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Global Warming, Eating Meat and the Importance of the Local Farm Movement — Directly from a Farmer

In my quest to green my life, I have been on a mission to eat more sustainably. I’ve tried to buy only locally grown and organic produce and have searched for grass-fed meats. Well, during my quest I have befriended Shannon Hayes, a sustainable farmer in Upstate New York. This journey to find better, healthier and more environmentally friendly meat can be read in one of my older post entitled “Grass-Fed Meat.”

Shannon has a wealth of information on today’s food issues and I thought Eco Chick readers might enjoy what she has to say about global warming, eating meat and the importance of the local farm movement. I hope you find it has informative and timely as I did.

Compare Apples to Apples When You’re Talking About Rib Eyes
By Shannon Hayes, farmer and host of grassfedcooking.com

After decades of hunching over in shame around environmentalist vegetarians, small grass-based meat farmers were finally given a chance hold our heads high by investigative journalists and nutritional advocates like Jo Robinson, Michael Pollan and Sally Fallon. In the last 10 years, Grass-fed meats have been lauded for their health benefits, their contributions to local economies and animal welfare, and most especially, for their environmental benefits.

…Until recently. A study released by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization started a buzz in November of 2006 suggesting that livestock production is responsible for more greenhouse gas emissions than all forms of transportation combined. According to a story in the New York Times, in 2007, PETA commissioned a Hummer and outfitted it with a driver wearing a chicken suit to travel around to environmental rallies, proclaiming meat as the number one cause of global warming. And this month, a story in Environmental Science and Technology reports on a new study which suggests that, rather than eating locally, we should just remove red meat and dairy from our diet once per week and replace it with chicken, fish or eggs, and have at least one day per week entirely meat-free. The result? Customers ordinarily seeking beef are suddenly asking for turkey burgers and chicken sausage; or they are dropping meat from their diets all together.

That’s pretty grim news for my family. Three generations of us garner a living from our small grass-based farm tucked up in the northern foothills of the Appalachian mountain chain. We’ve managed to build an exclusively local market for our products, making us an integral part of our rural economy. We’ve also managed to bring three additional farms back into viable agricultural production with the help of folks dedicated to buying locally.

…Which leads to the next piece of news being circulated: that these “small dietary shifts” of giving up meat can accomplish the same greenhouse gas reduction as eating locally. The subtext here seriously stings: “Forget about those looney meat farmers in the hills, don’t fret about canning local tomatoes, and return your faith to the conventional supermarket. Just buy less red meat and go vegetarian once per week..” As a grass-based meat farmer, I’ve got a beef with that — not to mention a serious steak in the matter (in this case, a rib eye, which I plan to lay across my grill later today).

Truth be told, these studies aren’t wrong. They aren’t exactly right, either, but I’ll get to that in a second.
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Organic Booze?

My husband and I are not big drinkers but recently we both wanted a beer. In trying to make our home and lives greener, we decided to try an organic beer. On a recommendation from a Whole Foods employee, we bought Peaks Organic Amber Ale. The beer was tasty and a great alternative to our favorite non-organic beer Sam Adams.

It got me thinking about spirits such as vodka and gin, which we only have in the house for guests. The first thing that always comes to mind when I think about how vodka is potatoes. Now I do not think that much of today’s vodka is make out of potatoes anymore but “hard” liquor is made out of some type of crop, a crop that is most likely over-farmed and covered with tons of pesticides degrading land and water.

Well in Wall Street Journal on May 15th, Joseph De Vila wrote an article entitled “Organic Liquor.” De Vila did a taste test of 3 organic vodkas and 1 organic gin. More important than his taste test is what Melkon Khosrovian, co-founder of distiller Modern Spirits, said in the piece about what is the point of drinking organic spirits. “It’s about sustainable farming,” he says, arguing that traditional farming involves pesticides and synthetic fertilizers, which can be harmful to farmers who come in contact with it and the ground used to grow the ingredients. “We would like to support farmers to move away from those processes,” Mr. Khosrovian says.

Both Smirdoff and Absolut vodkas are made from grain, but grain from industrial farms. Modern Spirits new TRU, certified organic vodka, is made from organic wheat. In addition, TRU comes in 100% recycled, recyclable or biodegradable packaging. And for every bottle sold, Modern Spirits plants new trees in tropical zones (where they are cut down in the greatest numbers) to pass on a better planet to the next generation of vodka drinkers.Now since I have not have the opportunity to taste any of Modern Spirits organic vodkas or the other brands mentioned by De Vila (Orange V Vodka, Rain Vodka, and Juniper Green Organic London Dry Gin), I cannot attest to the taste. But De Vila seemed to like them all. I hope to try them in the future.

