COVER STORY:

THE THING THAT ATE AGRICULTURE

Mega-mergers are creating a seamless food system that leaves no openings for competition, accountability or dependent family farmers. By Brian DeVore

It's a frustrating task tracking changes in agribusiness these days. Just ask William Heffernan, a University of Missouri rural sociologist who has long documented mergers, buy-outs and joint ventures in our food system. On March 4, he displayed a chart at the St. Charles Community Center in southeast Minnesota. It showed how four pork packers control 57 percent of the hog slaughter in this country. Number one was Smithfield Foods, number two IBP, number three ConAgra and number four Cargill. It also showed the four biggest hog producers in order of production size: Murphy Family Farms, Carroll's Foods, Continental Grain and Smithfield Foods. This was part of a report Heffernan presented to members of the U.S. Congress a few weeks before.

"Well folks, we're already out of date. These figures are wrong," said Heffernan bluntly to the farmers and other rural residents gathered at the community center. Just a few days prior, it was announced that Smithfield Foods was buying out Carroll's Foods, Inc., up until then a key supplier to Smithfield's packing plants. In one fell swoop, Smithfield had become the largest producer and packer of pork in the world. It was as if General Motors had bought out Ford and U.S. Steel and Firestone.

"We can't even keep up on this," conceded Heffernan with a I-don't-know-whether-to-laugh-or-cry kind of chuckle. "A month later, it's out of date already."

Feeding frenzy

The good professor can be forgiven for being a step or two behind the times. Agribusiness is morphing into a handful of mega-corporations at an unprecedented rate. Consolidations have been building up a head of steam for the past 12 months, with much of it culminating this fall and winter in a frenzy that shows no signs of abating. One estimate is that there was $3.5 trillion worth of agricultural merger activity in 1998 alone, double the rate of the year before. So far, 1999 is shaping up to be the biggest consolidation year yet. Besides Smithfield's buyout of Carroll's, Cargill, the largest privately held company in the world, has announced it is buying out a major competitor, Continental Grain Company. The acquisition, pending approval by the U.S. Justice Department, will make Cargill the single biggest exporter of grain in this country. And in mid-March, agri-chemical giant DuPont announced it had paid $7.7 billion for the 80 percent of Pioneer Hi-Bred International that it didn't already own. Pioneer is the largest seed company in the world.

According to the economic literature, it is no longer a competitive situation when four businesses control 40 percent or more of the marketplace. Based on this, most sectors of agribusiness have already bypassed "Go" on the Monopoly board. According to Heffernan's research, beef packing, pork packing, broiler production and many aspects of field crop processing are past what he calls the "CR4" threshold. It's affecting both the supply side--chemicals, fertilizers, seed, implements, credit ? and the market side--grain, meat, produce, transportation, processing-- of agriculture. Caught in the middle of all this are the hundreds of thousands of independent family farmers who are finding there are fewer places to sell their production or buy their inputs. On the other end of the spectrum are consumers, who are receiving their food through a system that is less accountable to them in terms of price, quality or method of production.

Smithfield, Cargill and DuPont are examples of mega-companies that have accomplished consolidation through outright purchase of a major competitor that?s pretty much in the same business as they are. But consolidation is taking many other forms as well: "joint ventures," "mergers," "partnerships," "integration," "operating agreements"and similar terms are being used to describe a variety of arrangements that result in the same final product: fewer players making decisions in agriculture.

"The consolidation is not just a Cargill-Continental type merger," says C. Robert Taylor, an agricultural economist at Auburn University in Alabama who is studying the effects of consolidation. "It's all these other partial ownerships, joint agreements, etc., that are affecting the system. When you put all that together with the mergers that are up front, you end up with a picture that's not pretty."

Consolidation in agriculture has always been a fact of life. But this recent spate of lumping is breathtaking in its size and scope. The Cargills of the world aren?t just buying out the "little guys" in the marketplace (although they?re doing that at a record pace as well), they're also taking over their biggest competitors. When Smithfield bought out Carroll's Foods, Smithfield's chief executive officer bragged to the media that this one single deal would triple the company's level of "vertical integration," or amount of control it has in the pork industry from the pig's genetics on up to the consumer's table. This one transaction, say Smithfield officials, accomplished what would normally have taken up to 10 years to complete through smaller acquisitions.

Another characteristic of these recent mergers is they are jumping traditional enterprise barriers. It?s perhaps no surprise Cargill is buying out a fellow grain trader. But, as the DuPont buyout of Pioneer shows, mergers that cross-connect everything from chemicals to seeds to pharmaceuticals to gene-splicing technology are increasingly common.

In some ways, agriculture is just catching up with the rest of the business world, which has been consolidating at a record pace for the past several years. The food-system's merger mania has been fueled within the past few years by the desire of companies to have a presence in the new global economy. Such a presence requires

money, lots of it. It costs much more to maintain a grain terminal in China than a few elevators on the Mississippi River. And within the past 12 months, consolidation has been turbocharged by the desire on the part of agribusiness to enter the biotechnology field in a big way. DuPont's purchase of Pioneer will make it a heavyweight in agricultural biotechnology. Last summer, the proposed merger of Monsanto and American Home Products would have created the largest "life sciences" company on the world (that deal later fell through). Biotechnology has been touted as the future of agriculture for more than a decade now, but so far all it has produced is a binful of bankrupt companies, an indication of the high financial risk associated with this endeavor. The result is that individual companies have had to team up to attract the kind of Wall Street capital a $500,000 genetically engineered cow requires.

Survival of the biggest 

In February, Mark Drabenstott, an economist with the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, told the U.S. Senate Agriculture Committee that consolidation was a positive trend that leads to lower-priced, higher-quality food for consumers. Agribusinesses also argue that creating bigger, well-resourced companies provide farmers with better services: Bigger elevators can unload a wagonload of corn faster and provide access to the latest futures trading contracts.

Based on pure expense of doing business in a global, high-tech marketplace, consolidation does make sense: there is simply no other way to pile up so much cash in one place. But when examined from an efficiency point of view, the arguments start to fall apart, says Heffernan, who recently produced a report on consolidation for the National Farmers Union. He likens the current situation to an hour glass, with lots of farmers producing food on top, very few processors in the middle, and many consumers at the bottom. That bottleneck in the middle gives agribusiness entities an inordinate
amount of control over what food is produced, what farmers receive for it and what it is sold for. In most sectors of the food system a competitive market has been eliminated, so the rules of efficiency no longer apply.

"In a system that lacks a competitive market, survival depends on power; efficiency has little to do with it," says Heffernan.

And that bottleneck isn't helping consumers. Taylor says that between 1984 and 1997, the price of a market basket of food (adjusted for inflation) rose by 2.8 percent. That's not a significant increase, but it's certainly not a drop. During that same period, the amount the farmer received for that food dropped by at least 35.7 percent. The rate of return on equity during the 1990s has been 18 percent for retail food chains and 17.2 percent for food processors.

