It has been a just a few days past a year since I first posted on this blog. A lot has changed since then, the most significant of which is that I now have a great job!

Since starting that job, this blog has been greatly neglected. So with that in mind, I will try to post much more often (which may mean shorter posts, but I will try!).

Last night I saw FRESH, the movie. It is a documentary about food, agriculture, and the stories behind the people growing food.

Watch this trailer:

I generally enjoyed the film and the story that unfolded. It is different from other documentaries in that it does not rely too heavily on the facts to tell the story. It is more about using the imagery and the narrative to reach out to the audience.

I liked seeing the sustainably managed farms, and especially Will Allen’s work in an urban setting. The stark comparison to the scenes from industrial farms are a harsh reality that I wish more people could witness.

If you would like to see FRESH, you can get a home screening license to watch in a group with friends, or try to catch a screening near you.

I have yet to see Food, Inc., but I will be seeing it at the end of the month. Perhaps then I can make a fuller comparison.

This NYT article talks about the trend that is becoming more popular now of keeping chickens in backyards across the nation, such as Chicago, Brooklyn, and the rural West.

From the article, the general sense is that most of the people who recently started raising chickens in their backyards are doing it because of the economic recession. A common sentiment that is repeated in the article is that people want to feel secure, just in case they lose their job or the recession gets worse.

Possibly the most difficult thing about raising animals is feeding them. The problem with raising the chickens in backyards is that you spend nearly as much as you could make just by buying feed for the chickens. There are also the initial costs of providing shelter and purchasing the chicks.

Compared to farms that purchase feed in bulk or have enough land to rotate the chickens on plots of grass, raising your own chickens is inefficient. You are hardly saving any money while increasing the hassle for your household.

In Nature, inputs and outputs balance each other out. For human food production endeavors, inputs and outputs aren’t as well balanced because all the components in a cycle are not always readily available in the same system. People raising animals in cities need to buy inputs from far away and feed that are products of the sun and grown by farmers. Sunlight is free, but farmers are like middlemen in this process because they increase the cost as they pass things along.

Growing your own chicken feed would make the system more ecologically connected, but that means more resources would need to go into another type of production. Hatching your own chicks (which doesn’t seem common by the amount of discussion of chick packaging companies in the article) would also lower the initial costs. You would essentially need a mini-farm in your backyard that contained a relatively closed cycle to make things very efficient.

Overall, I think the reasoning behind these people raising chickens is understandable but somewhat silly. Arguments that homegrown chickens and eggs taste better might be valid, and the sense of security may be worth the effort. But in the end, I don’t think having chickens will be the difference between one family being more successful during a deep recession than another family in the long run because I don’t think it will get to the point where families will have nothing to eat so the chickens would save the family from starvation.

Image credit:
Flickr user james+3

The author of the NYT editorial I wrote about on August 4th brought up this idea:
“Domestically, a power company can earn credits by, say, helping farmers capture methane emitted by animal waste ponds or cultivate land in ways that help absorb carbon.”

I’ve read a few articles about these “black lagoons” (term borrowed from NYT article linked below) of animal waste created by farms, specifically pig farms. Recently, I started wondering whether people really understand what these farms are like. If you haven’t ready anything like The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan, you could live on not knowing what kind of atrocities there are out there that are connected to producing your food.

The animals raised on large lot farms are kept in close quarters, and can’t be near each other’s waste because it would make them sick. (Which is quite understandable. It would make me sick too.) So the waste needs to be trucked out of the animals’ barns and deposited somewhere, often on one big piece of land on the same farm. This turns the land into a black lagoon of animal waste that contaminates the soil, possibly the groundwater, toxic gas emission, and tons of other issues that affect the environment and the health of humans.

For further reading, check out:

• NYT article
• More on the environmental impacts
• Methane to produce electricity

Image credit:
Flickr user friendsoffamilyfarmers

I’m somewhat of a skeptic when it comes to seafood sustainability. I doubt that any fish farming endeavor is completely waste-free or low-enough-ecological-impact to be done at the scale that would be needed to wean our culture off of a meat (and soy) industry that is tearing up the planet. You may not be aware, but much of the deforestation in South America is either for cattle raising or soy bean production. Much of the soy being grown is exported to be used as livestock feed, not for direct human consumption.

However, I do still think that it is necessary for most humans to have some animal protein in their diet (because our bodies have evolved this way). By “some,” I mean about the size of a deck of cards per week per adult. That is really all anyone who isn’t training or super active needs. (But of course, our tendency to want everything in excess defies self-control or self-denial.)

To help out, here are some links to a guide for how to judge your choices:

• http://www.montereybayaquarium.org/cr/SeafoodWatch/web/sfw_regional.aspx
• http://www.blueocean.org/seafood
• an interesting article!

