Posting Date: October 12, 2009
Learning (Again) to Feed Ourselves
I bet you've heard this one: "Think globally, eat locally!"
Yes, it's a clever, catchy saying ... but there's a lot to think about in those four words, and it goes beyond just "patronize the local farmer's market when you think of it." One big question — and it's one that the scientists of the Agricultural Research Service (ARS) are trying to answer — is, can we actually feed ourselves locally? Are there regions of the country where we've lost that capability? It's a sobering subject.
ARS scientists are part of a team — which also includes the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts University, Iowa State University, Cornell University, and Penn State, plus other USDA agencies — that's compiling all sorts of county-level data, from Maine to Virginia, on data such as weather, soil types, fertilizer use, land availability, water availability, projected changes in climate, and even suitability of the land for agriculture.
Fresh cut fruits and vegetables. (Photo by Peggy Greb)
Right now, we're fed by all parts of the country — and low fuel costs have played a big role in that. Strawberries from California in the midst of winter? No problem! Grapes from halfway across the world, still at a reasonable price? They're there waiting for you, whenever you're ready to pick them up. More than 65 percent of the vegetables, and 80 percent of the fruit, consumed along the Eastern Seaboard is produced and hauled in from somewhere else.
But as we saw to our great discomfort a while back, fuel prices can shoot up in the blink of an eye. We can't count on it always being cost-effective to haul berries all the way across the country and for those berries to be offered at our local supermarket for a price that won't send us into "sticker shock" at the checkout stand.
That's where the ARS scientists and their teammates come in. They believe that relying on strategic production of locally grown food can counter the challenges of rising transportation costs, expanding populations and vanishing farmlands.
Also, expanding opportunities for local food production could stimulate rural economies and keep some small towns from simply "drying up and blowing away," as the old saying goes. It could also offset the risk of food shortages in one area by increasing and diversifying local production in other areas.
And — perhaps best of all, from a purely selfish point of view — it could actually give us better, more flavorful, more nutritious fruits and vegetables. That's because our fruits and veggies wouldn't have to be picked so early and survive so much time in the back of a truck on their way from the farm to our dinner tables. If it's a shorter hop from the farm to the supermarket, we might wind up with tomatoes that actually taste like ... tomatoes!
The ARS scientists are surprisingly optimistic about what they're likely to find, pointing out that the results could remind us of how remarkably fertile the Eastern Seaboard once was and could be again. But the big telephone pole lying across the road ahead is likely to be lost land: just how many farm acres have disappeared under the latest outlet mall or mega-store, and how much of the soil that's left isn't really suitable for crop production.
This may seem like a tedious topic, but it's important one. If we keep counting on low fuel costs to keep our food supply affordable ... well, I don't think it takes a crystal ball to see where that will eventually dump us. So we need to start planning and thinking now, as the ARS scientists have done, about how we can boost local, sustainable food production to feed ourselves in the future.
Otherwise, as the scientists note, we could find ourselves dependent on other countries for our food supply — and competing with other nations for that food. And that's an even scarier prospect than the $4-plus-per-gallon gasoline that rattled us so badly a while back.
The Agricultural Research Service is the chief in-house scientific
research agency of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. You can read
more about ARS discoveries at http://www.ars.usda.gov/news/.
About the author
"Everybody's
Science" is written by Sandy Miller Hays, Director of Information for
the Agricultural Research Service, the chief scientific research agency
of the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Hays is a native of Fort Smith,
Ark. From the late 1970s until early 1988, Hays was a reporter, editor
and columnist at the Arkansas Democrat (now the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette),
a Little Rock-based daily newspaper. She joined the ARS Information
Staff in 1988, and became Director of Information in April 1998.