You want to do the right thing. Eat locally and sustainably 12 months of the year. Easy enough in California, but you live in Vermont or Minnesota or even New York—where winter settles in early and leaves late.
As currently deployed, New York State’s 36,000 farms can supply perhaps 40% of local food needs, so unless all New York residents become victory gardeners overnight, we will continue to depend on food imported from thousands of miles away.
But what if you started putting farms in new and unexpected areas closer to home? Areas with plenty of sunlight. Look up. Think green roofs.
Building owners motivated to lower HVAC costs, speed building approvals, and lower construction costs are turning to green roofs. But the roofs—while they provide significant business, health, environmental, and aesthetic benefits—are not always farms. They could be. They should be.
Welcome to Farms in the Sky
At investor conference Agriculture 2.0, I met Bob Fireman, a long-time real estate executive, who is now the president of Sky Vegetables. Bob dreams big. His vision is to have rooftop greenhouses raising vegetables 12 months of the year in communities from the Bronx to Boston, from the Bay Area to Detroit.
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.
Cows become part of the family when you name them. Then they return that kindness and attention with more milk.
An award-winning research team from Newcastle, England, Drs. Catherine Douglas and Peter Rowlinson, have shown that farmers who give a cow a name and treat her as an individual can increase annual milk production by almost 500 pints.
It was a breakthrough that was picked up by Harvard’s annual Ig Nobel Prizes, which honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then think.
A former dairy farmer I know called all his heifers “his ladies.” And, yes, they all had names. Turns out he was not only treating them with natural kindness but it was increasing his business too. (Years later when he visited the herd, they recognized him.)
In fact, farmers interacting with their animals is straightforward rather than sentimental. There’s a clear connection and caring between the farmer and the animals (and plants) in his care. Think about it: These are living, breathing creatures that you come in contact with every day.
Of course, in a factory setting it would be damn hard to care for one animal over another. But a small farm is different.
On a small farm you’re constantly engaging with your herd, flock or gaggle. When I have been in the middle of herd of cows taking photos for Friend of the Farmer, I’ve been surrounded by dozens of cows weighing from 200 to 1,000 pounds. These are big animals and yet the experience is a remarkably peaceful. Some cows may run away initially while others wander over to get their heads scratched. The one constant is the sound of grass being cropped.
Farm humor: What did the little red tractor say to the big green tractor? “Why don’t get you get a little closer, John Deere?”
If farmers can love a machine, it likely would be their tractor. Scratch that “If”: Farm duties that would have been done by hand or by a team of horses were, starting in the 1920s, taken over by tractors. Many of the farms I have seen in The Berkshires, Duchess and Litchfield Counties are using tractors that may not be antiques but are certainly old. And they work beautifully
The tractor shown above is a 1949 Farmall A manufactured by International Harvester. Its “tricycle front wheel design combined with good ground clearance allowed for more nimble maneuvering and accurate field cultivation.” The offset seat allows the farmer to look below his boots to the row he is cultivating
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