As regular readers are well aware, now we are farmers. And so Jonai Farms must have its own website, of course, where I’ve decided to blog our adventures in farming.
It will be interesting learning which blog is for which post, and occasionally I will simply cross post. So for those interested in all things farming and the rural life, check out The Hedonist Life over at Jonai Farms. 🙂
Road Trip USA was envisioned to serve a number of purposes, one of them to visit small, rebel farmers who are concerned enough about the impact of large industrial agriculture to participate in system-wide change through sustainable practices on their own farms. Those we have visited have been generous with their knowledge, and certainly fit Joel Salatin’s criteria that farms should be ‘aromatically and aesthetically pleasing’ – I’ll be posting on some soon…
The first farm we visited was in fact Polyface, which I’ve already detailed. It is a wonderful place, and an inspiration to many new and aspiring farmers such as ourselves. Salatin is not just farming, he’s also combating complacence and acceptance of industrial agriculture as normative through his many books, workshops, and what seems like a lot of time on the lecture circuit. I recommend reading a great post over on ‘Good Cooking for Hard Times’ that outlines some of the consequences of our faith in industrial ag and gives further detail to Polyface.
But I should begin at the beginning. For Road Trip USA, we packed the essential reading for our continued research into sustainable farming, then prepared ourselves for the Land of Processed Food.
When we encountered initial difficulties with the RockVan, you can imagine our surprise in the rather uninspiring town of Springfield, Virginia to find a little diner promoting itself as ‘Farm to Table’ just around the corner from our freeway hotel.
Turns out the Silver Diner is a regional chain that is ‘locally owned and operated’, and while it’s nice to see the interest and effort around sourcing produce locally, I’m really not sure about the ‘natural’ claims nor their ethical credentials after checking out their egg and milk suppliers.
The food we were served fit the bill of most chain fare in the States – large servings smothered in cheese, tasting of, well… fat. Vegetables were in short supply, the pancake breakfast managed to look as though there’s nothing local or natural about it – just what people want, right? I don’t want to knock Silver Diner for trying, but I was struck by how the commercial imperative to cater to the mainstream desire for sameness and quantity seems to be hampering their efforts at really tapping into the ‘farm to table’ movement. Less generously, these people are opportunists dressing up (relatively) local produce as ‘natural’.
But that’s just the first day.
As we’ve traversed thousands of miles across this vast, beautiful country, two of our most common interactions with food and agriculture have been amongst farmlands and supermarkets. Restaurants, while revealing what people eat outside the home, don’t tell you as much about their everyday existence as supermarkets do, and while supermarkets completely obscure their products’ sources, just drive through rural America and you’ll see the often-sad source for yourself.
Much of what we’ve seen evokes a bit of the nostalgic rural idyl – neat rows of corn bursting green across the horizon, the glimmer of red capsicums peeking through deeply verdant fields, circles of golden hay tidily surrounding a homely barn. In Pennsylvania, Virginia and North Carolina, it’s the cavernous old barns in varying states of decay or fresh repair, and if the mid-South is barns, Texas is windmills.
Yet if you drive through these fields day after day, week after week, and you have your sustainable and fair-trade agricultural lenses on, what you see is monocultures, dead and dying soils, rubbish-strewn poverty in small farming communities and field-workers’ cottages, and pastures decorated with billboards advertising casinos or treatment for Lupus.
The Mississippi Delta’s relentless monotony of cornfields made me wonder at the outcry against palm tree plantations in Malaysia, when our own backyard is so untidy. Not that I’m suggesting we shouldn’t protest the destruction of rainforests for monocultures, but that we should scrutinise the practices of our own countries more closely (who, of course, are also hugely reliant on palm oil for the gargantuan processed food industry). In case the monocultures don’t give you a touch of dysphoria, there’s the poverty – from run-down trailers to shotgun shacks held together with little more than a Southern Baptist’s prayers, rural Mississippi (which is pretty much all of Mississippi, the poorest state in the US) is poor – like, Flint, Michigan poor.
In Mississippi, what really struck me was the exploitation of labour, as it was pretty obvious that it wasn’t the farm owners’ houses we were despairing at.
