Last week I attended the Ninth Annual Rhode Island Local Food Forum, organized by Farm Fresh Rhode Island. The forum’s theme was “Center of the Plate,” reflecting its focus on local protein production. Particularly enlightening was a panel discussion whose moderator, academic chef Bill Idell, posed questions that resonate across the region.  These questions ultimately boil down to two big ones: First, what does a sustainable food system look like? And second, how can we make one happen?

The panel’s meat experts – local guru Pat McNiff of Pat’s Pastured and Mel Coleman from national good-meat powerhouse Niman Ranch – agreed that sustainable meat means raising animals in their natural habitats (not concentrated feedlots) and in a way that feeds both animals and soil. The panelists also highlighted that sustainable food systems require local capacity because geographically concentrated animal operations are at risk from extreme weather: last summer’s drought, for example, “force[d] livestock producers to liquidate herds because feed [wa]s too expensive.” All this means that local meat is not just grown in a place, but it also grows that place by enriching both land (ecologically) and community (economically).

Building capacity for local meat is tough, however, when farmers have limited access to land. This is the case in Rhode Island. Not only is land itself expensive here (as throughout New England), but property and estate taxes can make it almost impossible to keep productive land in agricultural use when it is more valuable as land for development (and is assessed as such for tax purposes). We at CLF are looking closely at this issue.

Moving from the land to the sea, the discussion yielded different insights from the panel’s seafood experts.  “Eating with the Ecosystem” founder Sarah Schumann and seafood-aggregation specialist Jared Auerbach of Red’s Best noted that sustainability means something much different for seafood than for meat, because so many fish and shellfish stocks are wild. They agreed that a sustainable seafood system should be biodiverse – instead of a singleminded focus on cod, for example, a sustainable system would mean sending more fluke, skate, scup, and squid to market. Diversifying the types of seafood we typically eat would allow overfished stocks to recover, and would also contribute to the resiliency of ocean life in the face of climate change and ocean acidification. Furthermore, a sustainable seafood system would mean – to borrow from Sarah Schumann – eating with the (local) ecosystem. Seafood brought in to local ports is easy to trace and to verify species, boat size, and fishing method – factors that are federally regulated but relatively easy to lose track of as more steps are added to the supply chain. Encouraging demand for diverse seafood products, localizing seafood markets with robust tracing and verification systems, and streamlining state and federal fisheries regulations would all help foster local, sustainable seafood systems.

All four panelists, farmers and fishers alike, agreed on another point: we need local, sustainable food systems both to limit and to respond to harms wrought by carbon dioxide emissions. These emissions cause climate change, leading to droughts and other extreme weather that disrupts agriculture; these disruptions, in turn, require robust local systems to add resilience to the global food system. And carbon dioxide emissions also cause ocean acidification, which poses an immediate risk to shellfish and a long-term risk to all ocean life.

All this highlights the importance of CLF’s farm-and-food and climate-change programs. Our work shutting down coal-fired power plants and promoting renewable energy helps to limit emissions that threaten our current food system (not to mention our planet). And our farm-and-food program promotes local and regional food systems that provide a broad range of environmental benefits. As CLF’s newest staff attorney, I am excited to be joining these efforts here in Rhode Island. The Local Food Forum made it clear that there are many good ideas brewing here – we just need to do the work to get our food policy right.

Grounded in our Colonial history, America’s harvest feast – Thanksgiving – is a quintessentially New England holiday, a time to be grateful for our region’s rich agricultural traditions of hard-fought bounty and community-minded collaboration.

As we head off to celebrate with our families (as the famous New England poem goes), it is worth remembering that many of our neighbors in New England are struggling, day in day out, to cobble together three meals of good, healthy food. We know that, here in my relatively prosperous state of New Hampshire, more than 1 in 5 households with children experience food insecurity, and more than 130,000 people turn to emergency sources of food like food pantries every year (a number that has more than doubled in the last six years). Hunger and poor nutrition pose special risks for children, who may experience lasting damage to their health, educational outcomes, and economic opportunities.

The stark reality of childhood hunger is one of the driving forces behind CLF’s Farm and Food Initiative, our ongoing work to build a thriving, sustainable food system that grows our region’s farming economy – in rural and urban areas alike – to benefit all people in New England.

