George Monbiot writes in the Guardian, 10th June 2008, an interesting article about farming on a small scale and why do we treat small/peasant farmers with contempt

Taras Grescoe author of “Bottomfeeder: How to Eat Ethically in a World of Vanishing Seafood is interviewed by Nicole Pasuka of Salon magazine on eating seafood ethically

Raj Patel writes about giving up meat in his blog, this article was also published in The Observer on the 22 June 2008 and George Monbiot gives more food for thought on the pleasures of the flesh published in The Guardian on the 15 April 2008.

Kangaroo: designed for our times
By John Kelly 13th June 2008
Executive Officer of the Kangaroo Industry Association

I’m fond of claiming that kangaroo has been the red meat of choice among Australian consumers for some 40,000 years. It’s only in the last 100 years or so that’s there’s been a bit of a hiccup in its marketing program and the kangaroo industry is attempting to turn this around.

I’m also fond of claiming that nothing makes greater environmental wisdom than us, in this land, producing our food from the animals which belong here. It is now widely recognised that doing so delivers considerable direct environmental benefits in our fragile arid rangelands where kangaroos are harvested. These are extremely fragile areas which can support a limited number of grazing animals. Allowing the grazing pressure from all animals to increase is one of the most serious environmental hazards in these rangelands.

Commercial kangaroo harvesting is the only tool currently available to exercise effective control over the kangaroo contribution to total grazing pressure. In its absence, as in Victoria and the Northern Territory, the only two states which don’t have commercial harvesting, kangaroos still get culled to protect agricultural enterprises, but the animals get left on the ground to rot. In this age of increasing world wide food shortages this surely must be something approaching a criminal waste.

Over the past 30 years a significant industry has developed utilising the kangaroo. Initially it focused on pest control for the pastoral industries. However, over the last decade there has been a growing realisation that the kangaroo industry has other significant economic and environmental benefits.

The kangaroo industry currently generates in excess of $200 million a year in income and employs more than 4,000 people. The vast bulk of these jobs are in remote rural communities, many of which would not exist without the industry.

It is a tightly regulated industry. Kangaroo harvesters for example have to complete a TAFE course and pass assessment by two different government authorities before they can get a licence. No other meat industry in the country requires its “slaughtermen” to be that well trained. This delivers an extremely high level of professionalism, with many commentators claiming that kangaroo is probably the most animal welfare-friendly meat available. As the RSPCA has said, “An animal killed instantly within its own environment is under less stress than domestic stock that have been herded, penned, transported etc.”

Thirty years of continual refinement has also lead to the development of extremely sophisticated monitoring mechanisms to ensure the harvest is sustainable. Each state with a commercial harvest is required to maintain and regularly update management plans for their kangaroo populations. Among other things these plans require them to do an annual population survey across the commercial harvest zones, which makes kangaroos one of the few animals on earth, inclusive of humans, subject to such regular and extensive population monitoring. Extensive scrutiny continues to conclude that the harvest delivers no threat to the species itself.

The kangaroo industry delivers one of the most amazing foods in the world. Kangaroo meat is extremely low in fat and half of this fat is poly-unsaturated. But better still it’s also very high in a compound called conjugated linoleic acid which, among other things, actively reduces blood pressure! Kangaroo meat also has a pleasant and slightly addictive flavour: however, it’s a unique feature of kangaroos - which makes their meat probably the most appropriate food for our times - is that they don’t emit methane when they burp. Sheep and cattle do by the tonne and methane is 23 times worse than carbon dioxide as a greenhouse warming gas.

So not only can kangaroo meat help reduce blood pressure, but a reliance on it above beef or lamb could also help reduce global warming: apparently it was designed for our times!

So the kangaroo industry turns a shameful waste into a valuable food, which can help reduce blood pressure, which is possibly the most animal welfare friendly protein available, which is also possibly the closest thing we can get to a carbon neutral meat … and which tastes great. Whoever designed this product deserves a pat on the back!

