06.04.08
Posted in In the Garden, Culture at 3:42 pm by steve
When is farming about connecting with nature; and when is farming about overcoming nature? It’s a question Don takes up in the case for and against industrial agriculture. Specialization and returns to scale make farming economically efficient; but they tend to take the joy out of the task of farming. Is there a kind of “middle ground” in which economic efficiency and the satisfactions of a connection to nature can happily coexist? Don’s commenters suggest there might be.
The power of Don’s piece is that he has hit upon a metaphor of the modern era. The question he asks is one that has been central to western culture since the Renaissance. We develop the question here, in a slightly different way.
In engineering, efficiency is defined clearly against some ideal. For instance, in thermodynamics first law effficiency describes the ratio between the energy released as heat and work extracted from that heat source. In the comments that accompany Don’s essay, there appear a number of ideas about efficiency. Each idea is important; and it is useful to understand how rational choice causes one to substitute one sort of efficiency for another.
1) efficiency of labor - how much food can be produced with an hour of labor. This is an essential idea. If a people is to produce arts and sciences, it only does so on a world-class way when a large portion of the adult workers are engaged in tasks not related to farming and raising children. Civilizations since the Sumerian have flourished in the brief intervals where new agricultural techniques or new lands have produced food in bountiful amounts and reduced labor to a minimum.
2) efficiency of land - how much food can be produced on an acre of land. In densely populated areas this becomes the limiting factor to sustaining a population. North America’s great blessing is that we have a few more decades, perhaps a century, before this issue is so constraining as it is now in China, Haiti, Bangladesh, or Rwanda. Recall that many historians believe that the Renaissance really got in full swing in Europe after the Black Death had wiped out a third of the population. Having lots of fertile land per capita has been the constant factor in the rise of the west for most of the last three millennia.
3) efficiency of energy - how much food can be produced with a given amount of exogenous energy input. Michael Pollan estimates that fully 15% of the food energy calories that Americans consume can be traced directly to ammonia used to fertilize the soil in which corn grows; and this ammonia is derived from natural gas. We are eating petroleum. This fact explains, too, why ethanol from corn is not such a great idea as a primary energy source.
In a purely economical sense, we would strive to create farms that have high efficiencies in all three areas. Artificially cheap oil has pushed us to substitute energy for labor. Similarly, artificially cheap land has driven us to substitute land for labor. We have enjoyed a huge number of material and cultural benefits from this: only two percent of Americans work the soil for profit. The rest of us enjoy other pursuits. But we have also created industrialized agriculture which has its own set of problems.
One problem is the lack of sustainability. When the oil and gas run out, the system crashes. Or when monoculture creates a primary food source that can be wiped out by a single organism - as potatoes in pre-famine Ireland or maize in current US agriculture, the system crashes. There is, therefore, a great need to move toward cultivation techniques that are much more sustainable.
A large enough collection of incremental improvements will position us well to make the leap when the energy crunch materializes. Some will increase the number of choices of seedstock and the number of kinds of primary foods. Some will allow us to run farm equipment and food distribution machinery on vegetable oils. Diesel engines were originally designed to run on vegetable oils, so this is not a great technological leap. But wind, nuclear, and solar energy will all play essential roles as well.
On the farm, soil fertility will be sustained less by addition of chemicals derived from natural gas and more from biogenic processes. We will learn to cultivate plants and use farm animals in ways that naturally keep soil fertile. We will learn to cultivate flora and fauna that keep nature balanced. We will cultivate beneficial insects such as honeybees, parasitic wasps, lady bugs, and beneficial nematodes. We will use the balancing techniques built into the natural world to bring balance to agriculture.
This brings us to the striking idea in Don’s piece. He establishes farming as something more than a simple economic activity. He establishes it as a means of connecting with nature. I have filled a suburban lot with roses, shrubs and flowering plants and I enjoy hearing birds sing in the morning, so I understand the satisfaction that comes from this connection. It seems to me that this is a factor missing from modern life, industrial farm not excepted.
