Chapter 6, Cool Food: Five Ingredients of Climate-Friendly Farming, begins with a description of a "cool farm": that of Mark Shepard, a Midwestern farmer with a sense of both what is environmentally friendly and what is wallet-friendly. The farm he has going sounds ideal: It takes harmful emissions out of the air rather than putting them in there; it is profitable without commodity subsidies. And boy is it productive.
Shepard isn't alone, either; he is part of a stewardship movement that stretches from Wisconsin to South Korea.
Along with many other farmers (and the author of The Wump World, a favorite book of his), Shepard is dubious about the so-called "progress" that CAFOs have made -- depleting soil, polluting rivers, damaging our climate. Shepard has "a different vision of progress" -- one that is:
- Nature-mentored: Work with nature rather than trying to control it! Grow what works rather than trying to make the land fit with what you want to grow. Trust nature to "help itself" once in awhile.
- Restorative: Count on nature to help you out. Restore, don't destroy.
- Regenerative: Make it sustainable. Don't use fossil fuels when there's a more energy-efficient way to get things done -- it can also help your yield.
- Resilient: Look to the future. It's all very well to reduce emissions, but if you don't focus on making your farm resilient, a natural disaster like a recent flood in the Midwest can destroy your crops. And a resilient farm takes a good farmer and can improve the quality of life for the farmer and his family.
- Community-empowered: You can't run a farm like Shepard's without a network of support to back you up.
Chapter 7, Myth-Informed: Answering the Critics, has answers to four common myths about "the future of food":
- The inevitability myth, aka Industrial agriculture is the only realistic way to go: "Small-scale farmers can feed the planet and cool the world." It is both possible and realistic to run an eco-friendly farm; we know because there are people doing it now.
- The false-trade-off myth, aka We can't have both "essential forests" and "sustainable farms": This contradicts the entire message of eco-friendly farms: that they can provide enough food without destroying the ecosystem. It's doable; it's being done.
- The poverty myth, aka Climate-friendly farming will bring poverty: Just because a lot of the people living in poverty live in rural areas doesn't mean that it was the rural farming that brought poverty. And besides, if industrial farming and all this productivity are really helping fight world hunger, where are the results?
- The prosperity-first myth, aka Shouldn't prosperity come before thinking about the environment?: We may not hear about it on the news, but ecological concern is alive and kicking in many areas with a huge concentration of poor people. Think Ecuador. Think Kenya.
By Erin
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