S2 Ep015 Organic Farmers Can Meet Urgent Climate Goals: with Elizabeth Henderson, Author, Farmer, and Activist, Pt1

Jul 24

U.S. agriculture must help mitigate climate change. Without changes to large scale production methods, projections suggest the agricultural sector will be responsible for 30% of U.S. emissions by 2050. On a day of intense wild fire smoke and poor air quality across New York, Elizabeth Henderson, an organic farmer for more than 30 years, explained why organic and sustainable farming methods are our key to meeting climate goals:

What makes healthy soil and why it’s the basis of organic farming;
How conventional (industrial) agriculture is destroying the environment;
The bad math that hides profiteering by industrial agriculture;
Why organic and small farms are well prepared to meet climate and food production challenges.

Bio:

Elizabeth Henderson farmed using organic practices at Peacework Farm in Wayne County, the first NY Community Supported Agriculture farm west of Albany, and provided vegetables, herbs and flowers for hundreds of Rochesterians for over 30 years. She co-chairs the Policy Committee of the Northeast Organic Farming Association Interstate Council, represents the NOFA Interstate Council on the Board of the Agricultural Justice Project, and is a member of the Rochester Food Policy Council. From 1993 – 2013, she chaired the Agricultural Development Board in Wayne County and took an active role in creating the Farming and Farmland Protection Plan for the county. She is lead author of Sharing the Harvest: A Citizen’s Guide to Community Supported Agriculture (Chelsea Green, 2007), contributed to https://disparitytoparity.org/parity-for-diversified-family-scale-produce-farms-like-mine/ and blogs at https://thepryingmantis.wordpress.com.

“
How do you keep small farms in business as the whole world system has been moving towards more and more consolidation, bigger and bigger farms, bigger and fewer businesses controlling all of food, all of the global food system.”
-Elizabeth Henderson

Transcript

Season 2, Episode 15 (Part 1) : Organic Farmers Can Meet Urgent Climate Goals: with Elizabeth Henderson, Author, Farmer, and Activist

Elizabeth Henderson, Organic Farmer:

How do you keep small farms in business as the whole world system has been moving towards more and more consolidation, bigger and bigger farms, bigger and fewer businesses controlling all of food, all of the global food system.

[Rhythmic sounds of electric train pulling into station]

[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]

Cevan Castle, Host:

This is Towards a Kinder Public, a podcast about steps that we can all take to achieve a kinder public space, that better meets our interconnected needs. I’m Cevan Castle, and along with Annie Chen, we are Kinderpublic.

My guest for this episode is Elizabeth Henderson, an author, organic farmer for over 30 years, and the creator of the first New York Community Supported Agriculture farm west of Albany. She co-chairs the Policy Committee of the Northeast Organic Farming Association’s (NOFA) Interstate Council, and represents the NOFA Interstate Council on the Board of the Agricultural Justice Project. She is a member of the Rochester Food Policy Council, among many other organic farming and justice leadership positions.

Elizabeth joined me to speak about the 2023 Farm Bill and the incredible potential our farm policy has to reduce emissions and negative climate impacts.

She also shared some farming information to help us understand why this legislation, which comes around for renewal usually every 5 years, is such a significant climate opportunity that impacts us all, regardless of our geographic location and proximity to rural areas.

Our conversation took place as New York state, where we are both located, along with many parts of Canada and the United States, were impacted by dangerous air quality due to wildfire smoke from forests burning in Canada. As this episode has gone into editing, the fires are still burning.

It may seem counterintuitive that climate change urgently needs to be addressed within agricultural policy, since that sector, in principle, should be centered on nature. Agriculture currently contributes an annual minimum of 11% of climate damaging emissions in the United States. If conventional farming methods are allowed to continue as they are, projections show that we can expect agriculture to contribute over 30% of climate damaging emissions by 2050, becoming- by far- the economic sector with the largest emissions in the United States.