Farming's return on equity averaged 4.5 percent during that same period. That lack of connection between what farmers were getting paid and the price of food became painfully clear this winter, when hog prices dropped to record lows, while the price of a pork chop in the supermarket meat case remained steady.

Agribusiness explains the decline in farmer returns and the failure of food prices to drop in terms of "increased services" offered to farmers and consumers: specialty cuts of meat, more packaging, etc. But some economists doubt those costs can come close to explaining the huge chasm between the real price of food and agribusiness profits. In a paper presented at the 1998 meeting of the American Agricultural Economics Association, Al-Amin Ussif and David Lambert found that all 47 subsectors of the U.S. food industry they analyzed had some degree of "market control" on both the input and output side of the equation. In other words, a few large firms maintain so much control that they are able to manipulate how much they pay for commodities they buy as well as what they sell them for after processing and packaging. And these firms can do that without worrying whether they are pricing themselves out of the market. Six subsectors in the food industry were identified by Ussif and Lambert as "having monopoly power alone."

Despite such stark statistics, government seems unwilling or unable to do anything, even though there are plenty of anti-trust laws on the books. Part of the problem is the clever way these consolidations are packaged, says Taylor.

"It's not classic anti-trust stuff, it's much more fuzzy and sophisticated."

This issue has caught the attention of lawmakers on both sides of the political aisle in Washington. Within the past few months, hearings have been held and studies demanded. But it's becoming a race against the clock.

"If we allow these structural changes to occur, it's very difficult to unwind them," says Michael Boehlje, a Purdue University agricultural economist.

Cluster bombs

If taken to its ultimate conclusion, what will our consolidated food system look like? Heffernan and his colleagues predict the formation of four or five food "clusters." These are seamless systems that control food from -- take your pick of colorful description -- seed to shelf, field to fork, dirt to dinner plate.

"In a food chain cluster, the food product is passed along from stage to stage, but ownership never changes and neither does the location of the decision-making," says Heffernan." The farmer becomes a grower, providing the labor and often some of the capital, but never owning the product as it moves through the food system and never making the major management decisions."

Farmers will be employees, or "bio-servants" in a new type of agricultural feudalism. Consumers will not only have no idea what the financial cost was to raise that corn that went into that milk that produced that ice cream; this seamless system will also black out

any knowledge of the environmental and social costs of raising that commodity.

ConAgra is the model for how to create an impenetrable cluster. This company is quickly taking control of every link in the food chain. Its United Agri Products business is a leading distributor of crop chemicals, fertilizers and seeds in North America, Mexico, Chile and the United Kingdom. This enterprise is also a leader in the distribution of biotechnology products, including seeds. ConAgra owns about 100 elevators, 1,000 barges and 2,000 railroad cars. The company produces its own livestock feed and ranks third in cattle feeding and second in cattle slaughtering. In 1998, it ranked third in pork processing and fifth in broiler production and processing.

That chain remains unbroken all the way down to the level of the grocery store. Behind Philip Morris, ConAgra is the second largest food processor in the U.S. Its labeled food items include Butterball, Healthy Choice, Peter Pan Peanut Butter and Hunt's. How did it gain so much control? In 1998, ConAgra was able to report it had acquired or created joint ventures with approximately 150 companies during the preceding 10 years.

How can farmers prevent the ConAgradization of our food system? The number one rule is to not duke it out head-on, says Heffernan. One thing these firms are efficient at is getting together large sums of money. If farmers are trying to compete with food clusters in a manner that requires a lot of cash, the mega-companies will win, plain and simple.

Minnesota Corn Processors learned that lesson the hard way when it invested millions of dollars in expensive corn processing equipment. This Marshall, Minn., farmer-owned corn processing co-op was started in 1980 in an attempt to add value to corn before it left the region. At the time, companies like Archer Daniels Midland (ADM) were getting all the value-added corn dollar. So it was a bitter pill to swallow when the co-op hit the financial skids so hard that in 1997 it ended up selling 30 percent of its stock to, guess who, ADM. That same year, another farmer-owned cooperative, ProGold, turned over part of its new $261 million corn wet milling plant to Cargill.

To survive as independent entities, farmers must take advantage of the industrialized food system's weaknesses. Marketing experts say sustainable agriculture is in the perfect position to do this. The agribusiness behemoth has gotten so big that it has shut out all personal contact with consumers. It has also lost the ability to respond to change, even when science calls for it. For example, last fall Cornell University researchers announced that replacing a portion of the corn-based diet of beef cattle with forage dramatically reduced the chance of a deadly strain of E. Coli (Escherichia coli) surviving in a human stomach. In addition, several agencies, including the World Health Organization and the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, have sounded alarm bells about how the use of antibiotics in hogs, cattle and chickens is producing antibiotic resistant bacteria in humans. Both of these situations offer an opportunity for the meat industry to make their product safer and healthier through the encouragement of grass-based livestock production. But industry officials say such changes are "too difficult" in their highly complicated system. Instead, they are promoting practices -- irradiation of meat is one example --that are highly controversial with the public.

"You would think the industry would be tripping all over itself to shut down feedlots," says Joel Salatin, a veteran grazier who direct markets his production to more than 400 customers. "But no. Because we have a big aircraft carrier here that we've invested in and it's going in a certain direction and it's awful hard to turn that thing around."

One alternative is the face-to-face "relationship" marketing farmers and consumers are starting to practice, both as individuals and as groups. Heffernan is working with "food circles" in Missouri to bring together consumers and farmers. These circles go beyond traditional farmers' markets to combine personal, trust-based relationships with education.
 
Frankly, such a localized, personalized system will not help the farmer who is raising a thousand acres of conventional row crops that must be sold at harvest time to the closest elevator. But it does offer a way to kick a few holes in the seamless food chain.

"Hey, let him go right ahead and use that term 'industrialized agriculture,'" says Heffernan of mega-companies. The farther they push it that way, the better farmers are, because the people are going to lose confidence in that food system and that's where farmers have the opportunity to come in with an alternative."

