Back to the land: organic farming returns to roots

Wendy Smith
Tempest

Organic started out as a more environmentally friendly way of eating. So why has the industry become equally as culpable as conventional agriculture when it comes to climate change, and how can ecologically conscious foodies minimize their impact on carbon emissions? Wendy Smith investigates.

It began as what you might call fringe food or niche nosh, the cuisine of the counterculture. But nowadays, eating organic is going mainstream.

Once associated with worm-infested apples and lumpy, misshapen peppers, the organic label has shed its frumpy image, and has become, along with its sister stamps “eco-friendly,” “sustainable,” and “green,” the consumer trend du jour. A recent Environics survey reports that almost three quarters of Canadians have tried organic food. About forty percent buy it fairly often, even though it costs twenty to two hundred percent more. At the Java U on Concordia’s Hall Building mezzanine, students regularly fork over four and five dollars for 100 per cent organic spelt cakes, cookies, and muffins to dip in their fair trade lattes. At the Atwater Market, stalls abound with crates of peppers and squash boasting the “Produits Biologiques Certifies” label.

Organic food certainly sounds environmentally benign enough. No endocrine-disrupting chemical pesticides, no inorganic nitrogen fertilizer, no DNA-kinking growth hormones or antibiotics or genetically modified organisms.

It’s been proven that organic agriculture is better for the soil: a 15-year study from the Rodale Institute in Pennsylvania showed a drastic increase in soil fertility when it was fertilized with manure instead of industrial fertilizer. It’s also better for the water. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization concluded in 2000 that “Organic farming can help reduce ground and surface water contamination and can safeguard drinking water supplies.”

More and more organic produce is shipped halfway around the world before reaching our plates.(Photo credit: Wendy Smith.)

But as consumer demand for organics peaks, the gap between farm and fork continues to widen, and organic food is shipped across further distances. While the organic food market in Canada is worth an estimated $650 million, 80 per cent of this food is imported. According to a recent study completed by Canadian Organic Growers (COG) and sponsored by Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, the 3,618 certified growers in Canada in 2005 comprised just one and a half per cent of total Canadian farming operations. While acreage has increased five per cent between 2004 and 2005, Quebec has actually seen a decline in its number of organic farmers.

Organic paradox

The big boys go organic. (Photo collage: Wendy Smith.)

Once upon a time, “going organic” was synonymous with eating locally grown produce while it was in season. The distance from field to plate was negligible, the ecological footprint small. But as organic caught on as a consumer trend, local farms couldn’t keep up with the demand from a growing base of consumers who wanted their organic strawberry-rhubarb pie in January, their hothouse tomatoes shipped by refrigerated truck in November. Then a funny thing happened: the philosophical underpinnings of the organic food industry collapsed underneath the weight of its own success. The agribusinesses gobbled up the smaller outfits, outsourcing production to gigantic overseas farms. In the past five years companies such as Nestle, Kellogg, Heinz, Dole and Chiquita have all bought or created organic brands. And now, Kraft, the multinational that brought you shrink-wrapped processed cheese and macaroni in a box, has thrown its hat into the organic ring.

The result? Organically labelled yoghurt and bananas fly off supermarket shelves and into the shopping carts of environmentally conscious consumers, even though such products travel the same number of kilometres in refrigerated trucks, spewing the same amount of fossil fuels from their exhaust pipes as their “non-organic” counterparts - - sometimes even more, if they’ve been grown in gas-powered greenhouses. Bill McKibben was one of the first authors to sound the alarm about global warming when he wrote The End of Nature back in 1989. In his newest book, Deep Economy, he writes that the average bite of organic food travels even farther than the average bite of non-organic food. Geneva Rae, a policy analyst for the Canada West Foundation, has pegged the average number of food miles for one kilogram of organic chocolate at 8,598 kilometres. That’s the equivalent of 1.3 kilograms of greenhouse gas emissions.

It costs 1.3 kg of GHGs to ship 1 kg of organic chocolate.(Photo collage: Wendy Smith.)

Canadian regulators are trying to encourage homegrown consumption by introducing the “Canada Organic” label. But agribusinesses south of the border – which export $2.6 billion worth of organic produce - are unfazed. “The introduction of Canadian organic regulations is not expected to change the degree of dependence on U.S. product over the medium term,” reports the USDA Foreign Agricultural Service's Global Agricultural Information Network. “It is expected that the major share of the anticipated increase in demand will continue to be met via increased imports of U.S. organic product.”

If that does turn out to be the case, then consumption of organic food will continue to contribute to global warming through the existing infrastructure of long distance food distribution.

It takes a village to raise a crop

In search of greener, more environmentally benign pastures, I pulled on my rubbers and headed out to Senneville, a tiny village of 960 people on the westernmost tip of the Island of Montreal, nestled along the shores of Lake of Two Mountains. Here, the street signs are printed in scrolling Old English script. Haughty mansions half-hidden by trees line the narrow dirt road. The median annual income, more than $100,000 per family, is the highest on the West Island. It’s the unlikely nucleus of urban ferment, where a grassroots swell toward locally grown crops is taking place.

