What's For Dinner?

Tonight's Guest: Ben Helphand Ben Helphand is co-chairing the 35th annual conference of the American Community Gardening Association. He's also executive director of NeighborSpace, a nonprofit urban land trust that preserves and sustains Chicago's community-managed open spaces. A grassroots form of community development, community gardens' scale and largely urban presence foster new ideas. Somewhere in the world's community gardens there is every permutation of growing things and using space to: grow food, flowers and healthy people; create beauty and foster recreation; teach new skills; and make communities more alive. In what amounts to a survey of cutting edge issues, Ben gives examples of Chicago gardens, describes plans for speakers, tours, and workshops, and conveys these gardens' remarkable contributions to communities.

Tonight's Guests: Margot McMillen, George Naylor Farmers Margot McMillen (Missouri) and George Naylor (Iowa) discuss pesticide drift - when dust, droplets or vapor move to unintended sites and affect non-target species. Pesticide drift can harm farmworkers, residents, wildlife, plants, and property. Accordingly, with each new pesticide generation manufacturers, regulators, public health experts and farmers continue to address drift management. But herbicide-resistant corn and soy with both 2,4-D and glyphosate - Enlist Duo - significantly raise the risks. 2,4-D volatilizes. This matters because vapor can be inhaled and because wind, temperature, and humidity affect rates of volatilization. Inclement weather makes farmers apply herbicides later in the season, for example, increasing risk of volatilization because the temperature is higher and prompt incorporation into the soil is impractical.

Tonight's Guest: Jay Feldman Jay Feldnman, Beyond Pesticides. Consumers reach for familiar brands without much reflection. But the familiar brand of USDA organic has been fought for for 20 years. It requires awareness and protection - today and into the future. Jay Feldman, National Organic Standards Board member and director of Beyond Pesticides, describes the federal structure that institutionalized (in a good sense) organic agriculture. About more than no-spray produce, it defines and protects the entire alternative approach to conventional agriculture. It stimulates farmers to innovate and insulates the standards from corporate influence. But once organics promised significant growth, more, larger producers became involved. Now the defenses that protect the broad and deep organics program are being attacked. Feldman, present at the creation, recounts this process.

Tonight's Guests: George Naylor, Steve Ellis, Michael Mayer Pesticide resistant weeds and massive disappearance and death of the U.S. honeybees - a farmer and two beekeepers lay out their perspective on managing weeds and protecting bees in the context of United States GM commodity crops. Glyphosate and neonicotinoids poison bees' food, kill the bees, and destroy their forage. Even without being combined with 2,4-D into Enlist Duo, their impact is huge. This week's show and the extra interview are with guests George Naylor, who grew up weeding soybeans and now uses conventional herbicides to grow non-GM soy and corn; commercial beekeeper Steve Ellis, who trucks 1300 hives between Minnesota and California annually and works with EPA regulators to protect bees; and Michael Mayer, commercial beekeeper in central Missouri for 42 years.

Tonight's Guest: Linda Wells The US EPA is accepting comments through June 30th on Dow Agroscience's application for approval of soy and corn seeds containing glyphosate and 2, 4-D. Linda Wells, Associate Director of Organizing at Pesticide Action Network North America, assesses the implications. Utilization of Round-up Ready and 2,4-D-ready GM seeds involves use of a massive amount of pesticides on a regular basis - and 2,4-D has more serious health effects and is both more susceptible to drift and more harmful to non-target species. She also notes that USDA and EPA are interpreting their mandate to protect very narrowly, giving inadequate consideration to exposures of rural people, both farm families and farm workers. Linda often writes for the PANNA blog, Ground Truth.

Tonight's Guest: Niaz Dorry Tonight I am joined by Niaz Dorry, who is the Executive Director of the Northwest Atlantic Marine Alliance (NAMA). NAMA advances the rights and and ecological benefits of small scale fishing communities at the same time it protects global marine diversity a "two-fer" for eaters and local economies. Before she was at NAMA Niaz worked with small-scale, traditional, and indigenous fishing communities in the US and around the globe as a Greenpeace oceans and fisheries campaigner, for which Time Magazine named her a Hero for the Planet. Niaz demonstrates her gift for story telling, recounting her start as a fisheries activist and explaining why "who fishes, matters".

