Urban Farmers’ Crops Go From Vacant Lot to Market

Denniston Wilks grows produce for sale in East New York, Brooklyn.

IN the shadows of the elevated tracks toward the end of the No. 3 line in East New York, Brooklyn, with an April chill still in the air, Denniston and Marlene Wilks gently pulled clusters of slender green shoots from the earth, revealing a blush of tiny red shallots at the base.

“Dennis used to keep them big, and people didn’t buy them,” Mrs. Wilks said. “They love to buy scallions.”

Growing up in rural Jamaica, the Wilkses helped their families raise crops like sugar cane, coffee and yams, and take them to market. Now, in Brooklyn, they are farmers once again, catering to their neighbors’ tastes: for scallions, for bitter melons like those from the West Indies and East Asia and for cilantro for Latin-American dinner tables.

“We never dreamed of it,” said Mr. Wilks, nor did his relatives in Jamaica. “They are totally astonished when you tell them that you farm and go to the market.”

For years, New Yorkers have grown basil, tomatoes and greens in window boxes, backyard plots and community gardens. But more and more New Yorkers like the Wilkses are raising fruits and vegetables, and not just to feed their families but to sell to people on their block.

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Dharma in the Dirt

MUIR BEACH, Calif.

AS a proudly Birkenstocked Zen gardener, Wendy Johnson can mindfully muster up affection for many of the earth’s species, with the possible exception of persimmon-devouring gophers.

But poison hemlock holds a special place in her heart.

Without the presence of this pernicious carrot look-alike, a potent vertigo-inducing poison that when ingested can cause death, she reasons, her garden would be all cloying lilac- and lily-scented perfection — boring, in short. The innocent-looking malevolent weed, which she allows to flourish for its capacity to draw rich minerals from the soil for compost, “gives the garden its punch,” she said, “snapping me back to my senses.”

Like her beloved hemlock, Ms. Johnson has deep taproots in California. Her own garden, bordered by a mountain creek with a view of the Pacific Ocean, lies down the road from the Green Gulch Farm Zen Center, where she helped pioneer the concept of organic gardening in the United States. Now the farm’s unofficial gardener emeritus, she lived at Green Gulch for 25 years, marrying, raising her two children and growing produce for Greens Restaurant, which was founded by the Center in 1979.

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Why Gas in the U.S. Is So Cheap

by Steve Hargreaves
Friday, May 2, 2008 provided by

Relatively low taxes have kept pump prices far below most other developed nations, which some say is precisely why the current runup is so painful.

Despite daily headlines bemoaning record gas prices, the U.S. is actually one of the cheaper places to fill up in the world.

Out of 155 countries surveyed, U.S. gas prices were the 45th cheapest, according to a recent study from AIRINC, a research firm that tracks cost of living data.

The difference is staggering. As of late March, U.S. gas prices averaged $3.45 a gallon. That compares to over $8 a gallon across much of Europe.

The U.S. has always fought to keep gas prices low, and the current debate among presidential candidates on how to keep them that way has been fierce.

But those cheap gas prices - which Americans have gotten used to - mean they feel price spikes like the ones we’re experiencing now more acutely than citizens from other nations which have had historically more expensive fuel.

Cheap gas prices have also lulled Americans into a cycle of buying bigger cars and bigger houses further away from their work - leaving them more exposed to rising prices, some experts say.

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Revenues from Europe’s high gas taxes are used to fund a variety of things. One thing they have built is better public transportation, said Peter Tertzakian, chief energy economist at ARC Financial, a Calgary-based private equity firm.

They gave people an alternative to driving, something we don’t have in North America,” said Tertzakian.

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Americans have taken advantage of cheap gas prices to do other things - like buy bigger cars and bigger houses further away from city centers, said Schipper.

On a per capita basis, Americans use three times more oil than Europeans, he said. That means Americans are more exposed to rising gas prices than their counterparts across the Atlantic.

“Five-thousand square feet in the suburbs, that’s much rarer in Europe,” said Schipper, referring to big homes. “We dug our hole.”

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and that hole’s only going to get deeper….from the Oil Drum, a prediction of $1000 a barrel oil by 2020  (let’s see, that translates out to $30/gallon for gasoline, doesn’t it?  and everything else that’s oil dependent will jump in price by more or less a factor of ten, too….)

This is a guest post by Phoenix, an engineer working in the energy sector, and a friend of mine for well over 3 decades.