Image Credit:
Flickr user SunnyvaleRocks

Will Allen is an urban farmer featured in this NYT article. He does interesting work in greenhouses to feed 10,000 local people. It is so exciting to see something great happening where it is needed most.

Urban centers, especially inner city areas, often lack access to fresh produce. This has enormous implications for health because, while it is easier to get a hamburger and fries for dinner, no one will be able to stop the obesity trends.

The article talks about composting and urban farming and the recent rise in appreciation and interest for such work.

The author seems to make a big deal about farming systems that close the cycle, using the “waste” to continue the growth and nutrient cycle.

But this is not something new!! We have been aware of these ecological principals for such a long time. By we, I mean scientists…and all the old school farmers who understood the relationships between all the living things on their farms.

There is no waste in Nature! That is the missing underlying idea that the author skips over. The history of how we are returning to this type of farming is not mentioned at all.

But the author makes a good point of bringing up the fact that farms like these are not and can not be self sufficient with the current condition. Will Allen’s farm receives grants and other types of support to keep up and running. For more similar farms to be successful, it has to become profitable. It makes me sad to say that, but it is basically true.

In any case, it is an enjoyable and informative article and I hope you read it!

That might sound like a strange idea, but it is possible! The Science Barge is a floating farm museum, currently docked in Yonkers, NY, that aims to bring awareness about urban farming. They claim to grow tomatoes, lettuce, and cucumbers with zero carbon emissions, zero pesticides, and zero runoff. Thousands of schoolchildren, adults, and press people have visited the barge since it opened in 2007.

They use hydroponics to grow their vegetables, which is also a large component of vertical farming. When I spoke to Dickson Despommier, he implied that large scale urban or indoor farming is not possible without hydroponic technology. Considering the lack of space or soil in New York City, I tend to agree with him, though I am not an expert on hydroponics.


The barge presents an interesting way to get the public interested in urban farming. Though it is just a museum, it is a great step in the right direction to getting people to think about getting their food through low-impact methods. If hydroponic farming could be done on a larger scale, either through more barges or vertical farming, the barge has the important role of easing this idea into the public eye. Education is key!


For more pictures of the Science Barge, check out this New York Times slideshow or Flickr slideshow.


(On a side note, a friend recently gave me a copy of the book The Lorax signed by Dickson Despommier as a graduation gift!)

Image credit: NYSunworks.org

It bothers me that some restaurants that are supposedly trying to educate the public about food choices and farming STILL charge exorbitant prices for their dishes. One example is the Blue Hill restaurants and farms (which are super prestigious and has received special chef awards and recognition).

What is the point of having that goal for the farm and restaurant if you are only going to reach people whose pocketbooks are fat enough to eat there?
Who is your target? And if you can’t grow and serve food cheaply and on a large enough scale, what are you really accomplishing?

This system is just perpetuating the idea that fresh, healthy food is something that only the elite have a chance of realizing.

A discussion about vertical farming and some of its environmental implications
(Portions of the quoted text have been edited from the raw transcript.)


Vertical farming has been brought into the forefront recently, with a spot in the film FUEL, articles in TIME, Scientific American, as well as others in the past 6 months. What this concept entails is growing food in a controlled indoor environment in vertical structures that could be built in cities, urban centers, and as annexes to new buildings being constructed. Plants can be grown hydroponically, and even some livestock can be raised. The technology is there, as is most of the ecological understanding.

The man behind this concept is Dickson Despommier, Ph.D., a professor of medical ecology at Columbia University’s Mailman School of Public Health. He is the kind of guy who gives away copies of The Lorax to spread love for the environment. He even keeps extra copies of them on his shelf in his office at Columbia’s Medical Campus. I visited him at this office, which, by the way, has a great view of the Hudson River. When asked how this vertical farming idea developed, Despommier tells the story about how the idea came out of a somewhat failed class project investigating rooftop gardening in New York City.

What came immediately after was further investigation and, later, years of adding detail to the concept. He and his wife spent that first summer talking out the concept. They learned a lot about what technology out there and even revisited some old favorite stories. Despommier explains it, “She put me onto a book she got as a kid—it was called Old MacDonald Had an Apartment House. And it was about Old MacDonald, who moves to the city and grows his food, all of his crops, inside the apartment house he’s in. And of course he grosses out everybody else in the apartment building. And they all move out, and in that case, he just took the whole thing over, but they come back in the wintertime to see where their old apartment was and they look in the bottom of it, and there’s a greengrocer, selling fresh produce. Wow! You know, they actually forgave him for doing all of this. Of course, that was the story, right?”