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COVER STORY SIDEBAR:

MERGER MANIA MAYHEM

These headlines from the agribusiness news of the past year paint a picture of the frenzied pace at which our food system has been consolidating. They are taken from Feedstuffs, The New York Times, the Minneapolis Star Tribune, the Saint Paul Pioneer Press and the Associated Press:

March 1998

Koch, Purina to create new nutrition value: Merger represents "wins" from farm to table

Dean Foods to acquire Coburg in South Carolina

Maple Leaf, Smithfield scrap over plans for Ontario plant

Dean Foods buys Lucky, Wengert dairies

April 1998

Cultor, Monsanto enter joint venture on biotechnology

Cenex, Harvest States merger approved

Babcock Swine, Roslin Institute sign pact

Dean Foods completes acquisition of Coburg

May 1998

AGP, Harvest States form oilseed venture; Creating efficient, 'one- margin system '

ConAgra, Farmland form alliance for grain
 
Dean completes purchase of Purity Dairies in mid-south: Moody's report supports consolidation

ADM increases stake in IBP

June, 1998

Novartis acquires interest in C.C. Benoist

Value captured in Cenex, Harvest States merger

Cenex Harvest States, LOL [Land O? Lakes] form feed business

ConAgra, ADM form joint venture to operate grain export facility

AHP-Monsanto merger: Company to focus on speed to market (this deal was later called off)

LOL to operate California plant

Perdue Farms to acquire De Luca to expand in home meal replacement

Monsanto reports collaboration in alfalfa research

ConAgra to expand in snack segment

July 1998

Monsanto to acquire Cargill seed unit; Gets indisputable access to fields

Dow, Mycogen to discuss full acquisition; Mycogen, Rhone Poulec to pool technology

ConAgra to buy Egg Beaters from Nabisco

SF Services approves merger with Farmland

Cenex Harvest States, UGC plan partnership

Cal-Maine joins two others to build Utah egg complex

Bovans, Hisex to merge businesses

Monsanto to buy plant breeding company from Unilever

Southern States, Agway form alliance

Countrymark LOL to complete unification Oct. 1

Farmland, FPC report merger plan

ADM Lesaffre merge malting operations

Dean Foods completes acquisition of Hillside

Dean Foods credits dairy acquisitions in results

August 1998

Dean Foods to continue plans to acquire dairies

The Andersons, Central Soya buy co-op

Smithfield to acquire supplier to McDonald's

September 1998

LOL acquires ag businesses of Countrymark

Smithfield buys French pork processor, begins global presence

Novartis reports benefits from merger synergies

Dean, Suiza plan to acquire additional dairies

Monsanto sets timeline for DeKalb purchase

DuPont establishes wheat research alliance

Mycogen purchases two Brazilian seed companies
 
ADM acquires vegetable oil business

October 1998

Novartis, LOL form joint venture to focus on specialty crop traits

LOL forms feed business with Stacyville Co-op

LOL completes acquisition of Countrymark

Southern States completes Gold Kist purchase

Farmland, MFA studying alliance in feed production venture

November 1998

CoBank, St. Paul Bank begin study to merge system

Smithfield to begin buying Schneider shares

IBP acquires appetizer business in expansion move

Smithfield initiates offer to buy Schneider

Dow completes purchase of Mycogen

Cargill buys out rival grain operation; Deal boosts firm?s hold on market

Monsanto announces plan to fund acquisitions

AgriPro to be divided between AgriBiotech, Garst

December 1998

Cargill acquires Bunge?s Venezuelan Units

Monsanto buys Isogen; reenters poultry feed market

Smithfield gains control of Schneider

Monsanto completes Dekalb purchase; Delta & Pine holding

Harvest States, UGC enter into grain joint venture

January 1999

Monsanto, Micro Flo sign glyphosate herbicide agreement

Cargill moves to expand interests in Japanese markets

Selling unit may help Monsanto close DPL deal

Monsanto, Nufarm announce agreement

February 1999

Three California dairies preparing for merger

March 1999

Smithfield to acquire Carroll's, become largest producer in world

Great Lakes, Monsanto sign research agreement

Farmland, Cenex to discuss combining grain operations

Cactus becomes largest cattle feeder in acquisition of three Koch feedlots

Perdue enters joint venture with AgriRecycle

DuPont to buy Pioneer for $7.7 billion

SMASHING THE HOURGLASS

This farmer is proving that we can bypass the kink in the pipeline

When rural sociologist William Heffernan talks about stepping off the consolidation express by creating relationships with consumers, he's got to have Joel Salatin in mind. The feisty resident of Virginia's Shenandoah Valley is a field general in the fight to prevent consolidated agribusiness from taking over every aspect of our food system. He and his family market beef, pork, chickens, turkeys and various other products to 400 loyal customers, some of whom drive 200 miles to visit the farm. In a series of three presentations Salatin gave around Minnesota in January, he used a combination of real-life examples and photographic slides from his farm to lay out his strategy for dealing with the Cargills and ConAgras of the world:

"We can tell them to take a hike and decide not to play their game."

Such statements would be dismissed as just so much empty bluster if it wasn't for this: Salatin makes a nice profit at what he does. That's why people listen to him, and why his three self-published books -- You Can Farm: The Entrepreneur's Guide to Start and Succeed in a Farming Enterprise, Salad Bar Beef and Pastured Poultry Profit$: Net $25,000 in 6 months on 20 Acres -- have been such hot sellers. Here are some excerpts from his Minnesota talks:

Why farmers get big

"The reason that farmers have had to get big in order to stay in business is because the average farmer in America is basically in the materials handling business: haul it in and haul it out. And when you're in the materials handling business, it is cheaper by the million, cheaper by the ton. But as soon as you get out of the materials handling business, the profit potential on the side of the farm becomes size neutral because we don't have to generate the cash flow to capitalize on the cost of things that rot, rust and depreciate."
The commodity business

"If you want to be a hermit [and not create relationships with consumers], you're going to be in the commodity business. But you know what? You're going to be in the commodity business, so you better not complain about $1.75 corn. The commodity business is a completely different ball game than the entrepreneurial direct marketing business. The biggest lie in the world is, You just grow it, and everything will be fine."

Creating a relationship

"If people are where the money is, we've got to break down all the barriers in order to get to the person's pocketbook. As long as our paradigms are people unfriendly we will never access their pocketbooks.

"Aesthetic landscapes: It's one of the greatest values we can ever add to our farms. So we need to look at what is beautiful. Mark it down: If it smells, or it's not pretty, it's not right."

Smarting up agriculture

"Everything in the industrial paradigm is about reducing everything to the lowest common denominator so any dummy can do it. Our whole food system runs on mediocrity rather than talking about food quality. That's the ultimate simplification. It's time to respect ourselves and say, 'You know what, I?m not working for $4 an hour.'"

Hitting the wrong target

"We have become incredibly accurate at hitting the wrong target. We've had all sorts of research go into producing a better corn crop, or a better tillage tool, and nobody has dared to ask the question, 'Do we need it?' We've become very good at developing hybrid seed corn without asking the question, 'Did I need to grow corn?'"

Stacking enterprises

In this slide, you've seen this field several times. You've see it with cows, you've see it with egg mobiles, and now you're seeing it ith turkeys. We're talking about $300 an acre income with the beef. We're talking about $500 an acre from the egg mobiles, we're talking about $2,500 from the broilers, and we're talking about $2,000 from the turkeys. Folks, we're talking about over $5,000 per acre income, and there's no combine, no disk, no plow, no nothing. It's just grass, and animals and management.

"When I see the potential for symbiotic, stacking enterprises on the existing land base, it gives me chill bumps."