In this spirit, CLF is grateful to be a part of a new effort in New Hampshire to tackle childhood hunger, which was formally launched yesterday. Spearheaded by Children’s Alliance of New Hampshire and a diverse coalition of stakeholders known as NH Hunger Solutions, the effort – New Hampshire’s Roadmap to End Child Hunger – has identified three key goals for the state: (1) increase access to healthy food by expanding the number of families that benefit from school meal, food assistance, and nutrition programs, (2) strengthen New Hampshire’s food systems with policies that improve the availability of affordable, local, healthy foods for families of all economic groups and that strengthen farmers’ connections with schools and community food programs, and (3) ensure overall economic security for all families by enhancing public financial assistance for those in need. Yesterday’s rollout of the Roadmap was a terrific event in the gymnasium at Henniker’s Community School, featuring a number of community and food system leaders. You can read more about the event in this NewHampshire.com article.

We at CLF are particularly gratified that the Roadmap recognizes the importance of a strong, resilient food system that connects all people to healthy, affordable foods produced locally and sustainably by New England and New Hampshire farmers. As we noted on Food Day last month, CLF and others are hard at work identifying the policy and practical barriers to this kind of system and developing recommended solutions.

As implementation of the Roadmap begins – in collaboration with the companion efforts of Food Solutions New England to build a statewide Food Advisory Council – we look forward to helping New Hampshire achieve the Roadmap’s ambitious goals. As we share Thanksgiving with our families, CLF and our partners are committed to living up to New England’s heritage of sharing the harvest.

Fifty years ago this week the world was gripped by the Cuban Missile Crisis, then unfolding. It was the low point, perhaps, of the cold war, a several-decade period in which hundreds of millions of people got used to the idea that absolute, global catastrophe could be just 20 minutes away.

Or at least we tried to get used to it. I recall being very confused, as a first-grader in the early 1960’s, about why sometimes when the alarm bell rang we quickly went outside, and other times we hunkered down next to the thick brick walls deep inside the school, and waited.

Fortunately, that catastrophe hasn’t happened. However, the mindset that most American baby-boomers grew up with – the entire world could change very drastically and permanently, during our lifetime if not during the afternoon – is still embedded in our psyches. It gave many of us nightmares when we were young.

We need to tap that well of concern, now. The world is changing dramatically. It’s happening more slowly than ICBMs delivering nuclear warheads over the North Pole, but it is speeding up. Everybody who goes outside knows that. Unlike the destruction-in-a-flash that many of us grew up imagining, it’s now change-within-a-decade, or change-by-next-growing-season. And we’re not only imagining. We’re seeing it.

So what’s an American Boomer to do? Wake up. Accept responsibility. Our resource-gobbling lifestyle has caused this mess. Suburbanization has wasted US resources for two generations. Change it, now. And use your still-massive influence to change regressive policies. It’s outrageous that both major candidates for President fully endorse dramatic expansion of drilling for fossil fuels. Don’t stand for that. Demand that we change course, and lead the world in doing so. If we don’t, large parts of our planet will become as inhospitable as we feared in our nuclear nightmares as children. Only then it will be a reality for our grandchildren and their children.

Then, set the table for the next generation, and get out of the way. The “Millenials” are intuitively heading in the right direction. Whether they are reacting to the ecological mess we are leaving them or the economic constraints they feel matters little: they’ve got the right ideas. They are investing their time and money locally.  They want smaller living spaces. They own fewer cars and use transit more. They are much more inclined toward sharing – cars, space, resources, goods, politics – than exclusive ownership. They are fond of repurposed goods.

And this is not just urban hipsters. All sorts of 20-somethings are living with their parents, shopping on Craigslist and launching businesses through crowd-sourced investment platforms like Kickstarter. They are revitalizing places across New England that Boomers and their parents left behind: from cities like Boston, Providence and Portland, to towns like Portsmouth, NH, Winooski, VT and Pittsfield, MA. They are eating food grown closeby by people they know. And all of this will create – in the decades to come – a way of living in New England that is healthier for all, lower-carbon, and more resilient to our changing climate than the way we have lived in this country since 1945.

It’s time. As the cold war has fizzled we’ve not been sure what would follow. Globalization, the rise of Petro-states, the incredible growth of China as an economic power, increasing inequality of wealth, climate change – these are centuries of chickens coming home to roost. There’s a lot going on. But at least it’s happening more or less in front of us, in the public eye, and in a way that offers opportunities to actually do something about it.

