First, download the worksheet [1] to understand and complete the assessment. This assignment will require you to draw on your reading of this online text from module one, as well as several options for case studies where we have provided brief descriptions and audiovisual resources (radio clips, videos, photos) that describe these systems. You will accomplish two parts of an assignment that will not only evaluate the learning objectives for module one but will also give you practice in skills you will need to complete your capstone project. These two parts are:
You will complete this assignment for your choice of two food system examples, as described in the detailed instructions below. You will first read, then draw a concept map, and then fill in a table with short responses.
Pennsylvania is the fourth largest state in the nation for milk production, after California, Wisconsin, and New York. Cows produce about 1.3 billion gallons of milk every year in Pennsylvania. Interestingly, 99% of Pennsylvania’s dairy farms are family-owned, which is in contrast to states such as California where large industrial dairies dominate production. On most conventional Pennsylvania dairy farms cows are fed forage crops that are grown on farms such as fermented chopped maize plants (silage) and alfalfa. These on-farm forages are mixed with other feed components that are imported to the farm to optimize milk production. There is also an expanding organic dairy sector in Pennsylvania that uses grazing whenever possible to satisfy the U.S. National Organic Program's regulations and organic philosophies of animal management (e.g. Fig. 1.2.8). Pennsylvania’s relatively good soils, temperate climate, and proximity to Eastern U.S. markets have helped to make dairy farms a dominant presence in Pennsylvania agriculture. Farms generally are on flat to hilly topography in what was originally forest, and patches of forest are still very common on steeper terrain throughout Pennsylvania. Manure produced by dairy cows is recycled into the soil to provide crops with nutrients. Farmers have to manage the application of manure and other fertilizers so that nutrients are best used by the crop and do not pollute waterways, which has been a major issue for water quality in the Chesapeake Bay downstream of Pennsylvania farms. Milk produced on these dairy farms is gathered into central processing plants and is then distributed to stores for purchase for consumers, or bought by other dairy industry manufacturers such as yogurt and cheese plants.
Be sure to also explore the following website to gain more insight on Pennsylvania’s dairy sector as part of the food system in order to successfully build your concept map and fill in the table items in the assignment:
Beef production on Colorado’s high plains. Few topics arouse as much debate in conversations around the current trends, sustainability, and alternatives in food systems as meat consumption, and especially feedlot beef consumption which requires relatively large amounts of water and energy to grow the feed necessary for cattle production using feedlots. This remarkable if somewhat older video presents in a matter-of-fact way the practices, infrastructure, and modification of nature involved in beef production at small and very large scales on the high plains of Colorado (Warning: this video shows brief scenes from a slaughterhouse, e.g. cutting of carcasses). Watch for details about the use of water in a dryland environment, how feed is acquired in both systems to fatten animals, the use of technology to maximize the weight gain of animals, and the details of transport to market.
Auctioneer voice.
Narrator: An auction in Greeley, a small town north of Denver, and the cattle raising center of Colorado.
Auctioneer voice.
Narrator: The calves have been bred in the pastures of the surrounding ranches. Now they come to be fattened up in the feedlots. This is Jim Park, the owner of a small family farm near Greeley, who raises cattle. And Carl Montega, a buyer for Monfort, the biggest meat producer in the area. Monfort of Colorado, a beef producing company with its own feedlots, slaughterhouses, and car parks. 85,000 animals can be fattened at the same time, 200,000 per year in this feedlot alone. And Monfort operates another two facilities of the same size in this region. Located on a high plateau, the climate on the plains is ideal for the animals. It is dry in summer and cold and dry in winter. This makes the cattle resistant to germs and infection. Monfort buys calves from all over the United States and sends them to Greeley to be fattened. They will be fed here for about 110 days until they have reached a suitable weight for slaughter. The new arrivals are sorted by age and size and then vaccinated. They are given a sedative against the stress of this new unfamiliar environment. Each animal is given a computer number and a hormone capsule is implanted. The hormones cause the animals to gain weight more quickly. Then an antiseptic bath to kill off bacteria. Cattle owners fear nothing more than an outbreak of infection in feedlots. Nevertheless, 1% of the livestock, that's about 2,000 cattle a year, will die from dust and stress before they reach the slaughterhouse. Jim Park’s family farm is only about a five-minute drive from Montfort. Jim Park owns about 250 acres of irrigated land; on which he grows fodder for his beef stock. He fattens 1,100 animals per year in a feedlot. Only two men run the farm, Jim himself and another farmhand. The business is fully mechanized with its own feed mill and all necessary equipment. Jim Park sells his cattle to the highest bidder among the US meat producers, including Monfort of Colorado.