But when you get to west Texas, where broad-acre cotton and wheat dominate the landscape, it gets harder to tell who owns what, and our sense was that the mid-sized family farms were the ones under enormous threat from long-term unsustainable practices and the current drought.
There’s spirited debate amongst the farming community here over when they can start calling it of a scale of the Dust Bowl of the 30s, but whether what we’re seeing is that bad or not, it’s very very bad. Whole wheat crops have been ploughed under, cattle sold early, and grain elevators gone bankrupt.
Even the rivers have up and left the state.
The detritus of industrial agriculture gone wrong is everywhere – from dead soils to deserted farmhouses, the dust devils are closing in.
But from wind springs new life, and just across Interstate 40 from the sad and stinking feedlots outside Amarillo are some of Texas’ many wind farms, a hopeful backdrop to the crumbling disasters of industrial agriculture in America’s midwest. Even the private oil derricks seem relatively harmless as they dredge the last of the land’s lifebloods from under its withering skin.
Yet many argue we must have these monolithic systems in order to feed the world. But what that attitude has given us is a system so broken farmers pay enormous sums to Monsanto to grow tens of thousands of acres of Round-Up-Ready corn to feed ruminants who live out their lives in malodorous CAFOs so we can have 24oz steaks on our plates – in Amarillo your super-sized steak is accompanied by the smell of their excrement in the feedlots just west of town.
And I will point out the obvious – we’re over-feeding the so-called global north, or what used to be called the First World, where now we’re mostly just first in diseases of affluence.
In many of America’s supermarkets, you can’t miss the ‘mobility scooters’ as you collect a trolley. The prevalence of obesity in America is no secret, and the majority of those we’ve seen using the scooters have fit the description. I’m not remotely interested in joining others in fat-shaming – I see no shame in obesity, just higher risk for disease and a diminished quality of life. Yet I can’t help but ponder the motive of supermarkets full of 85% highly-processed food in providing mobility scooters for their customers?
Once inside, you could follow Michael Pollan’s advice and stick to the outer aisles and produce section. And regular readers of my blog will know we go a step further and avoid big chain supermarkets entirely, but for the purposes of research and creativity, we’ve not only gone in, we’ve gone deep.
It starts with a game – try to find a food you know in its original form. Butter? No – oh, wait, yes, some.
Rice? Sure, but almost all instant and flavoured. Cheese? Over there in the dry goods ‘shelf-stable’ area.
Yoghurt? Of course, but I hope you don’t mind artificial flavours and sweeteners, and of course you’ll be delighted it’s all fat free.
Right, so dairy is fat or even dairy free, rice is instant and ‘value added’, and there are typically 3-4 times as many processed meat products as whole. And that’s mostly around Pollan’s supermarket periphery – you should see what’s in the middle. Oh, you’ve been there? So you know there is nothing whole in the middle – it’s entirely made up of ‘ingredients’ created by the wonders of science to befuddle our senses into thinking it’s actually food, marketed as healthier than what we might grow in our own backyards.
The fabulous Zoe recently said on Progressive Dinner Party, ‘I don’t accept that the leap from wheat kernel to bread is the same as the leap from bread to McDonalds‘.
It’s not full-cream dairy making you fat, America. Putting excessive amounts of ‘cheese product’ on highly processed meat products wrapped in highly processed ‘bread’ products served with a side of… well, I don’t know their scientific names… yeah, that and the super-sized sodas and high-sugar cereals, that might make you fat. When even the deli potato salad has High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS), you’re going to get fat.
These processed foods will make us all fat while we blind ourselves to the exploitation of workers who grew and harvested the ingredients that made these ‘foods’ whose origins are no longer recognisable nor traceable. Meanwhile, the workers will continue to die the illnesses of poverty and over-exposure to chemicals, and everyone will get fatter and sadder and act like nobody knows why. And more farmers will continue to leave the land because where is the dairy farmer’s dollar in a product so ‘value-added’ by others down the supply chain it’s no longer primarily made from milk anyway?
