In the Valley

text

Found It

Awhile back, I promised to look into the history of community sponsored agriculture, the model that my farm uses to sell most of its produce. Apparently the standard narrative is that CSAs started in Japan in the 1970s when a group of women concerned about pesticides formed subscription-partnerships with local farms, and that this model spread to Europe and the US. While the first part of that is true, it sounds like farms in Europe, inspired by the ideas of Rudolf Steiner, had actually been working on similar models since the 1950s. Chile also independently developed some CSA-forerunners in the early 1970s.

[CSA-ing in the the 1980s: Indian Line Farm]

But in the US, the CSA model first appeared independently at two farms in 1986: one at Indian Line Farm in South Egremont, Massachusetts, and one at Temple-Wilton Community Farm in southern New Hampshire. Both were inspired by European farms; their founders didn’t learn about what had been going on in Japan until after they founded their own CSAs. In fact, both farms were started when Europeans—a Swiss man in the case of Indian Line and a German man in the case of Temple-Wilton—merged their ideas and experiences with those of locals in the two New England towns. Both are still working CSA farms.

But those US pioneers don’t seem too concerned about exactly who thought of what first. As Trauger Groh, the German who helped found Temple-Wilton, put it in an article from a few years ago, “As with all great ideas, the idea of CSA had arrived. It just needed to emerge. The time was ripe. Who started at what hour is totally unimportant. What is important is that the CSA initiative has emerged and developed, and there is now a base for people to carry forward.”

text

Where to Ash

Here’s another major problem with the TVA spill and cleanup: once TVA gets the coal ash out of the river, there’s really no good way to dispose of it. TVA’s solution has been to pay a poor town in Alabama to let them dump the ash in an abandoned mine. In the short-term, this does help the town financially, and most people agree that this type of “dry storage” is safer than the “wet storage” system the ash had been in before. But it also sounds like the people in Perry County, Alabama, who will be living with the coal ash from now on, are getting some misinformation about the harmful chemicals it contains. Here’s a pretty good article about it:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/us/30ash.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

In the meantime, TVA has announced that as part of its effort to prevent future spills, it will convert all of its wet-ash storage to dry storage. In wet storage, the waste caught in smokestacks after coal is burned is washed out and then stored in water-covered landfills. In dry storage, its removed with a vacuum and then stored in silos.Where

text

Exeunt

There have been a lot of changes on the farm in the past couple of weeks. All of them stem from the fact that the farmer and his wife have decided that this will be their last season here. They’re in the process of selling the farm, not simply as land and a house, but hopefully also as a business. I’ve known this since the first week I got here, but it didn’t seem like much of a reality until things started disappearing. First to go were the two pigs and one of the cows. The pigs weren’t such a loss, since they were a bit brutish and literally ate like pigs and the biggest one, the Larry of the Larry-Moe-and-Curly trio, was a thorough bully. (That pig was a true pig, and the farmer considered rewarding Larry’s superlative ability to feed himself by making him the first to go to the slaughterhouse, but then he decided to be fair and send send him with his lackey, Moe. Someday we’ll figure out the connection between the fact that, of all the domesticated animals, pigs eat the most like us and act the most like us.)

More of a disappointment was the departure of the black cow—the cuter of the two—who followed me around whenever I went into the cow pasture. Saying goodbye to the chickens was also not so bad. They’re dumb, loud and dirty. I think if more of us knew just how unattractive an animal the average chicken is, we’d all eat a lot fewer chicken wings and omelets. They shit on their own eggs, break them, eat them, and are generally uncooperative. The farmer sold about fifty of the nicer-looking White Leghorns to a local, and kept the nine older hens. The flock had already slowed down their egg production as summer was ending, leaving us with only about two dozen eggs to sell at market. Now we get just enough for our breakfasts. With fewer to worry about, we tried letting them out of the run, but then we left the farm for a few hours and came back to find a grizzled chicken corpse by the back porch. Barney, the vicious beagle who can’t even keep raccoons out of the garden, was in the midst of stripping the feathers off a second hen when we caught him. We gave up on the idea of having free range chickens pretty quickly.

The biggest loss was the farmer’s wife and son. She had been looking for a job closer to their relatives since I arrived at the farm, and a few weeks ago she found one in Florida. So she and the four-year-old son took off a few weeks ago. It was tough to say goodbye to them, since they had been my family for the past month, but for their last dinner on the farm we had a good time and cooked a big leg of lamb that no one had bought at the market yet—valued at about $60.

“You guys are going to starve once I’m gone,” said the farmer’s ife. She seemed more concerned about how the farmer and I would cook and clean by ourselves than about selling the farm or starting a new job.

“We’ll just make a lot of hummus,” said the farmer.

“And drink beer,” I said. “We’ll be alright.”

text

The Spectrum

I’ve been talking to people from what seem to be the two most important—for lack of a better term—citizen watchdog groups in the TVA region. One is the afore-mentioned United Mountain Defense (they of the TVA smokestack puppets), and the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy. But although they share some very broad environmental concerns, they take very different views of TVA.

