How Will We Feed Ourselves? Sustainable Agriculture in the Roaring Fork Valley
The world, and this valley, is running out of farmland, seed diversity, safe food and a choice of who to buy it from.
Many doomsday prophets have long contended that before we blow ourselves up fighting over energy or water we will starve to death. Or go to war to keep from it. In the case of the famous 1973 sci-fi movie “Soylent Green,” mankind arrives at an even spookier alternative. Now the farming and ranching industry in the U.S. finds itself in the kind of perversely perilous state that makes that plot seem prescient. Agriculture stands poised to make more money than it ever has in history. Yet it may not last long enough to sustain the planet.
Land development is swallowing up the world’s arable ground faster than a B-movie special effect. According to U.S. Department of Agriculture statistics, between 2002 and 2007 the number of farms in Garfield County increased by 25 percent while the total acreage devoted to agriculture decreased by 17 percent. That’s an extreme example of a trend where increasing numbers of ever smaller farms are owned by people for whom farming isn’t their principal livelihood. The result is that the bulk of our food production has become dangerously concentrated in the hands of a few mega-companies, as chronicled in the feature film documentary, “Food, Inc.,” released in June.
Less farmland means less food, and this paucity of production has made many staples more expensive, even in a recession. Japan’s legally mandated hoarding has resulted in rice riots in Asia, driving up the price of the world’s most in-demand foodstuff. (Early Aspen’s mining camps suffered flour riots for some of the same reasons.) Worldwide use of corn to produce ethanol has helped triple its value over the past two years, making it almost unobtainable for poorer countries that depend on it. And food prices overall, as anyone who shops knows, went up over 5 percent in the last quarter of 2008 while nearly everything else went down, including energy costs.
One irony about rapidly running out of places to grow things is that farmland, previously not valuable enough to save from development, may finally become a good investment on its own. Western real estate brokers specializing in working ranch and farm properties haven’t felt the downturn nearly as much as other realtors. And countries such as Brazil, with vast areas of ranchland still available for reasonable sums, are being touted by the USDA for having the ability to dramatically expand their food production.
Still, farming and ranching have always been beset by problems. Tightened credit, for businesses that can’t survive without it, is a huge one right now. Fortunately farmers nationwide tend to be far less leveraged than other borrowers—or than they were during the last farm crisis in the 1980s, according to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack. In this valley, unlike most rural areas, many farms and ranches aren’t leveraged at all since they’re owned by people who would only need to borrow money if it conferred tax advantages.
Other current agriculture issues include invasive species that are impacting American fruit crops, as well as severe droughts in Texas and California. Farmers and ranchers also fear losing some long-held subsidies. The global “grain rush” has compelled American farmers to pull more than two million acres from a federal subsidy program that paid to keep them fallow for wildlife habitat, returning them to production that will pay more. Good for sustaining food supplies, bad for sustaining wildlife. And the hotly debated ethanol industry can’t survive without permanent subsidies, casting further doubt on its viability.
Which is not to damn biofuels in general. Two recent studies, one by the Nature Conservancy and one by Princeton, concluded that biofuels made from animal and food waste, damaged trees, algae and corn stover show the most promise because they don’t require ruinous land conversion that offsets their benefits. Montrose, Colo., two hours from Aspen, hosts a sizable biodiesel facility that uses recycled deep-fat fryer oil from Telluride restaurants to make 800 gallons of fuel per month, distributed to its co-op members. And longtime Roaring Fork Valley rancher, physicist and philanthropist George Stranahan is engaged in a local agricultural-energy, carbon sequestration project.
“Western pastureland used to be part of the agriculture industry and profitable at that. Today the profitability is marginal at best,” notes Stranahan. “Our fundamental question is, ‘Could these same lands be profitable in the energy industry?’ The particular package we are examining is a no-till cellulose crop thermo-chemically processed into liquid fuels and biochar. The biochar would be placed back in soils as an amendment and as permanent carbon sequestration. We work at understanding which technologies are likely winners and how the economics would work for the landowner.” In layman’s terms, they’re trying to find something new to grow and turn into fuel that will also have charcoal as a by-product that can be used to put carbon back into the ground instead of letting it pollute the atmosphere.
