COP15 looks like it may well be a cop out. The world was disappointed when it became clear Barack Obama would not get climate protection legislation through the U.S. Senate, endangering any meaningful global agreement. But a much earlier cop out came when agriculture failed to make it onto the agenda at all.

There is growing awareness of this sector's significance. Within the E.U., the food we eat represents nearly a third of the climate footprint of consumers. When it comes to tackling farming's footprint, all eyes have been on livestock-related methane emissions and nitrous oxide emissions from fertilised fields, or the potential to generate energy from biofuels and the anaerobic digestion of animal wastes. Aspirations are low. The 2020 target for agriculture in the U.K.'s Low Carbon Transition Plan is a voluntary 6-11 percent greenhouse gas reduction, compared to mandatory 20-40 percent targets in all other sectors of the economy.

One big blind spot remains, both in this country and elsewhere: soil carbon. Soil carbon sequestration, according to the IPCC's scientific advisors on land use, represents 89 percent of agriculture's greenhouse gas mitigation potential. Soil carbon losses caused by agriculture account for a tenth of total CO2 emissions attributable to human activity since 1850. However, unlike the carbon released from fossil fuels, the soil carbon store has the potential to be recreated to a substantial degree, if appropriate farming practices are adopted. By this we mean organic farming, with its strong reliance on animal fertilizer and avoidance of oil-based inputs and pesticides. Organic farming would remove large quantities of carbon from the atmosphere every year for the next 20 years at least. If all U.K. farmland was converted to organic farming, at least 3.2 million tonnes of carbon would be taken up by the soil each year -- the equivalent of taking nearly one million cars off the road. Action to increase soil carbon levels can therefore contribute substantially to the efforts to rapidly cut GHG emissions and avoid dangerous atmospheric CO2 increases.

Furthermore, raising soil carbon levels can make a vital contribution to climate adaptation, by improving soil structure and quality, reducing the impacts of flooding, droughts, and desertification, thereby also improving global food and water security.

So far, soil carbon is largely being ignored by climate policymakers and analysts in the U.K.. Critics have been too quick to dismiss soil carbon sequestration on the basis that the rates of sequestration tend to diminish 20 years after a switch to improved practices. But it is the next 20 years that will be critical in policy terms for delivering major greenhouse gas reductions. Moreover, carbon sequestration still continues thereafter, albeit at lower rates, for 100 years or more.

Recently, there have been encouraging signs of engagement with the issue at the European level. However, in the U.K., action on soil carbon was deferred in favor of a call for more research. Our report Soil Carbon and Organic Farming is a response to that challenge. The evidence it presents suggests that action to raise soil carbon levels -- through more widespread adoption of organic farming practices and grass-based and mixed farming systems -- can make a significant and immediate contribution to the greenhouse gas mitigation.

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Adding a bit more data to food system reformers' arguments, a new study led by Germany's prestigious Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research takes on the question of whether we can "feed the world" while preserving the planet come 2050. Short answer: Yes!

Researchers modeled various agricultural styles, growth patterns, and diets. Here's what they say:

Despite pushes from agribusiness to intensify farming to feed a growing global population that is expected to reach over nine billion by 2050, the researchers found that a diet equivalent to eating meat three times a week would allow forests to remain untouched, animals to be farmed in free-range conditions, and greener farming methods to be used.

With as many people obese in the West as malnourished in poor countries -- roughly a billion of each -- distributing protein more fairly is also an opportunity to tackle global health problems, the report points out. 

Oh, didn't I mention that we'd have to eat a bit less meat? But at least there's no need to go all Jonathan Safran Foer, so that's something, right? There's also one other slight adjustment we'd need to make. I won't hold you in suspense for too long as to what it is. But believe me when I say that House Ag Chair Rep. Collin Peterson (D-Minn.) won't like it at all:

[F]eeding the world in a planet-friendly way means there will be little room to grow bio-fuel crops for cars. Feeding people must come first.

People before cars? How un-American. Ah, well. Can't win 'em all!

But seriously, this study made a real attempt to model all production styles and wasn't simply focused on finding a way to make sustainable practices win.  And even if skepticism remains, as it no doubt will, this study provides some solid evidence that the knee-jerk claim by so-called "realists" that sustainable practices simply can't address the needs of a growing population is, well, flat out wrong. In fact, the study suggests that if there is an unrealistic side in this debate, it's not the reformers'. Expecting the world to adopt to high meat-consumption patterns of Western countries appears to be impractical at best:

Global adoption of the ‘western high meat’ diet is only probably feasible with massive land use change. This would mean that an additional three million km2 of land would be needed for agricultural production, expanding into grazing land, with potential for serious detrimental environmental consequences. It would rely on a highly optimistic 54 percent increase in crop yields in line with the highest possible FAO forecasts. This approach would also rely on confining the vast majority of farm animals in inhumane intensive production systems.

What's most useful about this study is that it throws down some markers. Sure, we can try to push our current unsustainable system full-bore until 2050. But we really will use up the planet and probably fail in the attempt. It's worth asking yourself: Is steak a mere three times a week and an electric car in your garage really too high a price to pay for a sustainable future for everyone?

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From Joel Salatin's foreword to The Raw Milk Revolution: Behind America's Emerging Battle Over Food Rights by David Gumpert.

I drink raw milk, sold illegally on the underground black market. I grew up on raw milk from our own Guernsey cows that our family hand-milked twice a day. We made yogurt, ice cream, butter, and cottage cheese. All through high school in the early 1970s, I sold our homemade yogurt, butter, buttermilk, and cottage cheese at the Curb Market on Saturday mornings. This was a precursor to today's farmer's markets.

In those days, the Virginia Department of Agriculture had a memorandum of agreement with the Curb Market that as long as vendors belonged to an Agricultural Extension organization such as Extension Homemaker's Clubs or 4-H, producers could bring value-added products to market without inspection and visits from the food police. The government agents assumed that anyone participating in the extension programs would be getting the latest, greatest food science and therefore conform to the most modern procedural protocols, which created its own protection.

As the Virginia Slims commercial says, "We've come a long way, baby." These conciliatory overtures to maintain healthy and vibrant local food economies exist no more. Today I can't sell any of those things at a farmer's market, and even if I take eggs some bureaucrat will come along with a pocket thermometer and, without warrant or warning, reach over and poke it through my display eggs to see if they are at the proper temperature. If they aren't, no amount of pleading that those are for display only can dissuade the petulant public servant from demanding that I dump those display eggs in a trash can on the spot. I don't sell at farmer's markets anymore.

