Week 1 Newsletter

Welcome to the 2008 CSA season!
We had a good winter with many opportunities for reading some of the many books and articles people recommended to us. One book that really grabbed my attention is “The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl” by Timothy Egan. The book tells a story that places much of the responsibility for the dust bowl on the shoulders of the government’s agricultural policy and willful ignorance.
The dust bowl affected land in southern Nebraska, eastern Colorado, western Kansas, a corner of New Mexico, the panhandle of Oklahoma, and northern Texas. This land was a dry, flat, treeless grassland. Stephen Long, who explored this area in 1820 for the U.S. government, wrote “… I do not hesitate in giving the opinion that it is wholly uninhabitable by people depending upon agriculture for their subsistence.” The government disagreed; they wanted this area of the country settled in order to control it. Speculators began buying up land and tempting people to move west promising cheap land that would lead to great riches. The Department of Agriculture encouraged people to begin breaking up the sod and practice dry-land farming using the dust as mulch to encourage the seeds to germinate. The cowboys and ranchers who knew the land pleaded with the homesteaders and government agents to leave the land unplowed.
During World War I the prices for wheat skyrocketed. More and more land was plowed up for wheat. Towns appeared all over the West, propped up by speculation on wheat prices and land. Farmers saw their bank accounts growing on the high wheat prices and borrowed on it for more land and new equipment. Then the Great Depression hit and prices fell. The farmers borrowed more money to plow up more land to pay down their loans. The government gave the farmers loans to keep them on the land (which led to the giant subsidies that are part of our Farm Bill today). As the situation became hopeless, the rain stopped falling. Farms dried up and blew away.
In 1936 alone, more than 850 million tons of topsoil blew away and more than 100 million acres would never again be productive farmland. People were dying from dust pneumonia, their lungs filling with dirt. The only thing left to eat on many farms was the pickled roots of tumbleweed. Dust from Oklahoma blew into New York City and Washington, D.C. causing the street lights to turn on in the middle of the day. Roosevelt finally realized that the government’s policy of plowing up this area of the U.S. was nothing but folly. The government began to buy up farms and move the farmers to land better (con’t p.2)(letter con’t) suited to agriculture. They planned to purchase 75 million acres of land to return it to grass but only purchased 11.3 million acres. Even today some of the land is still sterile and drifting after 65 years of being left unplowed.
The book left me shocked and heartsick. Fertile soil is the heart of any farm. While I assume that most of the farmers in the dust bowl loved their land, they were misled and were naive about the harsh climatic conditions. They blindly trusted the government, not taking into consideration what the cowboys and Native Americans had experienced on the land for hundreds of years before them. Few of them asked the important questions.
The lessons of the dustbowl led to the creation of the conservation service. Farmers were assisted by grants to become better stewards of the land. But while we have come a long way to prevent soil erosion, we continue to embrace new ways of making our riches from the land. In some ways this story reminds me of the brazen introduction of GMO (genetically modified organisms). Again, many people blindly trust the government to protect us from harm. Most of the conventional corn and soybeans in this country have been genetically modified, as they are either Round Up-ready or resistant to insects. When we eat non-organic tofu, soy milk, corn chips, corn syrup, or anything containing non-organic soy or corn, we eat plants that have been spliced with genetic material from other species. The argument is that there is nothing wrong with this because it is largely a sped-up process of what might occur in nature over thousands of years.
What questions should we be asking today? What are the side effects of GMO crops? What happens to the people and animals that eat GMO crops? How many GMO genes find their way into wild plants and onto farms that don’t use GMO crops? And once this has happened, what are the long-term consequences? In my opinion, the modified genes that are finding their way into our wild plants and unmodified crop plants could become the next dust bowl. We have started down a path we might not be able to return from. Once the modified genes have changed the genetic makeup of certain wild plants (as they seem to be) we can’t just undo the damage. It took only a few years to blow the Western top soil away that took thousands of years to create. We are facing a similar dilemma with GMO; the plants on our planet have found their genetic makeup over the course of millions of years of evolution. We are about to change this in a few short years and we have no idea if we will ever be able to turn the clock back on it.
By joining a CSA, you know who grows your fruits and vegetables and who raises your grains and meats. With this we are quietly saying “no” to the government's and universities' willful ignorance on the use of GMO. But our quiet resistance might need to become more vocal, as this concerns not only ourselves but the generations that follow us. The unintended consequences of GMO are beginning to surface and we need to know what they are in order to strengthen our argument against them. The Nature Institute, which is about 20 minutes from the farm, in Harlemville, is publishing the research done on the unintended consequences of GMOs. You can read their studies on their website at www.natureinstitute.org or you can contact them at 518-672-0116 for paper copies of their reports. It is time to join our voices of protest with those of much of the rest of the world who refuse to use GMO crops until these questions are answered.
~Jody