Pennsylvania Dept of Ag releases new raw milk guidelines

Last week, the Pennsylvania Department of Agriculture released its new guidelines for the production and sale of raw milk. My home is one of just ten states where it is legal for farmers to sell raw, unpasteurized milk from their cows. Penn State University's Department of Animal Sciences has also released an explanation of the official guidelines.

Highlights of this document for milk producers:
-Raw milk permits begin 1 September and end 31 August, and need to be renewed each year.
-You don't need state-regulated milk bottling equipment on your own farm, if customers bring their own containers.
-Your farm's water supply must be tested. Probably something you should be doing anyway, what with all the Marcellus Shale fracking going on.
-Advertising, delivering, or exchanging raw milk is considered "selling" under the law, and doing any of these things without a permit carries a stiff penalty.
-Your Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture played a big role in making this legislation possible, so thank them!

Highlights for consumers:
-Raw milk sold by Pennsylvania permit holders is randomly tested for several different types of bacteria throughout the year. This gives you more assurance that the milk you buy is safe to drink than many other distribution programs can offer.
-Cows whose raw milk will be sold for human consumption must be tested annually for several different bovine diseases and certified healthy by a veterinarian, a requirement that pasteurized milk producers do not have to meet.
-Pennsylvania raw milk is also tested for pesticide residue, an assurance you can't get from even most organic produce.
-You can check the permit status of a PA raw milk dairy online at any time.

the basic premise of organic

Are chemicals ever acceptable? Does 'natural' mean 'safe'? Is it even possible to feed the whole world sustainably?

Digress with me a moment to draw a comparison. I teach basic land navigation -- use of a map and compass -- to junior high school kids. There is so much I want to show them, from shortcuts for accurately plotting latitude and longitude, to how to navigate past obstacles like swamps and giant rocks. But increasingly, I find myself coming back to the basics. Many of these kids start out learning, for the first time, that the arrow on a compass points north. That fact is so basic, I sometimes forget to even cover it. But soon, I find myself backtracking -- starting at the beginning. Without comprehension of the most basic concepts, the finer points are mere hubris. Lately, I find myself doing the same thing when it comes to political and ethical arguments for organic farming. I'm defending even basic choices my family makes, like taking the time and effort to sort out the recyclables from the compost.

Here's a basic question:
What is organic?

I'd like to hear your answers, but I'll start with my own. The first thing that comes into my mind when I say "organic" is the absence of chemicals. But that requires us to define chemical. I remember a high school teacher who maintained that every single substance ever known to man should be considered a chemical, to be precise, whether it was synthesized in a laboratory or naturally occurred growing out of the ground. I disagreed with this assertion in 10th grade, and I still do. A chemical, to me, is something that is deliberately synthesized by humans, and doesn't occur naturally. Natural systems have trouble breaking it down, because it's new and bacteria don't recognize it. And because it's new, its long-term effects on human health and the environment really can't possibly be known for many generations, no matter how many studies we conduct or what interest groups fund them.

In my house, we do nearly all of our cleaning with vinegar. We don't have oven cleaner, countertop cleaner, bathroom scum cleaner, or even bleach. We do this for money-saving reasons: From personal experience, the vinegar is just as effective for cleaning up all the things I used to use those other products for, and does it for less than a tenth of the price. We do this for space-saving reasons: I keep a 5-gallon jug, and a small refillable spray bottle, of vinegar in my cupboard and don't need to make space for thirty other types of cleaners. We do this for environmental reasons: vinegar is a naturally occurring substance, made from the fermentation of apples or other fruits. If I spill it outside or flush it down my drain, tiny creatures in my ecosystem know what it is and know how to break it down and recycle it. I'm concerned about the saponification of our watersheds and streams, and so I choose to use fewer chemical soap products. And lastly, but perhaps most importantly, we do this to protect our family's health.

