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Home | Community Supported Agriculture | Sustainable Agriculture Internships | Educational Programs
The True Cost Of Cheap Food
By Alexandra Stafford
The Bulletin (Philadelphia, PA)
March 23, 2007
"If you eat food, you're involved in agriculture," Sam Cantrell told me during a visit to his farm in Glenmoore this past Tuesday. "It's up to the consumers to use their dollar, their purchasing power. That's going to bring change - that's going to recreate a local, sustainable food system."
Sam, a farmer and educator, has dedicated his life to teaching his community about the importance of conservation and ecology. Through his nonprofit organization, Maysie's Farm Conservation Center, Sam runs a farm, providing nutritious vegetables not only to the Montgomery School in Chester Springs, but also to 175 local families from May to November.
The center's many initiatives brings the public to the farm to learn the principles and practices of sustainable agriculture.
Although Sam, with the help of a few student interns, was busy preparing for the spring season - planting seeds and watering plants in the greenhouse - he still found time to show me around the farm and explain his participation in community supported agriculture (CSA).
The term CSA describes a relationship between a farm and the local people who consume the food the farm produces. Modeled after a producer-consumer alliance practiced in Switzerland, the first CSA was created in 1986 in Massachusetts. Today over 1000 farms throughout the country participate in this mutually beneficial partnership.
By participating in a CSA, a community member essentially buys a share of a farm's harvest before the season begins, understanding that unpredictable conditions such as weather and labor supply can effect the harvest. The security of a contract eliminates the need for farmers to invest time marketing their produce during the busy growing season, enabling them to concentrate solely on producing food. In exchange, participating families receive the highest quality produce, often organically grown, and always freshly picked at the peak of its ripeness.
At Maysie's Farm, an old barn houses the "grocery store," where CSA members, following quantity guidelines posted on a dry-erase board, collect their weekly harvest, and if they wish, to freely pick peas, beans, cherry tomatoes, blackberries, herbs and flowers directly from the garden.
As Sam and I left the barn and headed towards the greenhouse, accompanied by his two friendly border collies, I found myself longing to live in Glenmoore, or at the very least longing to be part of a similar community where I could participate in its food production.
A stroll through the greenhouse only deepened this desire. As we passed by a row of beautiful spinach - spinach about to be harvested for the boys and girls at the Montgomery School - Sam reached down and plucked a few leaves for me to taste. I can say without hesitation that never have I enjoyed spinach so fresh and delicious.
We continued on towards the hoop house, passing the solar energy panels, that effortlessly heated the greenhouse on this cloudless March day. The hoop house, an unheated shelter, much larger than the greenhouse, protected more treasures: the sweetest and crunchiest carrots and turnips; rows of beets and chives; and light green patches of tender Asian greens, such as mizuna, tatsoi, red kale and mustard greens. These prized greens ultimately get combined to make the farm's mesclun. As we strolled back to the barn, passing the snow-covered rows of soil beds, Sam, never missing an opportunity to educate, offered me his 60-second soil lecture. After describing an intricate system of mineral particles, air, and organic matter, he drew a simple conclusion: The key to growing healthy plants and, in turn, healthy humans, is to "grow good soil."
Soil should be neither packed down by heavy farm equipment nor tromped on by little children. All of Maysie's Farm CSA participants, adults and children alike, learn the importance of respecting the farm's soil.
Michael Pollan, in his latest book, The Omnivore's Dilemma, makes a similar connection between soil and health, or rather the destruction of soil and the destruction of health. In the book, Pollan traces three food chains from beginning to end - from the plant to the dinner table - beginning with the industrial food chain, the one that concerns him the most.
As he traces his McDonald's hamburger to its origin, corn - the diet of the cow that became his patty - and the farm on which it grew, Pollan describes how the introduction of synthetic fertilizers to corn fields in the 1950s changed the ecology of the farm. The changes made to the soil in which corn grows have created a cheap, abundant, and ultimately destructive crop.
Pollan notes that by applying synthetic fertilizers to corn, farmers no longer need to maintain a diversity of crops. This practice consequently opens the way to monoculture crops, which efficiently use light and space, reducing the amount of land needed to produce high-yield crops. Monoculture, however, drains the soil of much of its nutrients.
And as the soil erodes, the environment suffers in other areas. According to Pollan, the synthetic nitrogen remaining in the soil after the corn is harvested can travel in one of three directions: It can remain in the soil until it evaporates and acidifies, perhaps contributing to global warming; it can seep into our drinking water, polluting it; or it can flow down rivers harming marine ecosystems.
In addition to harming the environment, the production of cheap corn has harmed our health. Pollan simply states that when "food is abundant and cheap, people will eat more of it and get fat." According to the surgeon general, three of every five Americans are overweight and one of every five is obese. Moreover, both children and adults, unaware of the dangers of their eating habits, continue to develop Type II diabetes at an alarming rate, escalating the need for more care.
Pollan thus concludes that the true cost of the cheap hamburger is not accurately reflected in its 99-cent price. The cost to the environment in the form of pollution and the cost to the health care system in the form of obesity, are immeasurable. Precisely this chain of events - damaging soil, growing cheap corn, making cheap food, and overconsuming cheap food - is what Sam and many other farmers committed to running small sustainable agricultural economies seek to challenge. They strive to educate consumers about our country's current agricultural practices and the sustainability of these practices. If we continue to damage our ecosystem, farmland will eventually disappear, leaving us unable to support our growing population.
Moreover, recognizing that agriculture is the industry that feeds us, Sam and like-minded farmers strive to educate the public about what practices do work. Small, diversified farms like Maysie's, supported by the community, are ecologically sustainable. A farmer like Glenn Brendle, who supplies Center City restaurants year round with produce and who heats his greenhouses and home with the used vegetable oil he picks up from the very restaurants he supplies, embodies sustainability.
In contrast, industrialized organic farms that transport food thousands of miles across the country, burning gas and polluting the air with carbon dioxide are not sustainable.
After visiting Maysie's Farm, I have much to look forward to. This spring I look forward to walking to Reading Terminal Market every Thursday to pick up my basket of produce delivered from Lancaster Farm Fresh, the CSA I just joined. I look forward to not knowing what I am going to receive each week, and to the challenge of creating something new from each delivery. And I look forward to knowing I'll have paid the true cost for what I've received.
Indeed I am inspired. By Sam Cantrell. By all the other farmers who continue to educate the uninformed. Unless I stop eating, I am involved in agriculture. Alexandra Stafford can be reached at foodeditor@thebulletin.us.