Financial security

"Our 95 acres is paying three full-time salaries. The average farm in America takes $4 of machinery and buildings to turn one dollar in annual gross sales. Our ratio is 50 cents to a dollar. However you slice it, however you want to cut it, we can make the numbers work. The beauty of this is when we farm ecologically, we also farm economically. That's the beauty of this. We don't have to sacrifice the one to get the other."
 
 

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COMMENTARY:
 

TREATING ANIMALS LIKE ANIMALS, NOT MACHINES 

By Tom Frantzen

Farrowing and finishing hogs is a core activity on my farm. This has been true for the 25 years that I have farmed, as well as the 40 years of my father's farming career. My wife Irene and I see animal agriculture as a key component of developing a truly sustainable system on our farm. That's one of the reasons we belong to the Land Stewardship Project, which also sees livestock as a centerpiece of sustainability here in the Midwest.

But I'm not in favor of just any kind of livestock operation. Huge factory farms, which treat animals (and humans) like machines to achieve " efficiency,"  is a prehistoric way to produce food. Animal rightists are claiming that because of the brutal conditions sometimes found in factory facilities, all forms of animal agriculture are inherently inhumane. These groups love to make media hay out of any examples they find of livestock being treated inhumanely. I'm concerned that industrial confinement facilities are giving all livestock farmers a bad name in the eyes of the non-ag public.

That's too bad, because my recent experiences with alternative hog farming methods have proven to me that pork production does not have to be inhumane -- for the animals or the people. In 1978, a room in our barn was remodeled to hold 14 steel farrowing crates with slat floors. In another part of the barn, a slat floor nursery was built. A year later we remodeled another building into a total slat floor grower. Pigs left the slat floor grower weighing around 100 pounds and were finished in a "Cargill" outdoor concrete floor finishing facility.

I distinctly remember how those "modern improvements" changed the way we raised pigs. For the next 13 years, I would struggle with countless animal health problems associated with slat floors. Sows in the crates would slip on the slats. The "solution¬"was to replace the slats with a newer style slat. Sows still slipped. Little pigs suffered knee abrasions from sleeping on the hard floors. Pneumonia and injury related health problems were common, although not overwhelming.

The total slat floor grower building developed its own unique slat floor health troubles. These growing pigs were confined at the rate of 35 in a pen that was 160 square feet in diameter. The modern textbooks on pork production recommend these pig per-square-foot ratios. While pigs gained weight quickly in their grower, a common problem was cannibalism. Tail biting was a serious problem.

In 1994, Irene and I spent two weeks touring Sweden with a small group from Iowa and Minnesota. The farms we visited were employing deep bedded facilities to provide low stress, humane conditions for their livestock. I was awed by the health and content disposition of the stock and the farm families.

Swedish farmers and researchers spent years exploring new methods of livestock care. Their mission was to eliminate antibiotic drug use. They also wanted to improve the living conditions for livestock by reducing stress. Access to an ample bedding supply has become a key management practice in that country.

In 1997, we began building three "hoop buildings" that were each 30 feet wide and 72 feet long. These structures, which made their entry into the Midwest in the mid-1990s, offer an affordable, efficient way to raise hogs on deep straw bedding (and they can easily be converted to other uses when you?re not raising pigs). I was very anxious to use the new facilities. Every time I observed the crowded, slat-floor stressed pigs, I too became stressed -- their social brutality was caused by my failure to meet their basic instincts. On a hoop building tour, I was told that pigs have three desires: they want to run around, build a nest and chew on something. This behavior is impossible in a building with metal pens and slat floors.

Early one September morning, I opened the door of my grower to observe the pigs. One of the pens was covered with fresh blood. Their stress levels had built to the cannibal stage. I could take no more. I announced with a bit of profanity that my slat floor days were about to end that day!

The finished hoop building was bedded with fresh straw. I moved 160 pigs from the grower into the hoop building. Boy did those pigs have fun! In the new hoop building, they had 2,160 square feet of room to run, straw to chew and lots of bedding to nest in. They ran around all day and into the night. The next morning I ran out to check on them.

I will never forget what I found.

As I walked up to the open door, it was quiet, very quiet. I peeked into the hoop house to see 160 pigs in one massive straw nest; snoring with great content. I laughed until I cried. Their stress was gone, and so was mine.

Our deep bedded buildings are now more than a year old. We have not observed any social behavior problems. Even when the bedding pack is four foot deep, the odor level is very low. Nutrient losses from rain and snow runoff are nearly nonexistent. It took a long time, but our pigs finally have a happy home. I now sell humanely-raised antibiotic-free pork for a premium to a San Francisco-based company called Niman Ranch. I?m also looking forward to taking advantage of the new USDA organic meat label to add more value to my pigs.

What's to be learned here? If you're a farmer, don't accept the industrial agribusiness line that hogs have to be treated like machines in order to produce a livelihood for humans. And don't be fooled by the agribusiness strategy of making "animal rights" and "nimal welfare" one and the same. A good farmer should care about animal welfare.

If you are a consumer or food service provider, talk to your local small town meat processor and find out who is raising pork in a sustainable, humane manner. Ask your grocer to carry pork products that come from family farms that are not using factory-like confinement techniques.

The time is right for using a combination of good old fashioned animal husbandry and modern, low-cost housing technologies to create a livestock production system we'd be proud to see featured on the 10 o'clock news.
 
Tom and Irene Frantzen farm near the northeastern Iowa town of New Hampton.

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LETTERS:

CHECKOFF A MESS

Dear Editor:

From 1962 to 1968, as the delegate representing Minnesota on the National Pork Producers Board, I voluntarily spent many weeks and thousands of dollars of my own time and money to help establish and fund a voluntary pork checkoff program. It was called "Nickels for Profit." At that time, the vast majority of hog farms sold less than 1,000 pigs annually.

Had I known the program would evolve into the mess it is now I would never have had anything to do with it. It is doing great damage to the family farm structure in this country. The time is fast approaching when rural people will either have a hobby farm or be employed by a large corporate operation. Best of luck in your endeavor to end the mandatory pork checkoff.

-- Keith Thurston
    Madelia, Minn.
 

LIVING IN NONDIVERSE UNIVERSE

Dear Editor:

I wanted to let you know how outstanding your two articles on biodiversity were (November & December, 1998). I?ve read them about five times and learned something new each time. Being in the middle of corn and soybeans, I?m quite alarmed at what may be happening here in the future. My main activity in the year I've been here on the farm is to get off the corn and soybean rotation (which 80 acres had been in), restore the soil and increase biodiversity.

Thank you for this important and relevant information.

P.S.: I really think we need to be looking at how dependent our agricultural system is on petroleum and petroleum products. I think we're going to be facing shortages and increased costs of oil in the next 10 years ? which will have an incredible impact on conventional agriculture when it takes 50 gallons of fuel to produce and dry one acre of corn.

-- Nancy Adams
    Le Roy, Minn.