In January 2006 Phoenix emailed me a spreadsheet that predicted an oil price of $100/barrel by 2008, followed by an ongoing geometric rise in oil prices. I remember immediately phoning him to point out that the scenario was impossible because it is unsustainable - $100/barrel would cause economic havoc comparable to the oil shock of the 1970s and if a geometric price progression followed, then no economic recovery would be possible and… well, I recall using the phrase “rioting in the streets inside of 18 months”.

As we know, oil hit $100 in January 2008 and kept climbing, surpassing even Phoenix’s predictions. So when Phoenix offered to explain the model that generated those numbers, I leapt at the opportunity. Here is the story of how Phoenix became Peak Oil aware and generated his Price Calculator.

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OTC: $100 trillion needed to rebuild energy infrastructure

Uchenna Izundu
International Editor

HOUSTON, May 5 — The oil and gas industry will need to invest $50-100 trillion to rebuild its ageing infrastructure within the next 7 years and stave off a serious drop in oil and gas production, Matt Simmons, chairman of Simmons & Co. International, told OGJ May 5 at the Offshore Technology Conference in Houston.

In a worst-case scenario, Simmons said, oil and gas output could fall by 10-20% by 2013 if industry does not replace its rusting, corroded assets. Spare capacity also has run out because formerly cheap prices for oil and gas precluded upgrading and construction of new facilities .

The average age of offshore rigs is 25 years, and oil companies have ignored the problem for the past few decades because of the low energy prices, which meant that maintenance has been expensive.

However, the upward trend in prices can help pay for the rebuilding of the energy system, Simmons stated.

“There is no blueprint in place, and this is a global problem. The longer the blueprint is postponed, the more acute the crisis will get,” he said.

The reconstruction problem is compounded by the shortage of skilled engineers to carry out the work and the scarcity of raw materials.

“No census has been carried out on the age of the infrastructure,” he said. “The industry’s tool kit for corrosion is old, and painting over rust creates an illusion. Few parts of oil infrastructure have been replaced.”

Leaks, stains, oil streaks, metal fatigue, and brittle steel are all signs of ageing pipelines, platforms, wells, and other assets. Simmons said the industry’s focus had been on declining production, which was important, but it failed to recognize that declining oil fields are also accelerating rust on oil equipment.

“Peak oil is a reality. In 2005 we had peak production and this fell by 265,000 b/d in 2007. There is a high likelihood that production will continue to fall.”

Simmons forecasts that oil prices could hit $200/bbl as global demand increases. He pointed out that the industry had previously sold its best-quality grade of oil at $15/bbl and flared natural gas because it was too costly to develop.

“That was a mistake,” he concluded.

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And maybe spending that much on an oil infrastructure that is poised to destroy civilization as we know it is a bad idea…maybe we should fund our transition into the post oil economy while we’ve still got some oil left to grease the skids, so to speak….

Oil is expensive because oil is scarce

from the UK Telegraph

By David Strahan

Polishing the portholes on the Titanic hardly does it justice. This week saw ministers giving an uncanny impersonation of Corporal Jones urging calm over the Grangemouth refinery strike; lorry drivers protesting in Park Lane over a two pence rise in fuel duty; and much righteous indignation over the level of profits reported by Shell and BP. All of which entirely misses the point. These issues are trifling compared to global oil depletion, where there have been several distinct turns for the worse in the last month.

The idea that oil companies are somehow ‘to blame’ for record oil prices and rising fuel costs is seductive but absurd. For all their power and profits, the international oil companies are in fact in trouble. They may still be swimming in cash, but no longer in oil. Despite vast investment in exploration and production, these days they generally fail to replace the oil they produce each year with fresh discoveries, or even to maintain current levels of output. Shell’s oil production has been falling for six years, BP’s seems to have peaked 2005, and this week even the mighty Exxon was forced to admit its output dropped 10% in the first quarter of the year.

None of this should come as a surprise since all the evidence now suggests the world is rapidly approaching “peak oil”, the point when global oil production goes into terminal decline for fundamental geological reasons. Annual discovery of oil has been falling for over forty years, and now for every barrel we find we consume three. Oil production is already shrinking in 60 of the world’s 98 oil producing countries – including Britain, where output peaked in 1999 and has already plunged by more than half. When an individual country peaks it only matters for that country – Britain became a net importer of oil in 2006 – but when global supply starts to shrink the effects could be ruinous for everybody.