In that way, it’s a different kind of crisis than global nuclear annihilation. We all felt powerless to avert that. Perhaps that’s part of why it was so scary.The forces imperiling the planet now may be even more powerful, as they emanate from many different places and have quite a head of steam.

But they are not impenetrable. Smart, inspired and hopeful people all over are finding ways to bend those forces toward a better future. It is our responsibility, fellow Boomers, to help them.

I am reminded  of the story of the so-called Big A dam on the Penobscot River in Maine – a project that, after much debate, was never built.

Twenty five years ago CLF and others opposed this ill-advised project, advancing the then-novel argument that energy efficiency could satisfy the power needs of the time better than a dam that would have turned two outstanding reaches of river into a slackwater impoundment. A nice summary of the controversy and its context is here. The author, David Platt, a long-time journalist who covered the story, notes that it “became a fascinating discussion about energy, engineering, corporate power, the rising influence of non-corporate interests, the need to protect the environment, and the changing nature of the paper industry and the economy in Maine.”

A generation later, and amplified 1,000 times, that is our story – the story of our challenges and our opportunities at the beginning of the 21st century. At the end of this century we will and should be remembered as much for what we started as for what we stopped, as much for what we were for as for what we where against. At this time in history, while several generations – and people from many perspectives, not only the environmental movement – share the stage, it is imperative that we come together and get it right.

On October 24, CLF will join with people around the country to celebrate Food Day as part of a nationwide movement for healthy, affordable, and sustainable food. This is a time for us to gather and reflect on the agricultural abundance our region can provide, and the importance of making sure that our food systems not only supply bodily nutrition, but  also contribute in a healthful way to our community ecosystems.

At the smallest scale, CLF’s Boston staff will celebrate Food Day by breaking local bread (and cheese!) from Allandale Farm and sharing in the story of one urban community fighting for food justice: we’ll be getting together to watch The Garden, a documentary about the community’s fight to save a14-acre community garden in South Central Los Angeles from being sold for development. This important story reflects the struggles that many of our communities of color and low income communities face in order to gain access to a basic right: nutritious food. (For more on CLF’s Farm & Food work, check out this page.)

But CLF’s celebration of healthy, affordable, and sustainable food is not limited to October 24th. CLF attorneys working on our Farm and Food Initiative work year round to protect, expand, and improve our regional food system, tackling some of our region’s most pressing environmental and health issues, and making our region more resilient to the impacts of climate change already underway.

From our efforts in Vermont working with farmers and other professionals to demystify community-financing tools available to farmers seeking to start, or grow, their farms, to our study of policy and market barriers related to urban agriculture in Greater Boston, CLF and CLF Ventures’ Farm and Food work is both advocating sustainable farming practices and unlocking the economic development potential of agricultural development. And this is just the beginning: over the next two years, CLF will engage in the most comprehensive regional policy analysis that has ever been done for commercial agriculture in New England, leading to a suite of policy recommendations that will enable our region to develop a self-supporting food system.

CLF understands that food lies at the intersection of many of our most pressing problems – the obesity epidemic, soaring healthcare costs, a faltering economy, climate change, and social inequity. We hope you’ll not only join CLF in celebrating Food Day on October 24 (check out activities in your area here), but continue the journey with us as we advocate solutions that bring healthy food to all of New England’s communities using sustainable farming practices and reducing the impacts of climate change.

Seasonal produce at the Portland, Maine Farmer's Market - photo courtesy of www.facebook.com/PortlandMaineFarmersMarket

“Local” has become a new buzz word in America but what does it really mean, and why should we get on board? The reality is that within our own lifetimes we will witness the end of cheap oil and will have to learn to get by with less, whether we want to or not. In an attempt to practice just that, I planted a 600 sq. foot vegetable garden on some family property last year and found it to be very rewarding.

My family and I tilling the ground that will eventually become the garden. I am the farthest on the left holding the rake. Moving right across the photo: my sister, my husband, my brother, my dad, and my brother-in-law (operating the Gravely).

Our family garden about 7 weeks after planting.

Like many people though, I enjoy eating fresh produce all year round and when growing season is over, I find myself perusing the grocery aisles for tomatoes from Mexico and bell peppers from Holland. How can I justify this when I think about how much oil it takes to manufacture, fuel and maintain the truck or cargo ship that transported that produce to my supermarket?

