because their focus is reducing food insecurity, redirecting food that is currently wasted can make an impact. A new gleaning project, due to expand in the next year, can aid that process. But the environmental impacts of reducing waste are equally clear. Talk to local farmers here, and waste is not something they struggle with.

“We do not have any,” says Underwood, WA farmer Blayney Myers. “We compost vegetable matter or feed it to our chickens. The permaculture model talks about a closed circle, which is the way farms worked in the past. Animal waste feeds the compost and the compost feeds the growing plants, and they then serve as the animal’s food.” That system is something much more likely to be found on a small, integrated farm, rather than a large factory farm.

Of course, animal consumption increases effluent and uses more energy, and so the question becomes, should eating less meat be part of our waste-reduction strategy? The Natural Resources Defense Council advises, “Eating all locally grown food for one year could save the GHG equivalent of driving 1,000 miles, while eating a vegetarian meal one day a week could save the equivalent of driving 1,160 miles.”

But that, argues Sullivan, is another blind alley argument similar to the one about transportation. “That’s the fork over knife competition. But people are going to eat meat. If I buy grass fed beef from Jefferies Ranch in Grass Valley, that is a lot different from buying factory meat raised on corn and shipped across the country. It’s the quality of the food, the quality of the system, you have to think about.”

The logical end to this argument is: why not do BOTH? Buy local food and reduce the amount of calories we consume from meat, but be sure the meat is raised locally by sustainable, permaculture practices.

3. Local Organic, the Gold Standard

Only about 5 percent of locally farmed foods nation-wide come from organic growers.  The trade-off for farmers is that they can save money by avoiding the cost of chemicals, but they spend more money on labor, generally making the foods more expensive. At farmers markets here in the Gorge, more than half the growers are certified organic, or are growing organic on land that is not certified.

“We have not tested our land for pesticides,” says Washington farmer Blayney Myers. The land they bought had been used as pasture for cattle, and was more affordable than land in the Hood River Valley. But Myers farms it in organic fashion, like many of her fellow farmers.

Bucking the Barriers to Local

If local farms produce less waste and GHG emissions and produce cleaner food, why don’t we have a local food economy now?

The list of barriers to creating a local food system is long and intractable, and part of what the Food Security Coalition sussed out in its work. Sullivan ticks off the list:

• NOT ENOUGH COLD STORAGE and no distribution system to aggregate the produce of small farmers. The lack gives local farmers no incentive to meet the demand.
  

  Treebird Organics Farm

• NOT ENOUGH FARM LAND in production for local vegetables and protein. A great swath of the Hood River Valley and the high plains grain growing region are planted and harvested for export. We feed the world, but have a hard time feeding ourselves. “We don’t have very many mid-scale farms that allow farmers to scale up to a point where they sell wholesale to grocery stores,” says Sullivan. Most small farmers search hard for land that is clean and affordable. Says one Hood River farmer, “We looked at a property to lease that had high levels of heavy metals and residual pesticides. After that we decided we needed to find land that hadn’t been an orchard, or at least, not an orchard for that long. For old orchards, we’re talking about nearly 100 years of gnarly spray.”

• THE INHERENT CONFLICTS OF LAWS in two states. It’s nearly impossible to sell eggs across state lines, and yet egg production is better in Washington. When it comes to gleaning, Oregon offers a tax credit for Oregon farmers who donate to Oregon food banks, and Washington does not. Try sorting that out in an Oregon glean, when the food could easily be distributed to both Oregon and Washington food banks. 

• CULTURE. PERHAPS THE BIGGEST BARRIER of all is Americans’ perceptions of the value of food. “In other countries, they spend 20-30 percent on food, and here we spend ten percent and complain about it,” she says. It would help, she says, if small farmers were subsidized the way commodity farmers are.

Hopeful Signs

Sullivan thinks the most hopeful sign is the Food Security Coalition itself. “People coming together across sectors is really unique and powerful, from the superintendents of schools, to health care leaders.  We do still have a lot of land in ag production, unlike many areas, and if we can diversify what’s on the land, and have enough farmers who are willing to grow veggies, grains, eggs, we can do it.”

“This is a very complex thing. It’s not a matter of doing one thing. It requires multi-prong, systemic change,” says Sullivan. It short, it requires a revolution. For farmer Blayney Myers, it’s the only way. “Organic and local is the hope of our culture as far as I can see,”  Myers says. “Pay for good food, or pay for bad medicine.”

References:

• ‘Food Wars, The Global Battle for Mouths, Minds and Markets, Second Edition, 2014’ by Tim Lang and Michael Heasman.
• ‘Food-Miles and the Relative Climate Impacts of Food Choices in the United States’ by Christopher Weber, H. Scott Matthews, 2008

 

 

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