Then came Homo sapien. As super hunters, we first decimated the populations of any large animals we found in Africa. Nomadically, we spread out of the continent – largely driven by the desire to find more of these animals – but even way back when, our actions caused irreparable damage to the ecosystems we encountered. When we simply ran out of animals to attack, forced to the brink of starvation, we finally settled down into communities and start farming. Only then did agriculture truly begin.

It’s from that background we begin to examine a tough question – can biodiversity exist in a world of monocrop staples like corn and rice, amphibian crushing pesticides, and food safety protocols that explicitly make farmers keep sterile fields free of small animals? The answers are varied from those we have spoken to on the Nutrition Wonderland Tour of America.

Different Approaches, Methods

Sustainability has become such a hot marketing concept that it often gets detached from its meaning, so it helps to define what we are talking about here.

If you truly want to engage in the conservation of habitats before humanity ‘adjusted’ them, agriculture has no place. Sanctuaries and national parks serve that role, and perform an increasing important service in preserving these little oases. But that’s not what we are dealing with here says leading sustainable agriculture expert Jo Ann Baumgartner, director of the Wild Farm Alliance.

We spoke with her in the agricultural hotspot of Watsonville, CA, home to some of the most productive lands in the world. Her non-profit helps farmers move towards sustainable agriculture methods, some of which surprised us.

She explains sustainable agriculture is about allowing farms becoming a part of their natural environments, while still maintaining their ability to help feed humanity. Growing smaller, more diverse crops, restoring natural filtering grasses and hedges for wildlife around the periphery, reducing or eliminating chemicals – and allowing animals different pathways between their native habitats is all part of this delicate balancing act.

Many of these methods come into direct conflict with food safety. Exactly how that developed requires us to wind back the clock a few years.

How Wildlife Became the Enemy of the Farm

In 2006, there was a well publicized outbreak of e.coli in the spinach grown in California, causing a dramatic loss of money for farmers, handlers and anyone involved with the leafy greens. No one is quite sure about what exactly caused the contamination, but the best guess we have is that the feces of a feral pig who was harboring the disease came into contact with some spinach in a field.

Without a concrete explanation at hand, legislative powers in Sacramento began to rumble about tightening the screws on the spinach trade. This led most major growers to sign onto the Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement (LGMA), a codified set of enhanced food safety standards designed to keep your greens safe and sound. That was a pivotal moment for biodiversity on the farm Baumgartner explained, as habitat removal was drastically accelerated.

The source of the plight? A dirty buzzword among industry vets call supermetrics. This idea is promulgated by private buyers of leafy greens to distinguish certain operations which go beyond regular safety practices and meet a secret list of demands. A superficial look at these rules would make the whole thing seem like a laudable goal for every farmer. The reality though is quite different explained Diane Stuart, a lecturer at UC Santa Cruz whose focus deals with the environmental impact of food safety legislation.

Supermetrics have become a key aspect wholesale buyers like grocery store chains use to determine from whom they will buy their crops. The tougher the standards, the more likely your crop is to sell. Consequently, farmers have ripped out native landscapes and hedges at an alarming rate.

Since the LGMA was put into place, the Monterey County Resource Conservation District office put together a survey of leafy greens growers and found that nearly 90% of all farmers questioned had removed a significant amount of native vegetation from their lands. This process is still going on today and it’s a never ending cycle added Stuart. If a farmer wants to sell his crop, he has to meet these standards. Failing to do so could literally mean the farm.

The Cost of Action, Inaction

The case for conservation of pristine habitats is known worldwide at this point, thanks to some very hard working individuals and organizations. But the idea of conserving nature on farms is still in its infancy.

The Wild Farm Alliance and a rag-tag collection of public interest groups are on the cutting edge of explaining this paradigm. Implementing reform takes the form of localized food systems that decentralize risk, developing biodiversity plans with farmers, farmer education and habitat restoration. Policy changes are also being contemplated with regard to agriculture, reflected in grumbling about the Farm Bill, food safety legislation and some new, aggressive USDA initiatives designed to get farmers to take better care of their lands.

Farming conservation grants are debuting this year at the USDA and they operate with similar logic to big industry. The name of the game is money, so consider the position financially. In economic terms, USDA needed to put a cost on an undesirable externality – in this case habitat destruction – and make that cost offset the lost value of the environment.

Its the same idea behind carbon ‘cap and trade’: heavy-handed government policy shaping land use patterns, anathema to the spirit of American agriculture. But with a projected population of 500 million by 2050 – the way we use land will change regardless. The idea sustainable farming advocates and now the USDA is to shape land use by smoothing out the impact agriculture has on the surrounding environment, a laudable goal much more funding needs to be directed into.