But instead of interacting with nature, we do what is expected of us in a society that exists purely as an economic machine. Don, having once failed at creating a fully sustainable farm in which land is tilled using mules, moves on to other agricultural activities. At one point he contemplates working on a chicken farm. One of his tasks on the chicken farm would be to cull the flock. It involves moving through the chicken super-dome whacking underdeveloped chickens with a PCV pipe, collecting the carcasses, and recycling them.
Even while we may understand that this culling plays a vital role in keeping chickens big enough to provide us with large Sunday meals, the genius of his piece is that Don succeeds in making the act of popping underdeveloped chickens on the head with PVC pipe the metaphor of the current era. He gets us to understand that when we are no longer affected by this image, we cease to be fully functional as empathetic human beings. And society - no matter how economically successful - ceases to create meaningful relationships. We have been dehumanized.
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03.26.08
Posted in In the Garden, Book Reviews - Non-Fiction at 7:29 pm by steve
Review of the Sunset National Garden Book, 1997 ed.
The New Yorker cartoon is so famous it exists as a poster. It depicts a New Yorker’s view of the world to the west. Manhattan is drawn in detail, street by street. It takes up more than half of the picture. Then there is the Hudson River. New Jersey is a sliver. What is west of NJ is given only sketchy, almost parenthetical treatment. At one level the cartoon is a laugh at the New Yorker who cannot see past the edge of Manhattan Island. At another level it captures a truth that challenges all far-ranging projects: we make careful distinctions about what we know well, but we make much less rigorous distinctions about things with which we are not familiar. The problem is as old and as pervasive as the distinction between “us” and “them.” The British tried to rise above this in their undertakings; but that tradition seems to have died out with US ascendency.
This issue crops up in many places. In this case, it is in gardening.
On each little spot of earth, the specific cultural practices that are required for the successful cultivation of the vast array of farm, garden, and landscape plants is so overwhelming that no single person can hope to learn all the cultural practices for all the cultivated species grown, say, in all the continental US. Each location is different. Each offers opportunities and challenges for each cultivar. It is a daunting task to describe which cultivars will thrive where.
From the perspective of the gardener in Northeastern US, the first great challenge was cold hardiness. This is a concern that descends partly from British Victorian days when plants from the tropics were imported to England on a grand scale. And it is reinforced by the fact that much of the gardening land in the are lies to the south. If one is writing from NY or Boston and one covets cannas, jasmine, and pelargoniums, this is the challenge.
To address this challenge the USDA published the Cold Hardiness Map some decades ago. It was a great success because it provided simple, common language that people could use to talk about which plants would grow where. Every plant lable uses this system. More recently, there has been a heat index map. This adds a little new information because, while there is a general trend of places with warm winters getting hotter summers along the east coast, the moderating effects of oceans is diminished in, say Nouth Dakota. Brutally cold winters give way to blistering summers. The cold hardiness index proves to be ever less useful in determining summer heat index as one moves west. In fact, Colorado - two or three USDA zones warmer in the winter - can be cooler than South Dakota during the dog days of summer. And this is not reflected in the USDA hardiness map.
What we learn, if we look carefully at the regions west of the Hudson River, is that there is a great deal of variation in climate that arises from different east-west locations. The variation arises from proximity to oceans. It arises due to the prevaling west winds. It occurs because of variations in elevation. It occurs because of differences in rainfall. And it occurs because of differences in soil. As a result, the USDA zone system is not ideally suited to garderners in the west. If the USDA system works well, it does so on the east coast. It has some breakdowns by the time one reaches the Mississippi. By the time one gets to California, things look different. It is always so.
The Sunset Garden book is designed to address these problems. It is designed for the gardener in the west. By west, here, we mean two things. a) west of the Mississippi River and b) California. The question that rightly ought to arise is this: Are a) and b) the same or two different things?
Overview
The Sunset National Gardening Book derives from the idea that a host of factors influence the kind of flora best suited to a location. It considers: winter temperatures, elevation, summer temperatures, total rainfall, how rainfall is distributed throughout the year, winds, soil, even how cool night air moves in relation to hills and valleys. By considering all these factors, it makes a great number of distinctions about gardening zones. It defines twenty four gardening zones west of the Mississippi and twenty one zones east of it. And it lists horticulturally important plants from hundreds of genuses, providing the zones in which a plant will thive.
