Ride safe, and eat apples

First, a quick note on the proper use of the bike trails: 

A friend asked me if it is appropriate to drive on the bike lanes, to allow police, fire or ambulance traffic to pass.

I say: by all means, pull over onto the bike lanes for this purpose. Just make sure you're not squeezing some poor cyclist between your vehicle and the curb. Let the emergency vehicles pass -- on streets with bike lanes there should be ample room --  and be glad that this time round, the bell does not toll for you.

Now, on to more daily matters ... like food.

When Mother Nature turns the dial from summer to autumn, it's a full-on race for me to get the apples picked, the garden harvested and yard work done by freeze-up. Maybe it's just a seasonally-piqued awareness, but I've come across a number of items recently linked to food issues and population, and about how my boxes of local apples and garden potatoes are not insignificant parts of a global change in sustainable growth in food supply.

A few weeks back, I found a book called Foodshed, by Dee Hobsbawn-Smith. She's a Calgary restaurateur-turned-writer now living near Saskatoon. She calls herself "dee" in the book, but you can call her "Dee" if you want to. The book's title recalls our understanding of "watershed," how water flows from small creeks and streams, coming together into rivers, adding to the ocean's whole. Her premise is that our food supply works the same way -- and a growing number of international experts on sustainability agree with her.

Foodshed is a listing of 75 Alberta food growers she's met and visited over the years, who make up the next wave of sustainable farming (not to be confused with industrial agriculture). She lists them alphabetically, from asparagus, to zucchini. You shouldn't be surprised to discover that more than half of these farmers are within an easy day's drive of Red Deer. Vegetables, fruit, berries, lambs, chickens, beef, goats, bison, flowers, seeds, grains and herbs -- nearly the whole panoply of a complete and healthy diet -- can be found within easy reach by any of us. More local growers (and customers) are being added to the CSA system of food production every year. That's Community Supported Agriculture, where growers sell "shares" of their production every year, getting paid up-front for the coming year's harvest. The buyer shares the risk and the rewards of the grower's expertise. The grower has an assured cash flow to help make it pay.

This is not news in Central Alberta. But I found a couple of recent links to the issue in this month's National Geographic magazine, and in an archived CBC podcast called Feeding 10 Billion that show how Alberta, if not a leader in this trend, is certainly part of a new look at growing food, to make it possible for people to be have a healthy diet, and for local farm families to make a living on the land.

The magazine reference came in one of their many neat charts, this one talking about the "water footprint" of various crops -- how it takes way more water to produce a pound of beef than practically any other foodstuff, and comparing water use for just about all things agricultural. The reference to food production was in a footnote that said world food experts now recognize that small, local landholders are now key to global food self-sufficiency. Like the local growers that dee lists in her book Foodshed.

That is further supported by the CBC podcast, wherein Raj Patel, who once worked for the World Bank, cited Canadian research into the efficiency of small producers to do a better job of reliably feeding the world -- without the need for genetically-modified seeds, without expensive fertilizers and sprays, and without economic tyanny of transnational corporations. 

The conclusions of Patel, Hobsbawn-Smith and a growing number of experts are that industrial agriculture works well as an industry (given enough government handouts, marketing boards and tariff supports), but the next wave of the green revolution for a planet of 10 billion hungry mouths will be made of small landholders who have intimate knowledge of their climate and agricultural zones, and of the natural forces that make their land bountiful and resilient through change.

And that if every back yard grew fruit like my apple trees do, Red Deer would be a net exporter.

Ride safe, and eat apples.

Greg Neiman is a former editor of the Red Deer Advocate. Please reply to greg.neiman.blog.gmail.com.