Pablito's Blog

State Senate Hearing on Liquid Fertilizers

On Tuesday, the State Senate Ag committee held on hearing on the recent scandals involving organic liquid fertilizer.  There were lots of ideas for change, among others making it a felony to alter organic fertilizer with synthetics, as well as many ideas for reforming the regulatory structure and increasing inspections.

TFF subscriber Jim Downing covered the hearing for the Sacramento Bee.  You can find his article here:http://www.sacbee.com/business/story/1596999.html

Newsletter 2/3/09

DIRT IS GOOD FOR YOU

I was having a rough day when I just happened to find this piece in the New York Times:  <http://http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/27/health/27brod.html?scp=1&sq=eat%20dirt&st=cse. > The article outlines the growing body of scientific research indicating that eating or breathing in dirt as a child helps build the human immune system.

Of course, there’s a big “DUH” factor involved here.  Human beings evolved for millions of years in an environment full of dirt, so it should come as no surprise that our bodies have incorporated its presence into their systems.  However, it’s also true that our modern civilization has a pushes the idea that we are better and healthier now that we live in a “clean” world.  Our civilization to me now seems obsessed with sterility.  Artificial surfaces made with toxic chemicals — such as asphalt and plastic — are seen as “clean”.  Natural substances such as mud and dust are seen as “dirty”.  Humans cannot survive in a truly sterile environment any more than can the bacteria around us — bacteria which also make up a large percentage of the weight of our bodies.

The food safety industry is one of the biggest culprits in pushing fear of dirt on the public, and the recent outbreak of salmonella in peanuts is bringing them back into the spotlight once again.  They have schemes for irradiation, pasteurization, and other (patented, of course) technologies that would make our food safer — while making a tidy profit for the companies who control the technology.  I’d like to see a study of the correlation between documented “dirt eaters” and food borne illnesses.   Because despite all the hundreds of millions of dollars spend each year in our country to try to prevent food poisoning, the problem seems to be getting worse.  Maybe there are too few kids who never get their hands dirty…

PLAYING WITH DIRT

It’s that time of year again, and here at TFF we have fired up the greenhouse and started dropping seeds into seed flats.  On Thursday and Friday, the crew filled up about 500 plastic trays with potting soil and planted tomatoes, watermelons, and melons.  We use a vacuum seeder for the tomatoes, and do the rest by hand (bigger seeds).  Next stop is the incubation chamber, an insulated wooden closet with electric heaters inside.  The seed flats get stacked inside and then heated up to 80 degrees for 60 hours or so.  This “pops” or germinates the seeds quickly in a small space, and reduces our energy usage.

Once the seeds are “popped”, they get unstacked and moved onto tables in the larger greenhouse.  If it’s warm and sunny during the day, we won’t have to run the heaters in the house at all during the day.  At night, the heaters will keep the house at about 65 degrees.  Under this regime, we hope to have the plants emerge from the soil in a week or ten days.

If the weather cooperates, the tomato and melon plants should be ready by the end of March.  If it turns cold and rainy, we’ll have to crank up the heaters during the day and the plants will take an extra week or two.  But that’s okay, since wet weather will slow down our work to get the fields ready.

One of our biggest problems in the greenhouse the last few years has been rodents, who seem to really appreciate the fields of tomato and melon “sprouts” that we are growing for them.  Our response to this problem has been pretty dramatic — one mouse can eat thousands of tiny plants in just a few days:  We built chicken wire cages to enclose about 500 plant trays.  By the end of February, weeds and grasses outside the greenhouse start to sprout and the mice stop bothering us, so later plantings of summer crops don’t need the same level of protection.

Our other big pests in our greenhouses are slugs and snails.  Unlike in gardens in the SF Bay area, where these slimy critters are a problem all year, they only affect us during cold, wet periods.  Come April, the greenhouses are way too hot for the mollusks to tolerate.  But this time of year, a single slug can slurp its way across dozens of seed flats in a night, leaving a trail of destruction and still hiding itself away well before sunrise.  The most effective way we have found to deal with slugs may be familiar to you if you have them in your garden:  pre-dawn patrols to pick them off the plants and drown them in a bucket.  During peak periods of rainy weather, we have caught as many as 50 slugs in a single night!

Liquid Organic Fertilizer Scandal

In the last three weeks, the Sacramento Bee’s Jim Downing (a TFF subscriber!) has written two articles that expose a growing scandal involving liquid organic fertilizers that were illegally spiked with synthetic products.  The articles cover the issue very well and can be found here:  http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1501772.html; http://www.sacbee.com/capitolandcalifornia/story/1569698.html

                 This is a big story that has immense potential to damage the image of organic farmers and perception the public has of us.  I believe the only reason it has not gotten more coverage in the media is because the timing corresponded with President Obama’s inauguration.  Nonetheless, I believe the media will eventually discover the issue.  As in the case of the E. Coli contaminated spinach, they will oversimplify it and many people will stop buying organic produce.

