Trauma Farm (42 page)

THERE’S A SLIM BOOK
by Homer W. Smith called
Kamongo:
The Lungfish and the Padre,
where I first encountered the concept of entropy, which can be loosely defined as a measure of the transfer of information of all life, or its “degradation”— but you have to think of degradation in its scientific sense, not as a negative. You can think of it as a measure of degrees of freedom. It can also lead to complexity—diversity, the thrill of the world so many of us worship and strive to protect; and that’s why, when looked at in this way, it’s known as evolutionary entropy—what gave us those rosebuds and giraffes and opera.

The thin plot of
Kamongo,
a 1932 bestseller, consists of a scientist and a minister, both unable to sleep, meeting at the rail of their steamer ship on a hot night as it navigates the Suez Canal. The scientist explains his research on the kamongo, or lungfish, and meditates on the meaning of life. The kamongo has reached an evolutionary dead end. It’s slowly going extinct, and he wonders if the human brain is merely another development similar to the fish’s lung. He believes that we are like the lungfish—evolved into our own progress traps or feedback mechanisms—and that evolution consists of creatures breeding in the spinning eddies of a stream flowing to the sea. The two men debate this, but the minister is not convinced the world is so mechanical and remorseless. He believes in the need for mystery, for magic, the ineffable, a guiding hand, even though the scientist insists entropy is that ineffable, guiding hand—the whirlpool is the mystery the minister demands. Then they go their separate ways.

Smith is talking about not only natural selection but the second law of thermodynamics: the law that tells us energy is not lost. It merely flows to a more degraded, more diffuse form, or a more complex form in a closed system. Evolutionary entropy is the spinning whirlpools in the stream—the will to diversify and procreate in order to fill an ecological niche in a flowing environment. Understanding entrophy might be as close to knowing God as we’re going to get.

Most environmentalists worship the products of the second law unconsciously. Diversity! It’s the wonder of the small farm and the ocean deeps. How can we not love the exotic, enormous variety of the universe? One evening I was talking to the artist Robert Bateman about how diversity grows, and he mentioned that he considered life a river—of arts and animals and music and plants—flowing out of key tributaries along this river, until everything reaches the delta where it spreads like countless grains of sand. In many ways this is the evolution of science. Beginning with a number of simple and beautiful theories and natural laws, science has evolved into discoveries so complex only experts in the field can understand them.

WHAT DOES THIS HAVE
to do with small farming and my three blind mice? Everything, of course. There’s good reason for believing that the factory farm is our version of the lungfish. The distance between our mouths and the farm that grows our food has telescoped exponentially. We have gone from munching on an edible vine, to Mendel’s discovery of genetics, to genetic modification and the industrial production of rice on another continent. Sometimes it seems like we’ve raced straight from the digging stick to the combine-harvester.

As ugly as it can be, globalization is also a wonder of human ingenuity. First came the spinach, then came the varieties, then came the hydroponic factories thousands of miles away, and the mechanical sterilization and packaging in plastic containers injected with carbon dioxide so you can eat a “fresh” spinach salad—untouched by human hands— that is forty-three days old. With or without the salmonella. Then the packaging is shipped to China for recycling.

Such an intricate food system needs regulations respectful of the whole environment, not just the multinational agribusiness industry. Since our regulators are unable to see beyond this system, the ordinances, whether health or agricultural, are approaching an evolutionary dead end. The lungfish meets the feedback mechanism of Wallace, the progress trap of Wright. This is why small farming is being legislated out of existence, despite an inspired guerrilla war by the defenders of small farms and real food. So far our legislators can’t see beyond this progress trap we’ve inflicted upon ourselves. One of the main reasons why is that our species hasn’t evolved as quickly as the tools we have created. We’re gorillas with machine guns riding a fast train to oblivion.

Thus the farm joke about regulation I once ran into. According to this joke—whose accuracy I doubt, though I love it—the Lord’s Prayer is 66 words, the Gettysburg Address is 286 words, and there are 1,322 words in the Declaration of Independence, but the U.S. government regulations on the sale of cabbage take up 26,911 words.

This is the world of my three blind mice at the head table. They belong to the school that designed the laws that define the cabbage.

CONSIDER HEALTH REGULATIONS RELATED
to farm production. Each is individually good, all implemented for rational reasons, but incrementally they are unhealthy. Now we have health cops shutting down community barbecues or seizing the eggs from a farm stand or some old lady’s muffins made with real farm eggs. All sense of proportion has been lost. It used to be that a few people got sick at a picnic. Now 7 million pounds of potentially toxic meat or truckloads of infected spinach can cross nations within days. Yet this is what health and agricultural officials and the designers of manufactured food regard as progress. Since 1994 meat factories have recalled on average 8,500 tons of meat annually. The recalls are generally issued long after the food has been eaten. This is because there is none of the immediate feedback that occurs with local produce.