The obvious answer to this dilemma is to only buy produce during its growing season and to do so at your local farmer’s market, which for me is the South Portland Farmer’s Market. Here in Maine, there are many farmers’ markets, several of which operate during the winter months! In fact, the Portland Farmer’s Market holds the accolade of being the oldest continually operating market in the country, something Mainers can be proud of!

While I would love to support my local farmer’s market year round, my current budget does not permit me to do so. To help compensate for this, I plan to enroll in a food preservation class next year at my local university (University of Southern Maine). The course teaches not only canning techniques, but drying, freezing, pickling and much more. That way I can begin to build skills on how to preserve my own harvest, which will ultimately help my budget.

No matter what measures you decide are right for you – growing or buying local, eating in season or preserving your own harvest – the outcome will be the same: you will reduce greenhouse gases and gain valuable experience in how to use less oil, a skill that will help save your wallet in the long run as the price of oil rises.

Urban agriculture holds great promise for Boston.

This post was coauthored by Melissa Hoffer & Jo Anne Shatkin.

We are excited to share with you the news that today CLF and CLF Ventures released a report that, for the first time, details the economic development potential for urban agriculture in Greater Boston, assesses its environmental and health co-benefits, and examines current market and policy barriers to expanded food production in Greater Boston. The report‘s findings confirm that urban agriculture can play an important role in creating a more livable, carbon resilient, healthier, economically vibrant, and environmentally sustainable city—if we put smart policies in place and encourage market development for Boston grown foods.

Download a free copy of the report here: http://clf.org/growing-green/

The City of Boston has taken important steps over the past two years to advance urban agriculture, and new businesses are taking root, including City Growers, a Mattapan-based farming business that is featured in this report. There is a palpable sense of excitement about the potential of this new urban vision for agriculture for communities; possibilities abound. But CLF and CLF Ventures believe it is more than possible— it is a necessity, and an urgent one at that as we face the challenges of climate change, an obesity epidemic, lack of availability of healthy foods in many communities, and a fragile economy.

The report found that converting as few as 50 acres of vacant or underutilized land around Boston into agricultural production would spur job creation, improve access to healthy, local, fresh food, and reduce environmental harms. Key findings of the report include:

• Land is available. 50 acres – an area the size of Boston Common – is a small portion of the vacant or underutilized land available in Boston.
• Urban farms would stimulate the economy by creating jobs. 50 acres of urban agriculture in Boston will likely generate at least 130 direct farming jobs and may generate over 200 jobs depending on actual business characteristics and revenue.
• Healthy, local and affordable food. 50 acres in agricultural production would provide enough fresh produce to feed over 3,600 people over a six-month retail season. If the produce is used to prepare healthy school lunches in Boston Public Schools, 50 acres could provide more than one serving of fresh produce for each lunch served to a student eligible for free or reduced school lunch over a six month period. If 800 acres of potentially available City-owned land were put into agricultural production, the food needs of approximately 10 percent of Boston’s total population could be fully satisfied during a six-month retail season.
• Significant environmental impacts. Urban agriculture in Boston will result in a net reduction of greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. 50 acres of properly managed soils would sequester about 114 tons of cabon dioxide (CO2) per year and may result in an additional CO2 reduction of up to 4,700 tons per year.
• Community adaptation. No less than 6,000 new temperature records were set during the recent March 2012 heat wave, and more than 40,000 have been set for the year-to-date. Meanwhile, the July 2011-June 2012 period was the warmest 12-month period of any 12-months on record for the contiguous U.S., with the first half of 2012 being the hottest ever recorded. The International Energy Agency’s recent projection of a 10.8 degree F temperature increase over pre-industrial levels by the end of this century underscores the fact that a more decentralized food system will be necessary to enable our communities to better adapt to changing climate conditions, including the impacts of more frequent severe weather. Urban agriculture is a part of this solution.

As Jo Anne said in the press release announcing Growing Green, it’s clear that even 50 acres of sustainable agriculture on available land would be an economic stimulus and environmental resource for Boston. While we focused on a 50 acre test scenario, these conclusions are scalable across New England. Imagine how vibrant New England would be like with a robust and sustainable regional food system.

In addition to the potential benefits, the report also considers the policy and market barriers to fully realizing the potential of urban agriculture, examining the ways in which promoting urban agriculture will require city and state involvement and key needs for such involvement. Such barriers include the need for policies that provide affordable access to land, one of the key market barriers for both new and experienced farmers; strategies to reduce the risks associated with the Commonwealth’s hazardous material cleanup law; improved access to high quality compost; and better financing options to overcoming prohibitive capital and operating costs, amongst other findings.