The book is divided into two sections. The first section describes 45 gardening zones in Contintental US and Canada. It provides maps showing where these zones exist. It briefly sketches the kind of vegetation one can find. And it tells of how one species or a group of species have been used to define zone boundaries. For example, it distinguishes zone 1 from zone 2 with the example that the MacIntosh apple tree will grow happily in zone 2 but not in zone 1. And it distinguishes the bottom land in California’s central valley from the hills that edge the valley by describing precisely why members of the citrus family do better in the lowest hills.
The idea of defining zones by what will grow there we find to be an inspired, practical idea. It is a common, age old practice to define lands this way. Deserts, for instance. Or savannah. Or swamp or rainforest. The list is long, supporting the intuitive strength of the idea. What Sunset is not quite so good at doing, however, is providing a list of plants used to make the distinctions. Nor do they provide a rigorous list of climate criteria - temperature, rainfall, etc.
One is given some rationale for comparing a zone with its typical neighbors; but one is left not understanding the vital measurable criteria that define a zone. This matters, because it is not the zone numbers that the plants themselves care about; it is the physical properties that characterize the zones. If one lives near a zone boundary or if one has a property with microclimates, or if one experiences unusual weather understanding the physical distinctions is vital.
The overall arrangement of the 45 climate zones is very roughly arranged as a clock but running counter-clockwise. The center of the clock is not far from Dodge City, Kansas. Zone 1 stretches north from here into Canada and west to the warm, damp western fringes of Washington and Oregon. The damp, warm ocean-moderated fringes of these two states and their river valleys rate three or four more climate zones. Then it’s on to California. In California, almost every one of the twenty four western climate zones of the west exists. Zone 10 is reserved for western Kansas, New Mexico, and Arizona. The rationale, here, is that whereas California gets dry summers, these areas get most of their rain during the summer, making certain kinds of agriculture possible.
Florida gets zone 25. The zones 26-45 between Florida and northern Minnesota and Maine range in great arcs that generally parallel the Appalachians. As a person who has lived in three or four of these zones and driven through many more, I can say that the system seems quite sensible in the way it makes zonal distinctions. And if one tests this against the zonal lists for plants, one tends to get reasonably good predictive results.
The second section of the book is an accounting of commonly cultivated plants and how they fare in these zones. It is arranged alphabetically by genus. Where a genus offers a large variety of cultivars with subtly different cultural requirements, the pages of the book will usually offer a table with each cultivar getting a row entry and columns listing zones and describing requirements.
The Details
The guiding principle of the book is that a really useful zone system makes really useful distinctions that flawlessly and seemlessly guide a gardener in the selection of plants for a local garden. There can be little question that the book has done a laudable job for California gardeners. The map of the Los Angeles metropolitan area painstakingly shows at least ten separate climate zones. Similarly, the boundary delineating Sunset zone 7 from colder alpine zone 1 is painstakingly drawn to indicate each little creek valley that extends into the Sierra Nevadas. The kinds of distinctions the Sunset system makes are ideally suited to California gardeners. It makes those distinctions sensibly and communicates those distinctions clearly.
Similarly, the climate zones east of the Mississippi make careful and useful distinctions based on summer and winter temperatures, humidity, soil type, elevation, and so on. The zone boundaries rarely address issues of microclimate; but the local variations in climate east of the Mississippi are generally much less geographically dense than they are in the West. In California and Arizona, for instance, one can drive from warm, subtropical weather to hot desert or to snow-capped mountains in a few short hours, crossing many zone boundaries. In the east, one needs to get on an airplane to cross so many boundaries in so little time.
The Sunset zone system, when judged by its implementation in California and in areas east of the Mississippi, is sensible. It is an improvement on the USDA system for these parts of the nation, frequently a vast improvement.
