Resilient Food Part II: Actual Farms
What a resilient farm looks like.....on the ground (OMG so many puns). Plus soup.
So, yesterday I dragged you through the nature of agricultural resilience and how it might be better than the sort of industrial model of farming that is still more common in the U.S.
But how does it work and what difference does it make to farmers and to us?
Again, much of what I’m sharing today comes from Laura Lengnick’s excellent book: Resilient Agriculture.
I’m not going to weigh you down with an example of every type of resilient strategy or behavior, but just a few. And for those of you familiar with the language of climate or agricultural resilience, I’m not using the technical words, because I really believe this is useful for everyone.
Food is something we all have to ingest just about every day (unless you’re on a cleanse, in which case, I’m sorry for all the food references that are gonna make you hungry). So, it seems to me as though we really ought to know more about how it’s grown, how the community supports growers, and vice versa, as well as how our choices can shape the next chapter of food and farming. So, here goes with a few illustrations.
A few resilient strategies and some examples.
1.Being appropriately connected, and cultivating place-based innovation:
Aligned with the idea of diversity as a resilience strategy, is being able to collaborate among different and multiple farmers, markets, and suppliers within a region, and this does several things: It helps to provide a variety of experiential knowledge in managing a disruption (say a new pest), allows access to different locally-adapted design or crop options, and provides more diversified markets in which to sell food and connect to customers and communities.
Laura highlights the example of AG Kawamura in California, who grows vegetables. He says “There’s nothing that can replace experience and observational knowledge of a region….As a good example, we had a disease complex I couldn’t identify. I texted a picture of it to our partner down in Mexico and he immediately ID’d it as a new mildew and gave us a whole new prescription on how to handle it.”
2. Ecological Self-Regulation (meaning aligning with local, ecological conditions)
Understanding the natural habitat, organisms, and conditions of an area helps to allow a farm to operate with less ‘intervention’ from external solutions (like pesticides for example). Typically a farm will allow a diversity of annual plant cover, and provides habitat for beneficial insects and other creatures. The benefits are better soil health, fewer pest problems, often lower water needs and more efficient use of natural nutrients and carbon.
Laura quotes Ron Rosmann, of Rosmann Family Farms as saying: “We have never lost a crop to pests in 30 years now of no pesticides…We’ve had stable, very good yields during all that time….And we [are] continually planting more trees, more shrubs, more crops for pollinators, more windbreaks and more wildlife habitat.”
3. A reasonably profitable enterprise!
It’s not always something that gets enough attention, but farms actually have to financially support the people who own them and work on them! And not only that, but it has to yield the resources for healthcare, and education, and retirement, as well as….(shock!)…time off. If we’re doing agriculture ‘right’, it shouldn’t involve farmers working themselves or their employees to death for little or no income. But often that’s what we have right now - broke farmers and exploited farm workers.
At The Happy Berry in South Carolina, Walker and Ann Miller built marketing into their plan from the very beginning. They decided to focus on a pick-your-own market, also with some wholesale, so they deliberately sought land that was close to their markets - in between five medium sized towns and one larger metropolitan area. The fruit farmers also use a whole variety of natural techniques to capture rainfall and reduce water needs among many other sustainable and resilient practices.
So there are a few examples of how resilience can work in a variety of not-so-complicated ways on real farms.
Regional Foodsheds:
A unifying characteristic of the examples that Laura shares in Resilient Agriculture is that sustainable and resilient cooperation, markets, ecology, and the wellbeing of the land and the community as well as individuals, is the quality and nature of relationships. It truly comes down to ‘care-taking’ - stewarding both the land in which food is grown and livestock are raised, and taking care of our human needs for nutrition, connection and more.
It turns out, Laura notes, that the perfect scale for creating this kind of beneficial food system is regional, and there is effort underway to create a system of connected ‘foodsheds’ - analogous to watersheds. There is enough possibility for diversity (in crops and in demand), but it’s not so large an area that you can’t build a network and share solutions and ideas for example.
The added advantage of a regional approach to food, from my perspective, is that it dovetails perfectly with a historic and cultural appreciation for food and ‘home’. This is one of the key ways we learn about and become attached to place and even to environment - through food cultures and familiar dishes. I think that’s a critical part of our next chapter.
And this is where we’re going next. Tomorrow. We will start to get into how we eat, and why it’s about so much more than a diet or fuel.
Meanwhile, thank you so much to Laura Lengnick and her amazing research and fabulous writing. I hope that by taking a little tour through just a fragment of Laura’s work, I have convinced you that there is way more to know and also great stuff happening in many of the farms of America.
Today’s recipe: Vegetable Soup!
Perfect for summer or winter. This is the most flexible dish ever. It’s basically whatever veg you have plus whatever broth you want plus whatever seasonings your little heart desires. Plus one hour. Boom. Here’s one version, but please don’t let me limit your veggie soup creativity.
Ingredients
2 Tbsp olive oil
1 chopped yellow onion
Several peeled and chopped carrots
Several stalks of chopped celery
At least a few cloves of garlic, minced or diced teeny
1 1/2 cartons (or whatever) of low-sodium chicken broth or vegetable broth
2 cans diced tomatoes, or the tomatoes that also include green chiles if you like a little kick, which I do (don’t bother draining them, just dump it all in)
A few potatoes, diced (not too small otherwise they fall apart)
2 - 3 bay leaves (these add a surprising amount of flavor)
A big pinch of dried thyme (or whatever you like - not too much oregano or rosemary though - too strong)
Salt and freshly ground black pepper
A small packet of chopped frozen or fresh green beans, or frozen spinach, or frozen collards (don’t use fresh collards, they take too long to get tender)
1 cup(ish) frozen peas
You could also add corn if you like - I find it a bit sweet with corn. I’ve also added broccoli, turnip, chard, cabbage, cauliflower…really whatever.
I also sometimes add Worcester sauce (this is not vegetarian by the way - has a small amount of anchovy in it), or a touch of soy sauce, or some hot sauce or red pepper flakes, if I’m feelin’ spicy.
Instructions
Heat olive oil in a large pot - seriously so much easier when you get a pot that’s not too small. I use a dutch oven, because it looks decent enough that I can also just put it on the table for people to help themselves.
Add onions, carrots, and celery and saute until soft (a few minutes) then add garlic and saute a teeny bit (30 seconds) longer.
Add in broth, tomatoes, potatoes, green beans (etc), bay leaves, and other seasonings
Bring to a boil
Reduce heat to a simmer (and cover) for about 20 minutes (potatoes should be juuuuust tender but not falling apart).
Add peas and cook about 10 minutes longer (and corn if you’re using it).
Wack some in a bowl, top with some parmesan if you’re fancy, and let your stomach and soul feel good together. Oh and have some of yesterday’s bread with it too! If you have any left, which you probably don’t.
P.S. In yesterday’s recipe I initially said 3 cups of flour. It should be 3 1/2 cups (I was writing it from memory, which is a bad idea). I corrected it on the Substack post, but if you’re getting the post by email, add a bit more flour!