In 1975, when I graduated from high school and began plotting my farming career, I figured out that I could hand-milk ten cows, sell the milk to neighbors at regular retail prices, and be a full-time farmer. This was before most people had ever heard the word organic. But selling milk was illegal. In those days, we didn't know about herd shares or Community Supported Agriculture or even limited liability corporations.

As a result, I went to work for a local newspaper and became the proverbial part-time farmer--working in town to support the farming passion. I don't think I've ever gotten over the fact that the government arbitrarily determined to make it very difficult for me to become a farmer. That seems un-American, doesn't it?

Isn't it curious that at this juncture in our culture's evolution, we collectively believe Twinkies, Lucky Charms, and Coca-Cola are safe foods, but compost-grown tomatoes and raw milk are not? With legislation moving through Congress demanding that all agricultural practices be "science-based," I believe our food system is at Wounded Knee. I do not believe that is an overstatement.

Make no mistake, as the local, heritage, humane, ecological, sustainable -- call it what you will (anything but organic since the government now owns that word) -- food system takes flight, the industrial food system is fighting back. With a vengeance. By demonizing, criminalizing, and marginalizing the integrity food movement, the entrenched powers that be hope to derail this revolution.

This industrial food experiment, historically speaking, is completely abnormal. It's not normal to eat things you can't spell or pronounce. It's not normal to eat things you can't make in your kitchen. Indeed, if everything in today's science-based supermarket that was unavailable before 1900 were removed, hardly anything would be left. And as more people realize that this grand experiment in ingesting material totally foreign to our three-trillion-member internal community of intestinal microflora and -fauna is really biologically aberrant behavior, they are opting out of industrial fare. Indeed, to call it a food revolution is accurate.

But revolutions are always met with prejudice and entrenched paradigms from the about-to-be-unseated lords of the status quo. The realignment of power, trust, money, and commerce that the local heritage-based food movement represents inherently gives birth to a backlash. By the time of Wounded Knee, Native Americans no longer jeopardized the American reality.

But to many Americans, these Natives had to be crushed, extinguished, put on reservations. Would America have been stronger if European leaders had listened to wisdom about herbal remedies and consensus building? The answer is yes. But to Americans, the red man was just a barbarian because he didn't govern by parliamentary procedure or ride in horse-drawn stagecoaches along cobblestone streets. In fact, he was considered a threat to America. Just like giving slaves their freedom in 1850. Just like imbibing alcohol in 1925. Just like homeschooling in 1980.

The ultimate test of a tyrannical society or a free society is how it responds to its lunatic fringe. A strong, self-confident, free society tolerates and enjoys the fringe people who come up with zany notions. Indeed, most people later labeled geniuses were dubbed whacko by their contemporary mainstream society. So what does a culture do with weirdos who actually believe they have a right to choose what to feed their internal three-trillion-member community?

The only reason the right to food choice was not guaranteed in the Bill of Rights is because the Founders of America could not have envisioned a day when selling a glass of raw milk or homemade pickles to a neighbor would be outlawed. At the time, such a thought was as strange as levitation.

Indeed, what good is the freedom to own guns, worship, or assemble if we don't have the freedom to eat the proper fuel to energize us to shoot, pray, and preach? Is not freedom to choose our food at least as fundamental a right as the freedom to worship?

How would we feel if we had to get a license from bureaucrats to start a church? After all, beliefs can be pretty damaging things. And charlatans certainly do exist. Better protect people from those charlatans -- bad preachers and raw milk advocates.

But what does a society do when the charlatans are in charge? In charge of the regulating government agencies. In charge of the research institutions. In charge of the food system.

That is a real conundrum, because if health depends on opting out of what the charlatans think is safe, we are forced into civil disobedience. When the public no longer trusts its public servants, people begin taking charge of their own health and welfare. And that is exactly what is driving the local heritage food movement.

Lots of folks realize they don't want industrialists fooling around with something as basic as food. People like me don't trust Monsanto. We don't trust the Food and Drug Administration. We don't trust the Department of Agriculture. We don't trust Tyson. And we don't think it's safe to be dependent on food that sits for a month in the belly of a Chinese merchant marine vessel.

This clash of choice versus prohibition brings us to today's Wounded Knee of food. The local heritage-based food movement represents everything that is good and noble about farming and food culture. It is about decentralized farms. Pastoral livestock systems. Symbiotic multi-speciation. Companion planting. Earthworms. It is about community-appropriate techniques and scale. Aesthetically and aromatically sensual romantic farming. Re-embedding the butcher, baker, and candlestick maker in the village. And ultimately about health-giving food grown more productively on less land than industrial models.

Certainly some of this clash represents the difference between nurturing and dominating. The local heritage food movement -- the raw milk movement -- is all about respecting and honoring indigenous wisdom. The industrial mind-set worships techno-glitzy gadgetry and views heritage food advocates as simpletons and Luddites. Or dangerous criminals.

In this wonderful exposé The Raw Milk Revolution, David Gumpert employs the best journalistic investigative techniques to examine this clash from the raw milk battlefront. Be assured that the same mentality exists toward homemade pickles, home-cured meats, and cottage industry in general. The entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well in the food system, but it is harassed out of existence by capricious, malicious, and prejudiced government agents who really do believe they are doing society a favor by denying food choice to Americans.

The same curative properties espoused by raw milk advocates exist in a host of other food products, from homemade pound cake and potpies to pepperoni and pastured chicken. Real food is what developed our internal intestinal community. And it sure didn't develop on food from Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations and genetically modified potatoes that are partly human and partly tomato. Long after human cleverness has run its course, compost piles will still grow the best tomatoes and grazing cows will still yield one of nature's perfect foods: raw milk.

One of our former apprentices has just started a ten-cow herd-share arrangement with our customers. Here is a young, entrepreneurial, go-get-'em farmer embarking on his dream, serving people who are enjoying their dream of acquiring unadulterated milk. Can any arrangement, any relationship-between farmer and cow, cow and pasture, customer and producer be more honorable, respectable, open, and trusting? Everything about this is righteous, including respecting the individual enough to let her decide what to eat and what to feed her children.

Let the revolution continue.

