Where do issues of water pollution, adequacy of water, the impact of rising petroleum prices, and hunger meet?
Down on the farm. That's where. And here's why we need to rethink the whole way food gets to our tables.
First, Water
A year and a half ago, I wrote a series reflecting on observations I had made on a trip on route 36 through the norther tier of Kansas counties.:
Kansas and Nebraska are part of our bread basket. Our food security, heck, our lives, depend on these places, and how they grow and harvest our food.
But the security of that food is not a sure thing. So the story of our rural areas is a story about what we put on our tables. And it is a story about our environment, how we should live on this earth.
. . .
Water is a problem for many of our breadbasket states. Agriculture pollutes our water. Consider this study: Herbicides in Rainfall Across the Midwestern and Northeastern United States And agriculture uses about 70% of the water in these states.Take Kansas as an example. Its average rainfall is not high. It ranges from 16" a year on the Colorado border to 40" near the Missouri River, but for most of the state, it is between 22-30". Link Recent years have seen both flooding and drought.
. . .
The “vast Ogallala Formation” and other aquifers may not be as vast as needed to supply agriculture and growth. Indeed, the Kansas aquifer has long been studied and is of continuing concern to the state, to academics,
and to the federal government.The water in these aquifers is not in infinite supply, and the rainfall that recharges them can also be fickle.
No water, no agriculture. No agriculture, no people.
The truth is that Kansas is too dry to produce wheat without irrigation, and that is a serious problem that makes wheat and similar crops unsustainable over the long term.
And then consider the Imperial Valley in California where so much of our winter food is grown. The soil there is becoming so salty that its agricultural future is in doubt. link
It's a thorny problem. It is an arid region and no matter how much water is pumped in there just cannot be much water there. But over time salts from fertilizer and other sources build up in soil. The way to get rid of them is to flush the soil with lots of water. But this is an arid region and water must be conserved . . .
Pollution
The second water problem connected with agriculture is pollution. There are, of course, myriad problems associated with the dominant way we now get animal flesh to the table via Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs). In addition to issues about the treatment of animals, CAFOs produce enormous amounts of pollution, and that pollution finds its way into our water:
Despite substantial improvements in the nation's water quality since the inception of the Clean Water Act, nearly 40 percent of the nation's assessed waters show impairments from a wide range of sources. Improper management of manure from CAFOs is among the many contributors to remaining water quality problems. Improperly managed manure has caused serious acute and chronic water quality problems throughout the United States.
The cost of long supply lines
Come rising fuel costs, the Walmart / long food supply lines will become far more expensive and eventually collapse. Smart people would be taking action now to shorten those supply lines both for environmental reasons and also to ensure there is food on the table.
We all know that family farms are dying. We need to start now to save farmland and make it pay to farm. If we lose the farms near us, we are going to pay dearly.
You can take an environmental footprint test to get a sense of how food plays a role in the state of our environment.
Some people are already coming together to do just that. Take PASA the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture. Their 16th annual Farming for the Future Conference will be held in State College, PA Feb. 1-3. You can find the schedule here.
There's a lot of cummunity building that will be going on amidst an exchange of ideas that matter to our future. link
More on sustainable agriculture here - here - here. And on a slightly different note, here is information on sustainable communities.
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