Have any of you tasted them? I would love to hear what you think of organic beers and liquors.

You can read some of my past post by clicking here.

Dubai Greenwashing and (Ew!!) Inedible Corn

Way more amusing than environmental news has a right to be, as usual!

The War on Bugs

For anyone else who digs on books that examine how PR shapes public perception, Will Allen’s new book, The War on Bugs is the latest in a genre that includes The Best War Ever and Toxic Sludge is Good for You. Instead of the now-tired observation that much of our food supply harms our bodies and destroys the land, Allen looks at the historical connection between advertising and agriculture and how toxins were marketed and sold to farmers to create The War on Bugs. (Fans of The Lorax might be surprised to see how else Dr. Suess put his talents to work — shilling for DDT and Standard Oil — before he spoke for the trees.)

Here’s an excerpt from a Q&A with Will Allen that I did for Chelsea Green.

BG: You’re an organic farmer, but you’re also an ex-Marine – and you were arrested and sentenced to a year in jail during the early 70s for civil rights and antiwar activism. That’s not a one-track life. Were there noticeable turning points for you?

WA: A turning point for me came during my time in the Marine Corps when I was dispossessed of the belief that as Marines we were protecting democracy, liberty, and freedom. I learned we were mostly protecting corporations. Some of our military actions while I was a Marine were in Lebanon, Cuba, and Vietnam. In Lebanon, we protected American corporations in the mid-East and mid-East allies, no matter how corrupt. In Cuba, we protected American businesses, a dictator, the ruling class that fled to Miami after the Revolution, and the Mafia drug cartels. In Vietnam we protected business interests, rice interests, illegal drug interests – the opium trade – and religious interests. We installed a Catholic president in a nation where 95% of the population was Buddhist and were shocked when he was assassinated. By 1963, I was protesting the Vietnam War in Chicago rallies and campus teach-ins.

…

BG: Do you see any similarities in the way that wars are spun and sold to the American public and the ways that toxic chemicals are spun and sold to American farmers?

WA: Advertising agencies made a quantum leap during the First World War. They did contract work for the government to sell the war and recruitment work for the Army, Navy, and Marine Corps. The country was isolationist at the time and not interested in getting into another of Europe’s seemingly endless string of wars. Advertisers were able to get enlistments up and the public to buy war bonds. The themes were: a “can do attitude”, (such as, if America enters the war we will win it), a patriotic obligation, and protecting the civil rights of occupied countries.

When the same advertising agencies sold chemicals to farmers and householders, their pitches were similar. We are at war, be patriotic, and “a can do attitude.” That attitude encouraged such boasts as “. . .We can grow more than any other farmers in the world”, which led to the common belief that American farmers are feeding the world.

BG: On the flip side, do you see similarities in your resistance – resistance to war and resistance to toxic chemicals?

WA: I think that when someone becomes as anti-war as I am, then whatever one does – whether it is organic farming or something else – the irrationality and injustice of war is never far from their consciousness. While farm wars and military wars are of a different scale, many of the chemical and mining corporations that make fertilizer and pesticides are also manufacturers of bombs, and other military hardware and software. I think the sooner we can stop the chemical and genetic war on the farms, and the mindset that we are at war with nature, the better we will be as a species. In a sense, it is hard to not think of the war every time I fire up a tractor or pump or generator or heater that runs on gas or diesel from war zones around the world, especially Iraq. For that reason, we are looking at all the alternatives to fossil fuels for moving vehicles and for stationary heaters and generators.

War is not what is going on at Cedar Circle Organic Farm (in East Thetford, Vermont). We have struggles with pests, including woodchucks, voles, birds, worms, fungi, insects and weeds. We develop and copy strategies that are softer, non poisonous, and often very effective, and sometimes those adopted strategies are not effective. It is a process. We don’t have all the answers, but we have a lot more now than when we started in the 1960s.

Eco-Fashion Makes Local Farmers Happy

The organics industry is expected to boom faster than ever in the next few years. And I’m stoked.

It seems like everywhere I look, someone else is going organic. Just the other day I was perusing my favorite store, H&M and came across and entire organic section, that I had somehow missed the other times I was in there. We’re seeing them pop up all over – The Gap, American Apparel and prAna. It’s cool to be granola, and the farmers are loving it. As with the new craving for locally grown foods, the local farmers are starting to feel the love sustainably harvested homegrown threads.

Both American Apparel and prAna are not only continuing their lengthy organic roots, but will be doing so from Southern California to offset the carbon burned while transporting the goods! Woo!

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