Our ongoing work seeks to link urban agriculture to the larger regional food system, and focuses on how to overcome some of the barriers we have identified.

Boston is ideally positioned to play a lead role in coordinating with the Massachusetts Food Policy Council, other New England states, and cities around the region to build a vision for a New England regional food system and make it happen. Boston is emerging as a national leader in urban agriculture innovation, and can be a voice for the benefits of urban agriculture and as one of the region’s largest consumers, help to build the market for regionally grown food.

For more resources on this topic:

Find a copy of the report here: www.clf.org/growing-green/
Find an infographic detailing the report here: http://bit.ly/clfgrowinggreen
To read more about CLF’s Farm & Food Initiative, click here: http://www.clf.org/our-work/healthy-communities/food-and-farm-initiative/

Creative Commons image courtesy of BenandAsho on Flickr

We throw away a lot of food. Sometimes the scraps are inedible, like banana peels. Sometimes we forget about things in the refrigerator until we notice the smell. And sometimes our eyes are just bigger than our stomachs. Regardless of the reason, a lot of food scraps end up in our trash and ultimately the landfill. This is a wasted opportunity to realize environmental and economic benefits by using food scraps to improve soil health and generate renewable energy.

By diverting food scraps to other uses, such as generating energy and creating compost, we avoid the need to expand landfills in the state or transport waste long distances to out-of-state facilities. When food scraps and other organic matter decompose in landfills, they produce methane gas, a potent contributor to climate change. So diverting food scraps from landfills also helps us meet the state’s aggressive greenhouse-gas emission reduction goals.

To realize these benefits, the Massachusetts Department of Environmental Protection (DEP) is supporting public and private investment in a new kind of infrastructure for managing organic materials. But for this new infrastructure to succeed, DEP and the project developers that will build and operate this infrastructure need to convince the public that food scraps are not garbage, but something else entirely.

The DEP is currently working on an action plan for managing Massachusetts’s organic waste. The state needs a plan, because it has set lofty goals to divert organic material from landfill disposal to be used in other processes. The state’s draft Solid Waste Master Plan calls for diverting 35% of food waste, estimated to be about 350,000 tons of material per year. This goal is echoed by the Clean Energy Results Program, which sets a further goal of 50 megawatts of installed capacity of renewable energy from aerobic and anaerobic digestion facilities by 2020. And let’s not forget the proposal to ban commercial food waste from Massachusetts landfills in 2014. These are great goals, because diverting organic material out of the solid waste stream provides opportunities for economic development that can improve the environmental impacts of solid waste management, and now DEP is developing the plan to make sure we get there.

The plan aims to ensure that organic “waste” isn’t wasted in a landfill. It calls for a few things:

• Gathering better and more current information about sources of food waste,
• Providing funding and technical assistance to work out the logistics of separating food waste from the actual trash, and
• Working with haulers to move this material to appropriate processing facilities.

There are also provisions for funding and technical assistance to facilitate the construction of additional processing infrastructure, like anaerobic digestion (AD) facilities, and to develop good markets for the resulting products.

Organics diversion presents an economic opportunity for cash-strapped municipalities to save money through reduced trash fees. It also allows developers – municipal or private – to generate revenue by using “waste” organics as inputs for marketable products like compost and other soil amendments and as a source of clean, renewable heat and electricity. At a time when municipal budgets are facing historic shortfalls and municipalities are seeking means of both cutting costs and creating revenue, this is surely a good thing.

DEP’s draft action plan is a progressive, proactive approach to organics management, but it’s missing something very important. It provides much-needed support and direction for people and organizations that are already proponents of better organic material management and will help project proponents navigate the technical and regulatory processes to achieve success. But what about the majority of people who likely have no idea that the DEP is interested in doing something dramatically different with organic waste?

This action plan and DEP efforts to date on this issue do little to address the very real need for public engagement and outreach to help citizens and businesses understand the good reasons for organics diversion. These include:

• Mitigating greenhouse gas emissions through improved methane utilization;
• Generating renewable energy from anaerobic digestion; and
• Producing nutrient-rich soil amendments through composting.