By Miguel Altieri
Professor of agrocecology at the University of California, Berkeley
Article reprinted with permission from the Center of Ecoliteracy www.ecoliteracy.org

WORLD agriculture appears to be approaching a crossroads. The globalized economy has placed a series of conflicting demands on existing croplands. Not only is this land required to produce food for a growing human population, but it also must meet the increased demands for biofuels; and it must do so in an environmentally sound way that preserves biodiversity and reduces greenhouse emissions, while still representing a profitable activity to millions of farmers.
These pressures are setting in motion a global food system crisis of unprecedented scope that is already signalled by food riots in many parts of the world. This crisis, which threatens the livelihoods of millions more than the current 800 million hungry people, is the direct result of the dominating industrial farming model, which is dangerously dependent on fossil fuels and has also become the largest source of human impact on the biosphere.
In fact, there are now so many pressures on dwindling arable ecosystems that farming is overwhelming nature’s capacity to meet humankind’s food, fiber, and energy needs. The tragedy is that agriculture depends on the very ecological services (water cycles, pollinators, fertile soil formation, benevolent local weather, etc.) that intensive farming continually degrades or pushes beyond their limits.
Before the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, humanity is quickly realizing that the fossil fuel-based, capital-intensive, industrial-agricultural western model is not working to meet the food demands of various countries. Soaring oil prices will inevitably increase production costs and food prices, which have already escalated to the point that today one dollar purchases 30 percent less food than one year ago.
This situation is rapidly being aggravated by farmland being turned from food production to biofuels; it is also being aggravated by climate change, which has reduced crop yields as a result of droughts, floods, and other unpredictable weather events. Expanding land areas devoted to biofuels and transgenic crops will further exacerbate the ecological impacts of vast monocultures. Moreover, industrial agriculture presently contributes at least one-quarter of current greenhouse gas emissions, mainly methane and nitrous oxide. Continuing this dominant degrading system, as promoted by the current economic paradigm, is no longer a viable option.
The immediate challenge for our generation is to transform industrial agriculture by transitioning the world’s food systems away from reliance on fossil fuels. We need an alternative agricultural development paradigm: one that encourages more ecological, biodiverse, sustainable, and socially just forms of agriculture. Reshaping the entire agricultural policy and food system in ways that are environmentally sound and economically viable to farmers and consumers will require major changes in the political and economic forces that determine what is being produced, by whom, and for whom.
Out-of-control trade liberalization, which forces developing countries to open their markets to subsidized crops coming from the North, is the key mechanism driving farmers off their land and the principal obstacle to local economic development and food security. Only by challenging the control that big multinational corporations exert over the food system and changing the export-led and free-trade based agriculture model can the downward spiral of poverty, low wages, rural-urban migration, hunger, and environmental degradation be halted.
The concept of food sovereignty, as promoted by the world’s movement of small farmers, Via Campesina, constitutes the only viable alternative to the current and collapsing global food system, which failed in its assumptions that international trade was the key to solving the world’s food problem. Instead, food sovereignty focuses on closed local circuits of production and consumption and community action for access to land, water, and agrobiodiversity, which are of central importance for communities to control in order to be able to produce food locally with agroecological methods.
There is no doubt that an alliance between farmers and consumers is of strategic importance. In addition to moving down the food chain – that is, eating less animal protein – consumers need to realize that their quality of life is intractably associated with the type of agriculture practiced in neighboring rural areas, not only because of the quality of the food produced, but also because agriculture is multifunctional, producing a series of environmental services such as water quality and biodiversity conservation.
But this multifunctional production can only emerge if agricultural landscapes are dotted by small, diversified farms, which, as studies show, can produce from two to ten times more per unit area than larger, corporate farms. In the United States, the top 25 percent of sustainable agriculture farms, which are mostly small-to-medium size, exhibit higher yields than conventional farms, and exert a much lower negative impact on the environment, reducing soil erosion and conserving biodiversity.
Communities surrounded by populous small farms experience less social problems and have healthier economies than do communities surrounded by depopulated large, monoculture, mechanized farms. Thus it should be obvious to city dwellers that eating is both an ecological and political act; that buying food at local farmers markets will support the type of beyond-peak oil agriculture that is urgently needed; and that buying food in supermarkets perpetuates an unsustainable agricultural path.
The scale and urgency of the challenge we face has no precedent, but what needs to be done is environmentally, economically, and politically feasible. The speed with which changes must be implemented is great, but it is doubtful that we can gather the political will to radically transform our food system before hunger and food insecurity reach planetary and irreversible levels.