Jim Park: Oh, we've been in the business of feeding cattle probably about 20 years. Before that, we used to milk cows here. The old red barn behind us here, that's where we used to milk cows. But we've kind of got out of that business and basically just feedlot, feeding cattle right now. We raise most of our own alfalfa and corn, silage (the roughage part of it). I do have to buy some shelled corn, but the biggest majority of the feed we raise right here on the place and feed it to the cattle. I don't sell any corn or alfalfa off the place it all goes through the cattle.
Male voice (not visible): When Monfort is big business and is so close to you, is a family farm able to survive?
Jim Park: Well I think so. Big, of course, is maybe more efficient. But I think I think one of the disadvantages of being so big is everything is hired labor. At least here I own the cattle myself and I do have one man that's here year-round that works with me. And we just take more of a caring role, I think. If you're working for a big company, a lot of times you maybe don't care so much whether one sick or whether they're eating the way they should be or things like this. So I think we can probably compete just about as well.
Male voice (not visible): How did this farm start here?
Jim Park: Well my great granddad, fella by the name of Frederick Niemeyer, and Fritz was kind of his nickname. Fritz came to this country in the mid-1800s and he came from Germany over here to the United States and he homesteaded this place. It's been in the family since about 1888, so we've been here a little over 100 years.
Narrator: Like Fritz Niemeyer, many Germans settled in Colorado at that time. The land was well suited for growing sugar beets, something they were very good at. But the water shortage in Colorado meant hardship for the farmers. The drought of 1927-35, worse than any before, turned fertile land into desert. The farms were buried by sandstorms. The land could no longer feed the people and most of the farmers had to leave their homes. In 1935 the Colorado government started work on a gigantic irrigation project. The Rocky Mountains formal watershed, the farms and arable land on the Great Plains, seventy miles to the east, are only sparingly supplied with meltwater from the mountains. This is because most of the snow falls on the western side of the Rockies. Large water reservoirs were built west of the mountain range. From there a tunnel was drilled straight through the mountain and a pipeline was laid. When the rivers begin to dry up in summer, the stored water is pumped from west to east. It flows through pipelines down the slopes of the Rocky Mountains to the plains below, and can also be used to generate hydroelectric power. The water then flows through two canal systems north into the Cache la Poudre and south into the South Platte River. Many ditches carry it from the river to the fields and farms. In addition to wheat, corn, and alfalfa, corn for silage has become the main crop in Colorado. Under contract from Montfort, many farmers plant crops which are then harvested by Monfort using its own equipment and workforce. The corn is chopped right in the fields to form silage. It is then stored in silos in Monfort’s feedlot. Montfort buys corn wherever the price is right. In the feed mill, the grain is heated and ground in flakers, to form corn flakes. The fodder is mixed by compute. Cornflakes, silage, proteins, and vitamins are blended together for each group of cattle according to their age and weight. They are fed twice a day. The fodder is heated so that the animals waste no energy bringing it to body temperature. The aim - a weight gain of three pounds per day.
Woman’s voice (operator): Please feed pen 134 for 15 head, 604 for 20 head, and 542 for 1 head.
Narrator: Twenty farms are connected to this irrigation canal. The next-to-the-last is Jim's. A co-op, formed by the farmers, manages and supervises the just distribution of water. When water is short, some farmers even lock their gates to prevent water from being stolen. Some water rights date back to the previous century. These oldest rights are also the most valuable because they are the last to have their water restricted.
Male voice (not visible): What would your land be worth without the water right?
