Franklin Hiram King. You may not know the name, but you know the legacy: More than 100 years ago King invented the cylindrical silo.

It was King’s aversion to waste — something that any farmer can appreciate — that led him to create a new way of storing corn.

Until King, grain was held in rectangular buildings that had to be incredibly strong to support tons of weight and pressure. Rectangular buildings used up valuable land, and yet they waste space (those corners rarely get filled).

Wall and roof joints admit moisture, rodents and insects that led to rot and spoilage.

In fact, even today, the lack of proper storage facilities in India leads to the loss of 10 per cent of the total foodgrain production—in a country where hunger still claims the lives of a million children every year.

But the cylindrical silo has just two joints, is airtight and therefore easier to fumigate, and seals the harvest safely away from the elements.

Silos also put gravity to work. So, no need to use equipment to push grain into a corner, and no need to use a machine to load it onto a truck either. Both problems are easily solved when you load from the top and unload from the bottom.

A modern marvel and distinctly American invention, the cylindrical silo is a form so beautiful that some say Frank Lloyd Wright used it as inspiration for the Guggenheim Museum.

SOS—Save Our Soil

King has another legacy that may have an even bigger impact in the 21^st century.

King studied soil fertility and soil depletion, first at the University of Wisconsin in Madison (where he started a department of agricultural physics) and then later at the USDA.

He saw that the use of chemical fertilizers, just becoming popular, “cannot be considered indefinitely.” In just three generations, they were depleting the soil of a nutrient base that had built up over millennia.

King urged that the same amount of nutrients that are taken out of the land be put back in. That’s the definition of sustainable agriculture, and a practice universally accepted by all types of farmers.

His insights came from a nine-month study of farmers in Asia, including China, Japan and Korea. At the time Asian farmers protected fertility by incorporating every bit of waste back into their fields including “human waste, ashes from the cooking fire, muck from ditches, any scrap of food for humans or livestock.”

King’s resulting book, Farmers of Forty Centuries, may have launched the sustainable and organic agricultural movements in this country and Europe.

While many of the methods that King described are no longer used in Asia, farmers I talk to today are embracing age-old methods, even plowing with oxen, to keep costs down and to create food with great flavor.

From Farmers of Forty Centuries

“Time is a function of every life process as it is of every physical, chemical and mental reaction. The husbandman is an industrial biologist and as such is compelled to shape his operations so as to conform with the time requirements of his crops.

The oriental farmer is a time economizer beyond all others. He utilizes the first and last minute and all that are between . . .

They have long realized that much time is required to transform organic matter into forms available for plant food and although they are the heaviest users in the world, the largest portion of this organic matter is predigested with soil or subsoil before it is applied to their fields, and at an enormous cost of human time and labor, but it practically lengthens their growing season and enables them to adopt a system of multiple cropping which would not otherwise be possible.

By planting in hills and rows with intertillage it is very common to see three crops growing upon the same field at one time, but in different stages of maturity, one nearly ready to harvest, one just coming up, and the other at the stage when it is drawing most heavily upon the soil. By such practice, with heavy fertilization, and by supplemental irrigation when needful, the soil is made to do full duty throughout the growing season.”

More Reading

Farmers of Forty Centuries

Franklin Hiram King: Farmer For Future Centuries

Compost: An Incredible Transformation

Turns out that milk from grass-fed cows has significantly more of something called conjugated linoleic acid (which may create insulin resistance in the body) than grain-fed cows. Some researchers will add that cows fed on grass are just plain healthier. Cows may love grain but it’s not great as a steady diet.

Smart farmers don’t just turn animals loose on pastureland; they follow a process called rotational grazing.

Goats Are Your Offensive Line

Jen Dustin and her husband, Phil Leahy, of Leahy Farm in Lee, Massachusetts, will tell you that Step One is clearing brush, especially the invasive species. This is most efficiently done with goats—nature’s own brush-clearing machinery. They’ll eat the bark right off the trees if you’re not careful.  Only when the goats have cleared up overgrown fields will Jen and Phil bring in their cows.

Phil makes sure that his herd of Milking Devons only spends a couple of days on any one area of pasture, so they’re always on fresh grass.