It’s important to know that what we euphemistically call conventional farming is more accurately called industrial farming, which, simply put, is forced growth through synthetic chemicals, many of which are derived from fossil fuels. Nutritional value is generally low in this farming method because nutrition is not the point of this system, volume is.

Industrial agriculture is inherently unable to be a partner as we work to address the climate crisis, because its methods depend on overwhelming natural forces rather than understanding them and working with them. It also relies on fossil fuel and systems that we are now working to change.

Organic farming and other ecologically focused methods, in contrast, require highly skilled farmers and environmental stewards- people that know a lot about natural, biological, and physical processes. This knowledge base pre-dates industrial production, and has remained alive, growing and developing. We know what to do. We just have to ask the right people.

I’m grateful to share this conversation with you. Please visit the episode notes to see the names of organizations that you can follow and support to take meaningful action right away.

[Subway chimes arpeggio played on mandolin]

Cevan Castle:

I'm here with Elizabeth Henderson; thank you so much for making time to speak with me today and for simultaneously doing the highly skilled work of farming and the highly skilled work of being a steward of our environment.

I was so thrilled to meet you recently. We were in a Climate Reality Project meeting attended by multiple New York chapters, and we were talking about the 2023 Farm Bill and looking at farming supports and how to improve climate resilience within the bill.

I want to comment also on the environmental conditions today, because it seems extremely appropriate to be speaking to you on this day where we are experiencing, at least where I am, extremely dark gray skies and very poor air quality. So we may be taking breathing breaks as we're speaking because the conditions are not great. At least I will <laughing> I'm very impacted by these conditions. So- would you share a bit about yourself and how you have expertise on this topic?

Elizabeth Henderson:

Sure. Well, the air is bad here too, and I've set up my own do-it-yourself air filter to make things a little better with four air filters and a box fan, seems to work okay.

I started farming in 1979. I had a previous life as a university professor, and I just needed to get out of schools and do something totally different. So with some friends, I bought a farm in Western Massachusetts and my first idea was that I would work in a university without walls where we provided college degrees for people who were in prison. And while I learned how to farm, and I discovered that I really enjoyed the farming, none of the partners who started with me kept at it, but I did.

And it never occurred to any of us to farm any other way, but organic. The basis of organic is healthy soil. So if you have healthy soil, then the people and the animals who eat the plants will be healthy. So it's a whole system based around prevention rather than interventions like using pesticides to kill things. If you create a really healthy system, you don't need very much in the way of pest control. And that's continued to be true ever since. And as people have learned more about reducing tillage, weeds have become less of a problem as well.

So organic farming is based on building soil health and what makes soil healthy, a lot of it is the carbon in the soil, the soil organic matter, which is 58% carbon. And that healthy soil creates a whole ecology around the plants where the soil microorganisms feed the plants. Human beings don't really know how to do that yet. We have some inklings of the things that you need to feed the plants, but soil knows how, it's, you know, billions of years of co-evolution that have led to soil knowing how to feed plants and then plants to be healthy and feed healthy animals and human beings.

So that's what the whole system is about. And what I brought to that, because of my background in organizing, um, against the war in Vietnam, and for a healthier, cleaner environment, was developing local direct markets so that people could become members of my farm doing community supported agriculture.

And I learned about that both from people like Robyn Van En and also from Booker T. Whatley, who is one of the leaders of the Tuskegee School of Agriculture in the South, who wrote this wonderful book, How to Make a Hundred Thousand Dollars a Year on 25 Acres. And it wasn't exactly the same system, but it was very close and it was trying to solve the same problem, which is how do you keep small farms in business as the whole world system has been moving towards more and more consolidation, bigger and bigger farms, bigger and fewer businesses controlling all of food, all of the global food system.

And that is where we get into how conventional agriculture is destroying soil health and reducing the health of the entire climate. So when you have these systems where farmers are growing more and more, bigger and bigger monocrops of corn and soybeans or even wheat, and then using bigger and bigger equipment, plowing up more of the prairie, more of the grasses, cutting down more of the forests to plant these bigger and bigger fields where they fertilize using synthetic nitrogen fertilizers that are made, that are fossil fuel derivatives. They're made from either natural gas or even coal. So just the production of that fertilizer is an enormous contribution to the emissions that… like when New York State did its assessment for the Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act, they did not count that to the account of agriculture. So they're underestimated tremendously, the emissions that are the result of conventional agriculture.

