Life in the ECHO understory

Most of us, upon seeing a colorful butterfly, are glad of its existence. Even gardeners and farmers, aware of the damage done by the caterpillar, rarely blame the butterfly or seek to destroy it in order to prevent the next generation of caterpillars from coming about. We value butterflies, because we know that they beautify our world and pollinate our flowers, like this Zinnia in ECHO's community garden plot:

Danaus gilippus

Just as it is easy to ignore the munching of a caterpillar once we've idolized its more charismatic self, it can be easy to ignore the value of the droves of insects that we vilify simply because they sting, smell bad, or look like they might get stuck in our hair.

Take this wasp, for instance, that Brian and I spotted yesterday in his semi-arid farm plot:



How would you classify it? If it was in your garden or patio, would swat it?

I remember once, while working in an orchard in California, walking into a portable toilet and closing the door, only to be swarmed by a hive of wasps that had taken up residence there. After soothing my arms in a nearby irrigation ditch, I went to inform my boss about the hazard in the loo. I assumed he would exterminate the wasps: they were clearly a dangerous nuisance, and were of little use to the farm, as far as I could see.

The owners of the farm, however, saw things differently. Every living thing on the farm had a place, and Greg and Coco tried to live in harmony with all life forms as much as possible. They recognized, as we do here at ECHO, that sustainable farming is only possible with the help of a healthy and diverse community of critters.

"These wasps aren't bad," Greg reminded me; "they just need a better place to live." So Greg pulled out a bee smoker and, after calming the wasps as best he could, removed their hives and placed them in a wood pile nearby where the wasps could find and reclaim them.

Often, bugs we identify as evil are actually quite the opposite!

Take another look at the wasp above. What is it wrestling with?

Is that a spider? Yes, and not only that: it's a black widow!



All of a sudden, that wasp takes on a new value, doesn't it? Even if wasps aren't your favorite insects yet, you can probably still agree with Churchill and ancient tacticians who noted that:

Any enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Now, a friendship rooted in mutual distrust of a common foe is better than no friendship at all, but let me show you a little more of this particular wasp's story, so you can learn to value it for its own sake.

Brian and I first spotted this wasp in a cassava bush. It had just finished what likely had been an epic battle, one which ended only when the triumphant wasp stung the spider with a venom that paralyzed, but did not kill, the spider. After dragging the comatose black widow to a nearby patch of sand, the wasp dropped it and spent some time cleaning out burrows it had previously prepared in the ground:

Sericopompilus neotropicalis

Eventually, the wasp would stow the spider in one of these burrows, lay an egg in it, and seal the hole. The larva would hatch to a ready feast of not-quite-dead spider.

Unfortunately for this particular wasp, the chosen patch of sand was also home to a colony of small ants, who took every opportunity to try to steal the wasp's bounty while she was busy nest-making:



Consequently, the wasp kept having to retrieve the spider and drag it around until she found a spot safe from the foraging ants:



Sometimes, this meant getting off the ground:



In fact, at one point the wasp, seemingly exasperated by the tenacity of her thieving jackals, decided that I would make a good bush in which to hide her hard-earned treasure. She casually crawled up my pant leg, latched onto the strap of the camera I was holding, and hoisted her way on top of the camera, dragging the stunned spider the whole way. There she deposited the spider in the divet created by the viewfinder, and flew off to resume work on her nest. So entranced were Brian and I in the unfolding drama that the presence of two such fierce animals crawling together up my shirt caused neither of us to flinch; instead, we simply marveled at the opportunity we were given to witness this miniature but significant story within the community of life that makes up the ECHO farm.

Incredibly, not 15 minutes later, we came across yet another species of wasp, involved in a similar struggle to provide a food supply for its offspring. While the first wasp preferred spiders as its prey of choice, this wasp harvested grasshoppers.

Prionyx sp. (top), Chortophaga australior (bottom)

Here are two different wasp species which, while going about their normal ways of life, have quietly been reducing the pest pressure on our farm.[1] And by encouraging such critters, we have less need to spray pesticides, since a vibrant insect life helps keep everything in balance, the way the creator intended.

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[1] It is important to note that neither of these prey species are inherently "bad" merely because we label them as pests. Their roles in the ecosystem are as important as those of the wasps. It is only when an ecological imbalance allows their populations to go unchecked that they endanger us or our food supply.

Eastern Diamondback

Two weeks ago I moved to Ft. Myers, Florida, where I'm now living and working on a tropical agriculture farm run by ECHO (echonet.org). The farm exists to equip people and organizations who are working with poor farmers in developing countries. I'll be an intern here for the next year. I'll write more on that subject in a future post, but that'll suffice for now as a backdrop to this post.

