New administration supports local and organic agriculture

UPDATE

Sam Kass, who has been cooking for the Obama family for several years, is moving to the White to continue feeding them healthy organic food. He will be working with chef Cristeta Comerford, who is the head chef, apparently.

This is according to a NYTimes blog entry Obamas Bring Their Chicago Chef to the White House

Mr. Kass's appointment signals changes at the White House that should please chefs like Alice Waters, who have lobbied the Obamas to set an example for the rest of the country by emphasizing food that is healthy, local and sustainable. It further suggests that a vegetable garden on the White House grounds, another of Ms. Waters' dreams, could be on the horizon.

This is seen as good news for local, wholesome, organic food. The orginal post follows and gives some background on President Obama's vision for food.

In her Health.com article, Julie Upton, RD, talks about how the Obama family, and the President himself may help both the health of our country and the local and organic agriculture movement. She writes in
4 Ways Barack Obama Can Change the Way Our Country Eats that

Both President Obama and Vice President Joe Biden have expressed their desire to support legislation in favor of local and organic agriculture. Obama frequently mentions his appreciation of reform-minded food writer Michael Pollan, reports the New York Times, and wife Michelle has said she tries to buy organic when she can.

She joins other writers who are supporting that healthier food can be inspired from the top down. Michael Pollan clearly puts forth a way that we can change what we do, how we eat, even how we see ourselves. Michael Pollen proposed a "Farmer in Chief" in his New York Times blog The Food Issue: Farmer in Chief, discusses how we got to where we are with our food supply.

Others are advocating a portion of the grounds of the White House be turned into an organic garden.

Back in December, (December 23, 2008) Kim Severson listed what many people want to see happen in the new year in her article Is a New Food Policy on Obama’s List?

This is not simple wishful thinking. For the first time in nearly 40 years, we have a President with a rural agenda and policy. Read it. It is not all you may hope for, but it is radically different from anything we have seen in since Nixon. Plank after planK clearly spells out the Obama Administration's policies, such as this:

Encourage Organic and Local Agriculture: Help organic farmers afford to certify their crops and reform crop insurance to not penalize organic farmers. Promote regional food systems.

Those few of us who are in the forefront of healthy eating need to support and push this agenda. While you may find parts in it that are not perfect, support of all of it is essential to making sure that we have a place from which make adjustments. As Kim Severson said as she concluded her article,

“It’s like the hat manufacturers being furious because J. F. K. didn’t wear a hat, and suddenly everyone in America stopped wearing hats,” she said. “It’s that simple.”

Afterword: If you read these articles, look at the comments. There you will read the opponents of President Obama and his policies. Please consider writing comments in support of the articles (if you truly can make them) because the negativity to such ideas seems very strong and often stated.

What are the benefits of eating organic? Dr. set out to find out.

For three year Dr. only at organic food. Read about what he learned in For Three Years, Every Bite Organic. Here are two short excerpts from the story.

In a fascinating experiment — on himself — Dr. Alan Greene, a pediatrician and author in Danville, Calif., decided to find out. For the last three years, Dr. Greene has eaten nothing but organic foods, whether he’s cooking at home, dining out or snacking on the road.

He chose three years as a goal because that was the amount of time it took to have a breeding animal certified organic by the Department of Agriculture. While food growers comply with organic regulations every day, Dr. Greene wondered whether a person could meet the same standards.

...research suggests that organic foods do contain more of certain nutrients — almost twice as many, in the case of organic tomatoes studied for a 2007 report in The Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry.

Dr. Greene said he was inspired to go all-organic after talking to a dairy farmer who noted that livestock got sick less after a switch to organic practices. He wondered if becoming 100 percent organic might improve his own health.

Three years later, he says he has more energy and wakes up earlier. As a pediatrician regularly exposed to sick children, he was accustomed to several illnesses a year. Now, he says, he is rarely ill. His urine is a brighter yellow, a sign that he is ingesting more vitamins and nutrients.

This is why we are working to raise organic food year round.