Jim Park: Oh a couple hundred dollars an acre and with the water probably two thousand. So it's about a tenfold increase by having the water and being able to raise the crops. Fifteen minutes away from the feedlot, on the outskirts of Greeley, lies Montfort’s slaughterhouse. 5,000 animals are killed here per day in two shifts. The Monfort slaughterhouse in Greeley is considered one of the most modern in the world. And Monfort operates five other slaughterhouses in the US, and itself is only a small part of the gigantic food corporation, Conagra. After being refrigerated for 24 hours the carcasses are halved and sorted according to cut. Except for the tip of the tail, every part of the animal is put to good use. 2,500 people work here. A major part of the meat is processed into ground beef and prepared as hamburgers right here in the slaughterhouse, for a large restaurant chain. Premium meat is then put in boxes for delivery. Boxed beef is a Monfort specialty. There are no butchers needed in supermarkets. In addition, the freezer trucks can carry four times as much box meat as carcasses. Montfort has thus become one of the three market leaders and supplies the entire United States, in particular, the big cities along the East Coast. It used to make no difference how large cattle grew to be. Nowadays, however, a uniform size is essential for modern meatpacking plants because, otherwise, the cattle won't fit into the box.
Starting from modest beginnings and export of asparagus from Peru to Denmark in the 1950s, the industrial-scale asparagus sector in Peru’s dry coastal valleys (especially around the city of Ica, Peru) grew rapidly in the 1990s into one of the premier examples of a globalized export vegetable sector (Fig. 1.2.9), able to occupy a large percentage of the world’s off-season market in asparagus when producers in the northern hemisphere are not producing asparagus (FAO 2007). The asparagus sector in Peru takes advantage of the extremely dry climate to make asparagus plants go dormant in the same way that winters in the northern hemisphere make the perennial asparagus plants die back so that they create new edible shoots in the spring. When a field of Peruvian asparagus is ready to go into production, irrigation from rivers and river-fed water tables in coastal valleys is turned on, and a flush of asparagus shoots grows, is harvested using labor that is relatively cheap on a global scale, and immediately flown in refrigerated containers to markets in the rest of the world, chiefly Europe. Asparagus is also notable for being a delicacy among U.S. and European consumers, with a sort of star status among gourmet eaters (see e.g. Peruvian Asparagus [3]) Industrial-scale asparagus producers in Peru were able to achieve this scale of production and access to the global market via support from the Peruvian government, the help of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID), and their own resources and investment, based on earlier successes in the production of cotton in irrigated valleys (FAO, 2007). Interestingly, Ica asparagus growers organized several international tours to learn industrial methods of production in Europe and the U.S. and adapt them to their own region. However, the large scale of production and amounts of water needed are straining water supplies in the Ica region and have prompted objections regarding water supplies for other uses and the environment. Further, expansion of irrigation in Ica has been based on dam-building in upriver sites which alters ecosystems and water rights for other farmers in these valleys. The abundant supply of migrant labor from the Peruvian highlands and the economic power of the growers has also led to labor relations that are often quite unfavorable to workers.
Before drawing your concept map and filling in the table information for this assignment make sure to read the following news piece about Peruvian Asparagus from to learn more about the Peruvian asparagus industry and concerns about fresh water supply: Peru water wars threaten export boom [4].
You may also want to consult this brief from an industry news site covering the global fresh fruit and vegetable trade, detailing how asparagus is the most common Peruvian product shipped by air: Peru: [5]Asparagus is the most exported product by air [6]
Diaz, Luz Rios. 2007. Agro-industries characterization and appraisal: Asparagus in Peru [7]. Rome: FAO, 56 p.
Many in the class will be familiar with the recent growth of farmers' markets and other forms of direct marketing in which farmers sell more directly to consumers to capture a greater percentage of the final purchase price. This includes mail-order grass-fed beef from South Dakota, organic farms, and other small farms selling at open-air markets in any given small and medium city, and medium to large scale farms that produce for multiple restaurant accounts in large cities. The New York City greenmarkets (Fig. 1.2.10) are an excellent and long-standing example of this trend, starting with a few street corner vegetable markets and growing into an important hub of the Grow NYC sustainability movement in New York. The Grow NYC website Greenmarket Farmers Markets [8] documents that over 30,000 acres of farmland as well as small fishing operations near New York City form a ‘foodshed (analogous to a watershed feeding to a larger water body) that has made important inroads towards greater access to locally or regionally produced food with more sustainable practices, including participation in food assistance programs that strive to provide greater access to lower-income New Yorkers. Greenmarkets thus provide a growing, if small, proportion of New York City’s food supply.
