Note from the Founder: July

When In Drought: Think Outside the Box of Cornflakes

I don’t get the paper. I think it’s a generational thing. But I always enjoy reading it when I’m at my parents’, or a friend’s house who does. This past Sunday I had one of those nice laidback weekend mornings where I sat on the patio and drank coffee and read (my friend’s copy of) the Sunday Post.

“Hey, Molly, have you heard of this gal, Mary Ostafi?”

“Yeah, she’s one of our graduates!”

“She’s on the front page of the Business section for her rooftop farm.”

I was delighted to read the article announcing the opening of the long-time-coming Food Roof, a rooftop urban agriculture project conceived of by Mary Ostafi, a friend and 2011 apprentice. Mary and her husband Joe co-founded Urban Harvest STL back in 2011 and started the first community garden downtown. When the Koken Art Factory ended the group’s lease, they decided to think outside the box for where to grow produce for downtown dwellers.

Specifically, they thought about the top of the box, and whether rooftops could be designed as centers of food production in the concrete jungle of downtown St. Louis, where few (if any) green spaces exist that didn’t one day have buildings atop them, thus translating to a high possibility of lead-contaminated soil from the paints and materials from old buried structures.

The biggest funder of the project to date (with a $135,017 contribution) is MSD, Metropolitan Sewer District, through their Project Clear program. As MSD is all too aware, urban developments have a large number of impervious surfaces like parking lots and rooftops that mean less water is percolating through our ground and more water is over-running our city’s storm drains. “Projects like the FOOD ROOF Farm serve as innovative urban strategies to assist the community by capturing runoff before it enters the sewer system.” Property owners may seek Roofing Solutions in Seattle to have their roofs inspected and maintained.

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So this article was a delight to read – seeing a premiere example of an innovative strategy of food production, especially in times of climate change.

On the other hand, the article on the front page of the paper outlined another St. Louis-based strategy being explored when looking at modern-day food production in the face of climate change: making more drought-resistant varieties of corn. ($20 million from the National Science Foundation has been devoted to the overall project, in fact.)

Now to me that is like looking at different colors of siding for your house when the foundation blocks are crumbling. Given the severity of the situation, isn’t it time we start looking outside the box of corn flakes (and crackers, bread, soda, chips, deli meats, juice, etc.) we’ve been fed, and look at alternative crops? Perhaps even alternative farming methods?

The crop that springs to mind is one that Mr. Mark Shepard, author of Restoration Agriculture, often speaks of when comparing annual vs perennial agriculture: chestnuts. Chestnuts are a unique tree crop in that they are high carbohydrate and low fat, similar to the nutritional makeup of corn (but with 72% of the Recommended Daily Allowance of Vitamin C; corn contains 0%).

Shepard even goes so far as to recommend that instead of getting people to stop consuming less Cheetos, just substitute chestnut flour for the corn product and we’ll have healthier food products, not to mention a healthier state of agriculture.

The reason that chestnuts would make a great replacement crop for corn is not just that they are nutritional superstars in comparison, but also, of course, that they grow on trees. Trees are planted once, require substantial attention and labor in year 1, and from then on, require less effort and produce more. Plus they don’t require tilling up the fields year after year, as single-season annuals do. They means the ground can actually help sequester carbon and mitigate climate change, rather than release more carbon into the atmosphere and exacerbate it.

What are the problems with growing corn? Without making this article a graduate thesis, suffice it to say: Monoculture. Dependence on chemical herbicides and fertilizers. Proliferation of GMO production (88% of the corn grown in the US is GMO). Lack of biodiversity. Development of superweeds. Dependence on neonicotinoids. Colony collapse disorder.

And those are just some of the environmental hazards. Don’t even get me started on the nutritional ramifications of an agricultural economy based on corn as king. (Instead, watch this trailer.) Links have been made between the epidemic of obesity and diet-related diseases like diabetes and heart disease and our nation’s addiction to corn time and time again.

Rather than hold fast to something that isn’t working – for our waistlines nor for our waterways – perhaps it’d be best to let go of this paradigm that we must depend on corn for our future. At this point, that seems to be a losing battle. It’s time to think outside the box of corn flakes.

For Local Farms,