The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy (SACE) is in pretty close contact with TVA, even with many of its board members. They advise TVA about the impact of TVA policies and make recommendations on how it can improve its standing with concerned citizens. This type of approach reflects a philosophy that, given the right circumstances, TVA will move toward more efficient and renewable sources of energy; that it has the ability to do more good than harm.

United Mountain Defense (UMD) on the other hand, would like to see TVA gone immediately. The Authority’s encouragement of mountaintop destruction and its contribution to poisoning local waters make it unacceptable. They prefer demonstrations, marches, and the occasional act of civil disobedience to negotiation. In their view, TVA is not at all concerned with the well-being of the Tennessee Valley, so negotiation serves no purpose.

I don’t know who’s right. No one person I’ve talked to seems to be able to give a complete picture of the TVA, its motivations, its history. The SACE people talk to me about board meetings, press releases, studies; the UMD tell me about FBI connections, hazardous chemicals, and TVA police “gestapo tactics.” (More on all that later.) Probably both kinds of groups are necessary for any kind of change to happen. Certainly, both get the attention of the media and TVA, and both have a noticeable impact.

But I also feel like both aren’t taking a very long view of TVA. SACE thinks they were essentially successful in accomplishing their original mission; UMD thinks it’s been “poisoning Appalachia since 1933.” Both seem like pretty simplistic narratives. As for who’s view of TVA turns out to be right, we’ll have to see.

text

Red Meat Tape

We finally got the latest round of meat back last week. The farmer had quite a bit of trouble getting touch with the meat processor to make sure our beef and pork was ready. They wouldn’t pick up their phone or answer his messages on the day he was scheduled to pick it up, and since it’s a four hour round trip to the processor, he didn’t want to drive all the way there just to find out the meat wasn’t ready. He was calling them several times a day for about three days.

“The worst part is that there’s nothing I can do,” he said. “It’s not like I can go somewhere else.”

“They’ve got you by the sausage,” I said.

“Yeah,” he said. And it’s true. If a farmer wants to sell their meat directly to consumers, which is what the farmer does at the Knoxville farmer’s market, they can’t get it processed just anywhere. The animals have to be butchered, aged and packaged at a USDA-certified processor, and the closest one to the farm is two hours away in Bristol, Virginia. This might seem surprising, but it makes sense. Around here, in rural Tennessee, a lot of people raise cattle. If you drive for twenty minutes along the country road the farm is located off of, you’ll probably see one hundred cattle. The majority of those are owned and raised by family farms, but they’ll be sold at auction to a huge buyer who represents an even bigger company—like McDonald’s, for instance. After that, they’ll be “finished” in a feed lot, where they eat themselves sick on corn before being sent to slaughter. Since most of the rural farmers in our area are locked into this conventional system, they don’t need a USDA-certified butcher anywhere near them. So this one dinky place in the next state ends up being our only choice.

But he did eventually get the meat back, about four days late. The folks at the processor didn’t offer any explanation for their tardiness, but the taste made up for everything.

text

Growing Progress

One evening last week our old-timer neighbor came over with his wife. He brought this as a present for the farmer’s four-year-old son:

It’s Dan, the “Answer Plot Man”! Here’s the side of the package:

Talking about it the next day, the farmer and I couldn’t quite figure whether or not it was a joke. Basically, Dan, the “Answer Plot Man,” is a GMO food-wielding, herbicide-sparying action figure. Little-kid farmers are supposed to play with this toy and grow up with an affection for genetically-modified foods. It’s made by a company called Monsanto, one of the world’s biggest biotech companies.

Monsanto produces a synthetic hormone called rBGH, which is banned in every industrial country but the US. It developed the Agent Orange herbicide in the ’60s (a.ka., the toxic Vietnam herbicide), and was a major manufacturer of DDT (a.k.a., the bald eagle-killer). “Roundup,” advertised on the toy box, is the world’s best-selling herbicide and is produced by Monsanto. There have been several studies linking it to various diseases in humans and animals exposed to it. Because it’s such a strong herbicide, Montano had to produce genetically-altered varieties of crops that could tolerate it—hence the “Roundup Ready” corn and soybean signs in the toy.

But for our old-timer neighbor, and most farmers in our area, herbicides like Roundup are standard tools of cultivation. The farmer has told me that the old-timer shakes his head when he sees the farmer hoeing the little weeds in his beds of greens. And he laughs a little when he sees all the worms in our ears of corn. To the old-timer, the hoes and the worms remind him of the back-breaking labor and meager harvests of his childhood. To him, organic farming probably looks somewhat absurd. But I don’t think he’s really trying to indoctrinate the farmer’s four-year-old son about the wonders of genetically-modified crops. I think Dan, the Answer Plot Man, is just a gentle jab at our “primitive” methods. Every generation has a different idea of progress. For the old-timer, it’s GMO crops. For us, it’s worms in every ear of corn.

text

Green Power (Bait and) Switch

I’ve been hearing this ad on the radio for TVA’s “green power switch” program. The idea behind the program is pretty simple, and the radio ad makes it sound pretty good: a TVA customer—any ordinary person—can install solar panels or wind turbines on their house and generate their own energy. TVA buys back the power they generate, at about twice the retail rate. So the more you generate on your own, the lower your overall energy costs.