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Photo: Kat... via FlickrConsider the weasel: so unassuming, even sweet -- on the outside. But put them near their prey and watch out! I've got weasels on my mind, of course, thanks to Ohio Issue 2, which goes before voters tomorrow. Issue 2 is the Ohio livestock industry's attempt to head off restrictions on their worst practices, such as tail docking, battery cages and gestation crates, and, purely coincidentally I'm sure, to keep the Humane Society of the United States from doing in Ohio what they've done in California, Michigan, Florida and Colorado just to name a few -- either through the ballot box or negotiated executive order, change the way factory farms raise their animals. Fiendishly clever in its construction, Issue 2 would create a new commission called the Livestock Care Standards Board to regulate livestock farming techniques. It sounds so reformist! There would even be consumer and human society representation. How unassuming, even sweet -- on the outside.

Indeed, once you take a good look at Issue 2, you see how truly weaselly it is. Eleven members of the 13 member board would be appointed by the governor (who also appoints the chairman). While spaces would be reserved for those consumer and humane society representatives, as well as for family farmers (who may also be large-scale factory farmers), the Ohio Farm Bureau Federation itself would not have underwritten at least $500,000 of the estimated $5 million Issue 2 campaign [PDF] if there were not a clear understanding of whose interests would ultimately prevail.

But far worse for Ohioans than the board's makeup will be its influence. Issue 2 would write the LCSB into the Ohio State Constitution, rather into than the legal code -- no half measures for Big Ag! Why would this be a problem? The group Ohio Against a Constitutional Takeover explains (via PDF):

The Livestock Care Standards Board, once cemented into the state constitution, would have the power to override any act by the Ohio Department of Agriculture or the state legislature, or any other initiative or referendum brought before the Ohio public other than an additional constitutional amendment. In effect, this means that any standard created by the Board is a final decision, giving it unchecked power over animal agriculture.

Nothing like the exercise of little raw power to put a spring in an industry's step. To be clear, this board would have sole and supreme authority -- it would take "self-regulation" to a ridiculous extreme. Again, short of amending the state's constitution (which is more difficult than simply passing a referendum), voters, along with the state ag department and the state legislature, would lose any ability to control the livestock industry. They could, quite simply, do as they please.

The sad fact is that, in a low-turnout off-year election like tomorrow's, the odds of passing this ludicrous amendment are surprisingly good. Yes, newspapers across the state both large and small are opposed. Groups from Farm Aid, to the Ohio Farmers Union to Food and Water Watch, and the Center for Food Safety have stated their opposition as well. But that durn LCSB sounds so professional and reform-minded! Why not just trust it?

Make no mistake, this is not just Ohio's problem. Should this bit of governmental legerdemain succeed, a similar commission will likely be coming to a state near you. Big Ag isn't even pretending it's a one-off. Having been embarrassed at the polls in state after state when it's gone up against the Humane Society, Big Ag is trying not so much to take but to steal Ohioans' ball and go home. Let's hope they fail.

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George Voinovich (R-Ohio) [UPDATED]

Feed the world sustainably by 2050? Yes, we can!

An update appears at the bottom of the post:

The American Academy of Microbiologists (“the world’s oldest and largest life science organization”), just issued a major report on antibiotic resistance which, among many recommendations, calls for decreasing or eliminating the use of antibiotics in animal production. The report adds more support for the Preservation of Antibiotics for Medical Treatment Act (PAMTA), Rep. Louise Slaughter’s (D-N.Y.) bill before Congress that would end sub-therapeutic doses on antibiotics for livestock.

However, if the industry website Meatingplace is any indication, Big Meat really wants you to ignore that particular detail. What stood out in their reading was this bit (sub. req.):

"There are no scapegoats," states the report, Antibiotic Resistance: An Ecological Perspective on an Old Problem, which is based on a colloquium convened by AAM in October 2008. "Responsibility is partly due to medical practice, including patient demand; veterinary practice; industrial practices; politics; and antibiotics themselves. Ultimately, resistance development is founded in the inevitability of microbial evolution."

The report states further that antibiotic resistance is essentially uncontrollable. Nonetheless, the colloquium stressed the importance of "deliberate efforts" to contain and minimize transmission of resistant organisms as well as antibiotic use.

Actually, the report says that resistance is inevitable, not uncontrollable. Resistance is, of course, a function of evolutionary natural selection and has roots that go back billions of years. But the whole report is indeed about coping with and managing resistant strains as well as reducing the risks to public health.

But the report is very specific when it comes to farm practices. It explicitly endorses Denmark's successful livestock antibiotic ban as a example of Europe's "effective models for improving farming practices."

And don't forget the big finish where the report not only praises Europe's ban "on the use of growth promoters" -- a reference, no doubt, to using antibiotics as well as artificial hormones as growth promoters -- but it also says this:

On the farm, the use of antibiotics should be improved and more extensively controlled. Europe has banned the use of growth promoters, but this is only a part of needed improvements in veterinary medicine, including promotion and implementation of prudent use of antibiotics, quality of animal housing, biosecurity, and vaccinations. A global effort is essential. Every country should revise animal production practices with responsible use of antibiotics; the amounts used currently must be decreased or eliminated.

Get that? "Decreased or eliminated." So go ahead, Big Meat, run around touting this report. You might just do the good guys a favor.

UPDATE: Philip Brasher of the Des Moines Register spoke with FDA Comissioner Margerat Hamburg after she testified before the Senate yesterday in reference to the possibility that the FDA would restrict the use of antibiotics in livestock without waiting for Congress to act. Here's what Hamburg said:

[The] FDA is “examining the issue with other partners” in government and studying how to target antibiotic usage “for therapeutic need.”

She said antibiotic resistance “is one of the most pressing public problems of our day.”

The tell is the use of the phrase "therapeutic need," i.e. when an animal is sick. Even under Denmark's antibiotics ban, that kind of use is allowed. Hamburg's response certainly leaves one with the impression that the FDA will indeed act on antibiotics soon if Congress doesn't. Stay tuned.

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Feed the world sustainably by 2050? Yes, we can!

You looking at me, punk? Okay, okay. I've got a good one for you. Ready?

Q: Why are CAFOs just like B-movie action "star" Steven Seagal?

A: Because despite being Under Siege, Marked for Death and On Deadly Ground, they remain Hard to Kill and, even worse, Above the Law.

