Could New Mexico Feed Itself?

By Back on the Farm STANLEY CRAWFORD For the Journal

Afew years back, Alice Waters asked me whether I thought the region could feed itself. The occasion was a lunch at Seeds of Change, on the Rio Grande north of Espaola — a lunch made up of locally produced foods, including a rhubarb tart RoseMary confected from our own rhubarb.

I hemmed and hawed. If it had to, could northern New Mexico feed itself? Would it? Hadn’t it once? Finally I said, slowly and reluctantly, “Yes.” The conversation moved on to less demanding topics, but that “yes,” which was really a “yes, but” has nagged at me ever since.

In the intervening years I have tried to address all the buts: land prices driven into the stratosphere by real estate development and speculation, making it impossible for many young and talented growers to obtain an equity foothold from their labors; sprawl gobbling up agricultural land and water; artificially low food and fuel prices; a dearth of government programs to help small farmers with financial and technical assistance; a glut of government programs that subsidize agribusiness practices; climate change in the direction of severe oscillations between drought and flood.

The scene is not all bad, of course. Alice Waters herself, through her Berkeley restaurant, Chez Panisse, has nurtured a vast network of specialty organic small-farm suppliers up and down California. Through her initiative increasing numbers of Berkeley public school students are growing and serving their own produce in school cafeterias, as are the students of two Yale University colleges.

In Santa Fe, we have our own Farm-to-School program. Thousands of farmers’ markets throughout the country are keeping small farms alive and providing markets for a new generation of small-scale producers. Growers in Northern New Mexico have more farmers’ markets to sell at than in fact they can manage the time for: if you went to them all — Santa Fe, Pojoaque, Los Alamos, Espaola, Dixon and Taos – - you would have no time left to tend to your crops.

Alice Waters’ question was a good one, but it might be more useful to recast it as: Why does northern New Mexico no longer feed itself?

This in fact could be asked of every region of the country, even those that are agriculturally superproductive. Another Berkeley activist, writer Michael Pollan, places the source of many of our collective ills on the Farm Bill, which comes up for renewal this year.

In a recent New York Times Magazine piece, “You Are What You Grow,” he details how the $23 billion subsidies of the Farm Bill pump unhealthy quantities of added sugars and fats into our bodies, leading to increases in obesity and diabetes; depresses food prices throughout the world in order to earn export dollars, with the effect of driving small farmers out of business and thereby fueling the flow of refugees into cities everywhere and across our borders; encourages and subsidizes monocropping (particularly corn, soybeans, wheat, cotton), with disastrous effects on ecosystems in terms of pesticide, herbicide and nitrate contamination, turning agriculture into our single worst polluter.

In brief, the Farm Bill subsidizes corporate agribusiness at the expense of small producers and communities everywhere and at the expense of people and personal and public health. One might well call it one of the major forces of destabilization in the world, courtesy of the U.S. taxpayer. Only the arms business, our other major export dollar earner, wreaks more havoc.

Northern New Mexico will feed itself only when it becomes economically viable to do so. This will when happen the full social and environmental and health costs of doing business the agribusiness way are included in the price of its soft drinks, potato chips, sugared-up and over-salted and preservativelaced processed foods made with genetically engineered ingredients, its tainted spinach and lettuce, its meats produced by systems inhumane for both the creatures we sacrifice for our meals and for the workers we ask to perform this labor for us.

This will happen when we finally consider not just flavor whenever we eat but the whole complex that goes into making our meals, the conditions of our producers and workers, the health of their land and crops and livestock, the processes and therefore costs which bridge the distance between the dinner table and the field or the pasture or the milking parlor or the slaughter house.

As long as we prefer food produced by strangers under unknown conditions thousands of miles away from where we live, as long as we prefer packaging and the images of advertising to substance, as long as we prefer ignorance to knowledge, we are unlikely to be able to feed ourselves. That will come only when we finally realize it is important to personally know those who produce our food, to shake their hands, look them in the eye, read about them in the newspaper, gossip about them with our friends and neighbors. In short, when we finally reach the point of reintegrating food production into daily life everywhere, then things will change.

I doubt you will find these sentiments anywhere in the old USDA Farm Bill. They should be in the new one.

Crawford writes and farms in Dixon.

(c) 2007 Albuquerque Journal. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.