2010: a year for high food prices?

Now's the season for people to start thinking about their garden plans for the coming year. While you're considering those, consider this, from a New York Times story about the recent cold snap in Florida:

Vegetables were among the hardest hit. At least one major tomato grower, Ag-Mart Produce, has already declared that most of its Florida crop is “useless due to the freeze.” Other vegetable farms were expected to lose their entire crop, and wholesale prices have already increased.

“Tomatoes were down around $14 for a 25-pound box; now they are up over $20,” said Gene McAvoy, an agriculture expert with the University Florida, who predicted $100 million in vegetable losses. “Peppers — just after New Year’s they were $8 a box; now they’re up around $18.”

Translation: get ready to pay up to an extra dollar a pound at supermarkets in New York and Chicago.

A number of outlets are predicting that 2010 will be a year of climbing food prices:

The U.S. Department of Agriculture expects overall food prices to rise as much as 4 percent in the U.S. by the end of 2010. Yet, some economists think they could climb by as much as 5 percent. Even using the government's more conservative numbers, the price for eggs is forecast to rise 3 percent and beef is seen increasing 2 percent. Lamb, seafood and fish? All three categories are expected to jump as much as 5 percent.

A 5 percent boost in your grocery bill may not seem terribly devastating, but consider this: If you spend $300 a week on groceries now, you'll need to squeeze a raise of about a thousand dollars a year out of your boss (don't forget withholding tax) just to keep up with higher chicken, beef, pork and dairy prices....

[C]onsumers are still paying about 45 percent more for food now than they were just two years ago. Bill Lapp, former chief economist at food giant ConAgra (CAG) and now president of Advanced Economic Solutions, a consulting firm in Omaha, Neb. that specializes in analysis of food costs, says at the peak of the global food crisis, food prices in the U.S. grew 6 percent. In 2010, he thinks they could jump 5 percent. Yikes.

Establishing a garden can be a great investment with long-term paybacks. We're planning to set up times in the next month or so to meet with Rodgers Forge neighbors to talk about vegetable gardening and what we can do to help get your gardens going. (Contact us at theforgefarm@comcast.net if you're interested in meeting.) It's a good year to start planting.

Who will grow our food?

In a recent post from a great food and sustainability writer, Sharon Astyk, on one of our favorite sources, www.energybulletin.net, comes this stunning quote:

As of 2002, the average American farmer was nearly 56 years old. The average American small farmer is over 60. More than one out of every four farmers is over 65 years old and rapidly facing retirement, and less than 6% of all American farmers are younger than 35 years old.

Astyk goes on to point out why this is so alarming: Two hundred years ago civilization used 1 in 2.5 people to farm, yet today we employ only 1 in 100 people to farm. This drift toward centralization of farming resources, which is using fewer and fewer people on larger and larger farms, has left us extremely vulnerable to large demographic shifts. And this is exactly what we are facing.

The average age of American farmers is part of the broader aging of the American population. This aging of the population might not be significant if adequate numbers of young people were pursuing farming careers. Yet they are not -- at least not in the numbers that will be necessary to replace all the farmers lost to old age. Farmers have historically grown up on farms, apprenticing at the feet of their family, learning through long experience the intricacies of growing food. As fewer younger people apprentice with older farmers, essential farming knowledge is lost.

The Rodgers Forge Farm Initiative was born out of a desire to grow our own food in healthy and environmentally sustainable ways. We imagine a greater role for suburban yard gardens in the food supply of our community. Now we even imagine a greater role for small home-scale gardening in the food supply of our great country. Sharon Astyk concludes that future American farmers may not come from the traditional backgrounds:

So where do they come from? This is a new problem for human society -- while we've always had some people take up agriculture as a new profession (and when that happened, say, during the settlement of the US west, there were always extremely high failure rates and ecological costs), the vast majority of those who did the work and stayed at it grew up on farms. We have never before in human history (except perhaps when we developed agriculture, and that didn't happen all at once) had to teach an entire generation of non-farmers to farm. But that's the problem we face.

In A Nation of Farmers one of the things that Aaron and I argue is that the next generation of American farmers will have to come out of the garden, and from other nations rather than off the American farm. That is, the children who grow up with some knowledge of growing things will largely fall into two categories. They will grow up with parents who garden, and teach their children to garden, and who take that set of skills and build upon it, or they will be the migrants themselves or the children of immigrants who come from cultures where agriculture is more common than it is today.

