I realize that I’m a wide-eyed idealist, naive to the realities of doing business in this day and age, but I still can’t wrap my head around a paragraph like this:

Proposition 2 would require that starting in 2015, calves raised for veal, egg-laying hens and pregnant pigs be provided space to lie down, stand up, fully extend their limbs and turn around freely. Proponents say it would prevent animal cruelty; opponents say it would unnecessarily harm farmers and consumers by raising domestic prices and exposing consumers to cheaper, ostensibly more dangerous eggs from other countries.

Now, we’re not talking about giving every calf, chicken, and pig be given an acre of grassy meadow to run free, and a string quartet to score the scene. We’re not even talking about letting them see the sun. Nor are we talking about making this happen tomorrow, or a year from now. And this is light years away from mandating that industrial meat operations handle their wastes the way we require cities to do it.

We’re just talking about making their cages, the place they will likely spend their whole lives, big enough for them to be able to extend their limbs and turn around. That’s all. I mean, Christ, if you were going to establish a base-level, lowest common denominator standard for not being completely inhumane, that might be a good place to start.

But there’s so much in this paragraph that’s wrong.

Proponents say it would prevent animal cruelty… No, I don’t think it will. It goes a short way towards mitigating intense, widespread suffering, but that’s a ways off from actually preventing cruelty.

…opponents say it would unnecessarily harm farmers and consumers… When you’re managing a massive, highly efficient industrial factory system of growing meat, you’re no longer a “farmer” in any traditional sense of the word, so please discontinue attempts to play on my sympathies by putting a wheat chewing actor in overalls in front of me. Also, peddle that “concern for the consumer” bullshit to someone who’s buying it, this is all about your profit margins.

It’s just stunning to me that this is even a close contest.

This is pretty cool.

I love the pedal-powered farm equipment. Story in the WaPo here, website here.

(h/t TheWashCycle)

Okay, so this doesn’t have anything to do with Twin Peaks, but it is about a coop.

Via SurlyBlog, check out these photos from Eastside Egg Co-op at Zenger Farm of Portland, Oregon. This beautiful portable chicken coop is outfitted with a heavy heavy bad-ass Surly wheelset (Surly hubs, Large Marge rims and Endomorph tires), mounted to ISO-558-74 Chicken Coop Forks (fabricated by Sacha White of Vanilla Cycles).

Sustainable farming, pastured chickens, human powered farm equipment, bike geek participation… that right there’s a vision of a future that doesn’t suck, folks. Big salute to everyone involved, nice work, and great pics!

Mmmm eggs. And flour, lard, and sugar. And cherries. And coffee.

…perhaps by bringing the farm on up here?

My wife just sent me a link to this story on CNN about a village in England where they’ve started a farm co-op. It’s a small operation, enough to feed the approximately 100 families involved and have some left over to sell at a market.

I find this model compelling, because the people doing the farming aren’t full time farmers, but rather folks who all live there, and who have some time to contribute. I’m attracted to small sustainable agriculture in the near-term because of all the obvious reasons (quality of food and nutrient density, short travel distance, giving money to local growers instead of Archer Daniels Midland, etc). In the long term, I think we’re all going to have to learn to take care of ourselves again as culture, politics and life become what James Kunstler calls “profoundly local”.

But right now, this very minute, the thought of taking on several acres of growing land in an agriculture area and handling all aspects of the growing food and raising livestock from seed and piglet to table and market is daunting. The work is hard, which is fine. But Rebbie and I have spent most of our adult lives as urban animals, so there’s also the question of whether or not we could handle the geographic and cultural isolation of living where the farmland is, whether or not farming’s even something I’d be good at? Even if we found out that we’re natural born agriculturistas, the scale and the accompanying risks of taking on too much and losing it all are also really scary.

Hampshire’s Village Co-op is a whole different game. The scale isn’t so large, the work and the risk doesn’t have to be shouldered by any one family, and the location isn’t far away from the community. It is the community. In fact, if I’m understanding how their system works, farming isn’t even the primary occupation of most of these farmers, nor is profit the primary motivation. All of that suits me just fine, and seems like something a family could join and try without staking a life savings on.

And a community that grows its food together means a community that can have a potluck without a single three-bean salad showing up. Think about it. Make one huge portion of one dish with locally grown, freshly picked vegetables, enjoy bits of 20 such dishes with your neighbors. Sounds good to me!

With “Green Acres” bein’ our backyards, far-r-r-r-m livin’ can be not-so-hard. (You got that song in your head now, don’t ya? Sorry about that.)

I got inspired by the Bicycle MPG article on How Things Work (noted here), did a little investigating and tinkering, and built a Bicycle MPG Calculator. So far, my calculator is not as optimistic as theirs, but the Calorie-per-hour calculations are inside the ranges of several charts I found online, so I’ll say good’nuff’er gubmint work.

It should point out that this doesn’t factor for fuel used to produce the food you would use to get those calories, but plenty of folks have already taken that on. I’d be interested to see a more thorough exploration of that topic that weighs in the effectiveness of the food you eat.

For example, beef takes more fuel and water to produce than lettuce and beans, but isn’t there some efficiency advantage as far as nutrients-per-calorie in going a step up the food chain? And if it’s true that meat delivers a denser package of certain nutrients, can pastured chickens or farmed Tilapia do it for less energy?

Just as importantly, how much “efficiency” are we getting in return for being completely inhumane, torturing, fucked assholes to those animals while they’re doing us the favor of growing that meat on their bones for us? And what’s the additional energy costs of doing massive cleanup operations on the toxic waste dumps that industrial feedlots create?

Other folks have pointed out that eating locally will also increase that bottom-line efficiency, as the fuel for transportinatin’ your food is also a factor. That asparagus from Whole Foods might take a lot less fossil fuel to produce than a steak, but not if it’s been flown here from Argentina. Don’t get me wrong, I know it’s wrong to eat asparagus in the winter, and knowing that, I don’t want to be right. But getting seasonal produce from farmer’s markets does makes that link in the fuel consumption chain a lot smaller.

Lotsa questions! I have no answers to them, but enjoy the calculator, and maybe get happy about how incredibly bad-ass efficient you are on a bike. You’re one hell of a motor, that’s right.