The intersection of waste management and energy development is more complex than either of these individual business sectors taken on their own. For instance, energy facilities such as anaerobic digesters, which use “waste” materials as inputs to generate energy, face the siting hurdles typically encountered by both energy and waste facilities. Public concerns with other renewable energy technologies, such as wind and solar, have emerged relatively recently, but communities and individuals have been fighting against landfills and transfer stations for a very long time.

Today, forward-thinking people and businesses are beginning to talk about “materials management” rather than “waste management,” and those on the inside know what we mean by that. But most people don’t currently make the distinction, especially when the materials in question are leftover food and other organics that can rot. In the case of a proposed anaerobic digestion facility, the result is often a contested siting process. While AD proponents see facilities that will produce clean energy and environmentally beneficial soil products, opponents are concerned about siting waste incinerators, trash transfer stations, and toxic sludge.

The DEP, along with other state agencies such as the Department of Agriculture and Department of Energy Resources, is pushing to change the way “waste” materials are managed in Massachusetts. This is a good thing for economic development and the environmental performance of our materials-based economy. However, many people will not readily accept the subtle changes in regulatory definitions that distinguish separated materials from mixed solid waste. With these changes, materials that formerly had to be permitted as solid waste (trash) and processed at a permitted solid waste facility are no longer legally considered trash, so they can be processed at a composting or AD facility without a solid waste permit. I’m very happy this distinction is being made for organic material, but I know that many other people will consider this just another form of garbage disposal.

An action plan to encourage better organic materials management through diversion to composting and digestion needs to include significant resources to engage stakeholders around the Commonwealth to have open and honest conversations about the wide-ranging benefits, the potential pitfalls, and what everyone needs to know to avoid problems.

There is no reason to continue to dump organic material into landfills and many reasons to get everyone on board with using this material to generate more economic value and more environmental benefits for Massachusetts. But we can’t just “dot the i’s and cross the t’s” on the permit applications; we have to engage with people and navigate the changes in a collaborative and productive way. Diverting organic material from landfills can lead to a host of economic, environmental, and community benefits, but anyone who thinks changing the system will be as easy as selecting a site, telling the neighbors about the benefits, and awaiting approval and praise is in for a rude awakening. CLF Ventures looks forward to working with communities and project proponents to engage in open, clear discussions of the real impacts and benefits of organics management facilities so that all stakeholders share the same understanding of the issues and speak with the same terminology.

America is waking up to the fact that the unfathomable amounts of animal dung generated by our industrial agricultural system is poisoning our water and our air.  Those who live by waters polluted by the excesses of industrial agriculturae have long understood the grim connection between our cheap-food system and the slow death of rivers, lakes, streams, estuaries, and other coastal waters.  Now the mainstream media is bringing wider attention to this looming environmental disaster.

Exhibit A:  The Washington Post recently ran a prominent environmental expose under the headline “Manure becomes pollutant as volume grows” This excerpt explains the problem well:

Animal manure, a byproduct as old as agriculture, has become an unlikely modern pollution problem,….The country simply has more dung than it can handle: Crowded together at a new breed of megafarms, livestock produce three times as much waste as people, more than can be recycled as fertilizer for nearby fields.   That excess manure gives off air pollutants, and it is the country’s fastest-growing large source of methane, a greenhouse gas. And it washes down with the rain, helping to cause the 230 oxygen-deprived “dead zones”

"Dead zones" are areas within waterbodies where oxygen becomes severely depleted when massive algae colonies--fed by nutrient-rich manure and other agricultural waste--die off. The oxygen-depleting algae decomposition process has disastrous results for fish and other aquatic life. This fishkill occured on the Neuse River in North Carolina an area of intensive factory farming.

Exhibit B: Popular talk radio host and TV personality Don Imus featured an unusually-sobering interview with investigative author David Kirby about his new book “Animal Factory.”  In vivid detail, the author explained the inhumane conditions in which thousands of hogs, cows, and chickens are often confined at these industrial meat and dairy operations that are much more akin to factories than “farms.”  Citing many gasp-inducing horror stories from the book, Kirby underscored the public health and environmental risks created by the oceans of excrement these operations release into the environment when they saturate spray fields with levels of liquid manure that runs off into nearby rivers, streams, and lakes.

Exhibit C: Through the international success of documentary film “Food, Inc.,” which is nominated for a “Best Documentary Feature” Academy Award millions of moviegoers were exposed to moving pictures of the environmental and social repercussions of industrial agriculture.