Surely the fact that we can eat at the Silver Diner should make us happy? And not having to grow our own tomatoes, add seasoning to our rice, or fruit to our yoghurt – no need to pop our nachos in the oven to melt the cheese? Isn’t it marvellous that we not only don’t have to bake our own bread, we don’t even have to slice it? Those benevolent corporations will even boil your eggs for you.
Industrial agriculture has made all of us so much happier, hasn’t it? I mean, just look at these tomatoes, right?
This post is linked to Fight Back Fridays – you should check out some of the other Food Renegade posts!
As we commence RoadTripUSA, I’m thinking a lot about food. Okay, I always think a lot about food, but there’s something quite specific I’m thinking about and it’s around ‘ecotarianism’, pleasure and conviviality…
In America we’ll eat a lot of good food and a bit of bad food. To judge good and bad I weigh up flavour, texture, ‘wholeness’, seasonality, regionality, sustainability, animal husbandry, workers’ rights, and to some degree, health (though food that’s ‘bad’ for you because it’s fatty, etc, is something I don’t spend much time thinking about regarding our family as our lifestyle of predominantly whole foods nearly always ensures a well-balanced diet – but that’s another post). Making choices that ‘tread lightly’ and treat food and producers respectfully is what I understand by ‘ecotarian’, a fairly new term, discussed on the ABC recently by Cristy Clark.
Like most people, sometimes we compromise our usual principles and eat what we consider ‘bad food’ to greater or lesser extents. Road trips inevitably include some potato chips and sometimes a meal from Subway or a local takeaway, and on Friday nights at home we’ll occasionally order pizza or pick up fish and chips. When we make these choices, we’re still able to avoid factory-farmed pork and chicken rather easily.
When travelling, we usually let our standards slide on ethical meat – we tend to just eat everything as a way of understanding culture better – and that includes pork and chicken that is most likely factory farmed. The traceability issues we face at home are compounded overseas where we’re even less certain of our food’s origins. We continue with our usual habits of not eating too much meat generally, but we do like to try all the local specialties. In America, we’re usually with my family or friends, so keeping to ecotarian principles is pretty easy as we generally know the provenance of the food. However, eating out presents a greater challenge unless dining in one of America’s many wonderful SOLE (Sustainable, Organic, Local and Ethical) focused restaurants and cafes.
This trip to America is different to a visit ‘home’. We’ll be driving through a number of unfamiliar regions, and there’s a world of interesting local dishes I can’t wait to sample, including such nommish delights as pulled pork in the South… but the odds of there being much free-range pork on the menus in Alabama are pretty slim, I reckon. Chicken will pose a similar problem, and thanks to America’s preponderance of Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs), commonly known as ‘factory farms’, even beef poses an ethical dilemma unless you know the provenance. I could go on about dairy, seafood, fast food franchises, processed snack foods… you get the picture, but I’ll use pork as my primary example given our plans to be free-range pig farmers.
Will we eat pork in the full knowledge that it isn’t from ‘happy pigs’?
Yes, we will.
We won’t eat a lot of it, but we’ll eat it. There are a few reasons why – more than simply ‘I really want to try that because it looks really delicious’, though I can’t pretend that’s not part of the decision-making process. There are a few key reasons why we will compromise our usual ethics, but the core one is conviviality. That is, while traveling, I don’t want to be ‘that person’ who makes everyone uncomfortable by listing all the things we don’t eat, or by turning down food that someone has offered us in their home with, ‘oh, we don’t eat factory-farmed pork’ every time. Such a response not only tells your host you don’t want what they’ve offered, it infers they have done the wrong thing in offering it to you. I would rather leave ethical food discussions to this blog and other writings, and to conversations that are not taking place in the presence of such food.
At home, standards are easy to maintain. We buy or grow the food and we cook it. When in someone else’s home, I don’t ask if the pork is free range if that’s what’s on the menu. In fairness, my friends all know how we are and are pretty unlikely to give us factory-farmed meat, but if they did, I’d eat it. The animal is already dead and cooked at this stage – in my opinion to refuse to eat it is wasteful and disrespectful of the life it gave as well as inhospitable towards one’s hosts.