JAMES HOWARD KUNSTLER INTERVIEWED IN BUSINESS WEEK

Why is suburbia now threatened?
Cheap oil is what made suburbia possible. But we’ll run into problems with spot shortages. As we get into trouble with these supplies, our economy will suffer. Major instabilities in the system will present themselves much sooner than we are led to believe. And by that I mean the way we produce food, the way we conduct commerce, and the way we move around.

When will all that happen?
The rise and fall of oil production is asymmetrical. In other words, it’ll be a steeper, rockier tumble down than the steady increase going up. My own sense of things is that we will be in very serious trouble inside of five years.

Won’t it help to cut back on gas?
I get people who come up to the podium after a speaking engagement to tell me they’ve just gotten a Prius, expecting brownie points. It’s not that we’re driving the wrong cars. It’s that we’re driving cars of any size, incessantly.

What about biofuels?
We will use all of them, probably. But we will be greatly disappointed by what they can do for us. We certainly aren’t going to run Wal-Mart (WMT), Disney World (DIS), and the highway system on any combination of solar, wind, nuclear, ethanol, biodiesel, or used french-fry oil.

Isn’t it a bit radical to declare game over for Wal-Mart?
It is part and parcel of the suburban predicament. How long can they maintain their warehouse-on-wheels as the price of motor fuels goes up?

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The full onset of the mortgage foreclosure crisis, coupled with demographic changes, rising fuel prices and a host of other factors means that the suburbs could be on the way out. One analyst has postulated a future in which the suburbs, which once promised so much domestic happiness, are transformed into the new slums, with rampant crime fuelled by poverty and decay. The term “slumburbia” was not far behind.

Franklin Reserve, a walled but not gated community of 15,000 people, appears to be a prosperous development. But there are signs that all is not well. Some front lawns are unkempt, and for sale signs abound, almost matched by signs offering properties for rent. On Caprezzo Way a five-bedroom, three-bathroom house, complete with pool, is on the market for $550,000, probably $100,000 less than it would have been advertised for a year ago. Across the street a more ominous sign of the mortgage foreclosure crisis is taped to the wrought iron gate of a stucco house on Cortino Way. “Notice to quit,” it declares, telling the defaulting occupants they have three days to leave.

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The decline of the honeybee attracted worldwide attention in 2007. Investigations carried out by the Institute of Science in Society implicated a synergistic interaction between the recent widespread use of new pesticides (including Bt toxin from GM crops) and fungal infections  [1, 2] (Parasitic Fungus and Honeybee Decline , Parasitic Fungi and Pesticides Act Synergistically to Kill Honeybees?, SiS 35). Sub-lethal levels of neonicotinoid pesticides act synergistically with parasitic fungi in killing insects pests. Fungal spores, widely used as biocontrol agents are applied in sprays and baits, and when delivered in suspension with sub-lethal levels of pesticides are much more effective in killing insects. Equally, Bt biopesticides enhance the killing power of parasitic fungi synergistically. That information was transmitted through a written question to the European Parliament [3].

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so, while the price of gas has tripled in the US, it’s less than doubled in Europe….because the dollar is worth less….

If we take Autumn of 2000 as our base point when the euro was trading at its low of 0.8252 relative to the US dollar and oil was trading at $35 dollars per barrel, we get the following results: The increase in price of oil in euros has been 74% since 2000, while it has been a 237% increase in US dollars.

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Gasoline May Soon Cost a Sawbuck

Big New Shock at the Pump Forecast by Two Analysts

Get ready for another economic shock of major proportions — a virtual doubling of prices at the gas pump to as much as $10 a gallon.

Gas at that price range would make diesel even more expensive, which would make trucking/shipping almost prohibitive.  And then there’s chemical fertilizer and “all the marvelous ways/they’re using plastics nowadays,” as Tom Lehrer used to sing….like, “the American way of life is not negotiable”?  OK, then we’ll just cancel it outright….

Shortages Threaten Farmers’ Key Tool: Fertilizer

….Some dealers in the Midwest ran out of fertilizer last fall, and they continue to restrict sales this spring because of a limited supply.

“If you want 10,000 tons, they’ll sell you 5,000 today, maybe 3,000,” said W. Scott Tinsman Jr., a fertilizer dealer in Davenport, Iowa. “The rubber band is stretched really far.”

Fertilizer companies are confident the shortage will be solved eventually, noting that they plan to build scores of new factories. But that will probably create fresh problems in the long run as the world grows more dependent on fossil fuels to produce chemical fertilizers. Intensified use of such fertilizers is certain to mean greater pollution of waterways, too.

