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December 3, 2010
Farmer is an organic trailblazer
Michael Ableman advocates for smaller farms from his home base on Salt Spring Island.
OLGA LIVSHIN
“Salt Spring Island chose us,” said Michael Ableman, describing how his family ended up at their 120-acre Foxglove Farm on the largest of British Columbia’s southern Gulf islands. A charming refuge for many B.C. artists and artisans, the island is a fitting milieu for Ableman, an artist in his own way – an artist of the land.
Recognized in North America as a proponent of regional farming, he is one of the trailblazers of organic agriculture. “Our focus is more than organic, it’s beyond organic,” he said in a telephone interview with the Independent, describing his vision of what food produce should be like. “To refrain from chemical pesticides is not enough. We have to think about soil condition and biodiversity, address the issues of water, energy, nutrition and health.”
Ableman has been practising what he preaches for years. One of the main principles of his agrarian model is the small family farm, close to the community it feeds. “Small farms are 15 to 20 times more productive than their large-scale counterparts,” he explained. “They can yield a greater variety of produce and are closer to the consumer. At the moment, food travels an average of 1,300 miles from field to plate. Smaller regional farms, catering to local population, can reduce the cost and energy of transportation.”
Another benefit of a small, versatile farm, he said, is a greater biodiversity, which results in soil health. “It satisfies the needs of the land as well as those of a marketplace…. A farm shouldn’t be a food factory. It is a living organism.”
Ableman’s Foxglove Farm is just such an organism, constantly changing and developing. The farm uses very little material input of fertilizers or energy but lots of input of thoughts and ideas, which is another of Ableman’s guiding principles. Even his small tractor works partly on spent frying oil from local restaurants, further advancing his frugal, heavy-on-recycling approach. Water conservation is also taken seriously.
“Drip tapes and hoses, precise planting depths and timely cultivation, ancient dry-farming techniques and increased crop variety all allow us to grow food with much less water,” he said. “If you want to grow good tomatoes, don’t water them. It not only conserves water, it concentrates the flavor.”
His farm is an almost self-sustained entity, offering his community not only an amazing variety of fruits, vegetables, legumes and grains, some of which, like figs, are traditionally cultivated in a much warmer climate, but also popular classes on agriculture and art retreats. The details are on the Foxglove Farm website, foxglovefarmbc.ca.
Ableman’s ties to the local community also led him to adapt a European system of Community Support Agriculture (CSA), a debit-style program where customers “buy shares” and pay for a certain amount of produce before the season starts, thus supporting the farm upfront. During the season, customers pick up whatever they choose at the twice-weekly public market on Salt Spring Island, and the price is deducted from their pre-paid amount. In its first season at the farm, the system proved to be very successful.
Several local restaurants on the island and in the Lower Mainland benefit from the farm’s harvest. With such a net of distribution, the cost of transportation is cut to a minimum and the food reaches customers fresh, eliminating the cost and energy needed for prolonged storage. Furthermore, a middleman, the linchpin of industrial agriculture, is removed from the system completely. “Only farmers should get paid,” Ableman asserted. “They are the ones who produce the food and sell it.”
Currently, only 1.5 percent of North America’s population grows food. In Ableman’s opinion, the industrialization of agriculture, which started after the Second World War, has resulted “in reduced quality and safety of food, degradation and depletion of soil and water, and a whole range of cultural and social ills tied to our disconnection from the land and from nature.
I’m not suggesting that before the industrialization our food system was wonderful, but it wasn’t all drudgery, either.”
For the last two decades, Ableman’s life has been dedicated to elevating the farmer’s job to new heights in prestige and pay. “If we paid our farmers what we do our lawyers and doctors, perhaps we wouldn’t need the latter so much…. What many of us are now doing on small organic farms is incorporating innovative techniques and rediscovering ancient ideas. Farming is not a lowly job. It’s an honorable profession, an art, a craft.”