Have you ever noticed that household products that we deem safe to use on a daily basis suddenly become off-limits once you are pregnant? Pregnant women are supposed to avoid everything from tuna fish (mercury) to oven cleaner (toxic fumes) to conventionally grown apples (pesticides.) Were I to suggest these substances were inherently dangerous, many people would scoff -- my great-grandmother used those products, and nothing ever happened to her! (You know, except that breast cancer she almost died from.) But tell the same people that they ought to feel comfortable using them while pregnant, and they pause. Hey, maybe a lady carrying a tiny being inside ought to avoid regular apples. You know, just in case. Tiny beings can only handle a tiny concentration of pesticides, and several studies have shown that the human tissue containing the highest concentration of pesticides is breastmilk.

I'm sure there's some debate as to what concentrations of various pesticides, herbicides, and poisons is considered safe. But my conclusion is, if I know it's deadly in any reasonable concentration, why would I voluntarily introduce it into my home? Doesn't my family already face enough stress that is completely outside of my control? Reducing the number of poisons we ingest is one thing that is completely within my control.

Look for a part II of this discussion coming soon. I welcome your comments.

when farmers go hungry

“A year ago the food summit was taking place. How do you solve the problem of a billion people going hungry on a regular basis, something humanity has never suffered before? Hunger throughout human history has been localized in space and time. In some places some people starved for a short while, because of a drought, because of a flood, because of a war. But that permanently a billion people would be denied food is an achievement of a world based on capital intensive farming, control of agribusiness over agriculture, and systems of food production and food distribution designed not for human welfare, but for corporate welfare. That’s why we have hunger today. We have hunger because farmers who have to buy the seeds and the chemicals can’t afford to keep the food they’ve grown. They have to sell it immediately just to pay back the debt. And what they sell at a quarter price, they have to buy at four times the price just to eat as food. Most people who are hungry today are rural people who are producing food. Earlier hunger was an urban phenomenon. Now it is has become a problem faced by producers of food, which should tell us something is wrong with the way we are producing food.”

-- Vandana Shiva, "About Biotechnology."
Speech available for download here

human-powered enterprise

"What are you humming?" I asked one morning. The sun was shining across the waters of Lake Victoria, and little children were chasing their donkeys laden with water kegs up the hill to the village of Wagusu, Kenya.

Eddy, my host in the village, looked up from the watermelons. He grinned shyly. "I am writing a song to my mother," he said. We were going to see her in a neighboring village later that afternoon. "When I am finished, I will write a song to your mother. She carried you for months so that you could come work with us today."

We had many such short-yet-profound conversations over the course of my stay, and even three years later I am still drawing meaning from many of them. Eddy, an ambitious young man about my own age, had done a lot of work to get his tiny village put on the map. He'd made partnerships with Africa Home Adventure and the Kenya Voluntary Community Development Project to bring foreign volunteers, and their funding, into projects he had helped pilot. I paid around $100 a week for one of the most rewarding "vacations" I'd ever had. Only a very small portion of that went to buy things needed to host me -- some soap and cooking oil, for the eggs and cabbages we harvested in the field ourselves -- and the rest went to fund a vocational-technical program for girls.



The vo-tech program consisted of a small adobe -- that's mud, you know -- building, fancy because it had a poured concrete floor. Inside were two treadle sewing machines. The girls received training in tailoring and could come here to take turns using the machines. Some were orphans; others provided support for elderly family members. All of them were excited to have access to this simple machine, which required no electricity and gave them an opportunity to start their own businesses. To become self-sufficient.

How strikingly different our versions of self-sufficiency seem on the surface. To me, it means being able to make enough of my own food and materials that I don't need to depend on products imported from far away and produced through practices with which I don't agree. To the ten-year-old girl who unobtrusively followed me through the watermelon fields, all it meant was a chance to turn a bolt of cloth into a garment, and make a few shillings to buy eggs for her ailing grandmother. She was just learning to write her name, and could recite a few phrases in English, but she was a fiend on the sewing machine. School academics were important, but distant -- sewing skill on the treadle was critical to survival and future.

