After lunch came Tim Meyers of Bethel, whose farm has made the news several times in the last couple of years. He gave an update on his activities in the last year, and said that for the 2010 season he plans to produce 50 vegetable boxes a week for ten months. He dealt with an overabundance of greens this last season, he said, by calling local businesses and taking orders for boxed lunch salads. He tested Sunshine hulless barley, which grew well, but he'd planted it too late in the season for it to ripen fully. He described his use of liquified salmon and salmon byproducts as a fertilizer, his potato-planting tractor attachment, and the underground late-season growing room in which he was able to ripen habañeros in December. He showed the audience a map of high-quality soils in Alaska from an article in the September 2008 National Geographic, showing the Kuskokwim Delta and the Aleutians as areas of concentrated rich soils.
Jenifer McBeath of SNRAS gave a detailed presentation of disease control and root growth associated with the fungus Trichoderma atroviride.
Patricia O'Neil of the Alaska Division of Agricuture followed, giving a quick rundown of funding opportunities through the division.
Next came AlexAnna Salmon of Igiugig, who made her report at the conference as part of a requirement for an Alaska Agriculture Innovation Grant for farming equipment. Igiugig had access to "zero fresh produce," she said, and so the village council decided to work on food production. They have a potato festival now, and are working toward building a community kitchen. The village built a small greenhouse, engaged local elementary students to help with the planting, and had great success growing vegetables—until a freak windstorm blew it away and kept blowing for several days, shredding the vegetables with only a few beans surviving. (They plan to rebuild, but will try to make it less flight-worthy. The new greenhouse will be 24 x 38 feet.) Jeffrey Smeenk of SNRAS helped them assemble and learn to use a small Berta walk-behind tractor, with attachments for snowblowing, wood chopping (very popular), and tilling. She also described the scrap food collection program the village runs, in which scraps are fed to chickens, which produce eggs that are provided to the villagers.
Mark Fisher of Susitna Organics spoke next. Susitna Organics is a commercial manufacturer of humified compost, based in Wasilla. Fisher described the structure and life processes of soil and how his composting system works. Plants, he said, use up to 30% of their glucose production to attract and/or feed beneficial soil microbes, which in turn generate humus in the vicinity of the plant and convert soil nutrients into forms more readily absorbed by the plant. Humified compost, he explained, is compost with 3rd or 4th-generation microbial populations, which start to break the compost down into humus. Susitna Organics uses equipment and innoculants produced by a company based in Illinois, MidWest Biosystems. Their compost recipe includes wood chips, hay, cow manure, and microbial innoculants. They also make specialty or custom mixes (for example, compost with fish bone meal or other fertilizer added in).
Representatives from the Fairbanks Community Cooperative Market spoke next, describing the need for local retail outlets for locally produced food. The Co-op Market will be contracting with farmers a year ahead, concentrating on Fairbanks but working outward throughout Alaska, so that farmers can plan their next season's crops with the market in mind.
The final presentation of the day was given by Dean & Director Carol Lewis of SNRAS and AFES, who described the Food Security Survey project. Lewis began by talking about the oft-quoted 5% figure for food produced in Alaska, and the corresponding 95% that is presumed imported food: "We don't actually know [how much]," she said. Although this figure was estimated in a paper produced by SNRAS (and on which Lewis was an author), it was based on the best available data at the time—which wasn't very good and not very plentiful. This has been a consistent problem: there are some sources, such as the state's annual report, Alaska Agricultural Statistics, which provide good information, but are incomplete and not detailed enough. This project will assess how much food is produced in Alaska, where and by whom it is produced, what varieties of which crops, subsistence foods used (there are almost no statistics on gathered foods, although hunting and fishing are well documented), whether it is commercial production or for personal use, and so on. The survey project will be in cooperation with various agencies and groups such as Fish & Game, the Division of Agriculture, CES, tribal and village councils and organizations, and so on. The survey is an ambitious project, slated for completion by September 2010, with the goal to determine what kind and how much food is produced in Alaska for Alaskans, and hence our true level of food security.
After this, Craig Gerlach of the UAF Anthropology Department introduced the Food Security Panel, which included Danny Consenstein of the Farm Service Agency of Alaska, Mike Emers, Charlotte Jewell, Carol Lewis, Tim Meyers, sustainability coordinator Stephanie Scott of the Haines Borough, and executive director Ben Stevens of the Council of Athabascan Tribal Governments. Gerlach asked the panel to speak to two questions: What makes Alaska unique with regard to food security, and how do we design food production systems keeping in mind our food security—including our nutritional security?
• Emers estimated that, based on his own farm's output, it would take 100-150 four-acre farms to feed Fairbanks. Alaska suffers from isolation and lack of support industries for agriculture, and the expenses involved in farming in Alaska (including a large dollar investment up front) are high because of this.After the panelists spoke, people in the audience asked questions or made comments, among them:
• Jewell talked about the limited arable land available in Skagway—the airport is built on what used to be a farm, for example—and the sheer expense of land. Skagway used to be one of the breadbaskets of Alaska.
• Consenstein said that the Farm Service Agency supports family farmers by offering loans and financial planning, that the policy concern from the national level was job creation. He spoke of the need to collaborate with other agencies and the rest of the food system. While there have been over the last five years many thousands of farm failures, there have also been 108,000 new small farms starting up. This is good news for job creation. Consenstein also invited the participants to the Alaska Food Policy Council (first meeting May 18 in Anchorage).
• Scott asked about the policies 50 years ago, when communities were more self-sufficient. What were the land use policies then?
• Meyers talked about the ease with which he could do farming, and discussed mentoring: if a person came out to his farm for a season, he said, he could teach them how to farm on the tundra.
• Stevens said that rural Alaska is no longer sustainable. The old survival urge that used to be there has faded away, replaced by bad food and run on diesel fuel. It is as though people and communities have lost the desire for life, he said. The changes in rural culture have led to a plague of diabetes; the old skills are being lost. Stevens said he was charged with improving the health of the people, and that this led him to working toward improving the food system.
• Many food skills have been lost: cooking with fresh whole foods, butchering, raising small livestock, how to make a root cellar, eating seasonally, lack of knowledge of what is available in one's area and what those foods are for.
• The public doesn't understand the value of their food, either nutritionally or monetarily. The public is so used to ultra-cheap, processed food, that they don't value fresh local food that is priced reasonably.
• Almost all, if not all, seed farmers use is imported from Outside. Stable seed varieties are needed that are specific to Alaska conditions. Calypso Farm & Ecology Center is beginning a seed production field.
Although not on the schedule, the Alaska Community Agriculture Association gave a short presentation and invited farmers to join. They held a meeting after the conference ended.
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