Cevan Castle:

Could I pause there for one moment?

Elizabeth Henderson:

Sure.

Cevan Castle:

Can you explain more about that fertilizer use and how much of that is being used? And, and then again, reiterate the point that that's not being counted in agriculture.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Sure. Well, on an organic farm or an agro-ecological farm, you don't use any synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. Not any at all. So soil fertility comes from having healthy soil. You build that soil health by understanding, as much as you can, the natural systems that make soils healthy.

So, you grow cover crops and keep the soil, keep things growing as much of the time, as much of a year as possible, because plants, when they're growing, have this miracle machine that is working for us for free. It's called photosynthesis. So plants are taking carbon dioxide from the air and they're transforming it into sugars, into glucose, that they use for the growth of the plant itself, that up to 30% is used by shooting it into the soil and trading for the nutrients that they need from the microorganisms in the soil. And human beings are just barely coming to understand that.

And with conventional fertilizer, where you use the nitrogen, the synthetic nitrogen fertilizers and other synthetic fertilizers like that, you are short circuiting the soil feeding the plants, and just directly feeding the plants. And that is what diminishes the health of the soil and contributes to the emissions of conventional agriculture.

And as I said, in New York state, when they calculated the emissions from agriculture, they didn't count the fertilizer and the production of that, because a lot of it's not done in New York state.

And certainly, you know, a great deal of methane is produced on the large animal farms. Livestock are producing methane both from the way they digest and burp, but also because of the food that they eat. And the food is grown using synthetic nitrogen fertilizers. And it's grown using herbicides and pesticides that contribute to the carbon emissions, and great big equipment that also have significant emissions that, um, help break down the climate.

So on a smaller farm, you're not using that big equipment. On a farm that's committed to organic methods, whether it's certified organic or not, you're not using that synthetic fertilizer. You're growing cover crops. You're recycling nutrients by making compost, by building up the soil that way, by keeping the soil covered as much of the time as you can, year round. And that cycling of nutrients is what maintains the soil fertility, and even increases it, so that the crops that we grow or are more nutrient dense. In studies done by USDA over the past 30 years, they’ve shown that the vegetables and fruit sold in the marketplace in the United States have fewer and fewer nutrients, both minerals and vitamins.

Cevan:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Henderson:

And that's by being grown in soil that isn't healthy. So when you have a system that's based on healthy soil, the crops are more nutrient dense, your body needs less to feel satisfied. When the food that you're eating lacks nutrients, you just keep eating more and more, because you're trying to get the minerals and the vitamins that you need. And in the meantime you're getting more and more fats and other things that lead to obesity and bad health. So all these things are interconnected.

Cevan Castle:

I think it's interesting just to go back to the points you were making about tillage, too, and the use of herbicides and fertilizers. I was in a conversation recently where someone was equivocating about large scale agriculture because, you know, science, and these genetically engineered seeds that we're using that are working in combination with specialized herbicides, are actually really good because it's a reduced tillage kind of agriculture, because the weeds are suppressed through other means.

Could you talk a little bit about what tillage means for people who may not have a familiarity there, and why that system should not be considered, uh, at all beneficial because <laugh> of reduced tillage? <laugh>

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, I think the people who want to make organic agriculture look bad have seized on the tillage issue and they've really distorted it in mendacious ways. On an organic farm, like the one that I ran, we reduced tillage as much as we could by keeping grass strips in between permanent beds, so about a third of the ground was never tilled at all. And then on the beds, we used a minimum amount of tillage to cultivate out weeds and we used some tillage to turn in cover crops, but when we tested the soil, there was a continual growth of organic matter despite using a small amount of tillage like that. And now there are small farms that aren't using any tillage at all, they are in a cover crop, mowing it, covering it with a tarp and killing it that way. So that they aren't even turning the soil except for the tiny bit that you need to, to insert transplants or to grow, um, to put your seeds in the ground so that you can grow a crop.

