Loose Leaf Notes

 – The following first appeared in The Floyd Press on November 19, 2015. 

An Evening with Patrick Holden – a farmer and global voice on sustainable food practices – drew a large crowd at the Floyd EcoVillage last Tuesday night, November 10th. The free event included a beans and rice community dinner, homemade desserts and a cash bar that was provided as a fundraiser for the event host, SustainFloyd.

Following the meal and time for socializing, SustainFloyd member Jane Cundiff spoke from the main hall podium. She reviewed some of SustainFloyd’s successes and programs – including the Farmers Market, the Farm to School Program, a solar powered mobile power station, a Solar House Tour, the Tiny House Tour, and the Floyd Film Series at the Country Store – before inviting Woody Crenshaw to the stage.  Crenshaw, a (2008) founding member of SustainFloyd, introduced guest speaker Patrick Holden, who was coming from a speaking tour that began in Los Angeles.  He spoke in Baltimore at the John Hopkins Center for Livable Future the night before his Floyd speaking engagement.

“Patrick still goes back to his farm in Wales and milks his cows and makes cheese when he’s not traveling around the globe” Crenshaw said in his introduction.  He explained that Holden was part of an organization that wrote the first set of organic farming standards in the U.K. in the early ‘80s.  Holden was the long time director of the Soil Association, a conservation and environmental protection agency of which Prince Charles was a supporter of.  Currently, Holden is the 2010 founding director of the Sustainable Food Trust, a global organization working to accelerate sustainable food systems.

In conversation style with Crenshaw, Holden spoke about the goals of the Sustainable Food Trust to influence people in leadership roles, encourage collaboration and educate consumers.  He stressed how important it is for practicing farmers to be involved in the work because the tendency is that people in leadership positions are not grounded in agriculture.  He still farms part-time when he’s not traveling because “it revives me and anchors me in my subject. I really feel that anything I have to say that has any weight is probably derived from actual practice working on the land,” he said.

One of the biggest challenges of Holden’s work is that the pricing system for farming and food is distorted in such a way that industrial farming appears to make better business sense than sustainable localized farming. But the cost of damage to soil, water and public health from the regular use of nitrogen fertilizers and spraying GMO crops with Round-up are not figured in.  Cheap, highly processed foods have been linked with increased risks of obesity, diabetes, cancer and other diseases, another hidden cost factor.

“If Industrial Farming is sickening the population and causing an epidemic of disease, the people pick up the price tag for that with the insurance companies in the middle,” Holden said. Acknowledging that the work ahead is political and complicated, he remarked that it will take creativity to insure that the food pricing system reflects its true cost, which would give small farmers an opportunity to make a descent living wage.   Health care insurance companies could offer lower insurance costs to people who buy more local sustainable food, farm bill support could be redirected, polluters could be held financially responsible and herbicides could be taxed, Holden suggested.

Speaking about the upcoming 2015 Climate Change Conference in Paris, where Holden will be, he said, “If you want to reduce CO2 emissions, agriculture and food production is the single area where you can take action.  Food production is responsible for about 30% of total emissions.  It’s not an orthodox idea yet, but, if you want to reverse greenhouse gas accumulation we need to change the way we farm.” Holden also stated that the re-localization and shift to truly sustainable food systems has the decisive advantage that there is no alternative, “because if we carry on the way were are, we’re going over the cliff edge.”

Holden spoke with enthusiasm about the new generation of millennials – people reaching adulthood around the year 2000 – who are bringing new and creative ideas to the table.  Applause broke out when he reported that big food companies are losing market share now. He spoke of a recent conversation with a chief executive of one of the largest food companies in America who said ‘the millennials are no longer buying our food because they don’t trust our brand values. Unless we change what we do, we’re going to continue to lose market share.’

Holden expressed his hope of seeing everyone on the same ladder, working towards more sustainable practices that don’t pit farmers against farmers.  He also supports the development of new sustainable metrics scoring system standards that take into account fair price, as well as the ethical and social dimension of food production.

“I don’t have any magic bullets, but you’re absolutely asking the right questions,” he told an audience member at the close of the evening. – Colleen Redman

Photos: 1. Woody Crenshaw (left) and Patrick Holden.    2. A group from Grayson Land Care checks out the SustainFloyd table.  The Land Care group is like a Grayson County’s version of SustainFloyd one of the members said.  3. The EcoVillage’s Conversation Café was full of event attendees. Pictured are Ann Shrader, Carter Holliday, Barbara Spillman and Virginia Klara. 4. Jane Cundiff addresses the full house crowd.

5. Plenty! farm/food bank interns (left and far right) are ready to hear Holden speak.  Haley Leopold (center) is an education major at James Madison University.  She teaches a weekly class on Conscious Consumerism at the Springhouse Community High School and was in town for that. 6. Students of Cundiff’s Environmental Biology class at Radford University pause to pose for a picture. 7. Deb Tome asks Holden a question about fair trade during a question and answer period 8. SustainFloyd’s Mike Burton questions Holden about issues of farming in rural communities.

____________Our World Tuesday