Is a New Way Even Possible?

But the real question is: just how safe do we want our food? What are we willing to lose in the process? Baumgartner put that question to us and its still ringing in our heads over here. Its not an easy question nor does it have a convenient answer.

Sustainable farming methods may not come at a large financial cost (although some definitely do), but the premises would require a sea change from consumers. The USDA can fund whatever it wants but most people want a bag of fresh greens and they want it safe. That choice writhes its way clear up to the farm – and the food system is responding with a product most people want, despite its environmental impact.

Are we willing to go back to heads of lettuce and bunches of spinach? For some, that answer is yes but for most its likely no. Diane Stuart explained how some processors are pioneering new techniques like irradiating the crops, using ozone and requiring more testing to ensure safety. But with large plants capable of processing 5000 bags per hour, there is inherently more risk. The air quality on airplane flights or the germs in a hospital immediately come to mind as examples.

Stuart was especially confident in the ability to change agriculture into a driving force for biodiversity in the environment but we are not so sure. We can adjust the processes all day long but if consumers continue to demand a super safe bag of spinach, someone out there is going to deliver it. Both experts we spoke with have excellent plans on how to get individual farms to use more sustainable methods but serious changes to the food system would be required to get there. For now, these changes impact fractions of a percentage of the farms that feed the US and the world – merely experiments on what could be.

Time will tell if we can reverse the trend of habitat destruction on farms in a substantial way and balance that with food safety measures. Decentralizing the food system as Stuart suggested would go a long way to ensuring one bad batch of food does not find its way across the entire country in a matter of days. Along with the habitat restoration technique, the tools we need to fix the problem are at hand now. The will to do so, however, remains illusive.

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This is Nutrition Wonderland’s Tour of America – Day 4, Watsonville/Salinas/Santa Cruz, CA

Still, this community is at a turning point. The same beauty that gives the region bumper crops also jeopardizes its agricultural future. As it turns out, a delicately crafted piece of legislation and high yield crops are all that stands between the region turning into a concrete jungle like formerly agricultural Orange County. We spoke with the California Strawberry Commission in the California Strawberry Festival’s Oxnard office this past week about some of the challenges and opportunities facing their industry – and more generally – agriculture.

The Past into the Present

Carolyn O’Donnell, the Communications Director for the California Strawberry Commission, introduced us to some of the background involved with Oxnard and its strawberries. The community gets its name from agriculture; its named after a pair of sugar beet processing brothers that came to the area back in the late 1800s. Today, the region is home to the majority of strawberry production in the United States, an intensive production of continuing harvests that occurs twice annually.

One of the most interesting points in our discussion came from Sue Odgers, resident of the area for 50 years who has watched Oxnard transform from a 1970s population of 26,000 to well over 200,000 today. The region wasn’t always known for its strawberries as it is today, she told us. The community used to be known as the lima bean capital of the world, along with growing a sizable amount of sugar beets.

Our tour of some of the farms in the area bear out Odgers observation. We saw many fields of red bell peppers ready for the picking, an incredibly sophisticated tomato hothouse and, of course, some early planting of strawberries. The common theme with all these crops? Higher selling prices at market. After all, strawberries are far more sexy than lima beans.

Moving To High Dollar Crops

The move from cheaper crops to high dollar produce mirrored the change in population. Strawberries specifically are a very high dollar crop, so each farm can extract more dollars-per-acre than with lima beans. The switch in crop cover, it turns out, was a vital move in maintaining the area’s agricultural base – and one that could easily be overlooked as other agricultural communities look to emulate Oxnard’s success.

With all the extra strawberry coverage in Oxnard, we asked about pesticide usage, as berries in general regularly score highly in pesticide residues (.pdf link). O’Donnell pointed to continued growth in organics, now over 5% of the crop, and also mentioned that these harvests are inherently more sustainable than other crops simply because multiple harvests can come out of one field in the same year. The Commission is also making a push to replace methyl bromide by funding research into methods that can reduce dependence on the dangerous fumigant.

Connecting to the Community

Sue Odgers, a volunteer who sits on the California Strawberry Festival board, also plays a vital role in connecting the community to its signature crop by helping to organize an annual festival. Now in its 27th year, the two day California Strawberry Festival is a celebration of the food – and the region. Local arts and crafts creators stand shoulder to shoulder with growers, cooks and community leaders.