Defenders of industrial agriculture will tell you that spraying liquid manure on to pastures and cropland helps to fertilize that land to grow crops to feed the animals.  In reality, spraying massive amounts of liquid manure on the land is a cheap way for these industrial farms to dump their wastes.  The rest of us bear the true costs in the form of water that is unsafe for drinking, swimming, and fishing among other public health risks and other pollution problems.

Liquid manure is spread to saturation levels on a farm on the shores of Lake Champlain's St. Albans Bay, a part of the lake that has long suffered from algae blooms. Though blooms have yet to cause fishkills on the scale pictured above, scientists have documented a growing "dead zone" in the Lake's Northeast Arm--an area where manure from thousands of dairy cows is spread on riverside and lakeside cropland during much of the year.

This problem is coming to a head in Vermont, where lax regulation and poor management of industrial-scale dairy operations contributes pollution that feeds annual outbreaks of blue-green algae and nuisance weeds in Lake Champlain and is also responsible for bacteria contamination in the Lake and many other rivers and streams.  We would never allow unchecked pollution like this from any other industry, but the powerful agribusiness lobby has largely prevented the type of legislative and law-enforcement responses that this problem demands.  To learn more about CLF’s actions to document and force clean up and prevent a worsening of this dung disaster, read our report ”Failing Our Waters, Failing our Farms,” and the legal petition sent to EPA seeking stronger action under the Clean Water Act.   And check back here for a future post on other ways to get our society out of this dung dilemma.

In an insightful reaction to President Obama’s health care speech to a joint session of Congress, noted author Michael Pollan (Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food) said something very provocative on the pages of the New York Times.  Unlike South Carolina Congressman Joe Wilson, he didn’t accuse the president of lying.  But he did make pretty clear that the health care debate thus far has ignored a very significant part of the problem: an acknowledgment that our transformation into a fast food nation is playing a huge role in making health care more costly and less accessible for all Americans.

In his Op-ed titled “Big Food vs. Big Insurance“, he writes:

Cheap food is going to be popular as long as the social and environmental costs of that food are charged to the future. There’s lots of money to be made selling fast food and then treating the diseases that fast food causes. One of the leading products of the American food industry has become patients for the American health care industry.

He’s got a very compelling point, and it becomes even more compelling if you follow the “environmental costs” thread that he mentions only in passing.

Much of federal food policy is all about subsidies for corn, both as a feed crop for fatty meats raised under inhumane conditions on “factory farms” and for use in the ubiquitous sweetener high-fructose corn syrup found in calorie-laden soda and other processed foods throughout the supermarket.  Most of the corn grown in this country requires intensive application of nutrient-rich fertilizers, especially those with nitrogen.  A lot of the fertilizer gets dumped into rivers either through excess application onto the fields or through the mishandling of manure from the animals who eat all that corn without fully digesting the nutrients.

The water pollution problems caused by our heavily-subsidized fertilizer- intensive agriculture only serve to exacerbate our reliance on cheap and unhealthy food.  The result are seasonal “dead zones“: areas in polluted waterbodies like the Gulf of Mexico where algae blooms fed by the fertilizer runoff deplete waters of oxygen that fish need to live.  So to grow corn to fuel the increasing consumption of unhealthy process foods and soda related to the explosion of costly and increasingly-common health problems like Type 2 diabetes, we’re using fertilizers that destroy the capacity of fisheries to provide alternative sources of much healthier nutrition.  A vicious cycle if ever there was one.

Self-defeating food policies that poison and destroy fisheries aren’t the only link to rising health care costs.  As CLF reported in our “Conservation Matters” article on mercury pollution, “there is a high correlation between children with mental retardation, cerebral palsy, and other neurological disorders and mothers who have ingested high amounts of methylmercury from poisoned fish and water.”  To prevent these costly, life-long health conditions Northeastern states warn pregnant women and young children not to eat freshwater fish from the over “10,000 lakes, ponds, and reservoirs, as well as more than 46,000 miles of river deemed too toxic for fish consumption.” The pollution comes from coal-fired power plants whose owners refuse to sacrifice a small part of their enormous profits to install readily-available mercury pollution controls. CLF is continuing to fight for tougher mercury standards in hopes that New England’s freshwater fisheries–a historical source of great sustenance for our region’s people–will once again provide safe, nutritious food rather than potential health hazards.

There’s no doubt that health insurance reform is desperately needed, but to succeed in controlling costs and making us healthier it must accompanied by reforms to our food and environmental policies.