WESFARMERS - the former farmers’ co-operative and now one of Australia’s most successful industrial companies - won control of supermarket chain Coles in 2007 in a multi-billion dollar takeover. If you care about the future of food and farming in Australia - and you do nothing else - read this: an address to the National Press Club in March 2008 by National Association of Retail Grocers of Australia president and independent grocer John Cummings.

Woolworths and Coles: bad news for consumers, disastrous for business

Slow Food Gnowangerup Great Southern convivium inaugural leader Jenny Shepherdson died recently following a courageous fight with cancer. This is an extract of the eulogy given by her daughter Chelsey at the service of celebration for her life, which was held in Fremantle in March 2008.

JENNY was adamant that her life was to be celebrated. So today is definitely one to reflect, rejoice and pay homage to my mother’s motto: ‘Eat, drink and be merry!’

My story begins at the moment when my father met my mother. After Jenny conquered Europe in a mini skirt fit for a tea cosy, she came to visit the Buttroses in Gnowangerup. Jenny went along to the Apex ‘Around the town biker event’. It was in front of the original pharmacy, later re-birthed as the Blue Baa, that Geoff first saw Jenny in a pink mini dress. He thought: ‘Hey, that’s pretty smart for a biker chick!’

Things could only grow from that pivotal moment and as a result Mum and Dad married in 1971. Thus, life began in Gnowangerup where Mum had a full-time and part-time nursing position at Gnowangerup hospital until 1985. It was during this time between shifts and frozen casseroles that the family became four (with daughters Amber and Chelsey).

Gnowangerup life was a doozey – in particular, the seventies and eighties, where most weekends consisted of cabarets, balls, golf, gatherings at the Stirling Ranges, shoulder pads and dinner parties. Mum and Dad’s frequent socialising enabled us to be the free-range kids of the eighties (and yes we know who we are!).

Mum moved on from the hospital corridors to the school canteen as a community health school nurse and later as the senior community nurse for the Great Southern. Here she implemented Giant Fruit Salad Day, attempting to nourish a child’s lunch box way before her cooking idol Jamie Oliver ever did.

After 11 years, Jenny’s classroom was the back paddock and the yabbies became the pupils as Mum became the official yabbie farmer of Anglesey (the Shepherdson family farm). Still not content, she pumped out preserves and made a mean rosemary jelly to boot.

But the dream lingered and was certain when the old pharmacy was restored and the Blue Baa was born – a reality that formed a culinary partnership with (her great friend) Duffy for five years. I believe that the Blue Baa was not only soul food but was a testament to Mum’s creativity, strength and sheer determination.

Jenny, like so many country people, was always involved with the community and derived much satisfaction in doing so. She enjoyed working with the capable and effective group that put the Gnowangerup centenary celebrations together in 2004 and latterly as convenor of the Slow Food convivium with Bronwyn Gaze, which kept her passion for food alive. In her community work she made a difference.

Another part of Jenny’s extended family has been the Marcus Oldham Farm & Agricultural College men who have worked at Anglesey, not only on the football field but off, with frequent AFL banter being the topic of conversation over a lamb shank or five.

Jenny as a mother was always right but she was also always there and ever so generous. Mum taught me about nifty nurses’ corners, pride in the home, family, friendship and laughter but, above all, that the way to a Shepherdson’s heart was through their stomach! Food was her canvas. During my last phone conversation with Mum I was requesting a recipe for flourless gravy. Her response was: ‘Veal stock. It’s a stunner!’

Recent meetings between organic and biodynamic beef producers in Western Australia’s south west have resulted in the formation of a producer co-operative called Organic & Bio-Dynamic Meats of Western Australia Pty Limited. The farmer-members are developing a continuous supply of meat for the organic and biodynamic market. The co-operative was launched in October 2007.