We aren't so different, really, both bored by the study of things that don't produce immediate, tangible results. It's not that theory isn't interesting, it's just that it takes a backseat when there are so many other, more pressing things competing for attention. All this girl needed was the loan of enough money to buy her first bolt of cloth -- less than $5 -- to give her the hope that she needed to consider her ability to change her own future. A micro-microloan. What do you need to feel you have a bit of control over your destiny?

the central problem of progress

"To wrest greater quantities of food from a wheat field, you need to breed varieties that give the greatest yield, that is, the greatest number of bushel per acre. To be successful, your breeding program requires a large and diverse gene pool, which gives you lots of choices. But when you finally come up with the most bountiful wheat, all the farmers plant it. The progeny of the favored variety overwhelms the wheat gene pool, forcing landraces and ancient types, and even useful related weeds, to disappear. Therefore, when you need to breed a new variety -- because the favored one has become stressed by bad weather or a killer disease -- there is less diversity remaining in the gene pool on which to base your search for a solution.

Repeat that scenario many times, and soon, so little diversity remains that breeding better wheat is almost impossible. It's like deliberate, programmed forgetting. Apply it to the glory of Greece and Rome, and you get the Dark Ages. Apply it to agriculture and you get famine, migrations of hungry people searching for food, and
inevitably, war."

-- Susan Dworkin, The Viking in the Wheat Field: A Scientist's Struggle to Preserve the World Harvest

I share this because it's one of the most succinct explanations of the need for biodiversity I've ever read. There is a direct relationship between security and a people's ability to feed themselves. You wouldn't think this needs to be explained, but so many people ignore or choose not to believe it's true.

This book tells a fascinating story about a variety of wheat rust that nearly decimated all the world's wheat crops. It began as a mutation of an existing wheat rust in Uganda, and because so much of the world's current wheat supply is genetically similar, it spread frighteningly fast. The story follows a scientist who made "gene banks" part of his life's work, believing in the power of biodiversity. That's all well and good, and I think barrels of seed from every known variety stored in a secret underground vault are probably a good idea. But if we think this can be an insurance policy against loss of biodiversity, we're sadly mistaken.

Seeds kept in a vault are vulnerable to rot, pests, and fire. But more importantly, they aren't growing. They aren't making the tiny adaptations to changes in drought patterns or pests that living, reproducing creatures can make. If you vault away a traditional wheat seed today and pull it out a hundred years from now, it may not be able to deal with the increased level of salinity, or the new armyworm, or a multitude of other pests we haven't even dreamed of yet, that have all been living and reproducing and interacting with the real world in the meantime. One of the most critical aspects of food security -- and by extension, peace in general -- is small farmers tending genetically diverse crops.

Monsanto and the other big seed companies seem to honestly believe in what they are doing. They believe that they can feed more people on the planet by growing more wheat on one acre. They believe they're helping the environment by helping to prevent more acres of forest from being cleared to serve as agricultural fields. I think there is probably a place for high-yield, hybrid varieties in a world food system, if only to feed the massive quantities of standardized ingredient requirements for things like military MREs and Chips-A-Hoy cookies. But those who think monoculture on its current hegemonic scale is truly the solution to world hunger are deluding themselves.

Any cursory student of international relations can tell you that the problem of world hunger isn't that there's a shortage of food -- some figures say we currently produce more than twice as much food as all the people on earth could possibly eat -- but that poor folks can't afford to buy it. Take a look at your own community if you're not convinced. Are the people who come to the food pantries and soup kitchens folks who couldn't find adequate calories in the grocery store? Of course not. There's plenty of food to go around, if you've got enough cash. And the rock-bottom prices of cereal grain commodities that are driving farmers off their land don't affect the much prices of Hamburger Helper at Safeway.

It's the same story the world over. And as Vandana Shiva said, when the very farmers who grow the food are having difficulty feeding their families as they sell their crops to pay off their loans, it ought to be a sign something is seriously out of whack with our food system.

What do you think? Is it possible to feed the world with organic crops? In the long term, can we afford not to?