Looking beyond the green lawn for another California dream.
A lot of Americans are experimenting with a new relationship to food, water, soil and space.
Sheila Cassani began farming her rental home while a college student. She started with a small vegetable patch, but it soon spread to keeping chickens and bees and planting produce on nearly every available patch of the small yard not dedicated to the poultry. “We were motivated to basically turn the home into this engine of production instead of just this engine of consumption which most American homes have become in the last 50 years or so.”
Cassani and her partner Matthew wake up at the crack of dawn to let the chickens go free-range, but she says the garden isn’t a lot of work once you’ve put in the initial investment. Financially, their homestead conversion was fairly affordable because they focused on reusing found materials, such as old fence to make raised beds, bamboo that grows on the property for trellises and chicken fencing (even indoors, their furniture was mostly found, including a pallet wood sofa).
“As renters we’re just here putting money in it’s our personal investment so we’re really conscious of some ways we can utilize the space without having to make a really big financial investment so we basically used whatever was already here.”
They’ve dubbed their East Oakland (California) homestead the “Kansas Street Farm” and they try to keep things as closed loop as possible by catching rainwater, composting, using the chickens to prepare the veggie beds and fermenting leftover produce.
Industrial agriculture is a key driver in the generation of greenhouse gases (GHGs). Synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, heavy machinery, monocultures, land change, deforestation, refrigeration, waste and transportation are all part of a food system that generates significant emissions and contributes greatly to global climate change. Industrial agricultural practices, from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) to synthetic fertilizer-intensive corn and soy monocultures, genetically modified to tolerate huge amounts of herbicide, not only contribute considerable amounts of GHGs, but also underpin an inequitable and unhealthy global food system. Modern conventional agriculture is a fossil fuel-based, energy-intensive industry that is aligned with biotech, trade and energy interests, versus farmer and consumers priorities.
Compared to large-scale industrial farms, small-scale agroecological farms not only use fewer fossil fuel-based fertilizer inputs and emit less GHGs, including methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide (CO2), but they also have the potential to actually reverse climate change by sequestering CO2 from the air into the soil year after year. According to the Rodale Institute, small-scale farmers and pastoralists could sequester more than 100% of current annual CO2 emissions with a switch to widely available, safe and inexpensive agroecological management practices that emphasize diversity, traditional knowledge, agroforestry, landscape complexity, and water and soil management techniques, including cover cropping, composting and water harvesting….
If only she lived in a Teensy Tiny(TM) house, she could devote more square inches to food production, perhaps even cultivating more delicious insects as food.
You know, I think it is great that more and more people are getting into raising their own food. Yet, at the same time, I can’t help feeling that this is also a measure of our failures, of putting the best face possible on the disappointments of living with diminishing expectations.
Learn to love eating insects, because you can’t afford what you really want. Learn to enjoy having an impossibly cramped living space, because you can never afford anything better. Grow your own food, because the imbalance of wealth and political power in the world is so extreme it means the effective end of the middle class and our agricultural system.
We really could be doing SO much better by now.
Our industrial agricultural system is not sustainible and I certainly wouldn’t mourn its passing!
Growing your own food is an extremely satisfying endeavour and if done properly, not only are you reducing your reliance on a carbon intensive food production system, you can improve fitness and psychological wellbeing.
I’ve been growing my own chemical free fruit and veg, and running poultry since I was twelve, nearly 40 years. Oddly, the experience has nourished me, rather than impoverished me.
Growing your own food is good for the planet, personal health, animal welfare and in a small way, withdrawing support for the corporatist/industrialist/consumption paradigm
“Expections” were always an unrealistic fantasty resulting from a seemingly endless endowment of cheap energy. Expectations need to match what the Earth can actually provide.”The American way of life is not negotiable.” is not compatible with reality!
“Our industrial agricultural system is not sustainible ”
Why? Large farms grow food very efficiently in places with great soil and plenty of sun. The problem is not large farms – it is too many people needing too many large farms.
And when someone says that large farms are not sustainable, and says the answer is grow-your-own, then what they are also saying is…. lots of people are going to starve.
Is industrial ag efficient?
Another way of looking at Industrial ag is that it takes 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of food energy.
Small scale farmers produce 70% of the worlds food http://www.fao.org/fileadmin/templates/nr/sustainability_pathways/docs/Coping_with_food_and_agriculture_challenge__Smallholder_s_agenda_Final.pdf
Industrial ag depletes aquifers, involves huge areas of monoculture,(Destroys biodiversity, lacks resilience to pest, disease or climatic flutuations), requires inputs from depleting mineral resouces(Phosphate,Potash) and natural gas for nitrates.Pollutes water resource (runoff of nutrients and sediments) The list goes on!
1 hectare of biodiverse crops, including tree crops and livestock can produce far more net calorific energy than one hectare of transgenic, chemically supported monoculture by many times.
I don’t think it’s an either-or.
I think a more diverse food system could be one that is more resilient, and healthier for human beings, as well as natural systems.
I think the economic realities of things like the California drought are going to force some pretty dramatic changes, and smaller, more diversified food sources, like smaller, diversified energy sources, will be part of the solutions.
I like the dwarf fruit tree. The city is probably a good place for fruit trees, having smaller bird and insect populations to contend with, and you can throw a net over the dwarf pretty easy. I’ve unsuccessfully battled large caterpillar infestations on apple trees before, as a child.
Though it seems like i read a study years ago that concluded some car pollution makes its way into produce when the plants are near roadways. There’s a small farm of maybe 1 or 2 or 3 acres a couple miles down from where i live in Los Angeles, but it’s right next to the freeway (5 lanes each direction; lots of cars; lots of pollution). I’m afraid to eat anything grown there. If all our cars were electric-only, this would cut down on the pollution problem.
What encourages me about this video – real production that makes a measurable difference in their energy use (water) and food consumption, as well as the synergistic effects of poultry (companionship, routine, fertilizer, waste management, etc.) to enhance their growing systems.
What discourages me – the greenie/hippie vibe of using recycled pallet wood as indoor furniture, giving your garden a cutsie ‘farm’ name, relying on upcycled/recycled materials instead of spending a little more to create a more polished look.
Appearances matter, especially when we’re trying to bring about social changes like getting folks to grow food instead of lawns, reduce water use, think and act locally, challenge large, established food production systems, etc. I applaud this couple for their efforts and successes – more people could easily do this. But I think some folks may be turned off by the shabby chic/recycled look, and these are the folks who may want to do something about the problems we’re facing, but are living in a standard American suburb and may find it nearly impossible due to HOA covenants, or even peer pressure, to implement the sort of changes this couple has done. I think many Americans just aren’t ready to do this, but may be willing to grow veggies in a flower bed, or support local farmers, or a school garden program, etc. Given time we may all need to do this, but incremental steps are important to move us in a healthy direction.