Proud of being a farmer, Ableman enthused, “Each time I plant a seed and watch it emerge, I can’t help but feel renewed. That’s why I farm.” He wants to instil such a sense of pride and ownership in the next generation of farmers, who, he hopes, will be considered artisans rather than drudges.
The shift to the new model that is happening right now across the world must contend with the decrease of oil and water resources, and a return to simplicity seems to be crucial. “The agricultural corporate industry is dying a natural death,” Ableman said. “I believe in a couple of decades, my kind of philosophy will be predominant. We’re not a fringe movement anymore.”
He thinks that the organic-farming revolution is not only about nutritional safety or ecological concerns. “It’s also about what people are missing in their lives: good food and a connection to the land…. Small farms allow us to reconnect with the land, both spiritually and physically.”
Ableman was initiated into agriculture when he was a young boy, visiting his grandfather in rural Delaware, although the Ableman family tradition of farming runs even further into the past, to his great-grandfather, Abel, who emigrated from Russia to America in the 1870s. Ableman writes about it in his book Fields of Plenty (2005): “Jews in Russia were not allowed to own land … and Abel cherished his newfound freedom to take title as one of the greatest treasures of his adopted America.”
Like his great-grandfather, Ableman regards the land he works as his greatest treasure. Although he left home at 16, eager like many teenagers to establish his own identity, subconsciously he was drawn back to the land. At 18, he joined an agrarian commune, which grew apples and peaches. In 1981, he took a job at Fairview Gardens, a small fruit farm in California. He stayed there for more than 20 years, starting as a laborer and ending up as an executive director of the Centre for Urban Agriculture.
He never went to any agricultural school. According to Ableman, all he knows, he has learned by trial and error and by watching other farmers. “School is not for everyone. Some, like me, learn better by doing. Besides, you can’t learn everything in class. You have to touch the soil, to smell the fruits, to become intimate with the land.”
Fascinated by the ancient techniques of agriculture, he traveled the world for several winters in the 1980s, exploring traditional farming communities in China, Africa, Europe and South America. His notes and photographs became the basis for his first book, From the Good Earth (1993).
Under Ableman’s leadership, Fairview Gardens became an intense showcase of urban farming, an educational facility for a new generation of farmers. At some point, real-estate development would have gobbled the farm completely if, in 1994, Ableman hadn’t launched a campaign across the United States to save it. He formed a nonprofit organization and within a year had raised a million dollars to buy the farm from its owners. He documented the story of Fairview Gardens in his second book, On Good Land (1998).
After two decades at Fairview Gardens, Ableman decided to seek new horizons in Canada: “We liked Canadian culture, liked the sense of tolerance. There is less aggressiveness here.” He bought a farm on Salt Spring Island.
In the summer of 2003, he took a trip across the continent, from Salt Spring Island to the Atlantic coast and back, to meet the new wave of farmers. Fields of Plenty is a lyrical account of that journey; from orchards in California to a tomato plantation on a rooftop in New York, the book is an ode to farming and food. It contains numerous photographs and a score of recipes.
By his own admission, Ableman is a connoisseur of good food and of eating right. “There is an epidemic of obesity and diabetes in America,” he said. “The wrong diet of inferior, processed food is to blame.”
Ableman wants to feed lots of people with good food, coaxed from the earth by farmers; he wants children to know the sweet taste of fresh strawberries. “The strawberries from industrial, fumigated fields taste like cardboard,” he said.
Realizing that education is the key, he is tireless in spreading the word. Well-known in North America and Europe for his lectures and seminars, he travels a lot during the winter months, writes articles and books when he can and has published photographs in magazines, in addition to the classes he teaches when he’s home. Free of the strain of industrial, mono-cultured exploitation, it’s the beauty and plenty of the land that feeds his energy.
“I wouldn’t be satisfied just farming full time,” he concluded. “Communicating my ideas is important to me. I can’t put myself in a box of one activity. They all come from the same roots.”
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She is available for contract work. Contact her at [email protected].
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