Mind you, it’s not only when a host offers us something. There’s food on airlines, lack of choice in small country grocery stores and the usual road trip compromises. Or the myriad ‘hidden’ food ethical dilemmas, such as monoculture GM soy in the ingredients or factory-farmed eggs in some muffins at a diner. While our ethic enables us to avoid many such things, we would be miserable trying to completely avoid the horrors of industrial agriculture – sometimes the pleasure principle is achieved by not agonising so much and knowing you’ve done your best.
As I write these things I’m still sorting out the questions around hypocrisy and being complicit in an unethical food system. But the way I’m thinking about it is to understand ecosystems beyond their biological components – to include the social aspects as well.
If farming had not moved outside of ecosystems – as we all know industrial agriculture requires enormous external inputs and must find places beyond their boundaries to process their outputs – we wouldn’t have the severe negative environmental consequences we face today. But in addition to choosing food that comes from a healthy ecosystem, we should generally choose food that is still intricately linked to communities – that both sustains and is sustained by communities. When we conceive of an ethical approach to food this way, we must consider the human social interactions as well as those between humans and other animals or humans and the earth.
I guess rather than calling it ‘ecotarianism’ then, you might call it ‘ethotarianism’, because it’s about a consistent ethic of respect and pleasure. I’ve often said we should all be hedonists – in the tradition whereby one’s driving principle is to seek pleasure, both for oneself and for others, and taking one’s pleasure should not withdraw it from others, whether they are human, animal or vegetable.
But this complicates the question – the choices are in fact even more difficult than simply seeking ethically produced food – because sometimes the pleasure of various participants will be at odds. A clear example is when I’m offered a plate of pulled pork from unhappy pigs by a relative in the South – it’s too late to give that pig a happy life, but I can still be gracious to my host. Wherever possible, I avoid putting myself in such a position, but once in it, choices must be made, and mine will be to eat what I’m offered.
Less than three months ago, I wrote about our Notice to Vacate and how it galvanised us to action. Farmers we would be. Well guess what, dear readers? We found a farm!
It’s a beautiful 69 acres just west of Daylesford with an ordinary little 3-bedroom house on it. We’re putting all our worldly goods into a 40-foot high top shipping container, storing it on the property, and buggering off on RoadTripUSA ’til the end of August. Upon our return, we will convert the container into a parents’ retreat, with bedroom, study and our own bathroom for the first time since kids! Within a couple years we’d like to build a bigger Dream House.
ALL OF THIS IS SO EXCITING I’VE BEEN SHOUTING WITH DELIGHT ALL DAY ON THE TWITTERZ. 😀
We hope to get our first pigs soon after our return, and the first Pig Day (a la the wonderful de Bortolis) will be next winter. Don’t worry, you’ll hear about it. Other ideas include small herds of heritage cattle and sheep, plenty of chickens (we can have roosters finally!), ducks, turkeys… we’re investigating possible crops for small-scale commercial production such as garlic and horseradish as well. And of course we can’t wait to set up a serious permaculture system for our own delicious household growing.
For those wondering, have these months been stressful? UNEQUIVOCALLY YES. Not only has our future accommodation been uncertain since February, we’ve been trying to pull RoadTripUSA together in the midst of that uncertainty. I’m sure it’s just pure bloody-mindedness paired with eternal optimism that got us to where we are…
And let’s add to that list ongoing PhD work (and missed deadlines), a journal article in need of revision after the referees’ reports, CAPA work far more than two days a week (which is what I signed up for and fishbowl-optimist believed would happen) which has seen me interstate a number of times, the normal work involved in keeping a family of five on track plus Stuart’s regular demands of running and further developing Solarvox while still consulting for his old company two days a week… do you want me to stop now? I do. Stop.
In just over two weeks, we will fly away. That original starry-eyed plan where we buy a farm and settle when we get back, so we get to travel for three months rent and mortgage free has amazingly come true. It feels like we’ve done it by the skin of our teeth, but by golly we did it! Farmers we will be! 🙂
The National Sustainable Food Summit was put on in Melbourne 5/6 April by 3 Pillars Network – on their website they say they ‘will be the leading knowledge network for sustainable business in Australia.’