Last night I had just decided to cook up some tomato-spaghetti-chaya soup for dinner and was trying to find something to make as a side when our CEO, Stan, drove up to the intern housing in a golf cart. He had a pail with him, and next thing I knew he was lifting the end of a long, snake-like rope out of the pail. It kept coming for quite a while, like when Mary Poppins pulled that floor lamp out of her carpet bag. It actually did turn out to be a snake, a 5' behemoth rattler that the neighbor had found in her chicken pen. Her organic, free-range chicken pen. She called Stan, who shot it in the head and was now headed home to skin his trophy. He was kind enough to offer us interns the carcass after he was done skinning and gutting it.

Stan and Brandon (a fellow intern) with the snake:


Eastern Diamondbacks are among the most dangerous snakes in the US.




It had three fangs!


Anyway, obviously, our dinner problem was solved. We chopped it up, dipped it in goat milk and duck eggs, and then rolled it in seasoned flour before frying it in a pan:


Snakes aren't very meaty and the meat is a little tough (or at least, tough to scrape off of the ribs), but this one sure had a mild and delicious taste. Though perhaps we have its diet of organic free-range chickens to thank for that!

On cherries and paychecks - Part 2

Last week I submitted the following challenge: We employ farmers and expect them to guard our health, our children's food supply and our environment. The current market system mandates efficiency at the cost of ecology, worker health, and anything else not protected by legislation. How can we incentivise farmers to be innovative, creative, and responsible?

As I noted in my previous post, it's a difficult question. I certainly don't have all the answers, but here are a couple of ideas of changes that might offer farmers a better environment to work in.

1. Change how you view food.[1]

You walk the aisles of a grocery store, scanning rows of identical cans of soda, boxes of identical stuffing mix, chicken thighs tightly packed in identical trays, neat pyramids of identical apples. You judge them by the colorful packaging, or if you're like me, the sales price. The food industry - buyers, wholesalers, marketers, and retailers have spent inordinate amounts of energy trying to offer a homogeneous product. It makes sense: Uniform products can have a uniform price, uniform quality standards, uniform handling procedures. However, this also allows the retailer to sever the connection between the food they sell and its source. As soon as you no longer see a pail of cherries from Greg's orchard outside town, but instead just see a nondescript plastic bag of cherries, your retailer can switch out Greg's cherries with cherries that were picked unripe a week ago in Chile and you'll be none the wiser. If you see food merely as a product on a shelf, your grocer needs only to keep that product uniform and the supply steady - where that food came from, how it was produced, and how its history affected the environment and communities that produced it becomes moot.

The thing is, food is not a product; the farm is not a machine. Food is grown, raised on someone's land, land that has unique soil, limited water, and unpredictable weather. It is the result of a labor of love and the outgrowth of a living organism, of a carefully tended ecosystem. You can't force tomatoes in the winter or grow carrots in clay. That you can buy any food you want any time of the year doesn't mean that technology has conquered the forces of nature; it means that you are among the richest people in the world, with access to markets emperors of yore never dreamed of.

Greg and Katie hand sort through ripe-picked cherries, delivered same-day to local customers

Until we learn to remarry a particular food to its source, we will never truly value either. Appraising a bag of cherries merely by their color is like judging a man by his. If, however, we learn to understand that all foods have a history, we can use other attributes as better measures of quality. So next time you peruse a grocery aisle, look past the flashy packaging and search for tell-tail signs of the real characteristics of your food; Where was it grown? How was it grown? When was it grown? By whom? Where/when/how was it processed? Some of these are hard to see in the typical grocery store, even if you know what you're looking for and read the fine print. It's easier if you shop at a farmer's market so you can ask the farmer. In fact, getting to know the qualities of a farmer will often tell you much more about the qualities of his produce than looking at that produce in a grocery store ever could.

Of course, once you stop seeing cherries and start seeing farms and farmers, you'll start valuing cherries grown by good farmers more, not only because they taste better but also because they are connected to other things you care about. Which is good, because they cost more. But before you freak out, shut your laptop and head to the kitchen to stave off the impending guilt with a couple of hot pockets, let me assure you that just because good food costs more doesn't mean your food budget has to grow. Which leads me to my next point:

2. Wield your dollar shrewdly.

At this point you may be tempted to just concentrate on purchasing organic foods. After all, if we buy organic carrots, this will incentivise farmers to grow carrots more responsibly, right?

