Listening to the Music

Daniel, Jennifer, Ellen, and Arianna were in Charlotte this weekend for a visit. We stopped by the Matthews Farmers Market and paused to listen to the musicians who were playing:

Three Cheers for Wendell Berry

On August 6, 2009, the USDA announced a recall of approximately 825,769 pounds of ground beef products that may be linked to an outbreak of salmonellosis. Yes, that's a small amount, relatively speaking, but it should give meat-eaters pause yet again concerning their own health and safety.

Connect that fact to this report in the current issue (August 2009, pp. 5, 73) of Acres USA magazine. It concerns the testimony of (farmer, poet, writer, elder-statesman, Christian) Wendell Berry before a government panel on the proposed National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in which all farmers, big and small, would be forced to register every single animal they own with the government by means of an imbedded chip in order to track that animal's movement as a way to monitor outbreaks of disease. As one might imagine, Mr. Berry isn't having any of the government's plan. In his words (below), watch for the connection between the problem government has allowed (factory farming of animals in CAFOs [Confined Animal Feeding Operations] where disease outbreak is widespread), the government's solution (registering animals to track disease instead of doing what would prevent disease), and Berry's counter-solution (putting the animals back on pasture where they belong and where diseases are controlled by nature):

The Acres USA article:

Leave it to family-scale farming's own Wendell Berry, the award-winning author and essayist, to wrap up the National Animal Identification System (NAIS) in a mere 250 words. During testimony in one of the USDA "listening sessions," in which officials didn't hear what they wanted, Berry clearly stated that he will go to jail before his livestock will be tagged, registered, and monitored by the government.

He also noted that this was the first agricultural meeting he has attended which had the police present. But he called their presence premature.

[Said Berry] "If you impose this [NAIS] program on the small farmers, who are already overburdened, you're going to have to send the police for me. I'm 75 years old. I've about completed my responsibilities to my family. I'll lose very little in going to jail in opposition to your program—and I'll have to do it. Because I will be, in every way that I can conceive of, a non-cooperator."

The need to trace animals was made by the confined animal industry—which is, essentially, a series of disease-breeding operations, [Berry] said.

Berry continued: "The health issue was invented right there. The remedy is to put animals back on pasture, where they belong. The USDA is scapegoating the small producers to distract attention from the real cause of the trouble. Presumably these animal factories are, in a too familiar phrase, 'too big to fail.'"

In the end, these animal factories are failing. Failing in the marketplace of good ideas, failing environmentally, and failing to provide nutrition to nurture the minds of our citizens.

In 1644 the nonconformist English Presbyterian theologian Samuel Rutherford published a book titled Lex, Rex ("the law and the king" or "the law is king"). The thesis of the book was that the laws of man apply only insofar as they conform to the laws of God. Since God has appointed civil rulers (Romans 13), those rulers are obliged to institute laws that are consistent with God's. When man's laws become inconsistent with God's, man is not only free to disobey but has an obligation to do so.

Modern Christian theologian (the late) Francis Schaeffer used Rutherford's thesis as the basis for his 1981 book A Christian Manifesto, a book that fueled the short-lived efforts of some Christians to civilly disobey America's abortion rights laws and be arrested and go to jail for protesting at abortion clinics.

In the case of abortion, it can be said that man's laws violate one of God's written laws (the prohibition against killing another human being in the Ten Commandments). But what about God's natural laws -- such as taking animals out of their natural environments and lifestyles and confining them in disease-rich environments where the animals not only suffer but where diseases produced therein ultimately cause human suffering as well?

I thought of this question when reading Wendell Berry's public statement to the government that he would go to jail before he would allow the government onto his property to do something totally unnatural: implant a computer chip in his animals for purposes of counting and controlling them.

I go a step beyond Berry in believing that it is unnatural for man to eat animals (Genesis 1:29). But for those who insist on eating meat of any kind, if you are unfamiliar with acronyms like CAFO and NAIS then you deserve whatever illness or calamity befalls you. If that sounds harsh, it's only because I, like Wendell Berry, have little to lose at my stage of life from speaking and acting truthfully. To make the blind assumption, when it comes to a foundational area like food, that it is the government's job to protect your health . . . it is a naive assumption. It is the government that has either created or allowed CAFOs and the NAIS (and others), systems which nurture and allow the spread of the diseases that harm animals and people. When government agencies are routinely staffed by individuals with histories in and ties to the profit side of American agriculture, it doesn't take a rocket scientist to see how priorities get skewed.