With the large scale farms that are using mono crops and no-till, um, chemical no-till, they do kill the cover crops with herbicides, but those herbicides are killing the life in the soil. We've been reading now more and more about dust storms in the heartland of the United States, which takes us back to the dust bowl.

Cevan Castle:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Henderson:

And that was soils blowing away at a massive scale because the prairies had been turned over and very deep tillage using plowing was being used. So this chemical no-till doesn't plow, but it's killing the soil anyway. And so it's starting to turn, it takes a while for the results to show up, but they are definitely showing up and in the conditions of drought, the soil that has been treated with glyphosate and synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is losing the life of the microorganisms. Fungi that exude glomalin, and other gooey substances that hold the aggregates of the soil together, that hold it together and keep it from blowing away. Those are being destroyed by this chemical no-till. And if you test the soil, they are increasing carbon in the top six inches, but they're depleting the deeper carbon, which is what's built up when you use organic systems

Cevan Castle:

Mm-hmm. <affirmative> And that's probably more stable, right? Over the longer term.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Exactly.

Cevan Castle:

The deeper deposit.

Elizabeth Henderson:

That's right.

Cevan:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Henderson:

And the indigenous systems of agriculture, the, you know, the famous three sisters, they minimized tillage. They would only make mounds and plant in those and leave a lot of the ground covered, and then foraging in the forests and taking care of the forests so that the production of edible nuts and mushrooms and things like that were maximized. Turning more of the land back to native peoples to treat in that way is also a tremendous way of mitigating climate change. They have traditional systems that take care of the soil and maximize carbon and diminish the destruction of soil, which is what we see with the monocrop carbon destroying chemical systems that tie those farms into the ever fewer and ever larger agribusinesses.

Anyway, there are fewer, fewer big corporations like Tyson and Perdue and Cargill and Archer-Daniels-Midland that are the dealers that buy from the farmers and sell the inputs that farms need. The DuPont and the Syngenta, those fewer and fewer chemical companies that have captured the farmers. Because that's the only market in sight.

It used to be in, you know, in Iowa, there would be many, many places where the farm could sell their corn, or soybeans or whatever they were growing. Now there are only very few places, and the same is true with livestock. So those big companies control 40, 50, 60, 80% of the markets that they dominate and they are profiteering off the climate crisis that we're in, and particularly off of the Covid emergency that we have been through.

Tyson took out a full page advertisement in the New York Times claiming that there was going to be a shortage of chicken.

Cevan:

Yeah. [Sigh]

Elizabeth Henderson:

And a shortage of meat. And so their, um, meat processing plants had to be kept open.

Cevan:

Yeah.

Elizabeth Henderson:

And Trump went along with that.

So hundreds of processing plant workers died because they weren't given adequate protections from Covid. And at the same time, Tyson had millions of tons of meat that they were, they were selling more to China at that time than they had previously, while claiming in this country that there was a shortage of chicken, which enabled them to sell their chickens to stores at a higher price while they were paying farmers a lower price.

So if you look at the economic returns of those companies, all of those biggest companies, they have been making more money recently. Their profits are higher than they have ever been. And all of that is profiteering. And we should claw that back for the benefit of the people who are doing work in agriculture, farm workers, the farmers, and the low income people who need to eat healthier food.

Cevan Castle:

Yeah. And I remember also at that time hearing horrendous, truly, truly disturbing stories about animals being mass executed, in really awful conditions because they were not timing the distribution of the livestock into the processing system perfectly. And so they were basically disposing of the animals rather than figuring out a way to process them and get them into the stores.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, those huge systems are, they're inflexible and they're not sustainable. With Covid, within days, the small organic farms, um, the local farms that are based in their communities, were able to shift and find ways of delivering food to people without anybody touching anybody, wearing masks, putting bags of food where people could pick them up themselves, things like that.