I have been involved with this issue for several years as a board director of California Certified Organic Farmers, the largest organic certifier in the U.S.   At this time, I have decided to inform our CSA subscribers about how Terra Firma is dealing with it.

Our farm uses composted manure and cover crops to provide the vast majority of our soil fertility.  However, we have always used a small amount of liquid fertilizer in two applications:  long season crops using drip irrigation, primarily tomatoes and strawberries; and nursery crops (transplants) that we grow ourselves.  Liquid fertilizer is useful because it can be applied in irrigation water.

Terra Firma never used Biolyzer, the first fertilizer to be prohibited by our certifier and later the state.  When the product was outlawed, CCOF also made it clear that any growers using a product that was not explicitly approved for organic production would not be tolerated.  At that point, we were using a product that was approved by all the right agencies.  That product was Agrilyzer, and the company that was making it has now been shut down for violating state law.

Organic farmers are now in shock and dismay that the system that we created to maintain the integrity of the food we produce has been violated by unscrupulous fertilizer makers.  Unfortunately, for years we have applied the same model used for certifying farmers to those producing fertilizer — a model which mixes  regulation and inspection with trust.  We now realize that we were wrong to ever extend our trust to a group of people who don’t share our belief system. 

Many organic farmers thought that risks like these would be eliminated when the National Organic Program created state and federal agencies to verify and oversee our industry.  But as the Sac Bee’s articles show, the government agencies enforcing fertilizer integrity clearly are more focused on procedure than they are on protecting the integrity of organic food.  This story is one of government incompetence as much as it is greed and dishonesty.

This is not a food safety issue.  Crops grown with synthetic fertilizers do not pose any health risk to those who eat them.  However, the fact remains that much of the “organic” food sold during the last four years or more was not actually organic. Right now, TFF has several fields of broccoli, cauliflower, and cabbage that were grown from transplants that were fertilized with Agrilyzer.  Should we be prohibited from selling these vegetables as organic because we unwittingly used a fertilizer that had been illegally spiked?  Right now, the official answer is “no”, but the public’s answer may be quite different.

Going forward, TFF will use only liquid fertilizer that does meets the new, tougher CCOF standards issued last week.  You can see those standards here:  http://www.ccof.org/pdf/Cert_News_Resources/2009_Liquid_Fert_Policy.pdf

>  Farmers like us are demanding a much more rigorous inspection and testing program for fertilizers, one based on the presumption of guilt rather than innocence.  Unfortunately, it’s not as easy to do this as it was ten years ago:  organic farming is now governed by a mishmash of private, state, and federal agencies who have to work together.  This process is never fast.  As it goes forward, I will try to keep our customers apprised of what Terra Firma is doing to make sure that we and our customers are never again victims of this type of fraud.

Please post any questions or feedback about this issue on my blog so that anyone interested can see my responses. 

 

Farm Day Photos and a Recipe

Our 2008 Farm Day was a big success this year, with hundreds of Terra Firma subscribers attending.  They got to hear music by our official subscriber band, Coyote Blue, as well as tour the farm and pick ripe strawberries in the warm fall sun.  For the first time, we also provided some food and beverages:  a fundraiser for the Winters Healthcare Foundation's nutrition education program.  The vegetarian, low-carb dishes were prepared by participants in the program and included a cabbage salad with a tasty dressing for which many Farm Day attendees requested the recipe.  The recipe is included here, just below a link to some photos of the event taken by subscriber Karen.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/peonqueen/sets/72157608611242299/

 Peanut Dressing for Cabbage Salad

 

3 T. lemon juice

3 T. soy sauce

2 T. olive oil

3 T. almond or peanut butter

1 T. minced fresh ginger

1 minced fresh clove of garlic

5 T. rice vinegar

3 T. water

Diced fresh Serrano chiles to taste

 

Blend all ingredients in a food processor until smooth.

Pistachio Harvest

We harvested our pistachio orchard last week!  The harvest is mechanized, and I finally got a chance to video the process.  Here's a few videos of the trees being shaken.  The nuts fall onto a conveyor that runs past a fan that blows out the leaves, and then fall into a bin.  Sorry about the blurry edges; the lense was a bit smudged.

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<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/3jTb-NDMEUM"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/3jTb-NDMEUM" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>

<object width="425" height="350"> <param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/QBi12tdgO_4"> </param> <embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/QBi12tdgO_4" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="425" height="350"> </embed> </object>

Light Brown Apple Moth Spraying bibliography

I recently wrote a Terra Firma newsletter questioning the tactics of the people who are fighting to stop the spraying of pheromones by the California Department of Agriculture in the Bay Area as part of their campaign to fight the spread of the non-native Light Brown Apple Moth.  You can find the newsletter at www.terrafirmafarm.com.

I respect the right of people to protest aerial spraying of an urban population.  What I take issue with is their terminology in describing the material, Checkmate, as toxic and poisonous.  Checkmate is an organically approved material that we use at Terra Firma, and it is almost non-toxic (even salt and soap are toxic at high enough concentrations).  The definition of poisonous is:  "Any substance dangerous to living organisms that if applied internally or externally, destroy the action of vital functions or prevent the CONTINUANCE of life."  Checkmate is not a poison.  It is a pheromone that confuses male moths so that they cannot find females to breed with and reproduce addition generations of moths.