Like a gardener working on a massive scale, he knows that when you cut back a plant—as grazing does naturally—it stimulates growth.  The pastures are more productive, the animals healthier and the milk they produce is apparently more nutritious and tastier. And if the cows don’t nibble the grass all the way down to the ground, they are less likely to ingest parasites, which would require medical intervention.

It’s more work to do rotational grazing; Phil and Jen are constantly moving electric fences powered off a car battery. They’re fortunate to have enough land to feed their herd. But many farmers are limited by acreage in how they feed their animals.  Grain becomes a necessity or a supplement if pasture is limited.

Helping the Farmer Next Door

Do you live next to a farmer raising animals for dairy or meat? Do you have open land that is lying fallow? Consider leasing that land to your neighbor. You’ll get a nice tax break, a nominal cash payment and fresh meat and dairy. And the inevitable manure factor can be mitigated when a right-sized herd is moved frequently.

More Reading

Baloney Science on the Perils of Meat

Grass-Fed Beef from Pasture to Plate

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.

In the process, Sky Vegetables creates jobs and reduces the distance food has to travel—from a thousand miles to as little as five hundred feet, if you pick up your produce in the parking lot of one of his sky top farms.  “Our goal,” said Fireman, “is for food to be harvested and consumed within forty-eight hours.”

The typical old-line factory or warehouse roof is strong enough for cultivation. In Brooklyn, former e*Trade marketing manager Ben Flanner and New York Botanical Garden educational director Annie Novak started a farm on the roof of a former bagel factory.

Fireman favors standard-issue hydroponic technology. One example, a 44,000-square-foot project slated for the roof of a former shoe factory in struggling Brockton MA, would raise both plants and incomes.

Fifty workers would build the hydroponic farm; 20 full-time staffers and 10 part-timers would manage it once it is operational. Fireman estimates the one-acre garden can produce 300-400 tons of produce a year, “five to fifteen times the yield of conventional farming with only five percent of the water.”

While he declined to say what that produce would be worth, I’d calculate that, at $1.00 per pound for organic greens, that’s the equivalent of $600,00 to $800,000 per year. Fireman wants to supply local schools and hospitals with “greens and beans that you can’t get fresh twelve months of the year.” The balance will go to food banks and farmers markets.

Funding Should Be No Problem. Right?

Fireman is focusing on Brockton as a “gateway city looking for jobs and fresh food.” Once known as Shoe City USA, Brockton now wants to be a leader in sustainable growth. Support and funding will come from the State of Massachussets, block grants, tax incentives and development credits.

One would expect that—between the USDA’s newfound focus on local production and the Administration’s goal of creating new jobs—Fireman would be overwhelmed with funding options.

The reality is a bit different.

“Stimulus money,” according to Fireman, “tends to go shovel-ready projects.” ‘Shovel-ready’ means planning and approvals are done and people could be put to work immediately (generally interpreted as ‘within 90 days’). The focus has been on speed. By comparison, rooftop farming may take a bit more time to plan, but it still offers powerful long-term investment value.

To its credit, the USDA is focusing on local food production and specialty crops (aka vegetables) for the first time in a very long time. Secretary Vilsack even started a garden on the grounds of his Washington, D.C. headquarters. But projects they traditionally fund tend to be more focused on rural than urban sites.

“As many champions as we get from the municipal, state and federal levels,” Fireman says, “we still have to fight for funding.”

While he allows that “we’re not going to put California out of business,” Fireman is clear that the regional food system has to change. Will rooftop gardens and farms solve all our food production challenges? No more than wind power will replace our near-term dependence on oil. But there has never been a better time to make an investment in our future.

More on Sky Vegetables

Boston Globe

Company website

• 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.

While it may not kill people, a bacteria called campylobacter causes 2.4 million cases of food poisoning each year, resulting in diarrhea, cramping, abdominal pain, and fever. According to one John’s Hopkins test of supermarket chicken, 96 percent of Tyson chicken was contaminated with campylobacter.

For human bacterial infections, antibiotics can be lifesavers. The problem is that food-borne bacteria are becoming increasingly resistant to antibiotics.

A Perfect Medium for Creating a Superbug

If you were Dr. Evil, in your lab you would want a Petri dish the size of a Confined Animal Feeding Operation (CAFO), where bacteria have a chance to constantly improve and eventually overcome their antibiotic challengers.