The ultimate example of this has got to be the Excel Diary CAFO in Minnesota. El Dragón from Fair Food Fight has the details:

Fair Food Fight reported on Excel Dairy back in 2008, when the dairy became the first CAFO in Minnesota to be declared a public health hazard -- so noxious and obnxious is Excel, that even the Minnesota Milk Producers Association hung them out to dry.)

A year later, it's only gotten worse. So far in 2009, the dairy has wracked up over 100 fines (the dairy was issued over 500 last year, so that's an improvement), emissions of hydrogen sulfide have exceeded the state maximum, several evacuations have taken place, and, in June and July, Excel was ordered by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to empty two of its three manure lagoons. Luckily, there have been no cattle on the operation this year, giving the land and the neighbors a bit of a rest.

Bafflingly, Pollution Control officials could have put a stop to all this back in April but didn't. At an emotional MPCA Board meeting April 2009 to discuss whether or not to issue a new permit to Excel, owner/operator Rick Milner told the board that he wouldn't or couldn't comply with any conditions requiring him to clean up his own mess.

...Despite Milner's efforts to give MPCA every reason to deny him, the permit was issued anyway, and Milner has plans to move 1500 heads back onto the dairy in January and resume bolstering his manure lagoons in 2010. Furthermore, according to MinnPost's Ron Way, the state could have evoked its "superfund" law to clean up the mess and bill the dairy. But didn't.

El Dragón wonders who in the state can act to shut this guy down. Even the Minnesota's Department of Health can't do much more than beg the state's pollution control board to do its job. The Minnesota Post article linked above does a great job tracing the failings of the state's system of environmental enforcement against the ag sector. But this isn't just about Minnesota -- this phenomenon is replicated in states across the country, from Iowa to North Carolina.

What fascinates me is the fact that public health risks are pushed so far down the list -- the system can't seem to take them into account. I guess it helps when you've depopulated rural counties through consolidation, stripped municipal governments of development authority over their own land and effectively captured state regulatory agencies so that when a CAFO does move in to a populated area, residents are all but powerless to stop them. And then, you leave it up to a single pollution control board as the only real choke point -- creating a small target at which industry groups and captured ag departments can focus all their fire. In this case, it sounds like the state attorney general is getting involved and perhaps there will be a happy ending here.

Still, the system remains rigged to let these CAFO get built and operate with zero regard for the consequences. But you know how it is in this country, keep that retail price nice and low and you can get away with just about anything.

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Al Franken (D-Minn.)

Feed the world sustainably by 2050? Yes, we can!

To read the news, it would look like soda taxes are just around the corner. First, President Obama mildly suggested in an interview in Men's Health that soda taxes were worth some consideration. Then Obamafoodorama broke the news of Coca-Cola CEO Muhtar Kent's reaction to said soda tax:

“I have never seen it work where a government tells people what to eat and what to drink,’’ Kent said. “If it worked, the Soviet Union would still be around." Kent also called the soda tax "outrageous."

Whew. The man is pissed. That's probably why Coke is one of the companies behind the full-page ad in the Washington Post by a new junk food industry astroturf group designed to combat junk food taxes. More from Ob Fo:

The ad... was in the A section of the Washington Post on Sunday, part of a new campaign that lobby group Americans Against Food Taxes is running to fight taxation of soda and sugary beverages, although the plea is "don't tax our groceries." Coca Cola funds the group, as does Pepsi Cola, Dr. Pepper, Canada Dry, McDonald's, Jack in the Box, among others.

And now the NYT has jumped in to the debate with an article which mostly echoes Ob Fo in the particulars. One twist that the NYT adds, however, is the fact that a penny per ounce federal tax on soda would raise $14.8 billion in its first year -- that's a lot of money. It's also true that a penny per ounce is a pretty steep tax -- something like $0.64 to a $1 two-ilter bottle of soda -- that's a much higher figure than I've previously heard discussed.

But for all the attention, the prospects of someone actually passing a soda tax are pathetically dim. At present, and despite Obama's interest, there is not a single significant effort in Congress to establish a soda tax. Efforts at the state level haven't gotten very far either ("It didn't look like we had the votes," complained a NJ state legislator to the NYT on why he pulled his own soda tax bill).

Not that the situation isn't dire. Marion Nestle reports on the latest study which puts more hard numbers on the soda problem:

The study found that 41 percent of children (ages 2 – 11), 62 percent of adolescents (ages 12 – 17) and 24 percent of adults drink at least one soda or other sugar-sweetened beverage every day. Regardless of income or ethnicity, adults who drink one or more sodas or other sugar-sweetened beverages every day are 27 percent more likely to be overweight or obese.

To paraphrase Nestle, since when did a daily soda (or sports drink, which is just as bad) for kids become the norm? Well, since guys like Kent spent billions in marketing dollars to establish soda as, to quote him, "a staple food." Imagine if ice cream or candy were called "a staple food." It would be a joke. And it's a joke to think of soda that way, liquid candy that it is. Yet millions of Americans clearly do -- and that has to change before we'll get a handle on the obesity epidemic.

It's true that the effectiveness of a soda tax is still a subject of great debate. Public health officials on the one hand declare it to be a crucial tool in the fight against obesity. Economists, on the other hand, are far more skeptical -- although some new work suggests that a person's feelings of "price sensitivity" at the grocery store, independent of income level, is a strong determinant of food choices and obesity. Regardless, when deciding whom to put in charge of health and wellness policies, public health experts or economists, I find the choice easy. But that's just me. Still, I think it's tempting to focus too much on the behavioral consequences of a policy like this and ignore the fact that it generates a giant pile of money. Feel free to believe a soda tax won't solve obesity. But don't deny that its revenue will create all sorts of opportunities.

So let's get back to the money. What struck me is that the $14.8 billion dollars that could be raised from a soda tax far exceeds the total amount spent annually on federal farm subsidies.  Yes, most experts want to use any money raised from junk food taxes to combat obesity. But combating obesity isn't just about public awareness campaigns and diabetes treatment.

It seems to me that a soda tax offers a strategy for the ultimate bit of food system jujitsu -- to allow reformers to stop tilting at agribusiness windmills, at least in the near term, and go about building our own. How about dedicating a good chunk of that new money -- you know, a billion or two, chump change to the big boys -- to subsidizing fruit and vegetables (whether at the producer or consumer level) and developing regional food systems.

