Think of the word cooperative. Got a picture? Consider all the ready synonyms: helpful, accommodating, obliging.
Powerful words. Unless you live in America, where words get ground up and repurposed. “Cooperative,” to the cynic’s ear, sounds weak.
But thousands of people work for agricultural cooperative extensions all across America, providing farmers with the latest ideas on how to raise better crops.
This began more than a century ago with the founding of land grant universities, like Cornell in 1862, based on the sale of “government-owned land to finance universities with a charge of broad-based education and public benefit.”
Extension offices were established to provide resources to a wide range of citizens. Cornell, one of the oldest land grant universities, connects practical tested research with farmers in the field.
A Helping, Trusted Hand When You Need It
Every season farmers have so many things going against them: weather, disease, fickle consumers, cranky chefs and overseas producers selling below cost. But it you have an ag extension agent in your corner, you stand a fighting chance of finishing the year in the black.
In New York the staff of the Cornell Cooperative Extension (CCE) is beyond dedicated. One hundred and seventy Cornell-employed faculty and academic staff work collaboratively (another great word) with 400 locally employed professional extension educators and 40,000 volunteers.
“But it only works,” says Helene Dillard, the director of the CCE, “if you have a willing partner on the farm. As an ag agent you need to build respect and trust in the community.” That doesn’t happen overnight.
As Andy Turner, Executive Director for Greene and Columbia County, says, “you need to beincredibly passionate. Agents know how to make a direct connection with farmers.” Their sense of empathy comes from a shared experience; many ag agents have been growers. “Like all great partners, “they are not judgmental. They are trying to help the farmer wherever they need help.”
It’s almost a missionary zeal. One agent I met this fall, John Mishanec (pictured above), said that while he values his family vacations he often feels the need to get back to the fields. He needs to know out what’s been happening. What have the plants been doing since he’s been away? Who needs help?
Who’s driving the move to local food? Chefs, among others. According to a recent survey of 1,800 chefs, the big restaurant trend in 2010 is the purchase of local and sustainable ingredients.
But buying local is expensive, isn’t it? Shouldn’t restaurateurs worry that chefs are going to jack up their input costs by buying directly from the farmer?
Paul Wigsten, the produce buyer at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park—and a farmer—says that “restaurants may pay 5% to 20% more for local produce but there is no ‘trim’ or waste when you get produce hours from being in the ground.” Order product from California and you lose 10-20% in prep.
For four years Joel Hough was the head chef at the highly regarded Cookshop in New York’s Chelsea Art District. Hough also relaunched Provence as Hundred Acres in 2009. In this interview we learn why Hough believes sustainable is a smart business move.
Big stories sometimes get buried between Christmas and New Year’s Day. That’s when the Associated Press’s Martha Mendoza, and Margie Mason reported on the widespread use of antibiotics in livestock in this country. Let’s go to the headlines:
Of 35 million pounds of antibiotics used in the US in 2008, 70 percent of the drugs, or around 24 million pounds, were injected or fed to pigs, chickens and cows.
Researchers say the overuse of antibiotics in humans and animals has led to a plague of drug-resistant infections that kills more than 65,000 people in the U.S. per year
Industrial agriculture is a perfect machine for creating a superbug. Agriculture provides bacteria with hosts: livestock. The first half-million times bacteria meet antibiotics, the bacteria may be beaten back. But bacteria tend to respond to changes in their environment. They get better at what they do and expand outward to what every farm inevitably presents: a rotating cast of new characters to infect.
Dr. Margaret Mellon from the Union of Concerned Scientists put it this way: “when you expose a population to any lethal agent, you will over time select those that are resistant to the agent.” If they’re “fortunate,” the bacteria then make the jump to a receptive human host.
Three Easy Ways to Infect Humans
Resistant bacteria in animals can be transmitted to humans via multiple pathways, including meat (and sometimes vegetable) consumption; close contact with animals (through body parts open to the environment, like noses or open sores); through manure; and through dust and run-off into lakes and rivers. Continue reading Why We Feed Animals Mountains of Antibiotics
Farming is hard work, yet the farmers I meet are some of the most satisfied people I know. Odd, because in my experience, running a small business can be full of stress and often not a whole lot of fun.
What is different for farmers? Perhaps it’s just that being responsible for life pays tremendous dividends.
Farmers care for their animals and their crops. They’ll scratch a calf’s head, break the ice on the water trough in the dead of winter, raise crops from seed to harvest. Wendell Barry in Bringing It to the Table quotes Terry Cummins, the author of Feed My Sheep, on what its feels like to provide husbandry.
The feeling inside sort of just happens, and you can’t say that this did it or that did it. It’s the many little things. It doesn’t seem that taking a sweat-soaked harness off tired, hot horses would be something that would make you notice. Opening a barn door for sheep standing in a cold rain, or throwing a few grains of corn to the chickens are small things, but these small things begin to add up in you, and you begin to understand that you’re important.
You may not be real important like the people you read about in the newspaper, but you begin to feel that you’re important to all the life around you. Nobody else knows or cares too much about what you do, but if you get a good feeling inside about what you do, then it doesn’t matter if nobody else knows.
I do think about myself a lot when I’m along way back on the place bringing in the cows or sitting on the mowing machine all day. But when I start thinking about how our animals and crops and fields and woods and gardens sort of all fit together, then I get that good feeling inside and don’t worry much about what will happen to me.
But when you start to think of animals as protein and nature as a force that can be controlled, then something switches off in your brain, and you can make decisions that are good for business but not so good for animals and people. As we look to a new decade, it will be good to think about how we can reengage with our food in positive and sustainable ways.
As we get ready to tuck into Christmas dinners, it can be easy to forget that we’re a country at war. America has some 200,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan and probably three times that number in support personnel; that means that at least three-quarters of a million families at home are missing one or more family members.
Still Christmas, Hanukkah and Kwanza should be a time to celebrate life, family and friendship, while remembering the sacrifices made on our behalf.
My English father, John Becker, counted Christmas his favorite time of year, even during World War II. During the war food was rationed, so most families suffered some form of privation. I recall, for example, that his mother made a cake called Blackout cake that didn’t include sugar. It felt like a brick going down.
When he moved to the US in the early 1950s, John continued English traditions, like serving Christmas pudding that he would set afire with a spot of brandy. Kids would dig out coins buried in the desert.
Or we would head up to Riverside Church for the Christmas Eve service and carols. A thousand congregants singing together was a beautiful thing.
So in remembering tough times and the hopes that we will get through them wiser and not too worn, here is the Christmas dinner served at RAF Station Ford in 1943—well before MREs entered our vocabulary. And since this is a farm blog focusing on local, sustainable products, I should point out that all the vegetables served were of the season. That’s just how they did things 50 years ago, wartime or not.
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