The unassuming blue farmhouse, with the friendly dog and the friendly cat, is in the midst of a remodel. Behind the farmhouse is a garage, then a large, black barn. Inside the barn two enormous pigs look up curiously as Sandee Corlett and Jason Tucker walk in. Chickens are clucking from somewhere deep in the barn. Tucker gives the pigs a couple scoops of feed and vigorously rubs the female whose back is mid-thigh high. Past the barn and next to a small field is a small greenhouse used for starting organic seeds. And beyond that stands an angular wood building with large black panels on one side.
“So this is our solar house, it’s really the farm office slash workshop,” Corlett says. “We’re going to have a certified kitchen right here. The batteries are right here,” she says, going to a back closet with a row of eight black boxes on the floor. Wires stretch up the wall and connect to boxes that are part of the solar panels on the other side of the wall. The house runs on passive solar energy, is heated by a wood stove and has the capability to use wind power.
“We kind of started out trying to do farming for self-sufficiency,” Corlett said. She and Tucker own Earth’s Promise Farm, a 45-acre certified organic farm specializing in pastured poultry and produce for the Community Supported Agriculture initiative. They became commercial producers in order to pay for property they bought to avoid having to look at subdivisions from their solar house. But it wasn’t really about aesthetics for Corlett, who considers herself an environmentalist - it was about having a land ethic. She was influenced early in life by writers such as Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. After taking an environmental biology class in college she determined the way to save the environment was through agriculture. “The more I learned about the environment and what climate change was really about, the more I became concerned about how our private lands were managed,” she said. “Because we can control the public lands through the park system, but the private lands are controlled through private hands.”
No one has yet proven that global warming, or even global climate change, is occurring and that it is a direct effect of agriculture. However, there have been numerous cases and studies reporting alarming findings about chemicals in water, adverse effects from supplemental hormones, poor soil quality in heavily cultivated areas, disappearing wetlands, and of course, concerns about energy use. At the heart of Corlett’s reasons for being organic is the preservation of the earth. It’s not solely about avoiding chemicals or toxins for health reasons as many people who buy organic claim. A 2009 study by the Organic Trade Association found that 55 percent of families who have bought organic in the past two years did so for health reasons. While scientists have not found organic food to be inherently healthier than other foods, certified organic food is not exposed to unnatural pesticides or fertilizers, which are rather unhealthy for the earth.
“The problem with fertilizing, using artificial fertilizers is that, one, it takes energy to make those fertilizers and two, plants can’t necessarily uptake large amounts of fertilizer all at once, nitrogen all at once, so we have big problems with nitrogen runoff,” said Sarah Emery, PhD., an assistant professor in biology at the University of Louisville.
This nitrogen runoff has created a dead zone at the mouth of the Mississippi River in the Gulf of Mexico. A process called eutrophication, where excess nutrients stimulate the overproduction of algae, consumes much of the oxygen in the water and kills off many other organisms, Emery explains. While nitrogen is important to plant growth, plants can only use a certain amount of nitrogen at once, so the excess moves through the soil to the water table and ends up in rivers, lakes and oceans. This excess nitrogen not only causes harmful growth of some organisms and depletion of others, but it seriously disrupts the nutrient cycles which can lead to a decline in soil fertility.
In an undisturbed system all the used or harvested materials and nutrients are returned to the earth through human and animal waste. When the waste doesn’t get returned to the soil the nutrients don’t either. The nutrients get displaced, carbon and nitrogen in the soil become carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide in the air, both of which are considered greenhouse gases. “When rainforests are cut down or there is agriculture in places where there hasn’t been agriculture before and the soil is disturbed, then a lot of that solid carbon is converted to atmospheric carbon again. And atmospheric carbon is what we’re really concerned about in terms of climate change,” Emery explains.
Corlett and Tucker are trying to become a carbon neutral family, since that’s what farming for self-sufficiency is all about. “The idea was to be like an ecosystem and to be in a natural ecosystem there is no waste ever. All the natural resources are used. And if each individual family can become a self contained ecosystem then we’re not putting out the waste that becomes the waste stream that becomes the problems which really are at the heart of what environmental degradation is all about,” she explained with a touch of concern in her voice.
“It’s that we are upsetting the natural ecosystems and if we can instead fit in and not disturb the surrounding natural ecosystem around us, and we can somehow strive to be, you know,” Corlett hesitated looking for the right words, “the antibiotics don’t have to come and get us out of the system, you know, we’re accepted.”
One of the criticisms of organic agriculture is that it can’t produce enough to sustain growing populations. A study by scientists from Padua University in Italy, and Cornell University in New York, argues that “the external costs of intensive agriculture have been huge and that, although organic farming may need more land to produce the same yield, it conserves soil, water and biodiversity.” Emery suggests that focusing more on local initiatives would be more environmentally sustainable than organic farming based on an energy use perspective. A. Lee Meyer, PhD., professor of agricultural economics at the University of Kentucky and a state coordinator for Sustainable Agricultural Research and Education, points out that between extra labor requirements, transportation and marketing, both organic and local producers can use as much fuel as conventional farmers.
It’s clear there are a lot of questions and technicalities in the organic-sustainable-conventional agriculture debate. “There are a lot of positive things going on, really I think in some dimensions agriculture is much more sustainable than it was before,” said Meyer confidently. The trend has swung very far toward sustainability and environmental awareness and has considerable momentum. It’s reflected in the “buy local” and CSA initiatives, and the increasing number of organic and natural food stores.
Corlett believes organics is the solution, describing it as farming system that is “better able to adapt with the upcoming changes that we will be forced to figure out. Because it’s going to change everybody, and everybody’s going to have to change the way that they farm.”
“I think we’re really just identifying some of the issues now, and we have a long way to go in terms of finding the best solutions,” Meyer concluded.
*Written 12/7/09
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