TribeBlog

Last year I posted photographs of our gardens at Onetribe and my house and I hinted at my interest in whole foods and agriculture, but I didn’t go into much detail. Faced with some gift certificates to bookstores and a little extra cash over the holidays, I bombarded myself with new books to immerse my late night hours and weekends with. I have a huge interest in the idea that humans should be capable of sustaining themselves individually and as communities without the need for industrialized farming, which ruins the land and produces far inferior “food,” even after pumping it full of growth hormones and genetically altering its seed. Industrialized agriculture aims to modify nature to suit human need, which creates an imbalance we are unable to control. Genetically modifying seed for higher yield creates weaker, less nutritionally productive plants. Spraying pesticides and fertilizers on land not only disrupts the food chain, killing off animals and insects beneficial to the natural selection and growth of plants, but it overlooks the root of the problem of industrialized farming to begin with – it is not sustainable because it is a one way system in which nutrients are leeched from the land year after year without replenishment. Large farming conglomerates are constantly having to fix this imbalance with chemicals, creating an even larger problem each time it happens. The “food” grown today and flown all over the world out of season for consumption whenever we “feel like it” is nutritionally deficient to the tune of 30% to 50% of what it would contain if it was grown naturally on a normal time scale with no pesticides or fertilizers, and utilizes millions of tons of fossil fuels a year to produce petrochemicals sprayed on fields and fuels for machinery and shipment. We are, quite literally, eating oil in the end.

In my travels to Indonesia I have spent time doing research on Masanobu Fukuoka’s methods for natural no-till, no-flood cultivation of indigenous rice versus the government subsidized back-breaking growth of till, flood, pesticide and fertilizer ridden crop after crop growth of non-indigenous hybridized less nutritious rice. The difference in the health of the plants and the first few yields is amazing. The farmers around the experimental patty my friends Charlie and Wayan are growing in are jealous and wary of the fact that the naturally grown crop looked far worse for longer and ended up exploding into a much higher yield per plant than the industrially cultivated variety. The sad thing is that the wealthier land owners which own the land that the Balinese farm for rice take the money they make from the sale of the inferior rice and turn around and buy the traditional, much more nutritious indigenous rice with it to feed their families while the farmers are forced to feed their families with the industrialized, less nutritious crop. I am returning to Indonesia this year most likely in March to work on Onetribe stuff with our artists there and to continue my research with Charlie and Wayan on sustainable agriculture.

I have a big problem with the current state of the “organic” and “green” industries right now. They are almost exclusively geared toward high end products. I feel that the way to really make a difference is to start from the ground up, to make these products and healthy, whole, natural food affordable and available to the people that need it most, the poor, the malnourished, along with education about why they should not be eating all of the genetically modified corn-sugar ridden junk from fast food restaurants and stacked in the freezer section of the grocery store. There is so much food in the world that if it was re-organized to be grown locally and sustainably, there would not be a hungry mouth on this planet. But health is evidently not a basic human right. Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness are great and all, but if we are forced to make money for basic nourishment, there is something wrong with the system. The problem is that it IS a system, and this is what urbanized, sustainable growing and community based efforts aim to dismantle.

I recently gained access and blessing to start to utilize many acres of farmland about 60 miles SE of Richmond, VA as a test bed for several theories on natural growing and polyculture, which is the concept of growing several crops together, along with beneficial grasses and other plants to help naturally control and deter pests and disease, similar to the way a prairie works in the natural world. The reason prairies thrive, with their wildflowers, wild legumes and other edible grasses and such, is that the diversity creates a buffer against pests and disease (strength in numbers) because no one thing is going to effect every plant on the prairie in the way it does a monocultured crop (like an entire field of lettuce, for example). Farmers have found it necessary to spray pesticides and fertilizers on food crops since the switch to monocultured farming simply because nature can no longer do it by itself with success. The land I plan on using has been used for generations to rotate cotton, soy and corn. Recently they have switched to no-till farming, which is great (tilling does more harm than good by disturbing the natural decomposition process of the ground, disrupting oxygen channels necessary for root growth, and aiding in soil erosion by water and wind) but they are still using genetically modified, pesticide resistant seed (very, very common. chances are the “food” you eat is this way) so they can spray the entire field without killing the crop. I am working on taking soil and water table samples to see how this has residually effected the health of the soil, and then working a portion of the land as a polyculture farm to see if I can naturally heal the soil without the use of any synthetic additives. This has been proven to work, but through my efforts I hope to start to teach the local farming community about different ways to gain the same or higher yields while increasing the productivity of the soil over the years and breaking the cycle of nutritional imbalance in the soil, and thus the food. The measure of productivity in food is as close to 100% utilization of the natural elements available, including the sun, and letting the plants replenish the soil themselves as they have evolved to do. It’s quite simple really in the end, and if you think about it, there’s no way rain forests could exist, or prairies or any other kind of high growth environment if it was not a completely closed system. It would drain itself of nutrients in years and become a barren desert.

My eventual plan (and a portion of Onetribe’s charitable effort) is to really find a way to start people thinking on a more community-centric level, eating local, in season foods wherever and whenever possible, especially those of lesser income and circumstance. This keeps people healthy, creates community dialogue and growth and disrupts the multi-billion dollar junk food farming industry that has been built around us. Humans can only eat so much food at any given time, so the only way to effectively grow a business based on living commodities is to modify either humans or the commodities so that we either are able to consume or need to consume more of that commodity for the business to produce more profits. It’s a lot easier to take control of and be secretive about modifying and producing “food” crops than it is to modify humans, so that’s exactly how it’s been gone about. And that’s a sad state of affairs, that we think we need to rely on this. Break away, be your own human. Don’t let them modify your food (and modify your health and that of your family and friends) for their profits.