THE ORGANIC Meats Co-operative came about when organic farmer and olive grower Peter Gaebler, from Mumballup, was fed up having to sell his NASAA certified organic cattle on the conventional market because there wasn’t a certified abattoir close by.

Peter took the initiative to approach Dardanup Butchering Company, where general manager Brian Pittendreigh proved to be very supportive, primarily because DBC had been receiving increasing enquiries about the availability of organic and biodynamic meat. With the assistance of NASAA, DBC is now certified to slaughter, bone and dress, cattle, sheep, pigs, deer and goats. This NASAA certification also covers animals from farms with other recognised certifications, both organic and biodynamic.

Learning that DBC had obtained certification, Steven McCoy, the development officer for organic food and farming at the Department of Agriculture & Food, contacted the abattoir to see who would be supplying meat to them and if this was being developed in any orderly way. At this point Steve realised that the growers could use some help to become organised and develop the market. As he had already compiled a list of organic and biodynamic cattle producers he contacted them and began to convene meetings to determine whether these growers were interested in working together.

In short, through the enthusiasm and passion of these producers, the Organic and Biodynamic Meats WA Co-operative was formed in October 2007. The co-operative now has 18 members, incuding beef and lamb producers who farm in the south west region of WA from in and around Denmark, Katanning, Kojonup, Donnybrook, Margaret River, Pinjarra and Williams, to name just a few.

All farms are organic or biodynamic certified, where livestock naturally graze pasture without the use of synthetic chemicals, growth hormones, antibiotics or intensive feedlot grain diets. All meat is MSA quality graded for taste and tenderness, naturally high in Omega 3 and Vitamin E and can be purchased from select butchers and restaurants.

More information
Donna Kehlet, group co-ordinator
M 0408 858 199
E organicmeats@iinet.net.au
www.organicmeats.com.au

Beyond a Garden in Every School

Reprinted with permission from www.ecoliteracy.org It is written by Philip Nix, who is Founding Headmaster of Sonoma Country Day School in Santa Rosa, California

I FIRST read Wendell Berry’s essay, Discipline and hope, in the early 1970s. Nothing I have ever read has had a more profound impact on how I have lived my life. Over the years, I’ve returned again and again to my much marked-up text. His observations nurtured my experience until his insights flowered into convictions of my own. I now believe Discipline and hope should be required reading for all educators.

Berry provokes us to review our own lives and to see what we never saw before. When we are children, we take the world as we find it, heedless of the limitations and deprivations that we can only later understand as adults. Our youth is blessed with an ability to see everything around us as wonderful and essential, and so I saw through this essay how I had come to accept an instrumental and mechanical world as the proper order of things. I woke with a shock to a new sense of possibility; and as I entered teaching, I came to wish better for the children whose care and education were entrusted to me.

Berry defined for me the two very different worlds of my early childhood. One world was Brooklyn, New York, where a journey to Prospect Park was a marginal novelty for a subway-savvy kid. The visits to my father’s family in Mississippi, the delta cotton farms of his relatives, and the warm ripe figs in my grandfather’s garden, and the coolness of his potato cellar in July, might well have been another planet for all their resemblance to the place I lived most of the time.

Berry made clear that cities are about control. They lack harmony, but substitute a compelling order. They are man-made and man-sustained. The poet William Blake characterized life in London as enslavement to “mind-forged manacles.” After a time, one can no longer see what is missing; one consents to oppression. Until I read Wendell Berry, I thought Blake was describing some extreme blight. Afterward I came to see that much about my own urban childhood had alienated me from a critical aliveness.

The countryside calls for patience, interest, and presence. Its greatest joy is in community, not entertainment. While the city is about ideas and intention, the countryside is about experience. I came to understand the loss it manifestly is to live life as if the world, its agriculture, and the cycles of its seasons are considered mere footnotes to the comforts of suburbia and the excitements of the city lights.

Berry made it clear that without a local and disciplined regard for the natural world, our understanding, pleasure, and acceptance of life’s cycles would be forever damaged and would damage the world, itself. However, such a deep sense of place is not easily found, and the mind has a way of returning, unwittingly, to what it knows or has been trained to see.