I'm not so sure this is true. Think back to the video above. A simple rewards structure, where good performance is rewarded and bad performance is not, does not work to motivate anything beyond rudimentary cognitive tasks. In other words, buying organic carrots will motivate farmers to do just one thing - grow carrots organically. Sure, a new quality standard has been introduced, but it's not a very holistic one. The USDA organic certification mandates nothing about social justice or environmental responsibility.[2] And remember, we're not looking for just a higher quality standard. We're trying to motivate farmers to take initiative, to be creative, to take pride in their work and the health of their farms. Setting up another hoop for them to jump through to get their paycheck accomplishes little.

Let me go back to a quote from the video above:

"The best use of money as a motivator is to pay people enough to take the issue of money off the table"

In other words, we don't just want to pay farmers more to grow better food. We want to pay them enough that they have the freedom to pursue mastery in what seems to them a purposeful direction.

A weekly CSA basket. CC thebittenword.com

One way in which to accomplish this is a system called Community Supported Agriculture (CSA). In this system, a number of farms and consumer families form a cooperative in which the consumers fully support the farms, allowing those farms to engage in ecologically sound and socially equitable agriculture. In return, each family receives a share of the farm produce, usually in weekly boxes. Since farmers aren't being rewarded on a per-lb basis, they can concentrate on farming well rather than just maximizing production. Of course, this also means that consumers have to share some of the risks of farming; if an apple crop fails, you may receive fewer or smaller fruit. Furthermore, consumers are forced to live in harmony with their local agricultural production, and cook whatever shows up in that week's box. Still, this system greatly reduces waste, as well as shipping, marketing and retail costs. The consumer gets fresh, well-grown produce, and the farmer is given freedom to pursue his goals to the best of his ability, rather than being forced to conform to the whims of the market.[3]

A final word on money: Good food grown right should cost more. Food currently represents a historically minuscule part of the average budget. However, if you can't afford to increase your food budget, you can still afford to buy conscientiously. This is because:

1. If you eat right, you'll need to eat less. Natural foods are more nutritious than processed foods. Organic produce is more nutritious than stuff that's conventionally grown. It's science.
2. Your CSA basket may or may cost more than you usually spend on vegetables. But if you start actually cooking from scratch, you'd be surprised how much money you can save. So consider eating out of your own kitchen a couple more times a month, and leverage that money to support your local farmers.

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[1] This section isn't an idea directly about incentivising farmers. However, it's a paradigm-shift that's foundational for better consumer-farmer relationships, including the ones described in the next section.
[2] Many organic operations, especially those started in response to the consumer organic craze, are quite unsustainable. A farmer can buy a few acres, intensively grow crops until the land is exhausted, and move on. Farm sustainability cannot be achieved through legislation - it requires motivation on the part of the farmer.
[3] To find a CSA near you, check out http://www.localharvest.org/csa/

On cherries and paychecks - Part 1

Some of you may have watched some of the mini-lectures the Royal Society of Arts has published recently. They are particularly palatable to the modern attention span as they are short and are accompanied by an amusing animator, who draws or writes everything the narrator says as he speaks.

This incredibly entertaining narrated animation points out that incentives for non-menial tasks aren't as simple as economists have long assumed. I recommend you watch it, but if you don't have the 11 minutes to spare, I'll summarize it below:



While motivation for simple tasks follows a straightforward compensation-results pattern, it is impossible to motivate someone to do complex work - work that requires moderate to high levels of creative thinking - simply by adding 0's to their paychecks. In fact, once their financial needs are met, paying them more can result in worse results. If we want to see innovative and quality work from employees, they must have the freedom to pursue mastery in what seems to them a purposeful direction.

Now, you may wonder what this has to do with you; most of us aren't managers employing technically sophisticated, highly skilled employees.

Truth is, though, that we're all employers. Our employees? Among others, farmers.

"How's that? I don't write paychecks for any fruit pickers! I don't spray fertilizer or choose crops."

As a matter of fact, yes, you do.

Few industries have become as market driven in America as agriculture has. I've seen a farmer tear out a mature, productive avocado orchard simply because the market couldn't support his avocados anymore, since cheaper fruit was available from Mexico. I've seen the same happen citrus in Camarillo. To prunes in Woodland. Thousands of healthy fruit trees, orchards that took years of time and thousands of dollars of investment to establish, ripped out in their prime because the market, because we, demanded something else. Blueberries instead of avocados. Walnuts instead of prunes.