Tonight's Guest: Henk Hobbelink Regulatory agencies in the US, Argentina, Brazil and South Africa are considering applications for approval of a new GM soybean resistant to the herbicide 2,4-D, a well-documented human health and environmental hazard and an ingredient in Agent Orange. Henk Hobbelink, coordinator of GRAIN, 2,4-D describes this as part of the agribusiness GM seed strategy to control "the immense market for agricultural inputs and toxic herbicides" and to defeat those who continue to resist agribusiness incursions into their homelands. Henk notes the irony of 2,4-D's re-introduction to counter rapid spread of glyphosate-resistant superweeds that exist by having adapted to survive repeated sprayings of Roundup. GRAIN is an international NGO supporting small farmers' struggles for community-controlled and biodiversity-based food systems

Tonight's Guest: Brett Tolley The 6 year old Fish Locally Collaborative (FLC) unites individuals and organizations who represent 400,000 fishermen and people around the world who want to support fish stocks, fishing communities, and to change policy. Ideally, managing a resource locally or eating locally is about stewarding and enjoying what flourishes in a distinct ecosystem with its own particular features. Taking this seriously, the FLC's bottom-up approach to fisheries management utilizes the knowledge and power that result when participants with local stakes collaborate - from fishermen to academics and policy makers. Brett Tolley, organizer for the Northwest Marine Alliance, describes FLC's values and its aims to reach beyond its "silo" to others with common interests to sustain local food sources and food systems.

Tonight's Guest: Brett Tolley The 4th generation in a line of New England fishermen, Brett Tolley started out helping farmers struggle to co-exist with industrial agriculture, because his father had discouraged him from becoming a fisherman. But seeing consolidation doing the same things to fishermen that it has to farmers, he came back to fisheries as an activist. Catch shares, the current approach used to regulate commercial fishing, is not preserving fish stocks as intended and is making it impossible for local fishing communities to survive. Catch shares have turned the right to fish into a trade able commodity that belongs increasingly to large fishing fleets and seafood processing companies. Brett describes why, when and how catch shares were introduced and their ramifications for owners of small boats.

Tonight: The players in Policy making The conversation captures the multiple roles of a state legislator - and by implication, the several ways food activists can collaborate with other players in policy-making. The legislative roles include: individual with particular values and concerns and student of those he cares about; pivotal member of networks where activists and lobbyist learn about each other's positions; and participant/strategist during the approximately six years between introduction to law. Better known for concerns with healthcare, education, and economic support for working families, MA State Senator Jason Lewis strongly opposes cruelty to animals and the ecosystem destruction it usually involves. He has proposed legislation banning sale of shark fins in MA and banning certain animal confinement systems.

Tonight: State legislatures are a crucial battle ground for food rights issues. By mid-April, 2014, Vermont had passed the first Genetically Modified Organism (GMO) labeling bill in the US, and the Grocery Manufactures' Association had gotten a bill offered in the US House to preempt state GMO labeling. Pete Kennedy, Board President of Farm to Consumer Legal Defense Fund, describes beating back an article slipped into an unrelated bill in Illinois to ban raw milk sales to consumers on farms. Pat Fiero, Lead Regional Organizer, Move-On New England, tells how the MA GM labeling law is one committee away from the floor of the legislature. David Gumpert, writer on raw milk and food rights, describes raw milk as a food rights lightening rod for consumers and the FDA.

Tonight's Guest: Christopher Leonard - The Meat Racket (Part 2) The Meat Racket author Christopher Leonard reports on the "chickenization" of poultry and meat producers' farm and ranching operations. Christopher's business journalism in the Midwest took him to small towns where he saw poultry and hog farms and beef feedlots going out of business. He was witnessing emergence of what he calls "broken markets" and an almost feudal relationship between growers and owners of big meat companies. Listen to him describe the real facts behind the graying of rural America, as well as the couple years when he thought things might change, what happened instead, where his hopes for the future lie, and the risk that increasing proportions of supermarket meat will be imported.

Tonight's Guest: Christopher Leonard - The Meat Racket (Part 1) Whether or not US farming is profitable today depends on a lot more than hard work. Today's show explores what's decisive for poultry farmers - contract terms between them and the corporations they raise bird for. Once Christopher Leonard learned how contracts with Tyson Foods bankrupts and breaks the spirits of Arkansas poultry farmers, he spent nearly a decade to research and tell their stories. Farmers don't control the quality of the birds they get or the food they're supplied, but they do go into debt for the physical plant to raise them. Christopher says he dream now is for people to understand what vertical integration means, and he explains it with examples you wont forget.

