Science & Math

“Well, so much for your college education,” was the remark my father made when I announced I had purchased a farm and would be returning to Pennsylvania. He and his parents had escaped from the back breaking work in the orchards of Adams county to small town, industrial life with steady work, paid vacation, healthcare, and pensions. I, too, remained firmly planted in a day job in the tech sector for several years as I figured out what I was doing with a woefully run-down Civil War era farm. Not coming from a farming family I had no preconceived notions about conventional agriculture. I came more from the school of do-what-works. My yardstick was science and math.

Too often the only math done in food production is the bottom line—how can we make the most profit with as little as possible inputs. Science goes out the door, especially when financial gains are at stake. This paradigm goes far past the farm gate in our current system of megafarms consolidating large swaths of the food system, now including processing, transportation, and distribution. Worse, most of the laws and regulations attached to the food system are often written and implemented by people who must have failed both science and math.

Last week Dishing the Dirt fans wanted to know why I didn’t write about Earth Day. For me, every day is Earth Day. I’ve devoted my life to producing food that is environmentally, socially, and economically good for my customers, community, and planet. I know from both education and experience that soil must be built, that it’s a living, breathing ecosystem that can become depleted and useless with overuse. The Extension agent had to run my first soil tests twice to make sure the results were correct as the numbers were so bad. It took seven years to bring those pastures back into production without the use of chemicals. Every fall I’d take soil samples to see what my efforts produced as I mob grazed livestock, practiced rotational browsing, spread manure, compost, seeds, lime, kelp, and mowed down the invasive weeds before they could go to seed when the goats didn’t eat them. I find irony in the fact that organic chemistry was my most difficult and hated class yet it is the information I use frequently.

Today I’m witnessing an alarming trend—trading science and math for popularity. Who can bark loudest. Who can tug on your heartstrings. Who can get you the most bang for your buck.  When Epicurious, a food site that’s been around for twenty-five years, announced this week they would no longer be publishing beef recipes out of concern for the planet, I deleted them out of every social medial following and unsubscribed from their newsletters. Similarly, I became enraged at a posting on an agricultural list about a company that was advocating the transition of small, regional dairy farms to almond orchards to provide inputs for plant-based products. As they say in regenerative agriculture circles, it’s not the cow, but the how.

I get it. There’s a lot of change taking place on a global scale but vilifying one specific food across the board is plane nuts. One of the most ardent supporters of using cattle to sequester carbon is Nicolette Hahn Niman, a vegetarian, cattle rancher, environmental lawyer, and author of Defending Beef. In her book she points to years of scientific research showing the positive impacts livestock can have on the environment.

There’s a lot of data that says almonds use less water than cows, but science tells us that livestock recycle more water and nutrients than nut trees (or any other cultivated plant). The interaction with the environment is referred to a cycle for a reason. It’s basic math—when you take something out, in order to maintain equilibrium, something has to be returned. Those almond trees aren’t peeing and pooping in the orchards. Walk through any grass-based farm with livestock and it’s easy to see where the animals have left their deposits. The grass is always greener, taller, denser. As a large monocrop, almonds attract a plethora of pests requiring high doses of chemicals in order to return a profitable crop. More water versus more chemicals is the choice.

It is our choices which will ultimately determine the fate of the planet. Hopefully, they will be based upon science.  

I love a good bottle of wine, but these last few years have had me sticking with regionally produced beverages and spirits knowing that transportation and storage creates a larger environmental impact footprint. I used to choose glass over cans, but science and the numbers don’t lie; cans are far better and easier to recycle than glass or plastic. A notice from my trash hauler stating they would no longer accept any glass in the recycle container sealed the deal. Stanford University estimates that by recycling cans (as opposed to plastic bottles) per tonne 14,000 kilowatt hours are saved (42 for plastic bottles), 6545 liters of oil are reduced versus 19, and 270 square feet of landfill use is reduced compared to 54 square feet and a tonne of glass bottles would take up five times more space than plastic.

I’ve never been a slave to fashion but did have an affinity for Polar Fleece until science revealed the amount of microfibers that shed off into the environment and never go away. As a shepherdess, I watch each winter as the sheep stand outside with snow piling up on their backs as they contentedly munch away on hay and how each spring the shearer relieves them of this renewable resource that brings less than $1.50 per pound if I were to sell it as a commodity in a wool pool. Still, I will pay top dollar for Merino base layers made in the USA knowing a fellow farmer was out there taking care of their sheep just as I do.

Here’s my take on Earth Day—it needs to grow up. We’ve been celebrating for fifty years yet doing little in the way of serious active participation. I drove past a fast-food restaurant with three packed lanes of idling SUVs as teens took orders on iPads while walking through the lanes of traffic and thought to myself how chicken farmers on the Delmarva Peninsula are struggling to pay their bills despite over 600 million birds raised in that region alone that are pumping millions of gallons of manure into the Chesapeake Bay ruining the seafood industry that sustained the Eastern Shore for hundreds of years. You want to really celebrate Earth Day? Quit with the dollar burgers and cheap chicken.

Take a good look, a really good look at how your food is produced and distributed. There’s plenty of Certified Organic stuff out there, too, that needs to clean up their game when it comes to impacting the climate crisis. That produce may have been grown without chemical fertilizers, but what about petroleum-derived plastics for row covers? Is it recycled, sent to a landfill or (groan) burned. Speaking of burning, how about torching weeds using propane? How far are the products shipped? How much plastic packaging? These are the issues which must now be addressed according to science and not sales & marketing.

We, as a species, cannot keep going at this rate. We don’t need another Earth Day tee shirt made from cotton grown in India, processed in China, sewn in Bangladesh, and shipped to America so some environmental organization can raise money to save the earth.

Forget Earth Day 2022. Start now. Plant trees and flowers. Reduce your use of fossil fuels and plastics. Choose eco-friendly purchases when shopping. Look up at that big pink supermoon and realize that your standing on the only planet capable of supporting life. Let’s keep it that way.