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LSP NEWS:

FARMER FILLING ENDOWED AG CHAIR

Land Stewardship Project member Jim Van Der Pol will be occupying an influential position in Minnesota agriculture during the next year. It was announced in January that Van Der Pol will fill one of the School of Agriculture Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems positions for 1999-2000.

Van Der Pol raises crops and livestock with his wife LeeAnn, son Josh and daughter-in-law Cindy near the western Minnesota community of Kerkhoven. The family has a long history of involvement with sustainable agriculture. During his one-year appointment, Jim will work with the alternative swine program at the University of Minnesota's West Central Experiment Station in Morris. This program was funded by the Minnesota Legislature in 1998 after LSP members and staff pushed for such a program.

The School of Agriculture Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems was created in 1995 with funding from the School of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota (SAAM) Alumni Association, the Minnesota Legislature and the University of Minnesota.

For more information, contact the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture, 612-625-8235 or 1-800-909-6472.
 

AUDIT: MPCA ISN'T DOING JOB

In January, an investigation by Minnesota's Legislative Auditor's Office confirmed what the Land Stewardship Project has been saying for years: that the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) has been doing a poor job regulating large factory farms in the state. That audit was the result of, among other things, scientific and journalistic investigations LSP members and staff have been involved in recently.

The audit found that the MPCA?s feedlot program has a number of weaknesses, including inadequate rules, insufficient site visits to inspect proposed feedlot sites and construction work, little oversight of manure application practices and untimely service to livestock producers. The audit also discovered that the agency has a rigid, ineffective policy for dealing with small, open-lot facilities.

The Legislative Auditor's Office is recommending that the MPCA visit more proposed feedlot sites before issuing permits, particularly in environmentally sensitive areas. The auditor also wants the MPCA to improve its response time in reviewing feedlot permit applications.

For a copy of the report, Animal Feedlot Regulation, call 651-296-4708, or check out this web site: <http://www.auditor.leg.state.mn.us/pe9904.htm>.

Toxic gas update

On Jan. 25, it was announced by the MPCA that hog giant ValAdCo will pay a penalty of $32,500 for exceeding the state hydrogen sulfide ambient air standards 46 times in 1998. This fine comes after a many-month delay in which ValAdCo all but ignored MPCA warnings to take immediate action concerning the emissions (see Nov. 1998 LSL).

However, at press time a proposal was moving through the Minnesota Legislature (Senate File 692; House File 1235) that would exempt large operations from the state?s hydrogen sulfide standards when manure is being pumped or agitated. Technically, an operation could avoid ever complying with the law by manipulating its manure daily.

For more information, call LSP?s Mark Schultz, 612-823-5221, or Paul Sobocinski, 507-342-2323.
 

LSPers TAKE FARM MESSAGE TO D.C.

A group of Land Stewardship Project members traveled to Washington, D.C., in early March and delivered a simple message to policy makers: stop punishing sustainable farmers.

This trip was the culmination of several months of meeting and planning on the part of LSP?s Federal Farm Policy Committee. The committee, which is made up of several Minnesotans, has developed recommendations for policy which would support farming that produces multiple benefits to society such as protection and enhancement of natural resources and retention of wealth in rural communities. During the past two months, farmers from Iowa, Illinois and Nebraska joined the LSP Farm Policy Committee discussion. In Iowa, these farmers are members of Practical Farmers of Iowa; in Illinois, the Illinois Stewardship Alliance; and in Nebraska, the Center for Rural Affairs. All these ganizations,
including LSP, are members of the Midwest Sustainable Agriculture Working Group, a collaborative effort of farm and rural organizations founded in 1988 to develop and advance sustainable agriculture policy.

The result of this work is Farming for Optimal Results: Principles for the 2002 Farm Bill, a report outlining what steps should be taken by the government to make policy more friendly to family farmer-based, sustainable agriculture.

In meetings with top U.S. Department of Agriculture officials and Congressional ag leaders, the committee members emphasized how much damage past farm policy has done to rural communities. The crop subsidy system has mostly benefited large farms that raise only one or two commodities using chemical and energy intensive production practices. Smaller, more diverse enterprises have repeatedly been punished for using systems that protect the soil while reducing chemical and energy inputs. Even current farm policy has continued this bias against diverse agriculture. For example, last fall the government provided farmers with advanced payments called Loan Deficiency Payments to tide them through a period of low crop prices. Farmers who were raising monocultures of row crops such as corn or soybeans benefited greatly from these payments. But those who had land in environmentally-friendly grass or hay were pretty much left out in the cold.

Committee member Lyle Koenen, who farms with his father Ken and brother Paul near the western Minnesota town of Maynard, described their dairy operation to policy makers as a graphic example of this bias. The Koenens' land base is 420 acres and they have been using management intensive grazing to produce milk on grass since 1993. Their corn base (the amount of acres the government uses to calculate payments) is 182 acres. But in 1998, they actually planted only 68 acres of corn. The rest of their farm was in grass for grazing, hay and haylage. In 1998, their Production Flexibility Contract payment was $5,244. Their Loan Deficiency Payment last fall was $2,308. If they had planted the full 182 acres of corn, their Production Flexibility Contact payment plus Loan Deficiency Payment would have been $11,413, or $3,861 more. Thus, by doing a good job of farming, conserving soil, cutting way back on chemical use and making proper use of manure, they were penalized by the present government program, which still rewards corn production, despite the rhetoric that "Freedom to Farm" gives farmers more planting flexibility.

LSP's Farm Policy committee is proposing the calculation of a Farm Results Index (FRI) annually for each farm when determining government benefits. Choices of farming practices can make big differences in water quality, wildlife habitat, energy conservation, biodiversity and carbon sequestration, as well as quality of life, public health and economic vitality of communities. FRI points would be awarded to each farm according to its effectiveness in producing such societal benefits. The higher a farm's FRI point accumulation, the more it would be rewarded.

Participants in LSP's March farm policy trip included: Dwight Ault, farmer, Austin, Minn.; DeEtta Bilek, farmer, Aldrich, Minn.; Brad DeVries, LSP Policy Program staff; Dan French, farmer, Dodge Center, Minn.; Paul Gebhart, farmer, Edinburg, Ill.; Paul Homme, farmer, Granite Falls, Minn.; Nolan Jungclaus, farmer, Lake Lillian, Minn.; Linda Kleinschmidt, farmer, Hartington, Neb.; Jeff Klinge, farmer, Farmersburg, Iowa; Lyle Koenen, farmer, Maynard, Minn.; Greg Koether, farmer, McGregor, Iowa; Mark Schultz, LSP Policy Director; Dave Serfling, farmer, Preston, Minn.; Dan Specht, farmer, McGregor, Iowa; Kathleen Storms, SSND, rural minister, Mankato, Minn.; and Phil St. John, farmer, Wyoming, Ill.
 