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Costs killing Maine farmers

By Sharon Kiley Mack
Friday, April 25, 2008 - Bangor Daily News

LEVANT, Maine - Dairy farmer Brian Call doesn’t have a fancy milking parlor. He hand-carries the portable milking machine to each of his 30 cows, wiping their teats with pages ripped from an old telephone book. “Another way to save money,” he comments.

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In her letter to the congressional delegation and Maine’s dairy industry members, Gibson wrote, “People need to be concerned that small farms and small businesses are closing their doors, as they are the backbone of our economy and they fuel rural communities. We are becoming ghost farms and ghost towns, the end of an era and the start of a vacuum to be filled by monopolies, a form of economic totalitarianism.”

By telling her family’s personal financial story, Gibson hopes solutions will be found to save Maine’s small, family farms.

“I will tell you that we realize no profit from our dairy farm, nothing,” she said.

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Peak Farmers: A Guest Post by Elaine Solowey

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Joel Stein, the Angelino columnist said just last fall. “Agribusiness feeds us. Farmers are obsolete. They are one step above fire starters and cave painters”.

Now with food prices rising, food riots in 35 countries as of this writing and the concerns about peak oil, peak food, peak phosphorus, peak fertilizer finally crashing into mainstream consciousness it is surprising to me that no one connects the current crisis with a peak that was passed long ago.

Peak farmers.

But that peak should not be a surprise to anyone.

For the last 100 years there has been a world-wide effort to get rid of farmers…
Some were eliminated for political reasons the way that Stalin starved the Ukrainians to death and shipped the kulaks off to Siberia.

Some were driven off their land by the vast illegal enclosure actions of wealthy landowners in South American nations.

The Nazis in WWII swept up the farming inhabitants of Russian and Polish and Jewish villages and worked them to death in the factories that fed their war machine.

Millions of farmers were displaced by dams financed by the World Bank

Millions more were removed from agriculture by the policies of the WTO.

Some had their farms were taxed out from under them and the land tuned over to developers who built cheap houses and strips malls on it.

And more were eliminated by agricultural globalization, the belief that every farmer should specialize and produce as much of their single product as possible (to the neglect of everything else) - then we would all merrily cross- ship these things to each other for ever.

Still others were “sanitized” out of business. The small dairies and animal husbandry operations could not afford the large and expensive machines needed to raise animals and process milk and meat under the rules of “modern” hygiene.

These small operations were declared to be inefficient and dirty, never mind the fact that modern “hygienic” production units for meat and milk are nightmarishly cruel, filthy, and squalid. (Indeed, a backyard pigpen or chicken coop is a relative paradise compared the confining “crush” pens of the modern pig farm or the cage batteries of the modern poultry house.)

So farmers were eliminated, one after another, by murder, displacement, bankruptcy, by taxes that would not let land be passed from generation, by on- farm prices that left farmers unable to feed their own families, by subsidies that favored farms beyond human scale.

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Independence Days: My First Challenge

It is so desperately needed that we do declare our independence from the globalizing, totalitarian, destructive, toxic, dangerous agriculture that destroys our future and our power and pays to destroy democracy.  And so, when in the course of human events it becomes necessary for people to divorce themselves from a system that has become destructive, and thus:

We the people, in order to form a more perfect union of human and nature, establish justice and ensure food sovreignty, provide for the common nutrition, promote the general welfare and ensure the blessings of liberty, for ourselves and our posterity do ordain and establish this constitution for the United Food Sovereign People of the World.

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I challenge myself and all of you to work on creating food Independence Days this year - that all of us try to do one thing every day  to create Food Independence.  That means in each day or week, we would try to:

1. Plant something.  Obviously, those of us who live in the Northern Hemisphere and having spring are doing this anyway.  But the idea that you should plant all week and all year is a good reminder to those of us who sometimes don’t get our fall gardens or our succession plantings done regularly.  Remember, that beet you harvested left a space - maybe for the next one to get bigger, but maybe for a bit of arugula or a fall crop of peas, or a cover crop to enrich the soil.  Independence is the bounty of a single seed that creates an abundance of zucchini, and enough seeds to plant your own garden and your neighbor’s.

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3. Preserve something.  Sometimes this will be a big project, but it doesn’t have to be.  It doesn’t take long to slice a couple of tomatoes and set them on a screen in the sun, or to hang up a bunch of sage for winter.  And it adds up fast.  The time you spend now is time you don’t have to spend hauling to the store and cooking later.  Independence is eating our own, and cutting the ties we have to agribusiness.