In our schools today, we need to ask what we are training our students to see. We expect them to “go to art,” “go to science,” “go to physical education,” and “go to English.” We reinforce the notion that these categories can give us a neatly divided life, definitive knowledge, and a predictable and controllable experience. We are tied to schooling methods, in other words, that actively disintegrate the vital connections between things. They become, as Berry suggests, things we consume.

But what if we stopped thinking about going to and from places – above all, gardens – as if they really are separate?

An experiment in “gardenizing.”
Our school is in Sonoma County. We have land, experts, farmers, and good weather. And yet, for a time, we would “go to the garden” just like I used to go to Prospect Park. Then, somewhat uncomfortable with the new school garden movement, I wondered what would happen if we declared that the garden was at the center of the school’s life – if we “gardenized” the school, so to speak, rather than thinking of it as a new program.

Seeds provide no overnight harvest. We had some growing to do. But once the idea of the garden at the center of things began to influence us, we noticed that nature was not just to be discussed in our outdoor classroom. It showed up in conversations throughout the day, from the lunch tables to the history classes, and most certainly at our weekly meeting of the school community. Now assemblies included references to the weather, the seasons, and the local harvests.

Three years later, I see evidence of the garden far beyond its physical boundaries. For examples, we have had:
• Kindergarteners enthusiastically hunting for earthworms in a newly dug bed.
• Fourth-graders coloring yarn with vegetable-based dyes created from garden-grown produce and later using the yarns for weaving projects.
• Seventh-grade students learning about the physics of levers in an outdoor lab using garden tools.
• Seventh- and eight-grade language students using garden settings to mimic ancient Rome in recounting the stories of Romulus and Remus and The Judgment of Paris.
• Art students incorporating gourds into a garden mosaic and wall hanging.
• Students putting uneaten lunch food in a compost bucket instead of the trash.
• Physical education students traveling through the garden on their running route.
• Students at recess considering the garden an extension of the playfield, playing hide and seek amid the corn and resting on hay bales.

The Quakers abide by the tenet that one must respect others, “each to the measure of his own light.” Similarly, I believe we need to cultivate a “Garden Mind.” We have to see how we connect and reconnect to those around us, the new voices we hear, the new ways we begin to speak, what we choose to share, and perhaps revel in some joys we have long neglected or have only just discovered.

Schools are no better than the communities they serve. Our desire to make them agents of change for a society asks too much of them and it always has. They have been called upon to assimilate immigrants, produce space scientists, and initiate vast social change. What schools can do is to express the simplest aspects of the value of experience: love of knowledge and community. They can perform and inhabit the pleasures of being alive and connected.

If we allow that there might be such a thing as a “Garden Mind,” a simple sense of being that incorporates the disciplines that Wendell Berry wrote about so eloquently, we will move beyond the transient thrills of consumption. The complex garden, as Tina Poles puts it, is not about perfection; it may appear decidedly shaggy at first sight. But complexity invites our participation. So, in the end, we neither go to or from the garden. We abide in it.

When the English dramatist Sir William Gilbert delivered to one of his Pirates of Penzance characters these very words - ‘An attachment a la Plato for a bashful young potato, or a not-too-French French bean’ - he encapsulated the world’s affection for this ubiquitous food. As the BBC’s cookery website reads: ‘…he single-handedly grabbed this starchy tuber from the ground and hoiked it up in to the lofty heights of poetry and philosophy. And it is here we feel that this magnificent tuber rightfully belongs, such is its history and versatility. From chips to vodka, latkes to gratin, the influence of the potato is felt everywhere. They are such a joy to eat and there are so many different ways to eat them..’ The United Nations has named 2008 as the International Year of the Potato in recognition of its potential to feed the world’s growing population. One of the reasons for the choice of this vegetable was to raise awareness of agriculture in general. Pauline Tresise reports:

IN Peru where the potato is said to have originated, there are recorded 5000 different varieties. From the Spanish conquest the potato has spread throughout the world and is now grown in over 130 countries.