Estimating Your Total Food Market Size

The U.S. Food Market Estimator from the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University popped into my inbox today. It is a tool to estimate the gross consumption of food required in any state. For example, I found that in Washington State the population required the production of 18,326,421 pounds of garlic annual. Fascinating!

For small farmers, it puts our production capabilities into perspective. The market is huge, and we are small niche providers of specialty products. It can be easy to lose sight of this when we go into a huge grocery store and see as much produce a we may produce in a month or even a season on the shelves. It goes a long way to showing how there is room for us in the fresh food market.

This is a well-developed tool and the website provides supporting information, with links to the following topics:
• What is the U.S. Food Market Estimator?
• How does this tool work?
• Does this tool show actual consumption?
• What are the limitations of this tool?
• What food products are included?
• How are units of measure determined?
• Who might use this tool?
• Who developed the U.S. Food Market Estimator?

I encourage everyone to bookmark this tool and use it.

Good Food: the movie

I received this message from Mary Embleton who was passing it along from Melissa Young of Moving Images .

Dear friends, please forward to interested folks.

For those who missed the Seattle Film Festival premier of GOOD FOOD:

Seattle -
October 4, 7 pm Local Sightings Festival at NW Film Forum - 1515-12th Avenue [more on fest below]
October 16, 7 pm South Park Neighborhood Center, 820l - 10th Ave. South
October 22, 7 pm Rainier Valley Cultural Center, 3515 S. Alaska Street
November 21, 7 pm Wallingford Friday Night at the Meaningful Movies, Keystone church, 5019 Keystone Place N.

Western Washington -
October 12, 6:45 pm Oddfellows Hall in Eastsound, Orcas Island
October 18 & 19, 5 pm Lynwood Theatre, Bainbridge Island
October - date TBA Vashon Island
November 8, 8 pm Bellingham, WA - Washington Tilth Producers Conference

Eastern Washington -
September 25, 11:30 am Spokane Falls Community College
September 25, 7 pm Magic Lantern Theater - Spokane, Washington
October 2-5 date/time TBA Ellensburg Film Festival - Ellensburg, Washington

Elsewhere -
October 17-19 -dateTBA Black Bear Film Festival, Milford Pennsylvania
October 25, 11 a.m. UN Association Film Festival - Palo Alto, California


We hope you can join us. Check out - www.goodfoodthemovie.org to remain current on screenings, to view a 5 minute preview of the film, to read reviews, and to learn more about sustainable agriculture in the Northwest.

Mark Dworkin and Melissa Young
Moving Images


11th Annual Local Sightings Film Festival , October 3-8

Northwest Film Forum’s premiere showcase of Northwest filmmaking is back, bigger than ever. The festival, which happens at NWFF’s theaters in Seattle, features great prizes, filmmaker parties, archival Northwest films and an impressive national film industry jury looking for strong Northwest work.

The annual festival includes both feature film presentations as well as short film programs and special events with live film performances, installation art, audience participation and parties. This year’s festival takes place in the cinemas of Northwest Film Forum from October 3–8. Included in this year’s festival will be the usual assortment of fiction, documentary and experimental films as well as a featured presentation of a historical Seattle film, a staged reading of this year’s Washington State Screenplay Competition winning script, and an opening party that will ignite Seattle’s film scene Friday night and keep it bleary eyed Saturday morning.

Schedule features the documentary GOOD FOOD – playing Saturday October 4 at 7pm!

More information and complete program at www.localsightings.org

Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance (KCAA)

We, Abundantly Green and you, our CSA family members, and Poulsbo Farmers Market customers, and readers of Amicus Agraria are active in the local food movement just by what we do. Several years ago, I became active in moving a community-based agriculture promotion group forward. That group became the Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance (KCAA). The KCAA depends on people like you, community members, to join and work with it to promote and support local agriculture of all types in the Kitsap Peninsula.

The group is headed by our dear friend Nikki Johanson of Pheasant Fields Farm. She is joined by many people. There is a monthly meeting the first Tuesday of the month, 7:00 pm at the Norm Dicks Government Center in Bremerton.