4. Prep something.  Hit a yard sale and pick up an extra blanket.  Purchase some extra legumes and oatmeal.  Sort out and inventory your pantry.  Make a list of tools you need.  Find a way to give what you don’t need to someone who does.  Fix your bike.  Fill that old soda bottle with water with a couple of drops of bleach in it.  Plan for next year’s edible landscaping.  Make back-road directions to your place and send it to family in case they ever need to come to you - or make ‘em for yourself for where you might have to go. Clean, mend, declutter, learn a new skill.  Independence is being ready for whatever comes.

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The Politics of Food is Politics

By DE CLARKE and STAN GOFF

In recent days, we have seen the rising price of oil and the devaluation of the dollar create two quantum shifts in the economy: the beginning of the collapse of the air travel industry and a global crisis of food-price inflation. These are related in ways that are crucial to understand — because we are seeing the outlines of an historic opportunity to change the terms of theory and practice for a politics of resistance. As air carriers have gone bankrupt, the knock-on effects on travel agents, airports, airport-colocated hotels, “package” vacation resorts, etc. are considerable.

This is how one cascade pours into another, as the manifold contradictions of our global system merge and co-amplify. Tourism, which was supposed to be a relatively benign, non-extractive industry for colonized nations — an alternative to brutal extraction and cash cropping — turns out to have been just as extractive all along due to the climate (and cultural) damage done by commodified air travel.

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My own…anecdotal evidence….using simply composting mulch on organic compost over non-compacted soil, is that in 12 square surface-feet, one can grow three species of food, with six plants each… producing okra, tomatoes, cucumbers, peppers, peas, bush beans, etc. Mixing them, and adding a couple of marigolds and aromatics (like mint or parilla) seems to keep the little critters from taking more than their share. Last summer I had one cucumber vine that produced around 50 mature cucumbers, totalling well over 20 pounds of food, for around three months. By rotating seasonals, it is easily conceivable to take a 12 square-foot plot in a temperate zone and raise 100 pounds of food a year… being very conservative. Neither Syngenta, nor Cargill, nor Archer-Daniels-Midland want you to know this.

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We are not accustomed, especially on the political left, to thinking about such practical activities as “political.” We are still trapped in a strategic-theoretical model that equates power with policy, and policy is then undertaken as a purely ideological struggle. The persuasion of the word and the concept is given primacy over the persuasion of actual conditions and deeds. Metaphorically, we have constructed a line, running from left to right, and we use a constellation of policy-issues to place both people and discourse along that line.

The system, however, reproduces itself most earnestly through “facts-on-the-ground.” Fighting a system with nothing more than ideas is the most Quixotic, and ineffectual, form of struggle. Before we can suggest ideas, we must first have some facts-on-the-ground of our own to point to. Fortunately, we do. Some of them have just been recited above. We just need to point to them with more urgency now. Because the facts-on-the-ground of the present capitalist system, as we can see, have slammed into something like the end of an unexpected cul-de-sac. The epidemic of dollar hegemony has torn through the world like a plague; but plagues burn themselves out when all who are susceptible have been wiped out.

The airlines have run into the deep impasse of tooling and organization… and so has our food system. Our system has arrived decisively at what Ivan Illich called its second watershed: all our “cures” have become the disease. We are in a state of accelerating iatrogensis. The capitalist/extractive/technomanagerial system can only prescribe more of the same medicine that is killing us… or new medicines to treat the symptoms of the last medicine. This is not a metaphorical treadmill, but a downward spiral… and there is a bottom.

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Capitalism began by kicking people off their land and forbidding them to grow their own food; the end of capitalism may come when people who grow their own food and share it with neighbors are able to say a resounding No to capitalism’s end-phase exterminism.

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Canada’s C-51 Law May Outlaw 60% of Natural Health Products; Big Pharma Pushing to Criminalize Supplements

(NaturalNews) A new law being pushed in Canada by Big Pharma seeks to outlaw up to 60 percent of natural health products currently sold in Canada, even while criminalizing parents who give herbs or supplements to their children. The law, known as C-51, was introduced by the Canadian Minister of Health on April 8th, 2008, and it proposes sweeping changes to Canada’s Food and Drugs Act that could have devastating consequences on the health products industry.

The Act also changes the definition of the word “sell” to include anyone who gives such therapeutic products to someone else. So a mother giving an herb to her child, under the proposed new language, could be arrested for engaging in the sale of unregulated, unapproved “therapeutic substances.” Learn about more of these freedom-squashing changes to the law at the Stop51.com website: http://www.stopc51.com

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