Attendance is strong and focused around enjoying a variety of strawberry products, the favorite of which is a build-your-own strawberry shortcake booth. Odgers also described the scholarship fund the festival has setup. Now over $1,000,000 strong, the scholarship goes directly to help the children of migrant farms workers afford higher education.

Creating the connection between the farmers and residents of the cities on the Oxnard Plain is crucial so that residents see sprawl as taking away something meaningful from the communities. Such involvement helped the Ventura County region stay ahead of the development as we learned from Annika Forrester, the Food Safety and Grower Communications Specialist for the California Strawberry Commission.

Ventura County’s Different Plan

Oxnard’s complex farming past has evolved into legislation to stay ahead of the changes wrought by sprawl Forrester explained. Every 10 years, the state of California requires each county to publish its ‘General Plan’ for land use which, taken together, guide growth around the state. California tends to reinforce suburban style land uses which primarily convert agricultural land into tract home and strip mall development, according to sources inside the planning office we contacted.

The first community to actively organize against this planned encroachment was Napa Valley back in 1990, whose voters passed the Measure J. Its legal success against developer’s challenges that went all the way to the California Supreme Court provided Ventura County – home to Oxnard and other agricultural communities – a blueprint for how to protect their lands.

This culminated into the S.O.A.R initiative of Ventura County, an amendment to the General Plan passed back in 1998. The initiative locks in land uses primarily so agricultural lands stay that way. Ventura County went a step further and established an urban growth boundary, appropriately called CURB, that restricts all development outside said lines (Learn More Here). Only a simple majority vote can bend the CURB’s restrictions.

All the members of Strawberry Commission referred to the impact this legislation has had on the region. Without it, it seems beyond likely that many more acres of prime farmland would have been lost to development.

A Way Forward

To get people to eat better and practice better nutritional habits, we as a nation must physically have the right foods available for people to eat. Strawberries, along with the myriad of other crops coming out of the Oxnard Plain, are part of that answer. We have all seen the studies associating produce consumption with a reduction in chronic disease [1, 2, 3] – but translating a health answer into development policies is complex and hard to understand at a distance.

From what we saw, the Strawberry Commission is doing a good job of bridging that chasm between frenetic city life and more traditional agricultural farmers with their festival. While we would have hoped to see more than 5% of their total crop as organic, that percentage is surely growing – and its still more important that the crop continues to exist, organic or not. And that’s the real issue facing Oxnard and many other communities – how do we make development and agriculture work together?

Communities will have to assign higher values to agriculture in general. Oxnard is fortunate in that sense. The community came together to draft aggressive legislation that aimed to keep the area’s agricultural history intact. Switching from lima beans to strawberries and other high value crops also helped by driving up the value of agricultural lands, giving local farmers some ammunition against soaring land prices. But not every community can be the strawberry capital of the world.

Balancing population growth while still being able to grow the food for those new mouths will require delicate planning that may change from community to community. Oxnard, with a combination of legislation, community involvement and adoption of higher value crops, is a great example of how to make this work. However, development challenges will continue and forward thinking communities have to get out in front of the issues before land uses change forever.

When we travel up the coast to Santa Cruz, we will explore the other side of this issue: conservation of undeveloped land. The big question we will be asking is how to transition conventional agriculture into a lower impact, sustainable land use that can co-exist with natural open spaces. We will be speaking with the Wild Farm Alliance, the Monterey Aquarium and the University of California, Santa Cruz’s Sustainable Agriculture school to find out how they think it can work.

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This is the story from Day 1 of Nutrition Wonderland’s Tour of America.

View Nutrition Wonderland’s Tour of America – California in a larger map.

Here is the latest list of who we are visiting out on the road during this first stretch of the journey and what we are doing there:

• Hollywood Farmers Market – Hollywood/LA, CA: We will attend the largest farmers market in the Los Angeles metro area and speak with farmers about establishing a directory for all of their wares.
• California Strawberry Association – Oxnard, CA: We will be discussing how Oxnard became the strawberry capital of the world, the renown festival and history of the areas.
• USDA Leafy Greens Marketing Agreement Expansion Session – Monterey, CA: We will be attending the USDA’s meeting on expanding this food safety initiative, weighing the pros and cons.
• Wild Farm Alliance – Watsonville, CA: We will be talking with leaders of the organization about how to make conservation and sustainable agriculture co-exist in a world with limited resources.
• University of California, Santa Cruz: Center for Agroecology & Sustainable Food Systems – Santa Cruz, CA: We will be discussing many of the complex conservation agreements the University researchers are engaging farmers with.
• Rainbow Light Vitamins – Santa Cruz, CA: We hope to learn about the secret sauce that makes food form vitamins more effective at nutrient absorption than their regular counterparts.
• Farmsreach.com – San Francisco, CA: We will be speaking with the founders of this organization that are using technology to help overcome some of the market obstacles facing better local food distribution for regional restaurants.
• All Edibles Landscapes – Oakland, CA: Leaders of this organization will be teaching us the virtues of building micro-agricultural systems in small homeowner’s gardens.
• University of California, Davis: MIND Institute – Sacramento, CA: UC Davis researchers will be showing us the progress behind the MIND Institute’s groundbreaking Autism Phenome Project, the largest pro
• Lundberg Farms – Richvale, CA: One of the original pioneers in sustainable farming, we will speak to the famous rice farmers in Northern California about why they began promoting this style of farming before so many others.

