The gardener’s shadow

Gardening season isn’t just for those who till the soil: Many local tailgate markets are already open, and others will soon follow suit (see Garden Journal for details). Before you know it, local farm stands will join the mix, offering this season’s freshest fare. Such direct-to-consumer marketing also connects the community to its food supply in a pleasingly personal way.

photo by Jodi Ford

Jeff Racer of the Balm of Zarahemla farm in Fairview said: “This is a place where the local public can come and purchase the freshest vegetables, salad, fruits and eggs right from the farmer, picked earlier that day. It’s a place where someone like a bread maker—or, like myself, a soap maker—can sell direct to their customers. I’ve been doing these kind of markets for 12 years now, have a strong customer base, and I’ve made a good living.”

And Yvonne Cobourn of Asheville’s HeatherLane Farms explained: “It allows us, the farmers, to sell our items and provide a small income in order to support our families and farm. … My children actually look forward to tailgate Saturdays, as it give them a chance to meet new people, develop relationships with the other farmers, and look at business in a whole new way, other than Nike and The Gap.”

But there’s more at work here than mere flavor and an agreeable social exchange. Small-scale farms and gardens actually produce more food per acre—and far more food per British thermal unit of energy invested—than factory farms. Over the past decade, English agronomist Jules Pretty of the Centre for Environment and Society at the University of Essex studied hundreds of sustainable-agriculture projects involving 146,000 farmers in 57 countries. When these farmers abandoned energy- and chemical-intensive farming in favor of small-scale, sustainable methods, average yields increased by 150 percent. In essence, Pretty’s research has provided scientific confirmation of the adage, “The best fertilizer is a gardener’s shadow.”

If you think about it, the reasons for this are fairly obvious. A farmer who plants 1,000 acres of corn can’t possibly attend to the subtle differences in slope, soil and moisture that could produce a superb cuke crop in a moist location and bushels of tomatoes in a drier one. Even more to the point, large-scale farming depends on large-scale machinery, which requires fossil fuel during both its manufacture and subsequent use. Cheap oil (abetted by the political influence of corporations that have helped shape farm-subsidy policy) is the only reason large-scale farms have become the standard production method for so much of this country’s food supply.

However, you probably haven’t seen much cheap oil at the pump lately. And some argue that in order to feed as many as 9 billion people while the planet warms up in the coming decades, we’ll have to decentralize and put people and animals back on the land via community-based agriculture. Shadows aside, returning manure and other animal wastes to the soil is an essential part of building soil fertility, as organic farmers know full well. The industrial model that depends on intensive use of fossil-fueled machinery and sequestering of livestock in energy-wasting factory farms with lagoons full of excrement is inherently unsustainable.

But the Btu accounting doesn’t end at the hedgerow. The food-supply system developed in the era of cheap oil also depends on long-distance transport, which will only get more expensive as the remaining oil runs out. and that further underscores the need for strong, local food networks.

“Every dollar we choose to spend with a local food producer is essentially a vote for local farmland protection and prosperity,” explains teacher Casey McKissick, who runs the East Buncombe Middle School organic farm and stand. “That dollar is a vote for local food security, which may well be one of the most important issues of our time.”

Ask people why they shop at a local tailgate market and you’ll probably get a variety of answers, including the pleasure of more personal interactions. We are social animals, and the fragmentation of contemporary society has left us more and more isolated. Political scientist Robert Putnam of Harvard goes so far as to suggest (in his classic work Bowling Alone) that belonging to a group of some sort can actually help you live longer.

Buying alone is comparable to bowling alone, I suppose. And acclaimed environmentalist Bill McKibben, writing in Mother Jones magazine, reports that shoppers have 10 times as many conversations at farmers’ markets as they do in supermarkets. There’s also community-supported agriculture, in which buyers pay in advance for a whole season’s worth of produce. Folks who join CSAs are apt to develop a new circle of friends who meet each week to pick up their share of local-farm bounty.

“I think the direct, personal interaction between growers and customers fosters an overall investment in the small-farm economy,” says Educational Programs Coordinator Elizabeth Gibbs of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association. “As customers enjoy the freshest locally grown produce, they become personally invested—socially and financially—in preserving farmland and sustaining local farmers.”

Of course, nothing’s more local than the things you do yourself, and gardening has the added benefit of providing exercise. On even a small plot of land, you can not only grow a good bit of your own food but produce too much of one thing or another. And if there’s anyone who talks to more people at a farmer’s market than the shoppers, it has to be the sellers themselves. If the fruits of your efforts this year exceed your need for tomatoes or beans or the overly prolific zucchini, you can always spend a morning making new friends.

So do yourself and the planet a favor: Get local.