Tom Philpott has already complained that the USDA's new "Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food" campaign is long on aspirations but desperately short on money. And with agribiz once again firmly in control of the Congressional process, we know that the hope of significantly reorienting ag subsidies is dwindling -- at least until $200/bbl oil hits the farm sector. But the USDA leadership, along with the White House, do indeed seem committed to the principles enshrined in the KYF2 program. Why not try to coopt at least some of the agribiz interests into supporting them through backing a soda tax. What do they get? Some of them will get more money, of course. But they might also get assurances that current farm policies won't be thrown out the window. It's also a strategy that might split the currently united front of industrial growers and industrial processors - let the soda guys scream and yell while we focus on the farmers.

Okay it's a bit of a pipe dream. And yes, it's a kludgy solution -- it will certainly leave strident anti-subsidy groups like the Environmental Working Group fuming. But resiliency and expediency are important, too. And anything that brings us closer to realizing alternative systems while avoiding open combat with agribusiness needs a good, hard look. I say, why not?

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Norman Borlaug (Photo courtesy FAO)In the early 1940s, Mexico was a fraught region for U.S. geopolitical strategists. Not so long before -- 1939 -- a revolutionary government had nationalized the Mexican oil supply, dealing a sharp blow to U.S. oil interests, especially the Rockefeller family's dominant Standard Oil. Meanwhile, as war raged in Europe, there was doubt about which side the Mexican government would take -- the Allies or the Axis. What if Mexico chose to supply the Germans with oil?

Into that tense milieu, the Rockefeller family's foundation dispatched a team of agricultural scientists into the Mexican countryside on a mission of goodwill: to bring Mexican farmers the seed varieties, knowledge, and inputs necessary to "modernize" crop production.

As the University of Texas economist Harry Cleaver put it in a 1972 paper in American Economic Review, "The friendly gesture of a development project would not only help soften rising nationalism but might also help hang onto wartime friends."

One of the junior scientists on that mission would become the best known, eventually netting a Nobel Peace Prize for his work: Norman Borlaug, who died Sunday at the age of 95.

Borlaug is widely hailed as the father of the Green Revolution -- the grand effort, which started in Mexican wheat and corn fields in the 1940s, to bring industrial agriculture to the global South.

There's no evidence that Borlaug thought much about geopolitics during his career as a plant pathologist and evangelist for industrial agriculture. In their book Enough -- largely a Borlaug hagiography--the Wall Street Journal reporters Roger Thurow and Scott Kilman portray him as a man almost innocent of politics: He started out with a narrow scientific interest in wheat rust and a desire to "secure a steady job where he could work outdoors"; by the '60s and for the rest of his long life, he wanted merely to "do what was best for the hungry," the authors write.

Rather than focusing on the social relations around agriculture, Borlaug honed in on one thing: increasing yield. For him, the complexities of poverty and hunger could be reduced to a single problem: not enough food. From there, the answer was simple: grow as much as possible, using whatever technology available.

For Thurow and Kilman, Borlaug stands as an "international hero, an example of what an individual can accomplish in the quest to end hunger." That view is conventional, nearly universal. Borlaug's accomplishments inspire a kind of awe -- and rhetorical flights. "A towering scientist" and a "great benefactor of humankind," declared the U.N.'s Food and Agriculture Organization in a communique after Borlaug's death. The New York Times called him "the plant scientist who did more than anyone else in the 20th century to teach the world to feed itself and whose work was credited with saving hundreds of millions of lives."

But it may be that Borlaug's blindness to politics -- his refusal to consider the power relations at work in the countries whose hungry he set out to save -- undermined his legacy. His tireless effort to boost grain yields, while no doubt resulting in a flood of cheap grain, created all manner of problems that won't be easily solved.

In Mexico, to be sure, yields of corn and wheat rose dramatically in the areas where Borlaug's techniques took hold. But while Thurow and Kilman convincingly argue that Borlaug's main intent was to "help poor farmers," Mexico's smallholders have been in a state of severe crisis for more than a generation. The so-called "immigrant crisis" here in the United States is better viewed as an agrarian crisis in Mexico. Since the the advent of NAFTA alone, more than 1.5 million Mexican farmers have been forced off of their land. Since the Mexican manufacturing economy has been nowhere near robust enough to absorb them, a huge portion of one-time Mexican farmers now wash our dishes and harvest our crops.

While the factors contributing to Mexico's agrarian disaster are multiple and complex -- including neoliberal trade policy and U.S. crop subsidies -- the zeal to increase yield certainly factors in. In Borlaug's Green Revolution paradigm, farmers are urged to specialize in one or two commodity crops -- say, corn or wheat. To grow them, they were to buy hybridized seeds and ample doses of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation. (Borlaug's celebrated "dwarf" varieties can thrive only with plenty of water and lots of synthetic nitrogen, and face serious pest pressure, requiring heavy pesticide doses.) The award for buying into the "Green Revolution package" was a bumper crop. The problem was that when everyone did the same thing and yields spiked, the price farmers received for their crops plunged.

The result is a kind of vicious cycle: farmers scramble to produce more to offset losses, leading to yet more downward pressure on prices. Of course, there's the temptation to boost yields with yet more inputs like fertilizer -- meaning that farmers' costs could continue creeping up even as the prices they received in the marketplace fell steadily. The result is a kind of structural economic crisis in farming.

The winners in the game are not farmers, but rather the buyers of the cheap commodities (mainly transnational grain processors like Archer Daniels Midland and Cargill) as well as input suppliers (like Monsanto, Dupont, and, again, Cargill) that sell the needed seeds and agrichemicals. As I've written before, Mexico's grain trade -- both corn and wheat -- has fallen largely under the control of U.S. agribusiness giants, and its culinary staple, the tortilla, has succumbed to a kind of vapid industrialization.

Urban residents do benefit from cheaper food prices, to be sure; but it's worth emphasizing that in post-Green Revolution Mexico, urban poverty and malnutrition has remained stubbornly persistent, as anyone who has visited Mexico City in the past 20 years can verify.

One of the most ironic things I see in Borlaug obits is the idea that his innovations made countries like Mexico and India "self-sufficient" in food production. Actually, these nations became perilously dependent on foreign input suppliers for their food security. 

In India, site of the Green Revolution's greatest putative triumph, the legacy is even more mixed.

Today in India's grain belt, less than 40 years after Borlaug's Nobel triumph, the water table has been nearly completely tapped out by massive irrigation projects, farmers are in severe economic crisis, and cancer rates, seemingly related to agrichemical use, are tragically high.