Meanwhile, because of the power shift in government, health regulators can harass small farmers, but in some American states meat inspectors assigned to visit agribusiness slaughterhouses actually have to make written applications for permission (which has been refused more than once) to inspect on a specified time and date. This explains those many tainted-meat scandals.

ANOTHER PROGRESS TRAP IS
the so-called green revolution. The use of new hybrid seeds and pesticides and fertilizers and monoculture allowed many Asian nations to increase cultivation of crops from rice to cotton for decades, but now as the land becomes sterile, the insects immune, the chemicals too expensive, and traditional farming unviable in the era of globalization, the bankrupt farmers of India are suffering an epidemic of suicides as the farmers drink their own pesticides, illustrating too well what ruined them.

Our regulatory infrastructure can lead to the saddest consequences. In Poland swallows are symbols of good luck and favoured in barns, where they eat flies and insects with gusto. Yet entry into the European Union entails obeying its health regulations—and one of the edicts is that swallows must be exterminated in the Polish barns, since birds are potential disease carriers. The farmers are instructed to hang special plastic bags filled with chemical toxins that flying swallows will stick to and die, poisoned, thus creating the modern, healthy Polish barn.

Agribusiness originally assumed cheap food would attract customers, which it did, but as information spread about the production technologies and their dangers, consumption shifted toward organic produce, which also tastes better. Once organic produce grew into a major industry, it began transforming into what’s become known as “Big Organic”—mass-produced organic food using the factory methodology. That’s why people have lately taken up local food, bringing us full circle to the nutritious, more environmentally friendly, tasty diet provided by the local small farm in season. The trick is to not lose sight of the goal—good food.

Every agrarian society has traditionally offered what’s now termed farm-gate sales. On Salt Spring, until the last three years, farm stands were a booming trade. Islanders are environmentally conscious and fans of organic, local food. Unfortunately, the regulators have begun systematically targeting traditional community food. First they pursued our pie ladies, banning all bake sales and homemade pies. After the near-rioting died down they limited the ban to cream pies, but we know they’ll be back.

During the great forest fires in Kelowna, on the British Columbia mainland, several years ago, a small army of beleaguered firemen fought back the flames and saved hundreds of homes, orchards, and vineyards. An outpouring of thanks erupted from our elders, and thousands of homemade food items were mailed or delivered to the firemen, everything from pies to cookies to sandwiches. All of this food—truckloads of it—was dumped because it hadn’t been inspected and wasn’t prepared in approved kitchens, and was probably made by little old ladies who hadn’t taken a foodsafe course. That’s how a community is strangled. Whether it’s local barbecues and benefits, pie ladies, or candy apples on Halloween, we’re witnessing the alienation of ourselves from our neighbours.

Personal responsibility, relationships with your neighbours, and the traditional defences of small communities against bad practices have been replaced by food manufactured in thousands of countries from China to Mexico and a byzantine regulatory structure restricting real food and promoting factory farming. It’s taken North Americans several hundred years to begin learning to respect the traditional cultures of aboriginal peoples. Yet our governments have lost their respect for the traditional cultures of our own farmers.

These three blind mice were ostensibly sent here to protect us and our livestock. Their regulations ended up destroying us by banning all traditional slaughter. Within two years of this meeting, the most famous gourmet market lamb in the world, Salt Spring lamb, was effectively destroyed. Gone. The few surviving sheep farms have to book their slaughter off-island and four months in advance, paying more for the slaughter than for all the other costs of raising a lamb, guaranteeing its unprofitability. Nor can we provide the cuts our customers desire, and almost all local farmers fear that their babied, organic lamb is going to be switched and come back from a distant slaughterhouse as some scuzzy commercial lamb from a factory farm. We’re finished. Just about wiped out. Today, for now, we’re the lambs. Hopefully, not tomorrow.

And what of my three mice? They were changing in front of my eyes, morphing . . . . The anger began to flow like a infection through my blood as the discussion went around in circles, so I got up and left before I could utter words I would regret. Sometimes, you just can’t argue with a lungfish.

22
LOCAL LIVING,
LOCAL COMMUNITIES

W
HO’S THAT?” SHARON
asked as I lifted my finger off the steering wheel in the standard country wave to an unfamiliar pickup truck passing us on our dusty gravel road. We’d just finished dinner and were rushing our produce into the Farmers’ Institute before the deadline closed on the annual fall fair competitions. He waved a finger back.

“

“I have no idea,” I said.

“So why did you wave?”

That’s not hard to explain. If he was on our road, he was likely a neighbour who’d bought a different truck, or a new neighbour, or someone visiting a neighbour, or a tradesman coming back after dinner to finish some project for a neighbour, or a lost tourist. In any of these cases he deserved a friendly wave.