Tonight's Guest: Rodrigo Marciacq Rodrigo Marciacq has been a successful pioneer of hydroponics in Panama for the last 15 years of his 50 years of farming. What's For Dinner visited Rodrigo's greenhouses north of Boquete, where he raises 3/4 of an acre of hydroponic lettuces, grossing the equivalent of $250,000 per acre. After attending Texas A & M for a degree in agronomy, he worked for Chase Bank in Panama, grew coffee, and then onions, finally achieving a yield four times the average US commercial harvests, and without pesticide and herbicide use. With the kind of holistic view of farming you'd hear from a speaker at a U.S. organic farming conference, Rodrigo mentors other farmers as well as maintaining his own successful business.

Tonight's Guests: Ron and Kim Miller While they have U.S. Midwestern farming roots and an auto parts business in the Shenandoah Valley, Ron and Kim Miller grow organic vegetables, fruit and chickens in Panama. The Millers now sell at 2 farmers' markets on the Pacific side of Panama's central mountain range. In 2003 they began seeking property and making contacts in Panama. Their dream was to create a sustainable organic operation that could model and share techniques they're developing there for organic production of a broad range of fruits and vegetables. With a fulltime staff of 14 and practices based on the scientific and traditional knowledge of Panamanian farmers helping them, the Millers work very hard, enjoy it, and are in sight of their dream.

Tonight's Guest: Price Peterson This is the first of 3 shows featuring successful farmers in Panama talking about their work and the philosophy behind it. Price Peterson is the man behind the specialty coffee from Hacienda La Esmeralda famous for commanding $350/pound. Price Peterson had a doctorate in neurochemistry and taught at U of PA before taking over a family coffee farm in the northern Panama highlands in 1973. He and his wife moved [here] and learned the business of raising coffee and cattle before the region became popular and the now famous Geisha coffee bean got its current reputation. Hear how his perspective raising a popular specialty crop in Panama straddles liberal and mainstream US views about agriculture.

Tonight's Guest: Professor Steve Swallow Professor Steve Swallow describes economics research helping field birds and farmers. This professor of resource economics in Connecticut and Vermont and his students work on the problem of getting people to pay for their share of public goods. E.g. farmers need to cut their hay at exactly the time Bobolinks' very new young will die if the nests lose cover. The project brings together consumers who want to protect birds and preserve farmers' livelihoods and farmers who leave certain fields for the birds in return for payment covering their costs for participating.

Tonight's Guest: Heather Putnam Heather Putnam partners with small Costa Rican coffee farmers to save their livelihoods from destruction by La Roya, the coffee rust threatening the world's specialty coffee supply. Large coffee plantations use chemical controls against coffee rust. But they're expensive for small farmers nearly wiped out by recent years' low coffee prices. And these external inputs threaten ecological relationships among plants they raise for food and local markets. Heather co-directs a network of researchers and farmers, the Community Agroecology Network (CAN), working to help rural communities in Mexico and Central America develop self-sufficiency and sustainable farming practices. CAN offers tools and training to use non-chemical alternatives to address coffee rust, and Heather describes farmers' decision process to adopt them.

Tonight's Guests: Kathty Ozer, Ben Burkett The 2014 Farm Bill is signed at last! To Kathy Ozer and Ben Burkett (National Family Farm Coalition) what it lays out for the next 5 years "could have been better but could have been worse." Important programs for family farmers and members of southern farmer cooperatives survived but with decreased allocations. (E.g. Value-Added Producer Grants; Outreach & Assistance to Socially Disadvantaged Farmers; Beginning Farmer & Rancher Development). SNAP cuts were lower than expected. But it's business almost as usual for commodities: direct payments to farmers were replaced with income support based on commodity prices and income. Crop insurance was expanded. Kathy and Ben deplore missed opportunities to restructure the system to pay farmers fairly for their work.

Tonight's Guest: Steve Gliessman Steve Gliessman is one of the people who literally coined the term "agroecology." With a PhD in ecology, Steve did several years of subsistence farming in the 1960s in Central America and then taught agronomists in Mexico, near where new Green Revolution practices focused only on yields and discounted the value of any local knowledge. But in his collaboration with farmers, he realized that their "traditional knowledge" got high joint yields - from intercropping and relying on symbiotic relationships among plants and soil organisms. Since then Steve has taught US students at UC Santa Cruz, helped build the Community Agroecology Network, and helped lead 14 "Agroecology Short Courses" where What's For Dinner spoke to him in July, 2013.