The future of American food production may no longer depend on farming families but on gardening families. Happy New Year, Rodgers Forge farmers!

Rob Hopkins on TED: Our Future in Transition

Rob Hopkins is the founder of the Transition movement, which has been an influence on the Rodgers Forge Farm Initiative. The "transition" of Hopkins's movement is one away from an oil-dependent lifestyle -- because, Hopkins posits, oil is going away. The idea behind Transition is to make one's living situation as resilient as possible. In this talk, he outlines the Transition movement and discusses how it is different from the more popular notions of sustainability.

Peak Oil and Your Garden

At the Rodgers Forge Farm Initiative we've been concerned about climate change, soil depletion, and the health effects of chemical additives in our food. These are all reasons to garden here in the Forge. However, people are increasingly talking about another reason to garden at home, one we feel compelled to share with you: peak oil production.

You may have heard the term "peak oil" -- it has been in the news a lot lately. The idea isn't new, but it has remained on the margins of conversations about energy for decades. But with the steep increases in the price of oil in the summer of 2008, peak oil went mainstream.

Peak oil is the point at which oil production -- a single oil well or the entire production capacity of a country, or even a planet -- reaches its maximum. In the simplest terms, a peak corresponds to the midway point in reserve capacity. Oil production can increase year after year until the point at which half of the reserve has been reached. Then oil becomes harder and more expensive to extract, and production begins to decline. (United States oil production peaked in 1970 and has been in decline since.)

According to proponents of peak-oil theories, this decline in production can lead to price shocks and rising oil prices. While many proponents of oil interests insist that there are great reserves yet to be discovered, other geologists and executives of petroleum companies and energy investment firms refute such claims. The graph here shows the major oil discoveries of the past century. You can see that they mostly happened in the mid-20th Century and have been going down ever since.

What does this have to do with food and gardening? As Michael Pollan and others have pointed out, when you eat food from the supermarket, you are eating oil. Fossil energy was used to plow the fields and fertilize, harvest, freeze, and transport that food 1,500 miles from the field to your plate. The journalist Richard Manning has estimated that each food calorie in this country is backed by 10 calories of oil energy.

That means that food will have to be less energy intensive in the future, which means that it might have to be growing right out your front or back door. We'll return to this idea in future posts.

Preparing for Spring

So, you've read all about front-yard gardens and back-yard gardens in Rodgers Forge, and you're eager to start your own next year. Well, the time to start working on that garden is now. There is plenty of work you can do this fall to make your garden better next year.

Find a Place For the New Bed: Pick a sunny spot somewhere in your yard. Keep in mind that the sun is in a different spot now than it will be in June of next year. Make sure a water source is nearby. Also, make sure it is out of the way of any activity that might happen in the yard in warmer months.

Make Your Bed: We prefer raised beds, framed with two-by material -- usually 2x8 or 2x10. Make a box with no top or bottom (in other words, earth will be the bottom and the sky will be the top) that has a maximum width of three to four feet. (Your arms have to be able to reach the center to weed and pick.) The box can be as long as you like. Then dig that into your selected sunny spot.

Get Soil: You can get bagged stuff or bulk. Fill the box. You'll find it cheaper to get soil in bulk through, say, a compost operation.

You now have a garden bed that will hold plants next year. But you can do more to help the bed grow more vegetables come spring....

Set Up a Composter: You can set that up right on top of your new bed. Fill it with leaves and grass clippings and turn often. (See our brief guide to composting for more information.)

Dig In Leaves: It is absolutely insane that we bag up leaves and throw them away. The leaves are valuable soil amendments, filled with nutrients. Take a bagful, spread it on the soil, and dig it in. Take another bagful and use the leaves to cover the bed, insulating it from hard rains and cold snaps. When spring comes, you will pull those leaves off and compost them, and your garden bed will be ready to go.

Seminar on farming methods, Nov. 7

How Do You Feed a City?

"How do you feed a city?" asks Carolyn Steel, an architect. "It is one of the great questions of our time, yet it is one that is rarely asked. We take it for granted that if we go into a shop or a restaurant... there is going to be food there waiting for us, having magically come from somewhere. But when you think this, every day for a city the size of London" -- or even Baltimore -- "enough food has to be produced, transported, bought and sold, cooked, eaten, and disposed of, and that something similar has to happen every day for every city on earth, it's remarkable that cities get fed at all...."