 

6th ANNUAL RIVER KEEPER AWARD

Robert and Ann Hartkopf of Bloomington, Minn., were the recipients of the 6th Annual River Keeper Award, presented by the Clean Up our River Environment (CURE) Board of Directors at the organization's annual meeting in Granite Falls Feb. 20.

The River Keeper Award is given to an organization or individual that has demonstrated extraordinary commitment to the cause for a cleaner Minnesota River in the past year. CURE is a partner organization of the Land Stewardship Project, and is based out of LSP's western Minnesota office in Montevideo.

The Hartkopfs were recognized for the lonely and expensive legal battle they unsuccessfully fought against the repair and improvement of County Ditch 10 in Shible Township in Swift County. The Hartkopfs made several public presentations about the Ditch 10 improvement, showing that culverts had been significantly enlarged and the ditch profile had been widened during the so-called repair process. At the core of the Hartkopfs? argument against the repair of Ditch 10 was their assertion that the work being done was actually an improvement and thus required more public hearings and scrutiny that the ditch law requires for repairs.

"There is a lot of ditch improvement going on in the name of ditch repair," says CURE organizer Lynn Lokken. "And the Hartkopfs have raised everyone"s awareness of the injustices and shortcomings of ditch law this past year."
 

KING JOINS LSP

Bobby King has recently joined the Land Stewardship Project's southeast Minnesota office as a community organizer. King has worked as an organizer for Action Through Churches Together, which does church-based organizing on Minnesota's Iron Range. He has organized for Des Moines Citizens For Community Improvement, Loaves and Fishes Catholic Worker Community and the Committee for Strict Liability. King, who has a degree in liberal arts from St. John's College in Santa Fe, N. Mex., has also taught English literature and composition at Henan Teacher's University in China.

He lives in Winona and is working on issues such as livestock concentration in the dairy business. King is particularly interested in hearing from dairy farmers who are concerned about the premium payments large milk producers receive from processors. He can be contacted at 507-523-3366.
 

COPIER FOR SALE

The Land Stewardship Project's Twin Cities office has a used copy machine for sale. It's a 1995 Mita DC-3055 copier with a 20-bin sorter/stapler. It has three paper drawers as well as a bypass tray. It can do duplexing. We're asking $2,000 for the machine. For more information, call Gina Sperry, 651-653-0618.
 

MONITORING FEATURE:

A LAND'S EYE VIEW

Monitoring can help fill some important gaps.
By Caroline van Schaik

Driving through Scott County this wintry day, it is hard to see much of anything going on in the fields. It is a cold, bright day and the snow is crusty, even thin in places. The occasional plow pattern has broken through, and on the hillsides streaks of spread manure hint at fertility and dairies. But in the northern reaches of this still argely rural county, surveyor flags mark last year?s fields. Steam wafts over the broken ground of foundations taking shape despite the season. It is unmistakable what was not there last winter, and these changes of a place under development bear immediate attention.

The impact of construction on water quality in this region is of no new concern to those who monitor the headwaters of the Mississippi River. The Twin Cities is at the mouth of the Minnesota River where it empties into the Mississippi River. Their burgeoning population is a major feature of the Minnesota River basin: pavement and people change waterways as well as water flow and quality, and not, usually, in a favorable direction. Approximately 60 percent of the basin's pulation resides in six of its 37 counties, and four of those counties shape the southern portion of the metropolitan area. Urban sources of river pollution -- in bacterial, sediment, and chemical form -- are a statistically significant part of what ails the water.

The entire Minnesota River basin is composed of some 10 million acres and drains 12 major watersheds. The predominant land use is agriculture. Even Scott County, which is being engulfed by sprawl, remains two-thirds farmland. It, along with seven other counties in and around the Twin Cities, comprises the Lower Minnesota watershed.

Representing 10 percent of the basin area, this one watershed nevertheless contributes approximately a quarter of the sediment, a third of the phosphorous, and a tenth of all nitrogen loads in the Minnesota River. Water quality standards for fecal coliform counts, turbidity, and dissolved oxygen levels are frequently violated during the warm months. Those months coincide with the agricultural growing season as well as prime construction time. The combination of urban growth and agriculture is epitomized in this watershed. For example, in a 25-year study conducted by the University of Minnesota, two wastewater treatment plants accounted for a third of the phosphorous attributed to this watershed. The rest came from non-point sources. While treatment plants have upgraded their phosphorous removal procedures to reduce loads by 60 percent, the supposedly prohibitive cost of further improvements has encouraged a closer look at another pollution source -- the farm.

Significant differences in topography and weather explain some of the increase in contaminants in the eastern portion of the basin as opposed to the western side. Mean annual precipitation is 50 percent higher and the landscape is steeper by 10 percent to 45 percent. Erosion, therefore, is a high risk, and readily apparent in the shortage of topsoil on so many fields. Development aggravates the risk when water-absorbing soils become impervious surfaces that send contaminants directly into waterways.

Eyes to the ground

Be their view from the barn or a three-car garage, landowners have near- and far-reaching responsibilities for the state of our collective natural resources. Those resources are finite. They contribute to the quality of our lives from health, economical and aesthetics perspectives.

Livestock on a pasture is worth money in the bank or a Sunday's drive in the country, and neither is less important than the other to the individual viewer.

Viewing, then, is what we must do. Stop to look. What is there? What do you wish you saw? What will you see next season from the same spot, and next year, and in a few years? time?

This is the idea behind monitoring. It has nothing to do with being a country or a city dweller. Monitoring asks, simply, that we: 1) consciously look around and recognize what is happening and why; 2) that we do this regularly, so that changes don?t get away from us; 3) and finally, that we take the dare and address the difference between what we see and what we?d like to see. Getting on our coats and standing in the yard or walking the fields is the hardest part. The alternative, it seems, is pavement and its consequences.

The Land Stewardship Project convened a Monitoring Team some years ago and one of the outcomes was the recently published Monitoring Tool Box. The idea for it was born on the heels of questions from team farmers who, with research scientists, sociologists, and non-profit and government agents, pursued a conviction that conventional farming was not good for their families and communities, their land, or their pocketbooks. The resulting Tool Box was what they created to take a closer look at why.

This guide is a hands-on series of chapters that address quality of life issues as well as soils, bird and frog habitats, streams and economics. Personal objectives are a good frame of reference, and chapters help the novice reader/viewer think through possibilities. There are lots of low-tech tests to help your eye do its job. For example, a handful of soil will tell you much, just from its color and feel. But a coffee can percolation test gives you a better indication of how well that soil allows water to infiltrate.

This is not an original concept. Good stewardship of any resource incorporates monitoring of its health in the same way we check our own health from day to day. There are many programs and experts to help address the gap between what exists and what is wished.

Defining that gap is monitoring today. -END-

Caroline van Schaik is working with landowners in the Sand Creek watershed southwest of the Twin Cities. She also works with the Green Corridor Project in Washington and Chisago counties, and can be reached in LSP's Twin Cities office, 651-653-0618; <caroline@landstewardshipproject.org>.

