Photo by Lisa M. Hamilton

As I type, the Waxman-Markey energy bill is being batted around on the floor of the House. In the world of sustainable food systems, the big gripe is that big ag seems to have more or less wriggled its way out of being held accountable for its significant GHG emissions. Tom Philpott at Grist has been covering the issue well, and no matter what happens with the bill, the conversation about ag’s emissions should continue.

Cattle at JT Ranch, Newkirk, NM (Lisa M. Hamilton)

Last fall, the head of the U.N.’s International Panel on Climate Change, Dr. Rakendra Pachauri, offered a simple directive for combating global warming: eat less meat. Critics might point out that he is a vegetarian, but the numbers back up his idea. A 2006 UN report found that 18 percent of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions come from raising livestock for food. Overall, Pachauri’s advice is good, though I would add a corollary: At the same time that we begin eating less meat, we should be eating more of it.

Matthew Moore, “Rotations: Single Family Residence #5” (2003–2004)

As the national conversation about food grows, new voices are adding great dimension and depth to the discussion. One to watch is Matthew Moore, a fourth-generation farmer and installation artist who has joined his two careers into one.

Courtesy of the Land Institute

Over the past six months, farmers in the Midwest and Plains states have been contending with one weather disaster after another: floods, drought, freeze—you name it. I’ve written that we’d be wise to diversify our grain growing in order to create a resilience that can stand up to these extremes, especially given that continued climate change will likely bring more of them. Along these lines, farmer-researchers at The Land Institute, in Salina, Kansas, are working on a revolutionary solution: perennial grains.

Farmers Conservation Alliance. (Photo by Aaron Hewitt)

One of the great battles in 21st-century environmental politics is between farmers who draw from rivers for irrigation and the fish who live in those rivers—or rather, the people who care about keeping those fish. So on a recent trip to Oregon, I was surprised to come across a glimmer of hope—peace, even—in an ingenious invention with a humble name: the farmers screen. A system for diverting water out of a river that allows fish to pass through unscathed, the screen is based on such simple, common sense it’s a wonder nobody thought of it sooner.

Swans over the Massa family farm. (Courtesy of Greg Massa.)

The other night I met up with my friend Greg Massa, a fourth-generation rice farmer in California. He’s a maverick in the rice world for many reasons, not the least of which is that a few years ago he decided to stop pouring his product into the anonymous commodity market and began selling it instead at farmers markets, one pound at a time. (To enable this, he had to ask the mill to keep his rice separate from the rest it was processing. This meant that for the first time, Greg was able to eat his own rice—something none of his neighbor-farmers had ever done. It was, to his surprise and delight, delicious.)

Courtesy of Lisa M Hamilton

In Deeply Rooted, I wrote about a group of organic farmers in North Dakota who were doing the remarkable work of breeding wheat on their farms—something all but unheard of since the dawn of modern plant breeding. It came about because they needed a variety that would work without herbicides, fertilizers or pesticides, but the state university showed little interest in helping them—its focus was on conventional growers. So the farmers did what farmers do when they need something done: they did it themselves.

In April, their story took on new relevance, as a coalition of wheat trade associations in the US, Canada and Australia rolled out a renewed campaign to develop and release GMO wheat.

I’m pleased to be guest-blogging in conjunction with the release of my new book, Deeply Rooted: Unconventional Farmers in the Age of Agribusiness. The book tells three stories, of an African-American dairy farmer in East Texas, a tenth-generation rancher in New Mexico, and a sort of modern pioneer family in North Dakota. In their own ways, they are all “unconventional,” meaning they defy the tyrannical system of conventional agriculture. What they are doing is nothing less than redefining what it means to be an American farmer.