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.

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.

Download a free copy of the report here.
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.