The World Health Organization points out that antibiotic resistance is one of the leading threats to human health. Diseases like malaria, tuberculosis and staph are resurging in new and more deadly forms.

Dr. Mellon stressed the urgency of this issue. “There are no new antibiotics coming online. The pipeline is empty.” We need to protect what is still effective.

Regulations banned the use of antibiotics in European animal feed in 2006. Yet antibiotic use is still standard practice for many American producers—and for the many physicians who overprescribe them for humans.

Antibiotic Use Is All About Efficient Production. Right?

American farmers—not the ones I typically talk to—give their pigs, cows and chickens about “8 percent more antibiotics each year, usually to heal lung, skin or blood infections. But even healthy animals are given antibiotics. 13 percent of the antibiotics administered on farms last year were fed to healthy animals to make them grow faster. Antibiotics also save as much as 30 percent in feed costs among young swine, although the savings fade as pigs get older, according to a new USDA study.” (Source AP)

What happens if you reduce—not eliminate—the amount of antibiotics used to therapeutic uses only?  That’s already happened in Denmark, and the results have been positive by key measures that include consumer cost. In October 2009, Laura Rogers, Project Director of Human Health and Industrial Farming at Pew Charitable Trusts wrote on the Huffington Post:

“The (Danish) pork producers and those who represent them are fiercely proud of how they raise their pigs. Contrary to U.S. agribusiness claims about the ban, the average number of pigs produced per sow per year has increased from 21 to 25 (this is an important indicator of swine health and welfare, according to veterinarians). Most important, total antibiotic use has declined by 51 percent since an all-time high in 1992. Plus, the Danish industry group told us that the ban did not increase the cost of meat for the consumer.”

The farmers I know—those who raise pastured beef and lamb—only give antibiotics when absolutely necessary. Organic farmers are prohibited from using antibiotics or growth hormones. In fact, once an organic farmer gives a cow a shot of antibiotic, even for legitimate therapeutic reasons, he has to sell the animal.

In general, animals raised the way you see them in kids’ picture books get what they need in terms of food, nutrition, exercise and space. As a result they are generally healthier. Even the grazing practices on smaller farms tend to be designed for good health. Lynn Mordas at Dashing Star Farm advises that you not “let your sheep nibble grass down to the ground or they’ll pick up a parasite. Move them to new pasture often.”

A Mountain of Antibiotics, Sixty-Five Stories High

“Because of poor regulations and oversight of drug use in industrial farm animals, consumers in the U.S. do not know what their food is treated with, or how often,” said Laura Rogers.

Want to visualize that annual animal dosage of 24-million pounds of antibiotics? Well, one obsessed mathematician once calculated that 21 million pounds of beef would make a mountain 650 feet high and around a quarter of a mile across the base. Are antibiotics more or less dense than beef? I have no idea, but I know that that’s a huge amount of medicine to be pumping into our collective bodies.

Change is Gonna Come

The change begins with consumer pressure. Consumers’ buying habits pushed Walmart to drop milk produced using growth hormones. Government can legislate, but that’s a slow and ponderous process.

Or let’s consider a more radical path: Producers take the lead. Rather than block legislation, trade groups like the National Cattleman’s Association can get out in front of the issue and start reducing antibiotic use today. Why use antibiotics when an animal is not sick? Because it’s easy. But as Dr. Margaret Mellon said, “this is not rocket science. We have a perfectly good model with the Danes. Let’s put American ingenuity to work.”

Pressure Rises to Stop Antibiotics in Agriculture

Toxic Shock

Keep Antibiotics Working (site)

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.

In approaching his herd of beef cattle, Allen Cockerline of Whippoorwill Farm suggested that I initially keep a low profile, avoid direct contact, and talk to the cows. He may have even suggested that I sing a song.

“Just as people respond better to the personal touch, cows also feel happier and more relaxed if they are given a bit more one-to-one attention,” explained Dr. Douglas of Newcastle University.  “What our study shows is what many good, caring farmers have long since believed. By placing more importance on the individual, such as calling a cow by her name or interacting with the animal more as it grows up, we can not only improve the animal’s welfare and her perception of humans, but also increase milk production.”