In other words, to generate the massive yield gains that won Borlaug his Nobel, the nation sacrificed its most productive farmland and a generation of farmers. Meanwhile, as in Mexico, urban poverty and malnutrition in India's urban centers remained stubbornly persistent.
 
For me, the point isn't that Borlaug is a villain and that crop yields don't matter; rather, it's that boosting yield alone can't solve hunger problems in any but the most fleeting way. Farmers' economic well-being; biodiversity; ecology; local knowledge, buy-in, and food traditions -- all of these things matter, too.

As the U.S. and European governments, along with the Gates Foundation, turn their attention to Africa's hunger crisis, I hope those lessons are heeded -- despite Borlaug's near-canonization as a modern-day saint.

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"[P]lease don't blame organic producers for the high prices. Until the latest farm bill, which has a small provision for promotion of organic agriculture, organic farmers received not one break from the federal government. In contrast, the producers of corn, soybeans, wheat and cotton continue to get $20 billion or so a year in farm subsidies.

...Dealing with the elitism implied by the higher cost of organics means doing something about income inequities. If we want elected representatives to care more about public health than corporate health, let's work to remove the corruption from election campaign contributions. If Congress were less beholden to corporations, we might be able to create a system that paid farmers and farm workers decently and sold organic foods at prices that everyone could afford."

        -- Marion Nestle in a recent Q&A with the SF Chronicle

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First Lady Michelle Obama hosts the Bancroft Elementary School for the garden harvest of the White House in Washington on June 16, 2009Offical White House Photographer Samantha Appleton

[MORE UPDATES:] Obamafoodorama looked into the issue in depth. Now the story is there's no story. Here's an expert commenting on the 93 PPM figure:

that number is “ridiculously low” for any urban garden, according to Dr. Gabriel Filippelli, chair of Geology at Indiana University, and associate chair of the Center for Environmental Health. Dr. Filippelli spent a lot of time chuckling during a recent conversation about the White House Kitchen Garden, because trying to make a case for grave contamination based on a test result of 93 ppm is absurd.

So there you have it. Nothing to see here. Move along.

[UPDATE:] Sounds like this sludge story is getting a bit out of hand. Let's be clear -- the sludge was used over a decade ago. It was NOT used as mulch on the White House Kitchen Garden, as some rumors are asserted. As I say below, the lead levels in the White House soil are not dangerous. I was pointed to some ag extension sites like this one which declare that levels as high as 300ppm are considered safe for vegetable growing. Let's not get carried away people. This story is about the EPA's allowing corporate pressure to trump science regarding sewer sludge -- not that there's anything wrong with the vegetables coming out of the White House garden. A little perspective, please.

Here's a bit of not-so-delicious irony for you. Back when First Lady Michelle Obama planted her garden, the soil tested for slightly elevated lead levels -- not necessarily dangerous, but quite a bit higher than the amount considered the "normal" background soil lead level of 10 parts per million.

Lead contamination is a fact of life that for urban gardeners, as the NYT reported in May -- a hangover from the past, widespread industrial use of the toxic metal in everything from paint to gasoline to pesticides. The White House soil test results were thus shrugged off at the time as an inevitability of urban gardening. Well, Mother Jones' Blue Marble blog speculates that there is a particular guilty party, lead-wise, for the White House lawn's issues. And it's that fertilizer you love to hate -- sewer sludge.

Grist published a series of articles recently on the dangers of using sewer sludge on agricultural lands. Sludge tends to be full of heavy metals like lead, along with an encyclopedia's worth of industrial chemicals and pharmaceuticals. But back in the 1980s, the EPA was trying to convince everyone how wonderfully safe and useful all the leftover poo product was. So they spread some "clean" sludge on the White House South Lawn to prove it (and reportedly continued to do so for years).

Only now we discover the sludge wasn't quite so clean. It's entirely possible that the EPA was aware of the lead levels, but since the South Lawn grew only ornamental and not edible plants, it wasn't considered an issue -- that kind of distinction is often made with sewer sludge. Except, as we've learned, garden plans change. Kinda makes you wish the EPA had paid attention to the science on the dangers of sewer sludge and didn't fire the scientist who authored a study indicating the human health risks associated with the use of sewer sludge as fertilzier -- risks which, to this day, the EPA still effectively denies.

I bet the First Lady wishes the same thing.

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Land is where the food isGlobally, farmland -- and just as critically, water on that land -- is disappearing at an alarming rate. Approximately 50 million acres vanish each year to urbanization, population growth, and economic and industrial development. So what are countries doing in response? Looking to buy or lease fertile land in parts of the developing world, where property is cheap and governments are eager for foreign investment.

For example, Cambodia has entered land-for-oil talks with Kuwait and Qatar, and Laos has signed away 15 percent of its arable land. Yet both Cambodia and Laos have large food-insecure populations -- and both receive aid from the World Food Program. What will become of the subsistance farmers who will be displaced?Should food-insecure nations really be bargaining away farmland at a time of increasingly volatile food markets and climate change that could affect agricultural productivity?

I've been thinking through these issues for two recent pieces in Seed magazine. The first piece explores the trend in broad brushstrokes, and the second is a case study of the Kenya’s Tana River Delta, where Qatar is vying for land. Look for this story to break into the mainstream media after Joachim Von Braun, director of the International Food Policy Research Institute delivers a press conference today in Washington DC.

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Don't FUD it upImage: psdFDR must have been talking about the Internet when he famously said that we have nothing to fear but fear itself. Everywhere you turn there is another study raising some new hazard and questioning some baseline assumption about how our society lives, eats or fuels itself. And then in short order, another study appears questioning the conclusions of the first -- leaving us all full of nothing but FUD.

FUD, of course, stands for the bedrock principles of a depressingly large segment of corporations (and politicians) -- Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. The concept may go back as far as the 1920s, but it was Microsoft (inspired by IBM) that institutionalized it as a corporate practice.  FUD was (and to some extent is) a strategy designed to maintain Microsoft's hold over its customers. "Sure," Microsoft sales reps would say, "You could switch to [Apple/Linux/Lotus Notes] but here's what will happen..." They would then shower wavering customers with horror stories about the competitor's reliability, compatibility, even viability as a company. It was, as we know, very effective.