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SOUTHEAST MINNESOTA UPDATE:

WE HAVE THE POWER

By Karen Stettler

The Land Stewardship Project?s Lewiston office continues to reach out to its members to take the pulse on current issues. Community meetings held in Stewartville and Lanesboro in 1997 brought the livestock concentration issue to the forefront. Indeed, a new livestock concentration organizer position has been created.

At these meetings many priorities were identified. The following is a partial list: 1) Raise awareness of destruction and fear caused by factory farms to communities, families and the economy; 2) Publicize the true costs of factory farms on roads, medical and health problems, fish kills, and soil, air and ground water pollution; 3) Understand the rights of townships and local units of government to regulate factory farms; 4) Educate people about different types of farming ? sustainable versus conventional.

In response to these concerns, Nancy Barsness, a long-time LSP supporter and recognized authority on feedlot issues, was invited to St. Charles, Minn., in January to speak on "Regulating Feedlots: How To Take Charge at the Township and County Levels." Nancy Barsness has been a Clerk and Zoning Administrator for New Prairie Township for 20 years. New Prairie is the township that was recently involved with the Canadian Connection case that set a legal precedent for how townships deal with feedlot issues. In addition, Nancy has assisted many townships across the state as a planning and zoning consultant.

Township planning and related zoning controls are some of the most effective tools in Minnesota today for controlling undesirable developments such as large-scale livestock feedlots. Barsness echoed this and also emphasized that the township level of government continues to remain under fire. We all need to work together to make sure township government doesn?t become a part of history. Barsness also stated that the best time to deal with a factory farm is now, before there are people trying to get a permit. It is better to have a proactive moratorium than a reactive one.

Peter Tiede, an attorney and the head of the Land Use Practice Section with the St. Paul law firm of Murnane, Conlin, White and Brandt, was also featured. Each step in restricting factory livestock operations needs to be carefully monitored, he said, but it can be done. In fact, as the New Prairie case shows, the courts have supported a township government's right to exercise local control.

As Peter and Nancy said, and as LSP has believed and known, We have the power. It is a matter of exercising this power, right now.
 
 

TWIN CITIES UPDATE:

THREE IMPORTANT LETTERS

By Dana Jackson

Fresh blankets of snow continue to fall on fields near the Twin Cities as winter winds down, hiding all signs of last year?s tomatoes and sweet corn. But the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) farmer is looking forward, not back, as the seed catalogs pile up on the kitchen table and bags of seed for the 1999 season begin to arrive in the mail. It?s time to get field plans finished, tools sharpened, and apprentices hired. The soil will be bare and brown again before we know it.
Winter is the season when the Metro office gets the Twin Cities Region CSA Directory updated and published, so it will be ready for distribution before the first day of spring. LSP has promoted CSA farms since 1994, when we co-published the first listing and descriptions of farms in the area with the Minnesota Food Association. The directory helps encourage urban people to buy food shares from the CSA farms at the beginning of the season, for which they receive a weekly delivery of fresh, usually organic, vegetables. The directories are free upon request from LSP and the Minnesota Food Association. You can also download a copy off this web site.

LSP views the CSA movement as an important step in the development of a more regional and sustainable food system, and LSP staff have supported the development of CSA farms in the Metro area. Approximately 30 CSA farms have sprung up within a 100 mile radius of the Twin Cities (many are in western Wisconsin). Most of them serve approximately 80 to 100 shareholders and have regular drop off sites in Minneapolis and St. Paul.

About five years ago the farmers came together and formed a Guild.

"We decided that we needed a group made up of people in our same occupation, CSA farming. We had heard of some guilds in Europe made up of laborers on the land who grew wheat or grapes," says Kate Stout of North Creek Community Farm, who is currently the Guild chairwoman. "We share things we've learned with each other. The Guild is both a place to celebrate things that go well and share things that are hard, so we don't feel isolated."

The Guild recently organized a weekend retreat that gave the farmers a chance to relax and have fun as well as share farming information. Tim Reese, under a contract with LSP, has worked as an organizer and secretary for the Guild in the last year, helping Kate and the steering committee plan four meetings in 1998. Reese also worked with CSA farmer Donna Goodlaxson to develop a press packet for CSA farmers to use with local media.

He also organized the 1998 apprentice network. This network provides an opportunity for CSA apprentices, first year CSA farmers and other farmers new to the area to learn about farming practices on CSA operations other than the ones where they work. The Guild encourages apprentices on each farm to participate in special training activities.

In 1998, Reese divided the CSA farms into regions around the Twin Cities, and organized a visit to at least one farm in each region. The apprentices visited Red Cardinal Farm and Natural Harvest in June, discussing marketing, planning, and the benefits of combining a commercial and CSA operation. In July they visited Philadelphia Community Farm and Common Harvest Farm and attended a CSA farmer picnic that introduced them to the larger Guild network. At Big Woods Farm in August, the apprentices had a session on identifying insect pests. The final session was held in September at Our Farm and Spring Hill Farm, where they discussed cover cropping techniques.

Reese drew upon his three years of farming experience as an employee of Red Cardinal Farm and his graduate studies in agricultural education when he organized the farm tours and training for the apprentice network. He has begun planning the 1999 schedule of apprentice farm tours to give to new apprentices as soon as they start work in April.

In addition to collecting information from the farmers to put in the new CSA Directory, Reese has been organizing the 1999 Local Community Farm Festival, which was held at Hamline College on April 11 this year. This event is co-sponsored by LSP and the Sustainable Resources Center?s Urban Lands Program, with support from the Guild and the Minnesota Food Association. This highly successful event gives farmers an opportunity to talk individually to over 200 potential CSA customers.
 

Dana Jackson is LSP's associate director. She can be reached at 651- 653-0618; <danaj@maroon.tc.umn.edu>.

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BOOK REVIEW:

ON GOOD LAND: The Autobiography of an Urban Farm

By Michael Ableman

Foreword by Alice Waters
1998
138 pages, 44 photos
$18.95

Chronicle Books, 85 Second St.
San Francisco, CA 94105

Reviewed by Dana Jackson

This handsome book is subtitled The Autobiography of an Urban Farm, but it is also the autobiography of a farmer. It is Michael Ableman?s account of 17 years as manager of Fairview Gardens, 12 acres of vegetables and fruits now completely surrounded by tract home developments in Goleta, Calif., near Santa Barbara. It is the story of how he learned to choose the right crops, manage weeds, control insect pests and develop markets, but most of all how he and the supporters of Fairview Gardens struggled to protect the land from becoming one more subdivision.

Alice Waters, famous chef of Chez Panisse in San Francisco, expresses her admiration for Michael in the foreword: "Fairview Gardens is inspirational to me because just as Michael has refused to let the farm be destroyed by urbanization, he has refused to let his voice be drowned out by the incessant, seductive voices advertising artificial food. Michael knows firsthand both the environmental wisdom and the cultural benefits of small scale, diversified agriculture, and he has devoted himself to demonstrating the linkages, both practical and spiritual, that connect the good table to the good earth."

