Yard Scenes

Just some quick scenes from around the yard. The buckwheat around the dogwood tree was about ready to flower when I took these pics, and has now flowered. It's a cover crop that will add biomass and nitrogen to that little patch of earth in anticipation of some cool-weather crops this fall:

Some Brandywine heirloom tomatoes looking healthy:

Blueberries (darker pine straw mulch) and tomatoes (wheat straw mulch) along the back fence (all growing poorly, if I do say so):

Compost "bin" slowly gaining mass:

The ambient temperature was 80 and the interior temp of the pile was only 94 -- not enough mass yet to generate considerable heat. It should get up around 130 degrees if it ever gets cooking correctly (which it probably won't at the slow rate I'm adding raw material):

I trimmed the decimated leaves (from the cabbage butterfly caterpillars) off the kale and it's coming back! And I haven't seen the white butterflies around for about a week so I hope this new growth will last into the Fall:

A burgeoning aloe vera plant:

A wasp and butterfly (moth?) on the buckwheat:

The First Sane Words . . .

For a number of reasons, I have not paid a great deal of attention to the war of words over "healthcare" reform. Ever since watching one of last fall's presidential debates between Obama and McCain, and the subsequent election of Obama, I have tuned out, for this reason: In that debate, the moderator asked both candidates whether they considered "healthcare" a right or a responsibility. Obama said "right" while McCain said "responsibility." With Obama now in the White House, his view that healthcare is a right is the primary reason I have tuned out of the current debate. That view can only lead to more massive government programs to provide said right while giving citizens an excuse to opt out of the responsibility for creating their own healthful lifestyles.

But I have seen one set of sane words from a Senator that expresses what I believe about America's health crisis—that it is due to lifestyle choices for which we are largely responsible. Democratic Senator Tom Harkin (Iowa) recently published a paper titled "Fighting Disease, and Remaking America as a Wellness Society." You can read the entire paper (alas, full of proposals for umpteen pieces of legislation) for the details, but the opening paragraphs of his paper are worthy of commendation. I find it amazing that this view has not been heard elsewhere in the debate. Perhaps it has been—as I said, I haven't been listening that much.

Harkin writes:

The wealthiest nation in the world ought to be the healthiest nation in the world. But we're not. In fact, the U.S. ranks a dismal 24th in life expectancy, and we lag on many other health measures, as well.

The problem is that, while the U.S. spends far more on health care per capita than any other country, we spend it unwisely. More than 75 percent of all U.S. medical expenditures are accounted for by chronic conditions such as heart disease, cancer, diabetes, stress, and depression—man of which are preventable by changes in diet and lifestyle. Meanwhile, we spend peanuts on prevention—less than five percent of health care spending in the U.S. goes toward the prevention of chronic disease. In short, we don't have a health care system in America; we have a sick care system. And this misplaced emphasis on "sick care" is a major reason why there has been a shocking 78 percent increase in family health care premiums since 2001.

In my opinion, we don't hear the words "preventable by changes in diet and lifestyle" coming out of Washington more often because so many politicians' campaigns are funded, and their ears bent, by powerful food and agribusiness lobbyists. It's commendable that Harkin, a senator from one of the breadbasket states in the Union (Iowa), had the courage to print such words. May his tribe increase.

When Friends Become Your Food

Trace Ramsey is a thoughtful small farmer, photographer, and commentator living somewhere around the Pittsboro (Raleigh-Durham) area of North Carolina. He publishes occasional commentary with pictures on his blog, and I took the opportunity to post a response to today's post, "What Happens When Your Friends Become Your Food."

The post title explains the dilemma Trace is wrestling with: raising and caring for three little piggies that he knows he will one day kill and eat. Along with beautiful pictures of his pigs and their lush, natural habitat provided by Trace, there is honest and compassionate reflection about the tension created when you make friends with beings you intend to eat. But Trace says clearly that the answer is not to treat the animals as non-sentient "farm machines," because they aren't. Instead, he wrestles with a genuine problem, and I commend him for the public revelation of his thought process. His conclusion is a call for animal farmers to take responsibility for the meat meals they produce for themselves and others, responsibility manifested in how the animals are raised and cared for.

Here is the comment I left on his blog -- I offer it here in hopes of continuing the dialog:

Hi Trace,

Enjoy your photography and commentary! And I appreciate the thought you have put into the dilemma of killing and consuming your piggie pals. That thought process alone sets you apart from the vast majority of animal farmers in the world. You are definitely to be commended for creating a lifestyle for your pigs that lets them express all their porcine sensibilities — their “pigness,” as Joel Salatin likes to say. The pictures of your co-laborers on your farm gives evidence of the healthy life you’ve provided for them.