The KCAA was a primary sponsor of Joe Salatin coming to Kitsap county in June where he spoke to a sold-out audience at Olympic College on June 4. Mr. Salatin was profiled as one of the most influential independent organic farmers in the country in the book The Omnivores Dilemma.
Jim Freeman, a KCAA member volunteer, created an amazing blog for the KCAA called Buy Local Food in Kitsap, The Blog changes several times a week, featuring a farm, market, or source for local food.

The KCAA Blog features many topics that you might not realize were important to local food in Kitsap. One topic I recommend is “How to Support Local Farmers.” You might think, “I buy locally, I belong to a CSA,” and while essential, it is just one of many things that needs to happen to keep farms like ours farming. The blog is a good way to meet and befriend others who share your love of local, wholesome, farm fresh food, like ours. The blog, Buy Local Food in Kitsap, links to others, including our web page and Amicus Agraria. You can also go to it through the Abundantly Green website. You are invited to join in and comment and blog at both.

You do not have to be a resident of the Kitsap Peninsula to support and join the KCAA. The membership information follows:
• Individual Membership at $20 for a 1 year membership
• Family Membership (one contact) for $35 for a 1 year membership
• send a check to Kitsap Community & Agricultural Alliance, P. O. Box 11, Keyport, WA 98345
• Or fill out the form from the website
• phone number is 360-779-6523
• email is kcaa4u@yahoo.com

Compromising the Elixer of Life

Water is really the life-giving elixir. Water is not only what you drink, it is what the plants and animals drink. Freshwater systems occupy only 0.8 percent of Earth's surface.

The Worldwatch Institute reports that our renewable water supply amounts to approx 0.3 percent of the world's total freshwater, which is less that is presently being used. Sandra Postel, a Senior Fellow of The Worldwatch Institute, and expert in global water problems, states that "Most irrigation-based civilizations fail." Wow, that is a stark and scary statement. Her compelling facts back up her statement, leaving me with a sense of urgency about figuring out how can we avoid this path of failure. How can we?

The Why Files water map and linked articles provide detailed information from The World Health Organization -- WHO. "Of a population of roughly 6.1 billion, more than 1 billion lack access to potable water. The World Health Organization says that at any time, up to half of humanity has one of the six main diseases -- diarrhea, schistosomiasis, or trachoma, or infestation with ascaris, guinea worm, or hookworm -- associated with poor drinking water and inadequate sanitation."

Since most of us eat more plants than animals, and plants do not effectively process or filter the water the take up (up-take), the quality of the water that they are water with is very important. However, what about polluted water? What about our "water footprint?"

Discover Magazine has been doing a series of articles on water. Better Planet: Everything You Know About Water Conservation Is Wrong Forget short showers. Worry about the 6,340 gallons of "virtual water" in your leather bag. by Thomas M. Kostigen, published online May 28, 2008. I will leave you with two very shocking statements as teasers to encourage you to pop over there and read the whole article.

"...if each of us avoided wasting just one cupful of coffee a day, we could save enough water over the course of a year to provide two gallons to every one of the more than 1.1 billion people who don’t have access to freshwater at all.

That is a stark statistic, when as many as 5 million people die unnecessarily each year because of lack of water and water-related illnesses; one-third are under age 5."

Farther along in the article he writes: "Right now we lose 30 to 50 percent of the food we grow—and all the virtual water in it—by the time it is ready for consumption, says Daniel Zimmer, executive director of the World Water Council (WWC) in Marseille, France."

Discover Magazine has earned worldwide respect among the learned community they report on, and provides a wealth of information.

The Dallas-Fort Worth Star Telegram online news has a section devoted to clean water issues called Plant DFW: Drinking Water from a series of articles that they did in May 2008. The issues they address are underground chemical plumes affecting their water system (what do we have here on the Kitsap Peninsula?), Airline water, and more. They provide plenty of links, too. Discover Magazine is linked there as is National Geographic's The Green Guide.