Over the years, many delicious meals have been prepared in the farmhouse kitchen for friends and visitors. In 1989, I was privileged to be a guest at their good table, and savor vegetables and fruits picked just that morning and prepared with skill. It was clear that the farm was not creating "product" for market, but growing healthful food for people to buy and eat.

The author endears himself to the reader when he frankly recounts his failures. I experienced a sick feeling in the pit of my
stomach when I read about the time he was disking to control weeds, and "an entire control station of valves and pipes (became) lodged in the disk." This "baptism" was the first of many " plumbing mishaps," because lying under the 100-year old farm was a maze of pipes and valves installed for past walnut, lemon and avocado crops that each required their own plumbing system.

Soon after Ableman began to manage the farm, he expanded the peach orchard, but the variety he chose stayed green when ripe and customers would not buy the peaches. After that failure, the farm changed its focus from growing fruit for large-scale commodity shipping, to growing a wide variety of vegetables and fruits to market at the local farmers' market and their own roadside stand. As plant diversity increased, so did insect diversity. Ableman credits diversity for the minimum of insect pest problems on the farm. He also credits the habit of careful observation, learned from walking the land. "My best agricultural practice was to walk the fields and orchards, observing, taking notes, poking, digging, smelling, and inspecting," he says. The author shares what he learned from this practice in one-page, instructional sidebars with titles such as "How to Pick a Peach," "Pruning," "On Mulch" and "Water Wisdom."

Ableman and his crew are performing all these tasks on an island in a sea of tract houses. In previous years, new suburban residents objected to the farm's compost piles, its roosters crowing, and the produce stand along the road. Ableman knew that the real problem was that people had lost their connection to the land and the growing of food. He saw that as an educational challenge. Eventually, neighbors began to stop by the stand to buy freshly picked produce, and as the connection between food and farming became more understandable, they began to view Fairview Gardens as an asset in their community.

Objections to the roosters resulted in a major local controversy, with radio stations taping rooster sounds, the newspaper assigning a reporter to cover daily developments and televised hearings for which supporters of the farm showed up wearing pop-up rooster hats. Fairview Gardens won this battle, and roosters and chickens still roam under the orchard trees, "in search of bugs, worms and minerals in the soil." I love the image Ableman uses to describe the impact of the chickens: "I am certain that the action of the chickens constantly scratching the surface of the farm stimulates the land like some giant massage."

This book is lush with photographs, and except for the photo of the author and two aerial shots that show how the landscape changed from 1954 to 1994, all of the photographs are the work of Ableman. This is the second book he has authored and filled with his photographs, His first book, From the Good Earth, was based on 10 years of winter travel to learn about agriculture around the world.

Bright pictures of fruits or vegetables and pictures of children always get my attention, and this book abounds with them. The last chapter, entitled "Fertile Minds," contains photos of school children visiting the farm, and Ableman discusses how children learn from gardens.

In 1993 the land was down-zoned from residential to agricultural, which gives some reprieve from development pressure. Today the farm grows food for 125 CSA shareholders. It also markets produce at a roadside stand and serves as an educational center for school children, while continuing to welcome an endless stream of adult visitors. Local supporters helped Ableman incorporate the Center for Urban Agriculture, which is trying to raise enough money to buy the land outright from the owner under a conservation easement requiring it to remain a working organic farm and educational facility.

This book should remind us not to wait until our urban edge farms become islands in a sea of housing developments before we think about preserving them. Now is the time to address the causes of urban sprawl and develop consumer demand for fresh, locally grown produce. Such efforts can help give our metro-area farmland a value that surpasses a developer's wildest dreams.

Land Stewardship Project associate director Dana Jackson is an avid gardener.

BOOK REVIEW:

THE FREDERICK MANFRED READER

Edited by John Calvin Rezmerski

1996
511 pages
$21.95
Holy Cow! Press, 711 Woodland Ave., Duluth, MN 55812

Reviewes by Jim Tjepkema

John Rezmerski has done us a great service assembling excerpts from almost all of Frederick Manfred?s books into a single volume. Although Manfred was a popular writer years ago, today many people are not familiar with his work. Most of his novels and other writings are devoted to rural life in the Midwest and cover many aspects of rural existence that are of special concern to advocates of sustainable agriculture.

The great majority of Manfred?s work is devoted to rural life in the area where Iowa, Minnesota, Nebraska and South Dakota come together, which he called Sioux Land. Manfred knew this area well, having been raised on a farm in northwest Iowa and having lived for many years in southwest Minnesota.

Before his death in 1995, Manfred wrote more than 30 books and is probably best known for Lord Grizzly, the story of a buckskinner who was nearly killed by a grizzly bear and crawled hundreds of miles to save himself. His last book, Of Lizards and Angels, which was published in 1989, covers the fictional history of a northwest Iowa farm family from the time they homesteaded the land right up to the beginning of the farm crisis in the late 1970s. His first novel, The Golden Bowl, was published in 1944 and is a gripping tale of a young man who becomes involved with a farm family in South Dakota during the Dust Bowl days.

John Rezmerski very carefully selected segments from Manfred's writings and assembled them according to a well thought-out plan that gives an excellent picture of the author's writing career. Rezmerski is a poet who teaches at Gustavus Adolphus College and who has participated in fund raisers for the South Central Minnesota Chapter of the Sustainable Farming Association as a member of the Heartland Storytellers Guild. He was very well acquainted with Manfred, having associated with him in a writer's group that gave readings in small towns across Minnesota. The Manfred Reader begins with an overview of Manfred's work and includes many quotations from interviews with the writer.

If you read this collection from cover- to-cover, which is how Rezmerski would like the book read, I think you will agree that Frederick Manfred is an outstanding writer. In fact, I think Manfred's work compares favorably to that of more famous writers such as Sinclair Lewis, Willa Cather, Maria Sandoz and Meridel Le Sueur, who also wrote about our rural heritage. Frederick is a great storyteller who will hold your attention with fascinating tales that are well researched and skillfully presented. Also, he is not afraid to tackle difficult subjects such as sexual taboos and religious hypocrisy.

This collection of Manfred's work would be of special value to people who are concerned about the loss of family farms and the decline of rural communities. These carefully gathered excerpts demonstrate that Manfred was very aware of the many difficult situations faced by farmers and rural people.

Through his writings, Manfred has provided us with a wonderful portrait of rural society as it was in the recent as well as distant past. But these stories are relevant even today. They transcend time and setting, giving us insights into how we can deal with problems our farms and rural communities face in the present.

Land Stewardship Project member Jim Tjepkema farms near Clarks Grove, Minn., and is active in the South Central Minnesota Chapter of the Sustainable Farming Association.

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POETRY:
 
 

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