On the individual level here and around the country, people are returning to gardening as a way of eating healthier and dealing with high food prices. While this valley is like most of America in importing much of its sustenance, substantial efforts to offset that are being made. Aspen has provided community garden plots at the Marolt Open Space for years; the Common Sense Regeneration Project is helping locals start backyard gardens; a number of farmers’ markets now sell locally raised, and often organic, products; and residents have long been an enthusiastic market for peaches and other fruits grown in nearby areas from Paonia to Grand Junction.
Homegrown, hormone-free beef, pork, lamb and poultry have become almost the norm around Aspen in private homes as well as restaurants practicing the “eat locally” ethic. Wild-game-farm meats are also readily available, and hunting for your own deer, elk and trout keeps the food local and reduces its costs significantly. As does buying directly from the producers in quantity and paying a third of what you would in the supermarket.
Which is handy since a big problem with organic foods is that they fetch a 50 percent average premium over conventional food, earning Whole Foods stores the nickname “Whole Paycheck.” The payback is that the pricing provides producers with the incentive to go through the rigors to get and stay certified. And organics are healthier for the consumer as well as the growers and their land, giving their crops more long-term sustainability. It also helps sales that organic food often tastes better and is much in demand amongst gourmets and top chefs.
While the Ute Indians confined most of their local agriculture to the lower elevations around Silt and Rifle, when miners and settlers alighted in the upper Roaring Fork Valley in the late 1800s, they started raising as much food as they could where they were, with potatoes leading the list. The late Wilton Jaffee Sr. used to grow high-altitude seed potatoes at his W/J Ranch on McClain Flats as recently as 20 years ago in a continuation of a century-long tradition there, selling them across the country. Now the indigenous McClure Red potato, once the dominant crop in the valley, is being reintroduced here by Slow Foods Roaring Fork.
Even with all of this, the best estimates are that valley-wide, we still import more than 90 percent of our food. So how much could we improve? Jerome Osentowski is the founder of the Central Rocky Mountain Permaculture Institute and by acclaim the valley’s leading progressive agricultural expert. He does very well on his own unique and difficult growing property with his highly diversified and productive “perennial polyculture” model. “Instead of the old one-dimensional, three-month model some people are stuck on, we use multi-dimensional integrated principles,” he explains. “We’d modify my techniques and remain open to multiple strategies if we could get just 100 acres of open space on this valley floor into production. Then we could really turn things around here.”
“We know we could make a big difference in the valley just from seeing what a huge amount of food Jerome can produce on his half acre,” says architect Michael Thompson, who works with Osentowski on several projects and businesses, including EcoDesign Greenhouses. “On my own 300 square feet at home, following Jerome’s advice, I grow enough fruit and vegetables to last my wife and I five months.”
The big project right now for Osentowski, Thompson and others of the local “foodie groups” is to raise money to fund gardens, greenhouses and Community Supported Agriculture farm-school classes at every school in the valley to help educate children and adults about indoor gardening while also feeding them.
Of course, in order to grow anything you need seeds. And one of the most serious problems confronting modern agriculture is preservation of seed banks and species diversity. Estimates are the U.S. has lost 97 percent of its original fruit and vegetable varieties because of modern agriculture. The total global market value of commercial seeds in 2008 was $36.5 billion. And as the Organic Seed Alliance notes, the trends toward consolidation in the seed industry are scary. “No other natural resource (marine, timber, minerals) has ever shifted from public to private hands with such rapidity, such intensity of concentration and so little oversight.”
OSA, says executive director Dan Hobbs of Manitou Springs, Colo., is trying to counter this direction at the grassroots level, working with farmers in Colorado, New Mexico and elsewhere to breed new seed varieties for organic farming and gardening. And the Global Seed Vault in Norway is dedicated to protecting all remaining seed species for posterity.
Concerns also continue over the lack of regulation for genetically modified foods, and our food supply’s vulnerability to such things as Bird Flu and Mad Cow and Chronic Wasting diseases. Even rumors in those areas cause far-reaching shut-downs that reduce supplies and jack up prices. Just as it is risky to depend on unpredictable foreign energy sources, so it is with food that has to travel long distances. Besides higher prices, too many things can happen to it before it arrives, including that it doesn’t. And it’s worth bearing in mind what happens in “Soylent Green,” when the world has too many people and not enough food. People become the food.