Inside a CSA farm. Clockwise from top left: The fields in March, a wood storage shed, moving a building on the 100-year-old property, farmer Alison Hackney aboard the tractor.(Photo credit: Wendy Smith.)

Follow Senneville Road right to the end and you’ll come across La Ferme du Fort. It's a fairly nondescript clump of land in the middle of March; the sixty acres' worth of fields are still blanketed with snow and mud. The farm’s owner, Alison Hackney, approaches on her tractor. It’s the only piece of heavy machinery on the farm. The engine shudders to a halt as she outstretches her hand, grinning. “We’re moving a house today,” she says apologetically, after the round of introductions. “It might take awhile. But you can go in the greenhouse while you’re waiting and sample some of the spinach.”

The “house” about to be dismantled and moved is a small white building with green trim that used to be a summer playhouse for Hackney when she was a girl. The land the farm sits on has been in her family for almost one hundred years, and she wanted to build an organic farm to honour a living family heirloom while protecting the area's biodiversity.

No more than twenty minutes after we arrive, the overcast skies begin to pour. We seek refuge in Hackney’s (unheated) greenhouse, where spinach, arugula and corn salad – hardier species that can grow during the winter months – are sprouting in neat rows.

“I think it's a lot better than anything you could find in a supermarket,” she says, crunching into a sprig of spinach. And, unlike the organic kumquats from Spain, none of Hackney’s produce travels any farther than the community in which it was originally grown.

La Ferme du Fort Senneville is one of about 1400 farms in Canada and the United States that practices Community-supported Agriculture (CSA). With CSA, people in the community buy shares in each yearly harvest, the same way an investor might take out shares in a company. “They’re sharing the risk with the farmer, so it’s more equitable that way,” Hackney explains.

The farm’s partners pay up front at the beginning of the season - $545 or $285, depending on the size of the family. This gives Hackney enough start-up capital to invest in the seeding and planting of the crops. Once a week from late spring until late autumn, the partners are guaranteed a basket of fresh fruit and vegetables.

As with all organic farming, getting each year’s crop up and running is an intensive process that requires ingenuity and elbow grease. To keep flea beetles off her cucumber and melons, Hackney covers the crops with heavy agricultural fleece rows. She’ll use other species of crop to repel pests from the plant they want or allure crops to attract them to a “decoy” plant instead. She sets out cardboard envelopes containing eggs that hatch into wasps that feed on corn earworms but don’t bother humans.

Many hands make short work of the initial planting.(Photo credit: Wendy Smith.)

But despite the best of precautions, the pests sometimes get the better of the crops. Regardless, when Hackney surveyed the farm’s partners, she found the majority would prefer to have some insect damage to their food instead of cosmetically superior produce that had been chemically sprayed.

And in addition to being pesticide-free, the impact of CSA on global warming is considerably less compared to conventional practices. A 2005 report conducted by Toronto’s Food Share, a non-profit organization, compares the CO2 emissions from imported and locally grown food. Not surprisingly, it found that the imported food, which travelled an average of 5,000 kilometres from farm to shopping cart, emitted 100 times more CO2 than the local stuff, which travelled an average of 100 kilometres. A similar study conducted by Region of Waterloo Public Health found the city of Guelph could reduce its greenhouse gas emissions by 47,000 tonnes if it produced the food it currently imports – the equivalent of taking 16,191 cars off the road.

Locally-supported agriculture is “a win-win scenario,” points out Ryan Young, a Montreal environmental activist and radio host who produced a documentary for the NFB about another organic farm on the West Island. “I think local food production is especially an issue now with climate change concerns being so high on everyone’s list and the distance that you transport food creating a lot of greenhouse gases.”

For La Ferme's partners who come by the farm once a week to help turn the soil and scatter the seeds, like Joyce Dennison, local agriculture is also about reconnecting with the land while making friends. “When you’re working in your garden, you’re working by yourself, and here, it’s like a community. We always have a nice lunch together under the shade tree after a hard morning of work. And it gives you a chance to play in the dirt,” she adds with a chuckle.

So is CSA going to move the agricultural industry toward more sustainable, carbon neutral practices? Hackney would like to think so. Her business is booming: 56 people signed up to receive her weekly baskets last summer, and she’s already got 80 on board for this season.

Lori Stahlbrand, president of Local Flavour Plus, spoke at this winter's Guelph Organic Conference. Though LFP, which fosters various locally-supported agricultural programs, is theoretically national in scope, it is currently only operating in the Greater Toronto Area. Stahlbrand, who graduated from McGill University in 1981 and grew up in Montreal, would love to bring LFP to Montreal universities. "We need someone who really believes in this and knows the food service at least somewhat and help us to get started on campus," she says.

"We need a champion."