When I saw the event advertised, I knew immediately that I wanted to go. Unfortunately, my $1500 research funding allowance over the duration of candidature from my School at the University of Melbourne was exhausted last year, and I used up my one funding opportunity for an overseas conference and research on last year’s trip to Finland and Italy, so I had to come up with the registration fee myself, which was not insignificant at $655 (the student price) for two days. Given that no papers were printed (for sustainability reasons – not even the program), I honestly cannot imagine why it cost so much except that it must have been a tidy profit-making enterprise for 3 Pillars. The catering was mostly sustainable, ethical food – free range meats, organic milk and the like, but I still think the price was very high, and sadly meant a lot of people who would have had a lot to contribute (such as small, ethical producers?!) weren’t able to attend.
But on to the event! Because it was organised by a private organisation rather than government or higher education, I was unsure what to expect, and even more unsure what the outcomes would be. A Summit implies gathering the best minds to apply to a problem with a view to informing policy, regulation and community leadership. I’m not entirely clear how 3 Pillars intends to pursue the former two, but it’s obvious that they and many attendees are in fact community leaders, and that this event brought a diverse group together to talk about climate change, food security and a sustainable food future.
I’ll leave it to you to ask questions about the sponsors – I was just relieved neither of Australia’s grocery duopoly were on the list, and the diverse representation from across Australia’s food production, distribution, retail and consumption spectrum was important, in my view.
The key messages I took away were simple: we need good policy and regulation to support sustainable food production and recognise the important role farmers play as custodians of our natural resources, the free market has caused private interests to corrupt aspects of the food system for personal gain that is not in the public interest, and we need to dramatically increase the public’s knowledge and respect for food from paddock to plate.
I’ve quite simply typed up my notes as I took them throughout the Summit (I also tweeted a lot of this on the hashtag #SFS). They are not exhaustive, and I do hope I’ve recorded what I heard accurately. Any corrections would be welcome. The full presentations are up on the 3 Pillars Network Event Blog.
Professor Robin Batterham – ‘What does food security mean and why is it important to Australia?’
Dr Amanda Lee, Queensland Health
Robert Pekin, Food Connect
Jock Laurie, National Farmers Federation
Julian Cribb, author of The Coming Famine
Kirsten Larsen, Victorian Eco-Innovation Lab (VEIL)
‘Future Scenarios for Food? Victorian Food Supply Scenarios’
You really have to have a look at the full report to appreciate what an excellent bit of research this is from VEIL. I can’t do justice to the scenarios they propose here!
Michael McCallum, Global Foresight Network
Consumption break out session
‘Obesity and climate change are two huge market failures’ (UK)
Local food economies break out session
Dr John Williams, Wentworth Group of Concerned Scientists
Dr Tim Flannery, Chief Commissioner of the Climate Commission
Michael McCallum, Global Foresight Network
Richard Hames, Asian Foresight Institute
‘60% of the world’s investments at the moment go to weapons’
Waste break out session
Don’t just ask ‘how do we produce more?’ but also ‘how do we effectively redistribute food throughout the system?’
Michael Velders, ARUB
One person’s urine provides enough NPK to fertilise 400-500 square metres of agricultural land
Ideas
Michael Raupach, PMSEIC Expert Working Group on Energy-Water-Carbon (EWC)
PMSEIC – 2010 – ‘Challenges at Energy-Water-Carbon Intersections’
Brad, CSIRO
There’s a lot of information here, and many conversations to have about it all. I’ll pick up some of the threads in future posts. Thanks to 3 Pillars Network for putting on a very stimulating and informative Summit!
If you’re interested in Sustainable, Organic, Local, and Ethical (SOLE) food, you should check out Fight Back Fridays at Food Renegade. 🙂
IN FACT, YOU MIGHT LIKE TO BOYCOTT COLES AND WOOLWORTHS ENTIRELY, AS I HAVE FOR OVER TWO YEARS.