Could I add another thought here (as a vegan)? I think the very fact that you care about the dilemma you’ve created (killing that which you have “created” and grown to care for) is evidence that harvesting animals for food is an unnatural act. It’s easy to grow to feel the same way about a pig as we do about a dog or cat. They all enjoy belly rubs and ear-scratches and demonstrate pure pleasure that a tomato plant or tractor can not. You are certainly accurate to conclude that farm animals aren’t machines. It’s why we don’t kill and eat our pet dogs while they do in other cultures. There is obvious a lot of cultural confusion about what to do with animals we grow to care about. I think your sensitivity to the needs and ultimate end of your pigs is evidence that something in you/us wants NOT to kill them and eat them.

That reality then begs the question, Why should we? There is nothing in animal flesh that we need for good health that is not available in plants (with the possible exception of vitamin B-12 which, if we didn’t sanitize and cook our field crops, we’d get plenty of from the naturally-occurring bacteria that produce B-12)—and much that we don’t need (saturated fat, cholesterol, etc.). Therefore, eating animal flesh ultimately boils down to appetite and economics: Meat (fat) has a taste humans grow to like, and raising animals free-range is perhaps economically motivating.

So if taste and economics are the two main reasons for eating animals, we’ve only complicated our dilemma: We have now elevated our taste and pocketbook as higher values than the existence and pleasure of other sentient beings. In other words, we have to say to our porkers (chickens, cows), “I don’t need to kill you in order to be healthy, but I’m going to kill you because you taste good and you’re worth more to me dead than alive.” Ouch! No wonder we feel conflicted about the act.

Please don’t take my thoughts as adversarial, Trace. As I’ve said, I commend you for the public and deliberate way you’re working through your relationship to the animals you’re raising. I hope other animal farmers will learn from your example and that your commentary will stimulate further helpful and healthy dialogue on what is, at best, a complicated issue.

Ultimately, of course, I wish the human race could learn to co-exist with the non-human species in a non-confrontational way. Idealistic, perhaps, but as a Bible reader I see that peaceful coexistence was the pattern in the beginning (Genesis 2:19-20) and will be in the coming peaceable kingdom (Isaiah 11:6-9). Both man and animals were apparently created to be vegan (Genesis 1:29-30), though that pattern has been maligned through the ages. But I still think it represents the ideal to strive for. Dilemmas are not always avoidable, but the original plant-based pattern for living allows us to avoid the self-imposed angst we feel about loving, then consuming, our non-human friends.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts and providing a forum for feedback and discussion. Best wishes in all your endeavors and efforts to create a food “system” that is sustainable and satisfying to all its participants, human and non-human alike.

Chipotle's Business Model

Because I eat out so rarely, I had never eaten at a Chipotle fast-food restaurant. I've been aware of them for years but never knew there was anything different about them other than that seemed to be growing rapidly. But after watching the following video—they buy pork, chicken, and beef from sustainable natural farmers like Joel Salatin—I looked a bit closer and discovered there was a Chipotle in Matthews. I ordered and paid for a vegetarian burrito online and scheduled a pickup time following church on Sunday—worked like a charm. The burrito was great—my only preference would have been for brown rice instead of nutritionally deficient white rice—but otherwise it was very good. Nice to see a major fast-food chain going the extra step to use food sources that are outside the factory-farm system for raising animals. Unfortunately, neither the video nor anything on their web site (that I saw) suggests they are using organically grown ingredients on the veggie side of their model. Hopefully they'll get there. (I also like Chipotle because they co-sponsored a pro-Tour bike racing Team, at least for a year—haven't heard anything about their sponsorship lately.)

Anybody have any other experience/information about Chipotle? My enthusiasm for Chipotle's business model (their animal food sources) shouldn't be misinterpreted as support for their animal-based menu. Rather, I take note of it as evidence of a rising level of consciousness in the culture about the place of animals as "beings" rather than as commodities. That's a step in the right direction. The next step will be, once animals are recognized as "beings" by the whole culture, when the culture experiences the revulsion of slaughtering and consuming sentient beings. So we acknowledge small steps as they occur. And Chipotle has definitely taken a major step in a positive direction by sourcing their animal products from farmers who treat the animals well, doing less harm to the animals and the people who eat them.