We will post our pictures, stories and videos as we visit everyone. As you can see, we are already quite booked up but if you are interested in saying hello, drop us a line at mailto:info@nutritionwonderland.com

View Nutrition Wonderland’s Tour of America – 2009 in a larger map

We are beginning our survey out in Los Angeles on the West Coast in late September and continue across the United States’ desert southwest into Texas by early October, up through America’s breadbasket in the Great Plains in time for Halloween, examine the hotbed of organic agriculture in the upper Midwest and then head back towards the East Coast and Washington, DC by mid-late November. We should cover roughly 4,000 miles (6K/km) and talk with numerous people and organizations at the forefront of the radical changes going on in medicine and agriculture. If you follow our coverage the whole way, you will begin to see the synergies between the fields and the new way forward they are lighting.

From Two, Comes One

One factor in deciding to chronicle where ‘things‘ are with these fields at this particular time has to do with a recent evolution in the approach opinion leaders and policy makers are starting to adopt. Sustainable agriculture blog Civil Eats recently advocated for health care reform while The Integrative Medicine Foundation suggests implementing a sustainable agriculture component as a necessary part of establishing better health care in sub-Saharan Africa. These are not isolated incidents. Many of our stories have been outlining a similar vision, as we have described efforts to reform health care into a proactive system and the ways in which nutrients and diet impact diseases like autism.

It would appear that the worlds of sustainable agriculture and integrative medicine have started, ever so slowly, to merge.

The driving force behind this synergy has been the growing awareness that we have a severely broken food system in the United States – and it is a major reason our health care system costs dwarf that of any other industrialized nation on earth. Recent movies like Food Inc and King Corn have exposed the public to the underbelly of industrial agriculture but the connections between compromised growing methods and obesity rates or pesticides and birth defects are just now emerging amongst the public.

Many proponents of one field inevitably come to see the other as advocating a similar role call of changes. Reductions in harmful agricultural chemicals that effect reproductive health, reform of agricultural and health care insurance incentive structures, limiting large corporate agribusiness and pharmaceutical interests and developing more localized farmers and practitioners networks underscore the overlap between these fields.

And this development is a logical, even necessary trend. Traditional fields of agriculture and medicine are evolving to better address growing populations that continue to exist on a planet of finite resources. With time, these cutting edge developments will be folded into the mainstream. For now though, these developments are very much new and represent a still premature movement. How they evolve is unknown but we hope to give you a much clearer insight into how they will increasingly combine to represent a new approach to how we live on the planet.

What We Are Doing

Our journey aims to survey some of the newest developments in both fields, highlighting how the advancement of both sustainable agriculture and integrative medicine will bring all of us closer to the goal of healthier people on a healthier planet. Below is a list of organizations, locations and people we are in the process of organizing for our trip:

• Leafy Greens Marketing Association – Sacramento, CA
• Farms Reach – San Francisco, CA
• Frank Ford, founder of Arrowhead Mills – Irvine, CA
• Desert Agriculture – Blythe, CA
• University of Arizona – Integrative Medicine Center – Tuscon, AZ
• Gallup Indian Medical Center – Gallup, NM
• Sunstone Herb Farm – Albuquerque, NM
• Santa Fe Tree Farm – Santa Fe, NM
• Plano Community Garden – Plano, TX
• Food Democracy Now – Clear Lake, IA
• Iowa State University Sustainable Agriculture Program – Ames, IA
• Organic Valley Foods – LaFarge, WI
• Growing Power – Chicago, IL
• Rodale Institute – Kutztwon, PA

This is just the preliminary list and it will constantly be updated so check back in regularly. If you are involved in any of these fields and find yourself geographically close to the path we are blazing, drop us a line at info@nutritionwonderland.com and we will do our best to drop in to see you and learn about what you are doing.