See Flavour Crusader’s developing list of dairies selling milk you might like to try instead. 🙂
I was honoured and delighted to be invited to present a paper on the 12th of March 2011 at the Food Traditions and Culinary Cultures Symposium, followed by a ‘Conversation Dinner’ :-). The event has been convened by the Australasian Food Studies Network as part of the Melbourne Food and Wine Network, and is being hosted by the William Angliss Institute.
There’s a great line up of speakers on a variety of topics around food traditions and culinary cultures, followed up with a dinner to carry on the conversation. I’ll be talking about the increased opportunities a cosmopolitan society offers in the development of a more socially and environmentally sustainable world.
It promises to be a great day, and I really hope to see some of you there!
This week in Finland has been a stimulating blur of presentations and conversations about food, punctuated daily with doses of pickled herring. The 18th International Ethnological Food Research Conference was hailed by all as a great success, bringing together international scholars from a variety of disciplines to consider the historical, cultural, sociological, nutritional, political and ethical issues around the production, preparation and consumption of food. As well as many excellent papers, the conference had a thoughtful social program of dinners and outings, offering us all more opportunities for meeting and developing new friendships and possible collaborations.
Some highlights from the papers, in chronological order as I heard them:
Christian Coff from the University College Sealand in Denmark gave an excellent presentation on ‘Food Ethics in Everyday Food Consumption’. Christian kindly gave me the copy he’d brought of his book ‘The Taste for Ethics: An Ethic of Food Consumption’, which I’ll write about here on the blog after I read it. Some of his most interesting points included:
There were many other papers worthy of discussion, but I couldn’t go to all of them (we had three parallel sessions each time) and I have here highlighted those I went to that were of most relevance to my own project and interests. The days were incredibly fruitful, the participants wonderfully diverse in discipline, nationality and in fact, age (ranging from late 20s to 93 years old!), leading to many surprising and fascinating discussions. I really hope to be able to attend the 19th IEFRC in 2012 at Lund University, and then to convince them to let the conference move outside of Scandinavia to attract even more scholars from other regions. 
And now for something completely different.
I am delighted to be hosting my first guest post, by Keith Weeks (a pseudonym), a mechanical engineer with 5 years experience in renewable energy projects and dealing with Government. It arose from a conversation we had where I admitted I was unclear about the many recent changes in government policy around renewables. S/he volunteered to write something up for all our benefit, so here it is:
It seems to me renewables are in the news less of late. Most likely because the brinksmanship from either side has diminished now that the incompetent Rudd Government decided to shelve that dog of a policy until 2013.
Every now and then though, an article trickles in, discussing some arcane attribute of policy or some minor breakthrough on a small project. Here’s a good example from The Age.
It’s worth a read, if for no other reason than to see how badly the media handle technical topics.
For starters, there’s the old furphy that these minutiae of policy wrangling are bringing in the bulldozers and causing solar panel manufacturers to open and close. What is closer to the truth is that any company that has a hope of playing seriously in the renewables sector has all their potential projects mapped out, probably to Design Phase. Further, they know the economic settings that are required to make them work: costs of electricity, value of RECs (renewable energy certificates), subsidies on infrastructure. But coupled with that is the level of certainty that exists in any one of those variables.
At the moment, that certainty is very, very low.
In lieu of a proper Emissions Trading Scheme, the Renewable Energy Targets (there’s been some name changes recently. Most people know it as the Mandatory Renewable Energy Target) is the best policy in place for doing something about stationary electricity generation emissions. As distinct from transport emissions.
The RET sets a benchmark for energy retailers on the proportion of their electricity sold each year. It’s a straight line from about 10% in 2010, to 20% by 2020. This guarantees that 20% of all electricity sold and generated in Australia will come from renewable sources. This effectively means a cross subsidy to industry (by forcing retailers to buy green power) of about $20 billion over the life of the program.
This does not, however, guarantee in any way that our emissions will decrease. As an extreme example, if renewable penetration goes up to 20%, and energy use goes up by 20%, we have zero emissions reduction.
So as a means of supporting industry the RET is probably effective, but in some very specific ways.