The Associated Press (AP) investigated our water supplies in twenty-four major cities at the end of last year. They found what many of us have known for a while: the drugs that we take pass through our digestive systems and into the sewage stream. The extent of this pollution of our water was profiled in article written by Jeff Donn, Martha Mendoza and Justin Pritchard, published by the AP, March 10, 2008. Sex Hormones, Mood Stabilizers Found In Drinking Water Of 41 M Americans

Here is a taste of a this long and thoughtful piece.

“People take pills. Their bodies absorb some of the medication, but the rest of it passes through and is flushed down the toilet. The waste water is treated before it is discharged into reservoirs, rivers or lakes. Then, some of the water is cleansed again at drinking water treatment plants and piped to consumers. But most treatments do not remove all drug residue.

Sewage treatment plants are not set up to handle these chemicals, so now our birth control pills, antibiotics, pain relievers are in our drinking water. I first became aware of this problem when I read an article several years ago about the feminising of fish, amphibians, and mollusks species that can change gender. This is a serious problem for our food supply.

This is a really important issue for farming. How can our food supply be pure if our water is polluted? The title of the story is a link to the AP site. I have quoted few paragraphs so that you can see why this investigation is important.

A vast array of pharmaceuticals -- including antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones -- have been found in the drinking water supplies of at least 41 million Americans, an Associated Press investigation shows.

To be sure, the concentrations of these pharmaceuticals are tiny, measured in quantities of parts per billion or trillion, far below the levels of a medical dose.
Also, utilities insist their water is safe.

But the presence of so many prescription drugs _ and over-the-counter medicines like acetaminophen and ibuprofen _ in so much of our drinking water is heightening worries among scientists of long-term consequences to human health.

I encourage you to read the entire story. I have not found a follow up to this story. If you know of additional or follow up information, please share the links to it.

If, like me, you don't know about these drugs, and their effects on the human being, read this chapter from a text book for psychiatrists. Mood Stableizers are discussed in this online book from the Australia New Zealand Association of Psychiatrists in Training.

This is described as: Chapter 18: Mood stabilizers Saturday, 27 August 2005, Last modified: April 28, 2006, This chapter is not exciting. It provides more detail than medical students need. There is little controversy attached to mood stabilizers.

Why is this important and the blue planet: the water planet? What are we to do when freshwater systems occupy only 0.8 percent of Earth's surface and less that 3% of all the earth's water is potable, fresh water: that means able to be used by people, plants or animals. Without water, there is no life.

Demand for local food at an all time high

What a modern headline: “Demand for local food at an all time high.” A person born in 1908 probably would not be able to understand it, yet today the issue of locally grown versus imported food may be essential to our continued well-being. The locally grown food issue is, ironically, worldwide.

For all the industrialized nations the food chain has become a complex system based on global corporations that separate producers and consumers are through a chain of processors, value-added manufacturers, shippers and haulers, and retailers. This food chain is so convoluted it is almost impossible to understand. For example, If you shop at Costco and many other grocery stores, you are familiar with the Earthbound Farm Organic Foods, which is a subsidiary brand of Natural Selection Foods, which is a subsidiary of Tanimura and Antle.

The Certified Organic Associations of BC (Canada) has a chart of the global corporations that own some of the organic (but not local) brands you can find on your grocery store shelves. Who Owns What in the Organic food industry, by Phil Howard, an assistant professor at Michigan State University's Department of Community, Agriculture, Recreation and Resource Studies is surprising. If after reading the chart, you feel like you are in a modern version of Abbott and Costello’s “Who's on First,” you are not alone.

The global organic food industry is threatened by the movement to buy from local farmers, who actually provide less than 2% of all food consumed in the United States, and probably the industrialized world, as well, although I have no statistics on this. The globalization of food, which took away the issue of seasonality, so you could have tomatoes, cherries, broccoli, and more year-round, proved to be a highly disruptive situation to both food distribution and agriculture. Food distributors who did not provide out of season food found themselves out of business. Farmers planted one or two crops to meet the huge demand that nationwide and worldwide distribution created.