The next step in a usable system, then, is for all plants to be rated according to this system. Sunset has undertaken to do this. And for most plants they do a good job. Entries for each genus will list sun and shade requirements as well as water requirements. And they list which zones they thrive in. Where these vary significantly within a genus they are listed by species or cultivar.
Of Russell Hybrids Lupines we read:
Perennial Zones 1-7, 14-17, 34, 36-45. Not suited to hot climates. Best in cool areas of the West Coast, Pacific Northwest, New England, northern tier states, and southern Canada.
In my own limited experience, in zone 34 without supplemental water they tend to dry out, even in the shade. We observe that the Sunset zones are defined in such a way as to make it possible to communicate precisely where these lupines will not grow, even without the additional text. In the case of lupines, the limitation is much less about cold hardiness than it is heat tolerance and drought tolerance.
Artichokes, we are told, do well in zones 8,9, 14-16, 18-24, and especially 17. Those of us who have lived in Texas, in Michigan, and in the Northeast will happily divide the country into two sorts of artichoke - growing zones; where they grow and where they do not. The zone in which artichokes do grow is tiny. They have peculiar and exacting requirements that include cool summer weather, adequate moisture, and extremely mild winters. Of the arable land in the world, perhaps not one tenth of one percent is suitable for artichoke production. Perhaps it is not a tenth of this. After all this, it rates twelve separate climate zones!
While the Sunset Garden book is an improvement on the USDA zone system for eastern gardeners and while evidently makes finely honed distinctions needed by California gardeners, there is some concern that the quality of the distinctions it makes is not uniform over the nation.
There are compelling economic arguments for the appropriateness of this fact, were it so. California has a lot of gardeners. Also, it is large; and it is capable of growing a lot of plants. Other places are less well suited, perhaps. California, for example, is this nation’s vegetable garden. If a food is not derived directly or indirectly from corn, there’s a good chance that it was grown in California. So making good distinctions is not just about happy gardeners, it is about successful agriculture.
The Zone 1 Problem
That said, we cannot help but be skeptical about a single climate zone that lumps together such far flung places as Taos NM, Casper WY, Vail CO, Fort Collins CO, Bend OR, Great Falls MT, Truckee CA, and Minot ND. Sunset places these in zone 1.
We understand that two issues seriously limit plant growth and viability in zone 1: cold temperatures and lack of moisture. And we understand that, to some degree, these places all suffer from a lack of at least one of these elements. Compared to Los Angeles, all these places get cold. But that is like saying, compared to Bar Harbor, ME all of the US has hot summers. If one is obsessed with lupines and gives not a whit about any other plant, such a point of view is not seriously limiting. But if one’s gardening aims extend beyond the lupine, one will want to make more finely honed distinctions.
If Sunset were to make distinctions that correspond a little more clearly to how we perceive a location and its vegetation, they would make some meaningful distinctions within the zone they call zone 1. Take Taos NM, for example. The town lies at the western edge of a national forest. In town, the streets are lined with towering trees. Many yards have the normal sorts of grasses and flowers. One gets the sense in driving up from Albuquerque that the town towers high above a brutal, dry desert plain. Nor does this relative lushness evidently rely totally on irrigation systems as do, say, the verdant lawns of Orange County. If one drives not half an hour west of Taos, one will be on a flat plain that seems to stretch out many tens of miles in every direction. Nothing grows here. Almost nothing. It is flat and stark. While it may take a trained eye of a horticulturalist to distinguish even three different climate zones in LA, a four-year-old could distinguish the plain from the forest or the town.
Analogously, the plain east of Ft Collins is farmland. It does get some irrigation - which it needs to produce corn reliably. But this plain, arguably, is categorically different from the plain west of Taos. One might be able to grow barley here without irrigation. Probably the same is not true at Taos.
Much colder in winter and hotter in summer, but about as dry, is Minot ND. It’s hard to understand how anyone could confuse Minot’s climate with that of Taos, unless one is simply lumping together all the things that are categorically different from any one of LA’s ten zones.