What does this have to do with food and the environment? Well, in my opinion, what I like to call the FUD-osphere is now the greatest threat to any hope of victory in the fights against climate change, for public health and against unsustainable agriculture. The FUD-osphere -- that swirl of Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt that now permeates all media -- is made up of entities like the secretive product defense firms that companies hire to produce studies debunking negative health claims regarding their products. Fast Company did a fantastic profile of this network of Sith-lord scientists and unrepentant PR flacks who have no compunctions about tweaking their research methodologies (in this case over bisphenol-A) to generate results both favorable to industry and confusing to those trying to understand the truth. It's the product defense firms that allow the food industry to claim there isn't mercury in HFCS or that phlatates or VOCs or any other industrial chemical that might get some bad press aren't really harmful.

The FUD-osphere includes doctors who perform industry-funded research to demonstrate the safety of new drugs (Vioxx, anyone?). It includes crackpot scientists and historians, like James McWilliams, who has an op-ed in the NYT in defense of factory-farmed pork -- shown to be fiction by Marion Nestle and and Civil Eats. McWilliams has a history with this kind of thing -- he authored a deeply flawed article in Slate  -- debunked here -- accusing organic agriculture of responsibility for the presence of heavy metals in soil. Meanwhile, he has written a forthcoming book about the evils and dangers of local food. Really.

And the FUD-osphere certainly includes the entire global warming denier movement. Without the FUD-osphere relentlessly spewing pseudo-science and flawed resesarch, we wouldn't need Dave Roberts to categorize and debunk an exhaustive list of Climate Myths.  It's useful to have that kind of thing handy when you see a leader of the denier movement, Marc Morano, profiled in the NYT. In fact, to read the article is to understand how many journalists are the FUD-osphere's true, and pernicious, partners in crime. Driven by a desire for conflict -- often in the form of "he said/she said" stenography -- and the contrary view, the mainstream media embraces the FUD-osphere as a crucial element to any good story.

Making matters worse, the media has adopted a twisted definition of journalistic objectivity. A journalist in a paper of record or in a national magazine will almost never directly rebut or debunk even outright lies. They will merely record the other side's objection, leaving the conclusions to be drawn by the reader. The Fox News tagline of "We Report, You Decide" perfectly encapsulates this approach. In the case of Morano, nowhere in the article is any claim he has made directly addressed. It's left to "environmental advocates and bloggers" to provide a critique, which gives the reader not objective facts, but two sides of a coin.

Meanwhile, politicians -- Republicans in particular -- are masters of this game. Only those well-versed in the techniques of FUD could pull off a maneuver like successfully promulgating the claim that Obama is cutting overall defense spending when he's really raising it. You could almost say that at this point the GOP is the Party of FUD -- how else to interpret the Bush administration's famous assertion that they can "make their own reality." Or the fact that the Bush-era EPA, the FDA -- even NASA -- were populated with FUD-ocrats extraordinare.

Even the good guys can enter the FUD-osphere. The scare emails surrounding H.R. 875, one of the food safety bill before Congress, is a perfect example.  No matter how many times the erroneous claims that this bill will "destroy farmers markets" or "end organic agriculture" are debunked, the emails, often from groups that support local, organic food, keep coming.

In the FUD-osphere, as in Newtonian physics, every action as an equal and opposite reaction. In physics that phenomenon demonstrates the power of inertia. In society, it's the power of the status quo. In an environment where every time you yell "Yes," someone else yells "No" even louder, it's awfully hard to make any headway, rhetorical or otherwise. Raising the decibel level by yelling louder clearly isn't the answer. Unfortunately, I don't know what is.

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It's a greenhouse gas, gas, gas!

As Congress gears up to consider climate legislation, agribusiness is getting sweaty palms -- and for good reason.

A landmark 2007 FAO study credited industrial meat production with nearly a fifth of global greenhouse gas emissions -- a higher proportion than transportation. Here in the U.S., industrial meat may contribute an even higher portion of total GHG. For example, we produce a fifth of the globe's chicken and more than half of its turkey, according to one source. We also churn out prodigious amounts of pork and beef.

Meanwhile, evidence is mounting that industrial agriculture may contribute significantly more to climate change than was previously thought. A recent paper (PDF) published by the International Council for Science's SCOPE offshoot concludes that emissions of nitrous oxide are likely significantly greater that then the levels assumed in earlier assessments. Nitrous oxide is a greenhouse gas nearly 300 times more potent then carbon; and industrial farming, with its heavy reliance in synthetic nitrogen fertilizers, is by far the largest emitter of nitrous oxide. According to the SCOPE report, scientists -- including researchers for the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- have long assumed that about 1 percent of nitrogen fertilizer enters the atmosphere as nitrous oxide. But new research claims that 4 percent or as much as 5 percent of nitrogen fertilizer becomes nitrous oxide -- meaning that old estimates may be dramatically under counting agriculture's role in climate change.

This will not be welcome news to the U.S. agribusiness sector. Our biggest crop is corn -- a heavy nitrogen feeder. Corn fattens the food industry's cows, chickens, and pigs, sweetens its sodas and pastries, and generally shows up in nearly everything on the supermarket shelf. And for reasons that no one has ever successfully explained to me, it even increasingly powers oor cars! Here is The Economist reacting to the findings:

Maize, in particular, is described by experts in the field as a “nitrogen-leaky” plant because it has shallow roots and takes up nitrogen for only a few months of the year. This would make maize (which is one of the main sources of biofuel) a particularly bad contributor to global N2O emissions.

Ouch.

Perhaps anticipating draconian fines if serious climate legislation passes, the agribiz lobby has rolled out its climate agenda. It's a doozy. Honestly, I've seen nothing more brazen since AIG execs started stuffing their trousers with government cash after they had made the world's biggest insurance company a ward of the state. The first two of the "Nine Principles for Climate Legislation" say it all:

1. The agriculture sector must not be subject to an emissions cap.
2. Any cap-and-trade legislation must fully recognize the wide range of carbon mitigation or sequestration benefits that agriculture can provide.

In other words, screw the cap -- just give us the trade!!!

Now, societies are going to face serious decisions around food production as climate change proceeds apace. But behaving as though there's no limit to the emissions that get spewed out to feed ourselves gets us nowhere. A better strategy might be to force agribusiness to pay up for the messes it creates -- and give farmers incentives to move to more diversified systems that actually store carbon and eliminate or minimize synthetic fertilizer use. Too bad it's the scrappy Rodale Foundation, and or Congress, that's pushing that approach. As Meredith Niles reported here recently, the Waxman/Markey bill now under consideration exempts ag from a GHG cap.