Coming back to the certainty aspect, the details of the RET have been fiddled frequently of late. In June last year, the Rudd Government pulled the pin on their $8k subsidy of domestic solar (good idea) and replaced it with an exaggerated REC value for domestic solar instead.
There are good and bad aspects of this. The old $8k subsidy was pretty lazy and coarse. Everyone, everywhere, got the same money to put solar panels on their roof. An installation in Innamincka (the desert) got the same subsidy as someone in southern Tassie. Further, this type of subsidy is regularly shown to be the most expensive way to fund renewables available. There are no economies of scale, and none of the engineering benefits of making bigger parts; big inverters and transformers are more efficient than small ones. But, there are some difficult to quantify benefits of getting panels on roofs; mostly associated with the education aspect, making environmental issues more obvious and the ability to focus home owners’ minds on energy efficiency. Gross Feed In Tarrifs negate a lot of this benefit, but that’s an economics rant for another day.
The new scheme gives residential generators five times as many Renewable Energy Certificates as they are truly entitled to (NB I’ll do a separate post on the mechanics of RECs if anyone wants it). There is a nub of a good idea in here, in that this encourages home owners in good generating areas slightly more than people in bad generating areas. This adds a little efficiency to the Government spending.
However, in this case, it meant the market was flooded with certificates and the value crashed pretty significantly. Lots of people jumped up and down complaining about this and, probably correctly, the Government has intervened, passing new legislation that separates out the domestic generated credits. What this means is that now the actual amount of renewable energy generation in 2020 will be 20%, plus whatever domestic generation comes on line between now and then.
The myth comes from the influence of RECs on whether a project gets the red light or the green light. Because there is uncertainty in the REC value, making an investment decision purely on this basis would be very foolish. It comes back to the certainty argument.
This has a few flow on effects on the renewables market in general. Firstly it means that only projects with very high economic certainty will get a run. At the moment though, the only technology that can claim economic certainty is wind. This is due in part to the massive research and roll-out effort that has been occurring in Europe for about the last 15 years.
The question then becomes, how can Government encourage investment certainty?
By changing the economy.
I haven’t met anyone in the renewables field yet who doesn’t think we need a price on carbon. Pricing carbon (either through a trading scheme or a straight tax on carbon, I’m agnostic as to which is better) provides the certainty to encourage long term investment in renewables.
Make no mistake; it’s a big change to introduce to an economy. But I’ve known for 15 years that the change was coming, so any big company who didn’t build this risk into their future estimates deserves to suffer.
Legislation provides the trickle down certainty that is required for innovation. Certainty encourages investment by big players. Money will flow into universities and research institutions. Investment arms of well resourced engineering companies will swing into action and start crunching numbers, finding the most effective, but poorly demonstrated technologies. More cash will flow in from green venture capitalists, further accelerating the development.
But underpinning it all, is certainty.
Coming back to the article then; the changes to the RET were necessary, but were also fixing something that was broken by Labor. But are the changes going to make any significant difference to the renewable energy sector? Very unlikely, for all the reasons listed above.
Remember this though. If everyone voluntarily bought Greenpower, we wouldn’t even be talking about it.
Tammi here again: just thought this was a perfect opportunity to throw in a shameless plug for my dear husband Stuart’s solar hot water business – he’s focused on the DIY market, and he’s affordable. So if you’re in the market for solar hot water, look no further than Solarvox. 😉
I spent the second half of my childhood living on a 2000 acre cattle ranch in Oregon. Before that, we were city slickers in Orange County, California (before anyone called it ‘the OC’). In spite of this idyllic existence where my cowgirl dreams came true, I didn’t learn much of the ways of the land, so to speak. We had a ranch-hand in charge of the cattle, and although my parents were deeply involved, we kids largely just went along for the lark of a good round-up. I was good on a horse and knew a lot about their care, as well as the castrating and vaccination routines of pasture-fed cattle, but I couldn’t have told you a thing about growing fruit or vegetables, and chickens were a total mystery.