Plant hedgerows because consumers care for the environment.[1]

Tear them out again, because consumers are scared of Salmonella.[2]

Farmers are market driven and we, the consumers, control the market. Though we don't often give them a thought, we employ farmers. You. Me.

What we want from our farmers:
Many of you are already aware of how critical a part of our lives our food system is. Not only are we dependent on food for sustenance, but science is increasingly showing that, as the 3rd world development slogan has it, "good food is good medicine." Our bodies are affected not only by our food choices, but by the actual ingredients in our meals. Cultures that eat unprocessed foods that were grown organically have less cancer, fewer cavities, and better health.

Furthermore, agriculture is perhaps the most fundamental nexus of our communities with our environment. A full 40% of the earth's land area is devoted to crops or pasture. An unhealthy relationship with that land results in a sick planet. And a planet made sick under our stewardship is not only a travesty, but means giving up gifts we enjoy every day, like clean water, clean air, songbirds, and a ready food supply for us and our children.

Not only should the agricultural industry be important to you because of your health and the planet's, but because it is our farmers, and their ability to innovate, on which our ability to feed our growing global population in the coming decades hangs. Global food demands have tripled in the past 70 years. So far, we've more-or-less kept up with a growing population,[3] but we've had to cash in a lot of our fossil fuel supply and topsoil to do so. Sustainable food supply growth will require extraordinary drive and innovation from our farmers.

So here's a challenge: We employ men and women and expect them to guard our health, our children's food supply and our environment. We want, we need, we demand innovation, creativity, and responsibility. But what incentives do we offer?

Its not a hard question. When was the last time you talked to your farmers? Shoot, when was the last time you even thought about a farmer? I study food systems, and even I don't know more than a handful of farmers. The fact is, the only tool most of us use to communicate with farmers is our wallet in the grocery store. And the message we're sending isn't pretty.

Think back to the avocado farmer I mentioned earlier. Nobody told him "We recognize and value your mastery and experience. Your trees are healthy and you're using your land well." Nobody said "We like your farming philosophy." In fact, the only message he got was the one we sent by way of the market, and that one was loud and clear: "We won't buy your avocados - the ones coming from Mexico are cheaper. Produce something big and colorful and sell it for less than your neighbor or someone in China will, or cash in your family's land to a developer." And so this farmer did what he had to - he bulldozed his avocado trees and planted blueberries. In southern California. Not blueberry country, but at current market prices he might be able to float it.

By speaking only through the market, and by speaking only about price, size, and color, we are stripping farmers of not only the incentive, but even the freedom to pursue things they believe in, to innovate, to be creative.[4] We are stripping them of the ability to do the very things we expect of them - produce delicious, healthy food in sustainable, environmentally positive ways. Instead, we encourage them to grow nasty, plastic tomatoes and erode our topsoil, simply by refusing to give them the financial freedom to do anything else. The profit margins that farmers receive are so slim that spraying pesticides or using GMOs is no longer a choice the farmer gets to makes; if its economical, its a choice he has to make.

So how can we do things differently? How can you and I change our habits to better incentivise our employees?

The answers are not easy. So far, I have found them difficult to derive and even harder to implement. Most of them require paradigm-level changes, uncomfortable adjustments in how I view and interact with my food supply. I've thought about this subject a lot, and written up some of my ideas in a post for next week. But first, I'd love to hear what your thoughts are. What is your relationship with your food supply? Would you like to see changes in farming techniques in your local area and if so, how do you see yourself incentivising farmers to change?

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[1] Hedgerows increase biodiversity, provide habitat for native fauna and beneficial insects, and reduce erosion, among other benefits.
[2] Hedgerows provide habitat for animals such as raccoons and coyotes, which can be potential carriers of Salmonella. The chance of actual contamination from such a source is minimal; as far as I know most of the recent scares have been anthropogenic, such as improper handling of harvest equipment. Nevertheless, buyers are leery and many farmers have had to reverse decades of environmental progress or risk losing an entire crop of spinach because of a single paw print in a drainage ditch next to their field.
[3] I say "more-or-less" because our food abundance has not been regionally homogeneous. 25,000 people a day still die from starvation or starvation-related diseases, but this number is partly due to political instability, poor market access, and poverty.
[4] Yes, the avocado-turned-blueberry farmer was creative. He innovated. But he innovated because he had to. In agricultural sociology, this is called the technology treadmill. The early innovators succeed, the late innovators fail, and as soon as everyone is on the treadmill the field is level again and everyone has to look for new innovations to get ahead. This form of competition eventually leads to fewer, larger farms and an inescapable servanthood to technology.