Again, if you insist on the unnatural activity of eating meat of any kind, you should buy it from the person who raised it and slaughtered it him/herself; who can prove to you why it is safe. To consume meat from the factory-farm system (your local grocery store or discount warehouse or restaurant -- remember, that's where the 800,000 pounds of polluted beef mentioned earlier was headed) is to perpetuate a system that is unnatural, unhealthy, and worthy to be opposed.

Three cheers for Wendell Berry.

Farm Visit

Another CSA share pickup today from New Town Farms. Note the two different varieties of okra in the plastic bag (green and purple):

The plants bearing the purple okra are six to eight feet tall, though you can't really tell in this picture:

Here's the same picture with me standing right next to some of the tallest plants; they were about eight feet tall. The picture is cockeyed because I had set the camera on a rock:

Here are the plants bearing the green okra -- about five feet tall. Quite a difference in the height of these two varieties:

I was struck by this beautiful, majestic, tall (over eight feet) stalk of amaranth growing up "wild" in the midst of the cherry tomato patch. Besides its beauty (and other practical uses in different cultures) Sammy had told me a couple years ago that amaranth is a good trap crop for Japanese beetles. (Wikipedia has a good article on amaranth.)

Before I left I took a little video of the chickens in the coop, primarily to record the noble crowing of the rooster as he watched over his harem, and the gentle clucking of the hens. Such lovely sounds. If I ever have the opportunity to have chickens, I will. Don't know what I'll do with the eggs, but I am drawn to the birds -- especially because of their ruthlessness in keeping the yards free of bugs, adding their natural fertilizer to the soil, and constantly turning up the top inch or so of the soil by their scratching.

Little Buggers

As mentioned in an earlier post, the white cabbage butterfly is an annual menace in North American gardens and fields, attacking the Brassica family (broccoli, kale, cabbage, brussels sprouts, turnips, etc.). They appear in spring and can go through several life cycles until overwintering in the fall. I think I'm in my third cycle and this latest one has been a bear.

The life cycle is: butterflies hatch from their overwinter cocoons in the spring; they lay single eggs on plant leaves; the eggs hatch into tiny caterpillars; the caterpillars feed voraciously on the leaves and grow rapidly for a few weeks; the caterpillars spin themselves into cocoons; from the cocoons a new butterfly emerges. In the fall, the last cocoons of the season remain dormant (overwinter) until they hatch in response to the spring warmth—and the trouble starts all over.

Here's a (fuzzy) picture of a kale leaf silhouetted against the sky:

This bed of kale was shredded earlier this summer, grew new leaves, and has been shredded again:

Yep, that's caterpillar poop all over the skeleton of the leaf:

Amazing how bugs have specific tastes. I have a concrete planter with a nice Swiss chard plant in the middle and two kale plants on either end. You can see the chard is untouched and the kale in the lower left corner and the upper right center of the pic is shredded:

The caterpillars crawl on to the adjacent chard leaves but don't eat them:

Actually, these caterpillars may be from another species of cabbage butterfly, a brown one. Notice the brown striations on this caterpillar. The white cabbage butterfly produces (I think) a pale green caterpillar with a velvet appearance. I have seen both the white and brown butterflies flying about and laying eggs:

The caterpillars don't eat the chard but they don't mind storing their cocoons there. (I believe these are the cocoons of the butterfly life cycle, but stand to be corrected): I stand corrected! Daniel led me in the direction of these cocoons being probably those of a parasitic wasp that lays its eggs on the caterpillar. The eggs hatch, leave the host caterpillar, and the larvae spin cocoons on the leaf. That is a common lifecycle (as with the white cocoons on the back of tomato hornworms, so that could be what is happening here. Bottom line, these cocoons are too small and numerous to be the white cabbage butterfly cocoons.)

More of the little buggers:

Not sure why these have congregated at the base of the kale stalks:

In all fairness, I have laid out an all-you-can-eat buffet for these guys by having Brassicas growing in the middle of the summer. Normally, one would grow and harvest cool-weather Brassicas in the early spring (before the butterflies are active) and again in the cool of the fall (when they enter their overwinter period). But this kale has done well through the heat of the summer so I've let it stand, and am now paying the price for it.

The only remedies are hand picking the caterpillars (a losing battle, for sure), putting floating row covers over the crop to keep the butterflies from laying their eggs on the leaves (a good solution for small growers), and the use of Bt (bacillus thuringiensis), a bacteria that can be sprayed on the leaves. The caterpillars ingest the bacteria and it shuts down their feeding and they die off in a couple days. Bt is used extensively by commercial organic growers since it is not harmful to humans or other animals. I've used it before and it does control the caterpillars well. But the best solution is to grow the Brassicas early in the spring and in the fall so as to avoid the life cycle (or most of it).