Three years after high school, I found myself on the cliffs of Wales, walking with a lover I met in a hostel in London after dropping out of university while protesting the 1991 Gulf War. I’m vegetarian. We’re discussing our life’s dreams in that starry-eyed youthful way, and I pronounce my intention to own a property in Colorado someday, near enough to Boulder that there will be a like-minded community of hippies and dreamers, but far enough out to buy a farm big enough to do some serious growing. My lover says, ‘no way. I totally can’t picture you on a farm.’ (He also shortly thereafter informed me he had recently left the Australian Army Reserves. It is one of the true mysteries of this story that we are still together 19 years later…)
Some six years later, my lover/husband and I visited Daylesford for the first time. As always when we spend time in the country, we were enchanted and immediately commence dplans to move there. We signed the Convent Gallery’s guestbook with, ‘we’ll be back… to live next time.’
Since we met, Stuart and I have spent a total of two years actually living in the country, one in a small town in Oregon, where for most of the year we lived in a gorgeous little log cabin under a magnificent cherry tree, the other on a remote property in far east Gippsland, Victoria, which is an environmental education campus for Year 9 girls. The latter year was a pastoral dream, a poetic success, and professionally challenging. We swore again that we would live in the country on our own property one day…
But in all these pastoral dreams, I never really entertained the notion of actually being a farmer, in the sense of a producer for a market to make a living. Mine has always been a hippie’s halcyon daydream of self-sufficiency. Which, unsurprisingly, is probably why we haven’t yet made it happen. Exactly how do we earn a living on our own little unplugged piece of the planet? Even around Daylesford, there’s not a lot of work for an academic and a business development manager in building automation technologies.
But everything changed when we heard Joel Salatin of Polyface Farms last weekend. In case you haven’t heard of Joel, he describes himself as an environmentalist, capitalist, lunatic farmer. He is one of the most intelligent, charismatic speakers to whom I have had the pleasure to listen, and he did a great job of busting my every stereotype of ‘dumb farmers’. He even has a philosophy about that…
We went to the Lakehouse to hear Joel talk about building a local food system, and how to scale up ‘without losing your soul’. I was interested in the way I always am – how can we feed the world through smaller, more local production where farmers are embedded in communities? You know, the usual, ‘how do we save the world’ sort of questions that are my trademark. I came away convinced that the best way for Stuart and I to help save the world was not simply by ‘living the changes we wish to see in the world’ but by flogging them and making a living from them as well. Yes, I’m convinced that we can and should be primary producers. I give us about five years to get through a start-up period. How did Joel convert me?
Here are the highlights of Joel’s double-feature seminar, in note form with minimal editorialising.
First of all, a local food system has six components:
Producers
Processing
Accounting
Marketing
Distribution
Patrons
In the second seminar on scaling up, Joel went into more detail about Polyface Farm. Here’s what we learned…
Two other quick, interesting, important points:
And I quote,
“GMO is evil.â€
Patenting seeds and suing small growers, including traditional native American communities, when patented DNA is found in their seed stock is EVIL. Indeed.
Organic certification is insufficient as it is a pass/fail system. Those who would get a D- are alongside those who would earn an A+ – it’s a perverse incentive to work to the lowest common denominator. For example, one farm might produce all of its own organic compost – all of its outputs become inputs for the farm – no organic waste leaves the property. Another might bring in organic fish emulsion from the east coast, which has been sourced as a byproduct of Japanese driftnets and has a carbon footprint bigger than importing petrochemical fertilisers from Australia (this is to the US, of course).
According to Joel, if you ask whether something is organic, and the producer or seller says, ‘yes’, the conversation is over and you buy it. There are many things that might be environmentally or ethically suspect about the produce, but they are masked by the organic certification. When he’s asked why he doesn’t certify, there is a conversation, everybody learns more, and the word is spread further. 🙂
As I listened to Joel, it increasingly dawned on me that many arguments against running a small farm were being systematically debunked. He is a passionate advocate for farming in a way that is socially, environmentally and fiscally sustainable. He speaks my language. He writes fascinating books detailing what we only heard a few hours of. And he’s on the lecture circuit proselytising about all of it. Zomigod, I can do that.