Farms that had been doing community supported agriculture became like stores where they handled food from a number of farms and supplied the people in their area not just with their vegetables, but maybe meat and eggs from a neighboring farm. So the smaller farms are much more flexible.

Cevan Castle:

Yes. And it's interesting because that economic and, uh, process flexibility, it's not exactly economic flexibility, but, uh, the ability to adjust the business process, the business side and say, hey, I'm going to, in this difficult moment, I'm going to deliver to this area. My daughter and I participated in that actually in the Albany area, where people were doing delivery routes and we were leaving bags on people's porches. We were participating at that time in a small farmer's market, and farmers were doing the same. And there was a lot of innovation there. I saw, you know, more Free Fridges open up where people were depositing food so that it could be accessed at any time, day or night for free by people who were in need. I saw so much real collaboration and care for the community.

But I kind of want to draw a parallel, um, to the fast response to conditions that we saw during Covid in terms of the business side of the small farm, to the ability of the small farm to make changes and innovations as climate conditions develop. I feel like small farms are so able to be nimble and try new things and understand what's happening in their regional environmental condition and adjust, right?

Elizabeth Henderson:

Well, in sustainable agriculture, we've developed really excellent networks of communication. So I've been active since the seventies with the Northeast Organic Farming Association. And back when I started farming, there were no university courses in organic agriculture, so I learned from other farmers and other gardeners and then I really felt like anything I learned I needed to share with other people in order to pay back what I had learned myself.

So it's all farmer to farmer, gardener to gardener. And that's a great way of spreading know-how and supporting one another in being flexible. So CSA was an innovation that spread tremendously fast in exactly that way. We had gatherings where farmers who were doing it together with active members of their CSAs would talk about what we were doing and how we were doing it, how we could get a fair price by selling directly to people who were our loyal customers. And those loyal customers would talk about the benefits to them and what they were doing to support the farmers to train other consumers, other people who are conscious eaters, in supporting farmers too. So those networks are very much alive all over the country.

Cevan Castle:

Sounds like a model for a lot of other <laugh> people who need to get back to that community relationship.

Elizabeth Henderson:

Yeah, it absolutely is. And insofar as there are Black farms in this country, 20,000 of them throughout the south have been enabled to thrive due to the work of the Federation of Southern Co-Ops. So starting in the sixties, out of the Civil Rights movement, they've been organizing cooperatives, both marketing and growing co-ops and networks of, um, marketing to people in say Chicago, or New York City. Food from Southern Black farms sold directly to Black people in neighborhoods that needed it. And those are tremendous models for cooperation that grew out of the necessity of surviving in the horribly racist surroundings that the Federation of Southern Co-Ops has lived in.

And yet they are so positive and creative about doing things that will save their communities and also at the same time save the planet.

[Sounds of frogs calling from a marsh on a rainy summer evening]

Cevan:

Links to more information about our guest and the topics mentioned, as well as a full transcript of the conversation, are available on the podcast section of our website, kinderpublic.com.

To share information about issues in public space, and spaces that are doing things right, email podcast@kinderpublic.com.

If you have enjoyed an episode of Towards a Kinder Public, we would love your help in sharing the episode with others. Please leave us a rating and a review, it helps us make our topics more visible, and we really appreciate your support.

You can find us on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter! We are @kinderpublic.

I’m Cevan Castle, my guest has been Elizabeth Henderson. Join us next week for part 2 of this conversation, more details on the 2023 Farm Bill, and specific actions we can all take to support healthy legislation. Have a very good week!

[Frog sounds continue and then fade out]

Mentioned in this episode:

Peacework Farm

Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA)

Community Supported Agriculture (CSA)

The U.S. Farm Bill

DIY Air Filter Instructions (a.k.a. Corsi-Rosenthal Box)

Climate Reality Project

Rochester Food Policy Council

Agricultural Justice Project

Glyphosate

New York State Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act