It is ideally suited to growing in places where land is limited and labour is abundant. It is the most important crop after rice wheat and maize. With the advent of the Green Revolution the number of potato varieties declined in the very place where it had originated, the high plains of the Andes. Where once there were dozens of varieties growing, the local farmers had cut back to only a handful of varieties.

One farmer’s son, Zenon Gomel Apaza, returned to the Andes after studying agronomy at University and realized that his professional education didn’t match the reality of the land where originally the potato was farmed - 4000 metres high in the Peruvian Andes. He listened to the local farmers and became aware that much of what was needed to improve crop yields was present in their ancient culture and traditional knowledge. For a decade Gomel and his neighbours demonstrated that by diversifying seeds and tuber, along with reviving their traditional methods of farming rather than using the chemicals and modern technology, the farmers could re-establish the potato as an important food source and produce enough food to feed their families. By encouraging a diversity of plants he says, there is more possibility of these plants surviving adverse environmental conditions.

Gomel is convinced that by embracing these lessons of the past they will produce more potatoes which will help to transform how the communities are governed and the local farmers will relearn respect for the earth and the importance of their local culture.

Potatoes are the most commonly used vegetable in Australia. The potato landed in Australia on board Captain Cook’s fleet in 1770 and cultivation started not long after. They are commercially grown throughout the country from Tasmania to the tropics in northern Queensland. Potato growing in Western Australia has had an interesting history. Over a hundred years ago it was decided that potatoes grew best in the southern regions however with the development of irrigation they were planted in areas closer to Perth. To support the local potato production in the 1940s the Western Australian Government developed the Marketing of Potato Act which led to the formation of the Potato Marketing Board whose role was ‘to ensure a continuous and adequate supply, a reasonable return to all growers and a reasonable cost to consumers’.

Today the board, now known as Western Potato, still controls the Western Australian potato growers. The farmers are told how many potatoes they can grow, what types they can plant and what price they can sell them for. Western Australia is the only state with such rigid laws and regulations. It must be said that all growers are not completely happy with the tightly controlled situation. Previously local consumers had only one variety to consider with the choice being old or new, washed or brushed.

The Royal Blue is considered the cream of the crop and is available all year around; it is the most versatile, has an exceptional taste and can be used in all methods of cooking from boiling to frying. Besides the Royal Blue (and amongst the many varieties grown throughout Australia) these are the other varieties grown in Western Australian, the Friar, Desiree, Kipfler, Shepody, Southern Pearl, Super Red, Nadine, Ruby Lou, Kestrel, and Delaware

Slow Food Convivia in Western Australia are planning to hold an event honouring the potato and to highlight the most important root vegetable in the world.

The dedicated website of the International Year of the Potato has a very comprehensive story about the history and facts of the potato around the world.

Barbequed salmon with potato and onion salad
Preparation: 10 minutes
Cooking: 1 hour 10 minutes
Ingredients
8 white onions, sliced
2 tablespoons water
100ml olive oil
50ml balsamic vinegar
Salt and freshly ground black pepper, to taste
350g gourmet potatoes, boiled
4 medallions salmon fillet
1 handful curly endive, per person

Place onions into a pan with water and allow to cook very slowly, for about an hour until the natural sugar from the onions start to caramelise and brown. Combine olive oil, vinegar, salt and pepper. Shake well. Slice warm potatoes and sprinkle liberally with vinaigrette. Add onions and keep warm.Cook salmon fillets on a hot barbeque grill for 3-4 minutes each side (time may vary depending upon thickness of the fillet). Spoon potato and onion onto centre of a plate, sit some dressed endive on the potato and place salmon fillet on top. Drizzle over vinaigrette and serve immediately

Thanks to Nola Kennett, Slow Food Perth committee public officer, for the above recipe. The BBC cookery website also has a raft of potato recipes.

On Tuesday 15th April 2008 I had a phone call from Justin Wearne Retails Sales and Development Manager of Western Potatoes who advised that information in our article was not correct. Western Potatoes is a grower shareholder company and the Potato Marketing Corporation acts as a regulator which mainly entails them controlling supply and setting pricing of potatoes in Western Australia. For further information see
International Potato Centre