Big Systems

Last summer I did a continuing education course on Systems Thinking with a friend who works with NGOs, especially those involved with public food insecurity. For months, instead of spending hours listening to an audiobook while doing farm work or driving, I had latched on to the mental puzzle of all the moving parts of the food system as I knew it. The data set grew out of control with disparate pieces, all inter-related and interdependent. My notebooks have grown full of connections that bounce off each other like a vintage pinball game, lights flashing and bells ringing when ah-ha moments pass through a synapse and land on a bullseye.I started having conversations about the complexity of it all with my mentors in their 70’s, 80’s and even a few in their 90’s—all of them actively farming in one way or another. They were the generation that pushed for protections at the federal and state levels, who created the Certified Organic programs, began regional farmers markets, and started food cooperatives. They were the first to recognize the benefits of alternative energies. They put their properties in agricultural conservation easements, some feeling so strongly about protecting the land that they did so without any compensation for future development rights.There’s a quiet reserve in them, a peace in knowing that they’re doing their best to farm, to work, to feed others in a way that respects the environment, their communities, the farm workers, animals, watersheds, and wildlife. There is also a distinct shift, an understanding that all is not well in the grand scheme—the big systems are off kilter. One topic that keeps popping up over and over is the systemic dismantling of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and research centers at the Department of Agriculture (USDA).In the last three years many of the protections put in place since the 1970’s have either been rolled back or are currently in litigation to prevent their loosening. While I know these changes are taking place from what I read and peer discussions, more importantly, I am also hearing about them from my customers, namely the ones who have spent their entire careers at the agencies tasked with enforcement. They are devastated by what is happening.With Systems structures, it becomes clear how laws and regulations that seemingly don’t have an impact on farming actually do. The Endangered Species Act and the Migratory Bird Act protects healthy ecosystems. Without a healthy owl and hawk population, the rodents would take over the farm. On the citrus and avocado orchard where I lived for many years out west, the rancher had installed numerous owl nest boxes after the government outlawed his favorite rodenticide. Within the first year it was evident the owls did a much better job and cost much less. Ongoing proof of such practices can be seen today such as in the documentary, The Biggest Little Farm which was filmed in the same county.Over 20,000 farm workers are poisoned each year when mixing and applying chemicals, yet the laws and regulations regarding the education and licensure for people to use such are being gutted. Furthermore, bans on agricultural chemicals that negatively affect pollinators and aquatic life are being curtailed. If bees disappear, so will over half of our fruits, nuts, and vegetables. And if you’re wondering how your farmers are affected by taking the legal teeth out of chemical drift, talk to some of your Certified Organic growers about the possibilities of pesticide drift from their conventional farming neighbors next door. There’s a reason some have invested an incredible amount of money in greenhouses, high tunnels and row covers to keep their crops safe. All it takes is one untrained idiot with a spray boom on a breezy day to destroy years of organic cultivation. Instead of the ability to seek recompense, they’ll only get sorry about your luck.Almost seventy regulations have been reversed or revoked, including pollution controls on streams and wetlands, which was pushed for not only by drilling and mining lobbyists, but by farmers who considered it a win for them. Really?You know what that meant for me? The conventional dairy farmer upstream is able to rip out the riparian buffer and plant corn and soybeans right up to the stream bank. He is able to let his cows wade into the stream, creating massive amounts of sediments and an overload of nutrients, eroding the bank, damaging the sycamores that shade the water keeping it cool enough to support a native trout population. In just a few years, the meandering creek down over the hill from my house no longer has trout. This year the clusters of frogs eggs I’ve seen each year were gone. That little stream is part of the bigger system of the Chesapeake Bay watershed who also is on the losing end of deregulation.The Chesapeake Bay is the largest estuary in the United States and we are suffocating it with agricultural waste because we’re allowed to do so. Just because you can doesn’t mean you should. These are the dominoes that are falling and soon the impacts will be felt in our national food supply. Record-breaking fires are currently burning out of control in California, Arizona, Oregon, Idaho, Washington, and Colorado. These states produce a heck of a lot of food. But you say, I get my food at the local farmers market. True, but as the pandemic has taught us, when the grocery stores’ shelves are empty, people turn to the farmers markets. I witnessed firsthand this past spring how panicked people become when there are blips in their supply chain.It’s not all about agriculture. Most fishmongers today tout sustainable fisheries. Without regulations regarding catch limits, seasons, fishing waters, by-catch, and bans on equipment and practices that decimate catch populations to the brink of collapse, much of the seafood we enjoy today would disappear. Some already has.An even bigger canary in the coal mine of humanity in the wake of the gutting of the EPA are the forever chemicals which are increasingly being found in our foods and our bodies. Dairies and feedlots both large and small, throughout the country are prevented from their goods entering the food stream because of toxic chemicals far exceeding what the EPA considers a healthy limit. We’ve got politicians squabbling over raw milk crossing state lines on one hand and on the other, ignoring the removal of monitoring, research, funding, and regulations to prevent this from further happening.The number one issue to new and beginning farmers is access to land. Many are turning to remediated brown sites, plateaus formed by mountain top mining and tailing sites. Will they, too, spend a lifetime pouring their heart and soul into building soil, growing food, creating a business only to be told their goods are toxic and cannot be sold? Or by then will the regulations be nonexistent? We have been so caught up in minutia that we’ve quit examining the big picture with all its moving parts.This afternoon I was reminded again of the Butterfly Effect—a theory that tiny events can translate into huge impacts-as I walked through the pasture filled with milkweed being eaten by Monarch butterfly caterpillars who will soon transform into a miraculous creatures and make a 3,000-mile migration to Mexico. Along the way, they will provide food for wasps, ants, birds, snakes, toads, rats, lizards, frogs, and spiders—all pieces of the system we call Earth. My government tells me it is perfectly ok to kill the milkweeds and caterpillars with chemicals. My heart tells me it is not.