Vegetable and livestock producers that participate in New York City greenmarkets are in many ways sustaining and building on the legacy of small truck farms that for generations utilized fertile farmland surrounding many eastern cities (think of the sometimes mysterious identity of New Jersey as the ‘Garden State’). Today these farms generally have land sizes of 5 to 50 acres, much smaller than the farm sizes of Midwestern grain farms or California industrial vegetable production. They are comparatively diverse farms in terms of combining many different products (including eggs and meat) that can be sold for relatively advantageous prices together in a farmers market. Farms like those in the Hudson Valley North of New York City utilize flat, deep soils adjacent to river floodplains that are excellent for long-term production of crops if they are well cared for. These farms are also able to recycle relatively abundant urban wastes from dense urban and suburban populations (e.g. green wastes, manure from neighboring small livestock farms, city and county composting programs) that are used to keep soils extremely productive by global terms. In fact, some of these farms may face some of the same problems of nutrient excesses presented in the case above on Pennsylvania dairy farming systems. They also are able to grow crops for the sole purpose of adding organic matter to the soil and covering the soil in the winter (cover crops) that help to keep soil quality high. Produce and animal products are trucked directly to green market sites in New York City or to pick-up points for subscription-based Community-supported agriculture programs.
In contrast to the highly specialized and industrialized production of Peruvian asparagus for the global market (above), smallholders in the Andean Mountains of Peru integrate a wide variety of livestock and crop types on their farms, from llamas to sheep to dairy cattle, and from native potato varieties to maize as well as legume grains and forages and vegetables. They also place a high priority on self-sufficiency in many food crops, balanced with sales to local (e.g. within community barter and purchase on community market days) and regional (e.g. wholesale to regional intermediary buyers and markets, Fig. 1.2.11). The variety of crops, livestock, and production is partly explained by the varied elevation and soil types found in the mountainous Andean environment. A high diversity of products, production strategies, and market versus consumption destinations for agricultural production has thus emerged in modern Andean societies as a way to adapt to both the natural risks of a mountain environment (e.g. drought, frost, hail) and the opportunities and challenges of a complex and fluctuating market that very often does not favor the farmer’s interests.
The integration of small livestock herds in these systems is very important and allows farmers higher value products such as wool and meat that can be used for short-term cash needs. Grazing livestock also allows them to “harvest” manure nutrients via grazing on high-altitude grasslands. When animals are penned into night-time corral areas they produce manure that is stored for use in fertilizing crop fields. Farmers also apply limited amounts of modern chemical fertilizers to their crops, especially those destined for regional markets. Increasingly, farm communities are banding together using strong and complex community government schemes to win government funding for and build community-wide irrigation schemes that are fed by mountain stream systems. These irrigation systems, some very extensive, are used for adaptation to drought years, expansion of cultivated land or irrigation of fodder crops to feed animals year-round in small intensified dairy schemes. The expansion of small dairy enterprises has been driven by increases in the price of milk in Andean countries from growing urban populations. Because of the preponderance of sloped land in these mountain systems, soil productivity for these Andean smallholders is very vulnerable to erosion during the intense rainy season of the Central Andes. Climate change has also tended to accentuate the severity of climate risks in these systems.
Links
[1] https://www.e-education.psu.edu/geog3/sites/www.e-education.psu.edu.geog3/files/Mod1/Food_Module1Worksheet_RevisionSummer2016.docx
[2] https://www.centerfordairyexcellence.org/pa-dairy-goodness-that-matters/pa-dairy-overview/
[3] http://www.asparagus-lover.com/Peruvian-asparagus.html
[4] https://www.reuters.com/article/us-peru-water/peru-water-wars-threaten-agricultural-export-boom-idUKTRE68N4DN20100924
[5] https://www.freshplaza.com/article/2003185/peru-asparagus-is-the-most-exported-product-by-air/
[6] https://www.thepacker.com/news/produce-crops/peruvian-asparagus-importers-face-transportation-issues
[7] http://www.fao.org/docrep/016/ap297e/ap297e.pdf
[8] https://www.grownyc.org/greenmarket
[9] https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.0/