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Coalition of ranchers and farmers fights subsidies for corn ethanol

It's one thing when dirty hippies oppose your energy-independence scheme, but when ranchers, chicken farmers, and pork producers pile on the hate, that's trouble. An ad hoc coalition is opposing U.S. corn ethanol subsidies and pushing to end U.S. tariffs on Brazilian sugarcane ethanol. "This [corn] ethanol binge is insane," says Oklahoma rancher Paul Hitch, president-elect of the coalition-cobbling National Cattlemen's Beef Association. "This talk about energy independence and wrapping yourself in the flag and singing 'God Bless America' -- all that's going to come at a severe cost." Critics say federal and state ethanol subsidies -- which hit $5 billion to $7 billion in 2006 -- are sending corn prices sky-high, with effects rippling through the farming world. While fuel fans say cellulosic ethanol will begin to ease that frenzy by 2012, Hitch and others worry. "This ethanol thing is driving everybody half nuts," he says. "As far as presenting a united front ... we certainly can and will."

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U.S. federal judge bans sales, planting of genetically modified alfalfa

A first-of-its-kind ruling in the U.S. will stop Monsanto's genetically modified alfalfa in its tracks -- for now. Citing the USDA's failure to conduct an environmental impact statement before approving the crop in 2005 and its "cavalier" response to concerns that the franken-falfa could contaminate nearby fields, U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer banned sales of the seeds and barred planting after March 30. Monsanto-whipped farmers protested, saying they've already bought seeds for late-spring sowing and will lose money. This year was the second that the Roundup Ready crop, engineered to be resistant to Monsanto's potent herbicide, was to be used in the U.S.; it already fills 200,000 of the country's 23 million acres of alfalfa. "I hope this is just a bump in the road," said California farmer Phillip Bowles. But others -- including organic farmers, traditional seed companies, and green groups -- hope that bump becomes a roadblock in April, when Breyer will consider making the ban permanent.

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Feds won't make livestock-identification plan mandatory

Surprising exactly no one, a federal plan to track all U.S. livestock with ID tags remains controversial with farmers. Surprising some, the U.S. Department of Agriculture has given up on making it mandatory. Intended to trace disease and to combat -- wait for it -- agroterrorism, the National Animal Identification System is "admittedly a very emotional issue," says USDA undersecretary Bruce Knight, who has traveled the country to meet with skeptics. Since its rollout last year, NAIS has registered nearly a quarter of the nation's roughly 1.4 million farming "premises"; the next step for farms is to buy electronic tags for their animals at $2 to $3 a pop. Concerns range from religious (think tech-wary Amish) to economic to general mistrust of The Man: "The only reason for [NAIS] is to serve the economic interests of large meatpackers and people who are going to sell the technology," said Mary-Louise Zanoni, a small-farm advocate in New York. Said the agroterrorists: Mwah-ha-ha-ha.

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FBI raids companies linked to E. coli-tainted spinach

Federal agents raided two produce plants in Salinas Valley, Calif., yesterday, as part of a criminal investigation into whether they violated food-safety and environmental laws in distributing E. coli-tainted spinach. The FBI and the Food and Drug Administration executed search warrants for the plants operated by Natural Selection Foods and Growers Express. "We are investigating allegations that certain spinach growers and distributors may not have taken all necessary or appropriate steps to ensure that their spinach was safe before they were placed into interstate commerce," said U.S. Attorney Kevin Ryan. The investigators do not believe the contamination was deliberate, but the companies could be criminally penalized if found to have been negligent. Said Natural Selection CEO Charles Sweat, "We continue to believe that the source of the contamination was in the fields from which we buy our spinach." Eight samples of cow poop near two Salinas Valley spinach fields tested positive for E. coli on Tuesday, but it is yet to be determined whether it matches the strain that killed one person and sickened nearly 200 across the U.S. and Canada.

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Immigration crackdown exacerbates organic-farm labor shortage

Organic farmers are desperately struggling to find workers, caught between rising demand and an ever-more-severe labor shortage. More than half of the 1.8 million farmworkers in the U.S. are here illegally, and increased border patrols have reduced the number of immigrants trying to cross the U.S.-Mexico border. Service-sector jobs in the city are easy to find, and the work required by organic farms -- pulling up weeds by hand -- is backbreaking. "No one wants to do this work," says California organic ag foreman Eber Diaz. "I've never seen a situation where it was so difficult to find people." Traditional farmers can get by with up to 20 percent fewer workers by wiping out weeds with pesticides, but for organic farmers, it's human labor or nothing. The situation has made immigration reformers out of many organic farmers; they're pushing for a guest worker program like the one currently stalled in D.C. As for actually paying workers what the work is worth, well, what are we, communists?

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Whole Foods unveils initiatives to boost local and compassionate farming

Whole Foods Market, the fast-growing natural-foods purveyor, has announced a series of initiatives that would support small, local farms and improve treatment of animals. In an open letter to food writer Michael Pollan, who has criticized Whole Foods for relying on "industrial organic" farms, CEO John Mackey described the chain's coming efforts to build a network of "animal-compassionate" farms, purchase more local food for its distribution centers, and even allow local farmers to sell food directly to customers in store parking lots.

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Urban gardeners evicted from community farm in L.A.

South Central Farm, a 14-acre community garden in a sea of warehouses in urban L.A., will be bulldozed to make way for ... a warehouse. The 350 low-income families who for years have been growing food on the plot this week lost their fight to save the farm. Landowner Ralph Horowitz obtained an eviction order, and protestors, who in recent weeks have included celebs Daryl Hannah, Joan Baez, and Julia Butterfly Hill, were forcibly kicked out by the cops. More than 40 people were arrested. Horowitz had been forced to sell the land to the city in the 1980s for a project that never happened. In 1992, the city turned the site over to a food bank, which allowed families to build a community garden there. In 2003, Horowitz settled a lawsuit he brought against the city, which then agreed to sell it back to him for $5 million, and he's been trying to get rid of the gardeners ever since. The morning of the eviction, L.A. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa offered to pay Horowitz his $16 million asking price for the plot, but Horowitz declined. "I just want my land back," he said. Gotta have your priorities.

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