The local food movement may be as disruptive in reverse. If you enter the phrase “demand for locally grown food” into Yahoo Search, you will get 9,870,000 articles returned.

LOCAL FOOD DISTRIBUTION

Local Kitsap Peninsula food is actually difficult to find. All of the local CSA (community supported agriculture) farms were sold out weeks in advance. Local farmers markets report an increase in customers of double or more over last year. Even our miserable weather and resulting slow season does not deter CSA members and farmers market customers.

However, not everyone can join a CSA or go to a farmers market. To help people who want to enjoy locally grown food, Bainbridge Islander Carlee Ashen started Farm Courier to bring local produce to Bainbridge Island doorsteps. She is at the forefront of local food distribution. Farm Courier enjoys an unique place in the local food distribution system, but Ashen’s success is going to inspire others to copy her business model and join her in providing fresh, locally grown food on the Kitsap Peninsula.Farm Courier and Carlee Ashen were recently featured in this Bainbridge Island Review article Cyber market links Bainbridge growers to residents hungry for local food.

Crossposted with http://www.buylocalfoodinkitsap.org/

Weather, the Jet Stream, and trees

The weather is back to overcast rainy days. At least the temperature is over 60 degrees F. We had our two or three days of summer last week. Temperatures jumped 25 degrees F overnight. At least the plants were happy.

We had to move the start of our 20 week CSA back two full weeks (did this three weeks ago) because of the cold weather. There was frost on the ground May 3. This is unusual in Kitsap County because we have a maritime climate, that while about 10 degrees F cooler than Seattle, is fairly warm. By mid-April we should have had consistent temperatures in the high 60's during the day, and in the mid-40's at night. From March on we should have been in the high 50's to low 60's in the day and low-40's at night.

This all may be due to the Jet Stream moving northward and weakening. MSNBC had an article on this April 21, 2008 Jet stream moving north, weather shifts likely. There have been several articles on this topic. If you have more information on this, please leave the links in the comment section.

I have no idea if global climate change is a natural phenomena or man-made, but it is probably due to a combination of the two.

People wanting to change the man-made problems are trying a number of remedies. In Pellston, Michigan, scientists have begun what will be a decades long test concerning tree varieties and the atmosphere. Scientists starve aspen trees in global warming experiment. This one is both curious and compelling. Trying to offset man-made change may be the fastest answer.

We sold out of our CSA shares two weeks before we originally intended to start. The demand for local food is increasing.

Inert Is Not Inert Anymore

Inert
adj.

1. Unable to move or act.
2. Sluggish in action or motion; lethargic. See synonyms at inactive.
3. Chemistry. Not readily reactive with other elements; forming few or no chemical compounds.
4. Having no pharmacologic or therapeutic action.

[Latin iners, inert- : in-, not; see in–1 + ars, skill.]

Seems like a straightforward definition, but if you care about being poisoned, maybe you should care about this:

Ingredients can be listed as "inert" if they do not have an action pertinent to stated action of the product. This means that an herbicide that kills plants can have in its "inert" ingredients pesticides that kill pests, or you, or your kids and pets. Or inversely, a pesticide to kill a specific pest (like we're not all linked!) could wipe out all the food crops, or flowers, or your yard.

OK, maybe that sounds harsh or paranoid, but if you rid your yard of one noxious weed, you could set off a chain reaction if you use some products. When I first heard about the Inert ingredients, I thought it was one of those "urban myths." I searched for information on it and found many articles. Here is a link to an article Aerial Spraying for the Brown Apple Moth to Resume" that discusses this issue. The article is in Beyond Pesticides Daily New Blog (October 24, 2007). Here is a quote from the article about one inert list:

However, the inert chemicals in CheckMate LBAM-F have now come under scrutiny by local residents. These inerts ingredients causing concern are: butylated hydroxytoluene, tricaprylyl methyl ammonium chloride, polyvinyl alcohol, and sodium phosphate. These inerts are listed by the US EPA as List 3 - Inerts of unknown toxicity, and List 4B - Other ingredients for which EPA has sufficient information to reasonably conclude that the current use pattern in pesticide products will not adversely affect public health or the environment, respectively.