Similarly, the climate of the mountains of Colorado is categorically distinct from the climate of its flatland. On the plain, plant culture is most severly limited by lack of moisture. In the high lands, moisture is frequently less of a problem than temperature. This distinction is crucial. Again, drive west of Fort Collins for one hour and the plant life is markedly different. It is ironic that the very people who fail to make the distinction depend so heavily on water that originates in these very highlands to irrigate their farms and gardens.
The alpine ranges of California, too, get cold winters. Large swathes of upland northern CA lie in USDA zone 5. That’s as cold as Pittsburgh. Almost as wet, too. That makes it categorically distinct from either Minot, ND or the plain west of Taos. In between these extremes is Bend, OR. Here, rainfall is precious, but the air temperature is much less extreme than it is in Minot, ND. Many types of grasses and trees are wll adapted to the region. With just a bit of supplemental watering, gardens can be quite glorious. It is a little difficult to believe that it is indistinguishable from Ft Collins since its rainfall pattern is markedly different; but it does, at least, share a common USDA hardiness zone.
How seriously one considers the zone 1 problem depends on how one looks at it. A huge portion of the commercial and recreational plant cultivation takes place in zones other than Sunset zone 1. Not many people live in this zone. And, almost by Sunset’s definition, plants do not grow there. So in most practical senses this is not very important.
Still, we have difficulty swallowing this argument. Sunset zone 1 covers perhaps 25 percent of the Continental US, maybe more. Each location offers a different combination of difficulties. By treating the whole vast space as a single zone one must either believe that the same things grow throughout or that nothing does. One is tempted to believe nothing does. The dry land farmers of eastern Montana and the Dakotas might not believe it - not every year. Nor would the people whose Taos yards sport 100 ft tall trees. Given the kinds of distinctions used for artichoke-growing zones, it’s hard to understand the almost complete absence of fundamental distinctions within Sunset zone 1.
While we must laud Sunset for doing an enviable job on California zones, and for refining the zone system in the east, we expect that the gardeners of what is now (was in 1997) zone 1 may hope for a system that is as careful about distinguishing verdant, chilly upland areas from blistering, dry, northern plains. The rigors that were used to arrive at the almost two dozen zonal distinctions Sunset made within California might well be applied to their own zone 1. This would produce two kinds of zones; one in which vegetation is typically water limited, and one in which it is typically coldness limited. This is an absolutely essential distinction. Probably one could subdivide Sunset zone 1 into at least half a dozen truly meaningful, distinct zones.
In some ways, our concern is less about the practical than it is about the symbolic. There is a sense in which the Sunset system projects a kind of provincial self-absorption. And this strikes us as being serious flaw in a work that shows as much practical promise as this work does. It is a little ironic since the left coast is treating the central states even more parenthetically than the right coast treated them with the USDA zone map.
With its cold hardiness map, the USDA failed to make all the important distinctions that affect plants. But the problems were at least rather more uniformly distributed across the US. Problems that arose were typically due to the fact that garden writers in the east were thinking in eastern terms and writing primarily for eastern audiences. If one lived on the west coast; one quickly learned that summer moisture was an issue. And if one lived between California and Kansas, one learned that water was a problem in general. Within these parameters, the USDA guide was a great deal of help, even in California.
The Sunset climate zone system was started as a local system for California gardeners. Then it was extended to include more of the US. Actually, it seems that for the west it was more projected than extended. The question was less “how do we treat climate west of the Mississippi as we treated California climate?” than it was “how do we project the zones defined for California onto other areas?” Sometimes when this rendered nonsense new zones were defined. But not often.
Outside zone 1 Sunset does a good job - frequently an exemplary job - of making important distinctions, distinctions that are really meaningful to people who garden or farm. The great irony of this is that once one gets outside California, the Sunset guide’s treatment of the west may be even less suitable than the USDA’s treatment. At least the latter will tell you that it gets colder in North Dakota than it does in Taos and Bend. Sadly, if we start out hoping it was designed to serve all regions of the west equally well, we end up seeing its designers as making the same sorts of errors as the New Yorkers depicted in the cartoon.
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