I wanted to post some of the links that I have used to research this issue.  If you read them, you will find that they refute, question, or disprove most or all of the claims that the anti-spray campaign is making about the pheromone spray

There is no scientific connection between the illnesses people reported during the spraying and the materials sprayed.  There is ample medical documentation of this.  Please see the following link:  http://www.oehha.org/risk/pdf/LBAM041008.pdf:

The inert ingredients (ingredients in the product other than the pheromone) in Checkmate were not originally released to the public, but they have been now.  The anti-spray groups continue to claim they are toxic, but apparently the EPA diagrees with them.  "EPA believes use of these pheromone products, including aerial application over residential areas, presents negligible risks to human health and the environment for the following reasons"  Please see this link for more info:  http://www.epa.gov/region09/pesticides/light-brown-moth.html

"Toxic" is a legally defined term, as defined by toxicity standards set by the EPA.  Checkmate has a toxicity of "slight", as does dish soap and other common products.  This is a link to the Pesticide Action Network information about the material.  http://pesticideinfo.org/Detail_Product.jsp?REG_NR=05633600025&DIST_NR=056336

Checkmate and other pheromone sprays are one of the technologies that both organic and conventional farmers are using to reduce the use of truly toxic pesticides such as organophosphates, which harm both humans and wildlife.  Thoughtful people in the Bay Area -- whether they oppose or support CDFA's aerial spraying campaign -- need to recognize the general safety of these technologies and not malign them in order to support their own agendas.

Thanks

Photos from a rainy saturday

I took a bunch of pictures on Saturday in the light rain we got here, while racing around trying to figure out what we could and couldn't do that day.  They're in the photo section.

Why agricultural research matters

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/18/business/worldbusiness/18focus.html?pagewanted=3&_r=1&hp&adxnnlx=1211053365-D9Uii%20r0jnKgpdzG8fGKIQ

This article just barely touches on the crisis in agricultural research right now.  It also conspicuously avoids mentioning one of the biggest causes of the decline:  genetic engineering.  Companies like Monsanto have bought up most of the private seed companies in the world, stripped out their basic research and focused them entirely on developing expensive GMO crops that do not solve real problems, but rather provide increased sales for their other products like herbicides and pesticides.  Meanwhile, many of the biggest agricultural universities have followed the money in the same direction, abandoning basic plant breeding in favor of genetic modification.  Government funding for plant breeding, as the article mentions, has also been cut drastically.

W gets slammed by India

American politicians and the media seem to be unable to place the blame for food shortages where it really belongs, but at least India got some publicity this week when they slammed President Bush for his comments which appeared to blame China and India for the problem.

Our country uses more than our fair share of everything on the planet, yet seems to believe we are entitled to get it all for dirt cheap.  If politicians had been willing to practice some leadership ten years ago on issues like renewable energy, gas mileage, suburban development, farmland preservation, nutrition and others, our country might have been in a really different place now.

On the flipside, all of us who have been working on these issues on a personal level -- reduce, reuse, recycle -- for years are going to be able to make the transition to the economics of scarcity much more smoothly than the folks who've been pretending that the U.S. is its own planet.

NYT story on fertilizer shortages

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/30/business/worldbusiness/30fertilizer.html?scp=3&sq=fertilizer&st=nyt

One good thing about the current food shortage: it may increase people's awareness of how their food is grown.  This story offers some good details about artificial nitrogen fertilizer, which is one of the primary ingredients of cheap food.

There is clearly a pro-artificial fertilizer bent to this article, although they interview a few people who point out the damaging effects that it has on water quality and fish.  What is not clearly outlined, though, is this:  a world of scarce fossil fuel will also be a world of scarcer food.

Although the article pooh-poohs (pun) the use of manure as a fertilizer, the truth is that animal waste in the U.S. is a tremendously underutilized resource.  In the last 30 years, farmers have gotten away from using manure as fertilizer because it was far cheaper to use artificial stuff.  The problem is not so much that you need to use alot of manure -- we generate millions of tons of it as a waste product of livestock farming.  It's just that it costs more to haul and spread a ton of manure than it does to haul and spread 100 lbs. of artificial fertilizer.  With the cost of the concentrated material rising, it is improving the economics of using manure.  All in all, that's a good thing, because right now alot of manure is simply dumped into "lagoons" where it ends up polluting ground and surface water, adding to the problems caused by overuse of artificial fertilizer.  Spreading it out over many acres, when done properly, results in far less pollution.

Eventually, the world is going to have to find a way to use every bit of manure produced by every domesticated animal on the planet, as well as the manure of the end users of those animals -- human beings.  In a post-fossil fuel economy, human waste will be an incredibly valuable resource for energy production and fertilizer, and future generations will shake their heads in disbelief that for a hundred years we treated it as a waste product instead.