SFA Confab & Reflections

Yesterday morning, Miss Lauren Fulner (aka Teaspoon) and I made our way to our alma mater, Gustavus Adolphus College, for the Sustainable Farming Association Confab. Discussions were lively after that initial hesitancy, and I was happy to make a few acquaintances discussing food, agriculture, and politics. I thought it wise to provide a few key points that were important to me from the Confab.

First, when you talk about changing agriculture--particularly with the moniker of sustainability around--you are talking about everything. One of the lecturers brought up--albeit, inaccurately--the John Muir quote, "When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe," I could only agree. Ostensibly, we were there to talk about farming, but what does that mean? Farming involves people working with the land with certain methods, employing and nurturing specific plants well combating others, using particular tools or machinery to do cultivate and harvest and process, in order to provide food for citizens far and wide. Where to begin? Well, repopulating and redemocratizing the rural landscape with young, innovative, clever, dedicated people is a start; so we talk about encouraging and providing resources for new farmers. What about manufacturing tools or energy with which to farm? Well, we can talk about refurbishing old machinery like the electric tractor (I am uncertain, but I think they were talking about this from the Flying Beet), or building value-added processing infrastructure on the small and local scale, or establishing renewable energy systems for farming and distribution. Or we can talk politics about the subsidies that encourage commodity corn and soybeans (industrial resources) to fresh fruits and vegetables and grains (nutritious foods), or the legislative rigmarole that surrounds raw milk and independent cheese making, or connecting individuals to CSAs (Community-Supported Agriculture) and farmers markets. (One immense triumph on the last count is the still pretty recent ability to use food stamps at farmers' markets.) Or we could...

Well you get the idea and I want to move on anyway.

Second, and this did not get as much attention as I would have liked, is the reality of school lunches and the excitement in changing the programs. Some mention was made to farm-to-school programs as well as farm-to-hospitals and the like, which is incredibly exciting. Having begun to follow Mrs. Q's Fed Up With School Lunch blog and having read an older article about meat standards in school lunches (check the tumblr), the expeditious necessity of fixing it is all the more apparent. If there is grassroots motivation for widespread political change in the school lunch program (which favors, cheap, flavorless commodity foods), it will motivate a reconsideration of farming more generally (toward fresher, healthier, whole foods), thus providing markets and motivation for more farmers toward wholesome fruits and vegetables, potentially carrying a potent wave of agricultural and food system change. Presently, the school lunch program is a dumping ground for low quality, nutrient poor, highly processed, unmarketable food-like products. In the back of my mind, I can recall my own experiences with this, but reading up on Mrs. Q's exploits and Oliver's Food Revolution (reservations aside) makes these reality all the more worrisome.

And third (of course, there is more for me to cover, but Lauren has returned and I ought to attend to the analog reality again), architectural innovation and design insights will increasingly pervade urban and landscape development more generally. This was not an obvious topic of the conference, but recalling a group thought experiment from last spring at Gustavus, chatting with some students and the architecture representative, and the way nearly everyone spoke about agricultural methods and system transformations, this is increasingly obvious. Design, in this regard, will be a sort of rich retro-chic retrofitting and reconsideration of old methods. That may mean electric tractors on farms; narrow, small shop-lined sidewalks (to support pedestrianism and discourage driving, potentially providing cheap and fresh food to lunchtime businesspeople); the breakdown of suburbia for a novel, richer, youthful, and more progressive rural communities; or hybrid digital downtown farmers' markets (use your mobile phone to confirm origin, nutrient content, freshness, longevity, chemical content), I don't know. What I do know is that I am excited about it.

I will likely bring in a few more recollections over the next week, but for now, signing off.