2008 Woodie Awards
The Beet
Organic farmers keep it real in the Oregon valley
Robert Singer
Issue date: 8/21/08 Section: Commentary
Talent is a small Oregon town nestled at the base of the Cascades. Pastures and family farms usurp the strip mall wonderland classic of American development, and that was why I was there: to farm for a while, to see where the things I consumed actually came from and to find an antidote, or at least some hope, to the problem of America's vacant consumption.
It was only earlier in the summer that the stimulus checks rained in and people began to buy things because they could, heedless of necessity or what the real price-including the toll on the environment-actually was. How could we know? How could we see that cotton in our shirts or corn in our cereal came from industrial operations that poisoned the land? Why think on it, when there is so much stuff to buy?
However unsustainable this ethos is, it is understandable in light of the epidemic ignorance of where our things come from. Nobody can have an innate understanding of what sustainability would look like when they don't know what there is to sustain. We are immersed in an economy, which its main tenet is one of endless growth and accumulation of capital, things go directly against the ecological reality of limited resources.
It seems an absurdist and destructive conundrum: why would the market pulse of a nation be so unrenewable and uncapped?
Yet for the past 10,000, agricultural societies have grown and grown, without much attention to their toll on the environment.
Now, having pressed our empire to the limits of arable land, technology is aiding us in beefing up the yields on our now limited farm space through the genetic engineering of seeds created to withstand overcrowding.
In the case of corn, the suppliers created the demand for it: massive government subsidies to corn farmers paved the way for large-scale operations, who were now paid to continue to put their grain into an already-flooded market. To use up such surplus, industrial manufacturers feed it to cattle and, increasingly, to fish, both who don't naturally eat it, or process it into a thousand different food additives or, more and more, shovel it into our gas tanks in the form of ethanol.
Such giant crop monocultures deplete soil health to levels that require artificial fertilizers, upsetting the natural balance of flora and running off into our streams and rivers, one component in a nationwide freshwater shortage.
Such is the sorry state of modern agriculture: it is now a system that values massive production, eaten mindlessly by we, the consumers, instead of investing in the quality of food and the long-term health of the planet. Such is shortsighted and very dangerous.
In Oregon, in a small town in the Rogue Valley, a few farmers are working under the ethos of sustainability.
To them, real wealth comes in the form of plump tomatoes. I've seen and been a part of how they handle their land: the three or so acres are weeded by hand, without herbicides; chicken coups are moved every morning so no lasting damage is done to the grass they range on; varieties of vegetables are planted together, enriching the loam.
It is a farm somebody could live off, a rarity in these days of monocultures.
It is a farm that puts back into the earth what it takes out, run by people with a deep knowledge of what the planet can produce, and how little we actually need to take from it to survive.
Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.
It was only earlier in the summer that the stimulus checks rained in and people began to buy things because they could, heedless of necessity or what the real price-including the toll on the environment-actually was. How could we know? How could we see that cotton in our shirts or corn in our cereal came from industrial operations that poisoned the land? Why think on it, when there is so much stuff to buy?
However unsustainable this ethos is, it is understandable in light of the epidemic ignorance of where our things come from. Nobody can have an innate understanding of what sustainability would look like when they don't know what there is to sustain. We are immersed in an economy, which its main tenet is one of endless growth and accumulation of capital, things go directly against the ecological reality of limited resources.
It seems an absurdist and destructive conundrum: why would the market pulse of a nation be so unrenewable and uncapped?
Yet for the past 10,000, agricultural societies have grown and grown, without much attention to their toll on the environment.
Now, having pressed our empire to the limits of arable land, technology is aiding us in beefing up the yields on our now limited farm space through the genetic engineering of seeds created to withstand overcrowding.
In the case of corn, the suppliers created the demand for it: massive government subsidies to corn farmers paved the way for large-scale operations, who were now paid to continue to put their grain into an already-flooded market. To use up such surplus, industrial manufacturers feed it to cattle and, increasingly, to fish, both who don't naturally eat it, or process it into a thousand different food additives or, more and more, shovel it into our gas tanks in the form of ethanol.
Such giant crop monocultures deplete soil health to levels that require artificial fertilizers, upsetting the natural balance of flora and running off into our streams and rivers, one component in a nationwide freshwater shortage.
Such is the sorry state of modern agriculture: it is now a system that values massive production, eaten mindlessly by we, the consumers, instead of investing in the quality of food and the long-term health of the planet. Such is shortsighted and very dangerous.
In Oregon, in a small town in the Rogue Valley, a few farmers are working under the ethos of sustainability.
To them, real wealth comes in the form of plump tomatoes. I've seen and been a part of how they handle their land: the three or so acres are weeded by hand, without herbicides; chicken coups are moved every morning so no lasting damage is done to the grass they range on; varieties of vegetables are planted together, enriching the loam.
It is a farm somebody could live off, a rarity in these days of monocultures.
It is a farm that puts back into the earth what it takes out, run by people with a deep knowledge of what the planet can produce, and how little we actually need to take from it to survive.
Roberta Singer is a sophomore in the College of Arts and Sciences.
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