The funny thing about this ad is the narrator. He’s recorded to sound like an old-timey radio announcer talking up a new appliance, circa 1933. In other words, circa the time TVA was founded. At the time, the Authority was lauded as the greatest progressive force to reach the Tennessee Valley. As one of the state’s senators put it when the TVA Act was passed, “By this act the Tennessee Valley is started on its way to a full development as a great industrial and agricultural empire.”

David Lilienthal was more responsible than anyone for popularizing the progressive image of the TVA. Through a strong publications campaign of magazine articles, movies, photo essays, and museum exhibitions, Lilienthal religiously convinced the public that the Valley deserved cheap electricity, especially its rural farmers, who until then had gone unserved by the power companies of the Southeast. Lilienthal’s TVA was going to save the valley with cheap power.

The radio ad looks to me like an attempt by TVA to align its present with its mythic past. But ironically, it points out the biggest problem with TVA’s myth: cheap power can never be clean power. David Lilienthal’s insistence on providing power at the lowest rate possible meant that costs like the environmental impact of producing that power could no longer factor in TVA’s decision-making. As soon as TVA’s top priority became cheap power, the regional-planning aspect of TVA’s original mission went out the window as fast as air conditioning in the summer.

The real problem, however, is that the green power switch program is that I doubt it will ever be much more than a public relations ploy to make TVA look green. A few people using solar power won’t change the fact that TVA is the nation’s largest coal consumer. It won’t clean up TVA’s forty-year-old coal and nuclear plants. It won’t change the fact that TVA has been resisting clean air and water regulation for the past thirty years. But I’ll have to find some numbers on its actual impact.

text

Horror Movie Donkey

In the early mornings a thick fog smothers the farm. The fog hadn’t yet retreated back into the hills today when the farmer and I were harvesting kale. Something bellowed in the distance.

“Hear that?” said the farmer. “Donkey. I swear that sound’s been used in some horror movie. Terrifies ignorant cityfolk.”

I considered admitting that the only scary donkey recordings I had heard were on a Scott Walker album, but decided against it. If he had asked me what animal I though made that noise, I would not have guessed a donkey. I’ve always enjoyed being outside, but like the average urban or even suburban middle-class person, I’ve spent most of my life working, eating and sleeping indoors. Now that I’m spending the majority of my waking hours, and all of my sleeping hours, outdoors, I realize just how many sounds I’m unfamiliar with. Add a donkey braying in the fog to the list of sounds that have dropped out of our cultural consciousness.

text

Nothing New?

The reports that have been coming out over the past couple of weeks criticize TVA for dysfunctional management: its various departments can’t communicate with one another, its board isn’t in touch with what’s happening on the ground, or how its policies are being carried out.

I’ve been reading a book called Prisoners of Myth by Erwin Hargrove, that talks about the authority’s administrative history. And it seems like bad communication has always been a central feature of TVA management. Even when FDR assembled the first board, he chose three people with divergent interests who were unlikely to work out their disagreements. And FDR himself was unwilling to work out the kinks or give them a unified message. He preferred to let each board member think that their particular vision for the organization was the most important.

[The original TVA board, with David Lilienthal at right.]

Eventually, the vision of David Lilienthal won out. The youngest of the three original board members, he had been the public face of TVA for some time, and was instrumental in popularizing its program of cheap power for the people of the Tennessee Valley. It was his rhetoric that gave the TVA its public persona of a progressive organization crusading for the needs of the common man over the interests of private power companies. He was made chairman in 1941.

But as Hargrove argues, he was also a prisoner of his own myth: the myth that the TVA was essentially a grassroots organization. The problem with that narrative is that from the beginning the TVA was not in fact taking its direction from the least privileged residents of the Tennessee Valley, but rather from the region’s farm and business leaders. As one early TVA official put it, “grassroots” to the board meant “the power structure, not ten farmers.” Lilienthal’s vision for the TVA emphasized efficiency, not equity. I think that vision goes a long way in explaining how “progress” for the TVA came to mean always offering electricity at the lowest rate possible, no matter the costs; a vision that neglected the larger regional planning mission that it was originally supposed to have.

[Portrait of Lilienthal on a 1947 cover of TIME Magazine.]

Hargrove describes how the “grassroots” theme came to be the central message of TVA’s forceful public relations efforts: lecture tours by the board, movies, photographic essays, museum and world fair exhibitions, tours of TVA sites. And by arguing that no organization controlled from Washington could maintain this grassroots mission, the TVA continued to avoid federal oversight.

text

Focus Your Fruits

[Our upright citizens.]

We’re finally getting some tomatoes. You might think we want the plants to grow as big, and produce as much fruit, as possible. This isn’t the case with tomatoes. If we let them go, they would naturally sprawl out along the ground in an unwieldy tangle. When that happens the plant produces more fruit, but ones with less taste that are harder to pick. So we sucker and trellis the plants, picking off the tangential growths before they get too big and training the main stalk to grow upward through a series of strings. We want them to be like ourselves, following a straight path, devoting our energies to a few select ends, instead of diluting our talents in too many directions.

[What your hands look like after suckering tomatoes.]