Suzanne Dowling, a concerned resident, said, “There are health hazards associated with each and every one of the four inert ingredients of the product to be dumped on us.”

There are additional links in this article.

For the regulators of certified organic products the inert list is of prime concern. One of the men who works for WSDA Organic Program told me that they spend a huge amount of their time testing the inert ingredients of products being put forth as "organic".

If you read my last post about Pesticides in children, you can extrapolate the implications of non-inert Inert ingredients.

Spring is coming, and state and local pest controllers will be out aerial spraying gypsy or codling moths honestly not knowing about the "inert" list. They truly believe it to be a real inert ingredient such a silica.

Question of the day:
How do we move to knowing what is really in things?

As more and more people suffer from neurological problems, allergies, diseases, and syndromes, it is time to look at the environment in which we live. The following article appeared at the end of January 2008. As with all newspaper articles, it was a one-edition wonder. I am quoting some of it here with appropriate links, and links to the original study, at the bottom of this, to educate us all.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer, January 30, 2008
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/349263_pesticide30.html

Harmful pesticides found in everyday food products
Mercer Island children tested in yearlong study

By ANDREW SCHNEIDER
P-I SENIOR CORRESPONDENT

Government promises to rid the nation's food supply of brain-damaging pesticides aren't doing the job, according to the results of a yearlong study that carefully monitored the diets of a group of local children.

The peer-reviewed study found that the urine and saliva of children eating a variety of conventional foods from area groceries contained biological markers of organophosphates, the family of pesticides spawned by the creation of nerve gas agents in World War II.

When the same children ate organic fruits, vegetables and juices, signs of pesticides were not found.

"The transformation is extremely rapid," said Chensheng Lu, the principal author of the study published online in the current issue [15 January 2008] of Environmental Health Perspectives.

"Once you switch from conventional food to organic, the pesticides (malathion and chlorpyrifos) that we can measure in the urine disappears. The level returns immediately when you go back to the conventional diets," said Lu, a professor at Emory University's School of Public Health and a leading authority on pesticides and children.

Within eight to 36 hours of the children switching to organic food, the pesticides were no longer detected in the testing.

The subjects for his testing were 21 children, ages 3 to 11, from two elementary schools and a Montessori preschool on Mercer Island.

With good scientific caution, Chensheng Lu, went on to discuss the limitations of current research, noting, however, that:

"In animal and a few human studies, we know chlorpyrifos inhibits an enzyme that transmits a signal in the brain so the body can function properly. Unfortunately, that's all we know."

The article continues, discussing Chlorpyrifos:

Dangerous science

Chlorpyrifos, made by Dow Chemical Co., is one of the most widely used organophosphate insecticides in the United States and, many believe, the world.

For years, millions of pounds of the chemical insecticide were used in schools, homes, day care centers and public housing, and studies show that children were often exposed to enormously high doses. Just as the EPA was ready to ban the product, which analysts said would have damaged Dow's overseas sales, the company "voluntarily" removed it from the home market. Yet, with few exceptions, the agricultural uses continued.

The EPA's Web site is a study in contradictions when it comes to chlorpyrifos.

To be fair to the EPA, the website actually reflects attitudes towards these chemicals over time. It is, however confusing, because you need to read the dates of the various documents. If you search on the word chlorpyrifos, nearly a half million articles or references will be identified. This chemical has been in use since, at least 1988, and likely earlier.

To read more about this, go to the article at http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/local/349263_pesticide30.html

P-I senior correspondent Andrew Schneider can be reached at 206-448-8218 or andrewschneider@seattlepi.com.

The study was published in Environmental Health Perspectives www.ehponline.org The study was published in the 15 January 2008 issue. You can download a PDF copy of the study from EHP at http://www.ehponline.org/docs/2008/10912/abstract.html