Making the connection between vertical farming and our daily lives may seem like a stretch, but put into the perspective of the global human impact, it begins to make sense.


Despommier is personally invested in vertical farming because, as he says, “[at] no time in the history of the earth has any one organism dominated the scene like we have. And it’s created huge problems…. [F]or every indoor acre of farming that you create, you can save five to ten to fifteen outdoor acres of land.” This encourages the hope that we may decrease our dependency on the environment as well as relieve some pressure on the farmers. He continues, “Seven billion people have an agricultural footprint the size of South America. Another three billion, which will happen in another forty years, will require an additional Brazil. We already use 80% of the land to farm.” So if something doesn’t change in the way we grow our food, millions more people will not have enough to eat.

Because vertical farming requires less land, a big incentive to make it work on a large scale is that it would allow more people to live in urban centers. Social pressure, specifically as it affects livelihoods, is an important factor that influences density of settlements. “Failed farms result in a migration of farmers to the cities, every time. What happens to the land? In fact, there’s been a recent trend—which is quite amazing, actually—Landsat photographs from space will tell you that the forests have recovered over 5% in the last three years.” Vertical farming will not induce failed farming on conventional agricultural lands, but it will create alternatives to a system that has no future for expansion. If the right social pressures are created and people are given the choice, vertical farming may be one of the solutions to growing problems.


According to Despommier, “If we could supply everybody with enough water and enough food, you could have ten billion people on the planet, because most of them will choose to live in cities, just like you and I. Make the cities imitate nature in terms of ecological process, and you’ve got it made. Your agricultural footprint goes very, very small. The rest of the world recovers.”

At the heart of the issue is the disconnect between humans and the environment. The overwhelming attitude towards the environment and resources is one of utilitarian values. This worldview is not only destructive for the earth, but for our species and our existence. “If you look at nature and say what’s the difference between us and them,” Despommier suggests, “the answer comes back, there’s no difference. Because we are them. We are nature. We are an expression of nature.”

“However,” Despommier continues, “we don’t behave like a single species. We don’t behave like one termite mound, for the greater good of the termite mound.” This type of behavior makes it difficult for collaboration towards a common goal. The goal must be large enough that all humans find purpose in it. Maybe we are reaching that point in the face of the threats presented by climate change, but we have yet to make any progress.


“So here’s my question,” he says, “my question is how can humans behave like the rest of nature? The rest of nature self limits themselves by the amount of resource that they have available to them, and the availability of their niche that they live in. That’s an ecological concept that is immutable. Everyone believes this, everyone except us. Isn’t that crazy? So if we are a natural species, just like everything else, and if we are creating for ourselves a world that is non-sustainable, then it behooves us to use our intelligence to create a sustainable world.”

Just like with any invention, Despommier points out that, “The way you make a vertical farm work is you don’t assume it’ll work to begin with. The assumption is I will get it to work. How? By applying science and technology at all levels.” The mindset that things must immediately work, that they must be an immediate solution, is impossible to live up to. Nothing really ever works that way in any other sector, so we shouldn’t expect that from this one. There may be hidden factors to consider and several issues to work out, many more than to mention here, but that happens with every new human endeavor and can be overcome by investment in innovation.

The right mindset is to ask the right questions to help progress along the way. “So, how do I make this building behave like an ecosystem?” he asks. “I want this building to reflect that process. We create cities. We love ‘em. Let’s live in them. Let’s make them ecological units. Let’s encourage people to live in the city.”


However, we should remember that the social factors are just as important as the ecological ones. “Old MacDonald moved to the city!” he exclaims. “Remember, remember, he wanted the social services, for his kids. He wanted to go to the movies every now and then. He wanted to visit the library. He wanted social services to take care of…he didn’t want to have to worry about his water anymore, his heating, that’s all taken care of.” So maybe the solutions to human problems are also intertwined with solutions to environmental problems, and we cannot view or approach them as completely separate things.


Close to the end of my time with Despommier, I asked, “For vertical farming to happen, what is the next barrier to overcome?”

“Money,” he says. “Social will and political impetus. I think in another year, those 2 things will go away. They’ll go away because the virtue of this is to prescient not to want to do it.” So we can hope to imagine the future, with adequate investment in this new technology, we could have self-sufficient communities and a more sustainable lifestyle.


“Cool stuff,” Despommier comments. “It’s like a living building. It is a living building. I want it to be inside my city. I want to live near it. I want to get up at 3 o’clock in the morning and be able to make myself a Caesar salad by going to the green market that’s open 24 hours a day and buying something that was picked 10 minutes ago. And take it back to my apartment and chop it all up and put some nice stuff on it and sit down and eat it. That’s what I want.”