Good Food from Happy Soil
By Debra Shore
Photos by Kevin Weinstein

"There's nothing that has a bigger impact on the land than agriculture," says John Hall, director of the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute in Troy, Wisconsin. Dave Cleverdon knows this firsthand. In the 1980s, Cleverdon and his wife bought a derelict farm west of Bigfoot Prairie on the northwestern fringe of Chicago Wilderness. Owned by one family since the 1850s, by the time Cleverdon got to it, it was "as close to an ecological disaster as anything I've seen here," he says. "The soil was dead."

To be blunt, conventional agriculture has done nothing good for nature. It has depleted the soil of nutrients, requiring ever greater applications of fossil fuel-based fertilizer to be productive. Topsoil has eroded and washed downstream at an estimated rate of millions of tons a year, carrying chemicals and wastes that pollute groundwater and streams. To produce 150 bushels of corn on an acre of land, the conventional Midwestern farmer will apply 150 pounds of nitrogen in fertilizer. Of that, 47 pounds will be harvested and 100 pounds will head toward the Mississippi and the Gulf.

	Chicago's Green City Market —supporting local farmers is good for biodiversity.

Sustainable agriculture and, in particular, certified organic farms like Dave Cleverdon's Kinnikinnick Farm, in Caledonia, Illinois, are much less harmful to the land and water than their conventional counterparts. Organic farmers shun the use of pesticides and fertilizers and seek to replenish nutrients by rotating crops and planting cover crops.

"On a true organic farm, there's a lot of biodiversity," says Jim Slama, president of Sustain, a group pursuing a Local Organic Initiative to examine the potential for establishing a regional food system based on organic agriculture. "Conventional farms have few crops and lots of chemicals that kill beneficial insects and wildlife. Organic growers, such as Angelic Organics (just on the western edge of Chicago Wilderness and two miles from Cleverdon's place), have 30 to 40 crops, and fields edged with native plants and a lot of happy critters." To be certified organic, for instance, farms are required to have a 25-foot buffer with neighboring fields. This filters runoff, but can also serve as a habitat greenway for beneficial insects.

Cleverdon, his wife and children, and a rotating crew of laborers and interns have spent the last 14 years bringing the land back from the brink. He has spread high-calcium agricultural lime to loosen the soil and make more nutrients available. He grows 25 varieties of greens in raised beds. He mows paths instead of tilling the greenery under, following the dictum "all green all the time." Cleverdon says, "You can feel the difference walking through the beds after several years. The land is spongier. I'm just a city boy, but you can walk through this and feel where the land is angry."

Eat Locally
Sarah Stegner, veteran chef at Chicago's Ritz-Carlton, and a number of other prominent local chefs are at the forefront of a relatively recent campaign — call it the culinary counterpart to the conservation movement — seeking to find and support ways to save a diversity of foods, to foster sustainable agricultural practices close to home, and to buy and cook foods only when they are in season."For me the whole thing started trying to upgrade the quality of my restaurant," Stegner says.

Four years ago, Stegner and her cohorts (see list) — led by Chicago Tribune food writer Abby Mandel — founded Chicago's Green City Market, a weekly venue for organic farmers from this region to sell their food to chefs and to the public. Now, every Wednesday from late June through the end of October, tents rise at the southern end of Lincoln Park to shade a cornucopia of fresh produce and tired farmers, as well as eager shoppers come to savor their goods. "The market has made it possible for everybody, not just a few restaurants, to get high-quality goods and to support local farmers," Stegner adds.

Homegrown Wisconsin is a cooperative of about 20 organic farms in Wisconsin that makes deliveries twice a week to Chicago-area restaurants and sells produce at the Green City Market. Paul and Louise Maki's Blue Skies Berry Farm outside Brooklyn, Wisconsin, is 3.75 acres of edible flowers and raspberries. Steve Pincus of Tipi Produce has 80 acres, some certified organic and some on the way. He focuses on mainstay crops like carrots, onions, broccoli, and potatoes. Both participate in the Homegrown co-op.

Chef Sarah Stegner (right) bargains with Louise Maki for edible flowers and herbs from Blue Skies Berry Farm. Later in the season, raspberries!

Stegner has made trips to tour the farms and has brought all her restaurant wait staff to the market to meet the farmers. "Now they understand what the issues are," she says, "and can talk about what's on the menu. The rapport you have between the back and the front of the house will make or break a restaurant. We all went and picked tomatoes at 70th Street Farm one summer. Just the fact that it's locally grown, and they're watching it from the beginning to the end with a great deal of care, and they'll tell you when they water — it makes a huge difference. What excites me is when I get the product in and I get to work with something that's really delicious and beautiful and vibrant. Everybody gets excited in the kitchen and can't wait to cook it and eat it. I have buffalo on my menu now. I had not worked with it before and the quality is unbelievable. If you order it," she says to the likely skeptics, "you will not walk away unhappy."

Jim Slama finds two critical challenges in this region. "First, we need more farmers with the expertise to grow organic food," he says. The vast majority of land being farmed is still in corn and bean production using conventional practices. The other challenge is that of distribution — getting food from farm to table. Still, Slama figures that there is a big local market for organic food. "We have a tremendous opportunity to preserve farmland that otherwise could be targeted for development on the outer edges of the Chicago region," Slama says.

A Third Way
Even though organic farming is much better for the land, wildlife, and people than conventional agriculture, it still takes a toll. Wes Jackson, founder of The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, and a longtime critic of conventional agriculture, suggests there is a third way, a model of growing food based on a self-renewing ecosystem dear to Chicago Wilderness: the prairie. Rather than rely on a system of food production that depends upon ever-increasing amounts of fossil fuels and water, Jackson has studied the self-regulating, highly resilient natural ecosystem of the prairie, which tends to increase its ecological wealth. "All prairie, left alone, recycles materials, sponsors its own fertility, runs on contemporary sunlight, and increases biodiversity," Jackson says.

Jackson and his colleagues have developed a model he calls "natural systems agriculture." This method will feature perennial plants in mixtures, in counterpoint to the monocultures of annuals in use today. "Perennial roots hold the soil," says Jackson, "and a diversity of species presents a formidable chemical array to thwart the insect or pathogen that could otherwise create an epidemic." Researchers at The Land Institute are currently working to "perennialize" the major cereal crops — corn, wheat, rice, rye, and barley — since 70 percent of all human calories consumed worldwide derive from these annual grasses. Jackson estimates it may take them 25 years to do this, but the important work is underway. By adopting natural systems agriculture, Jackson adds, "humanity for the first time turns away from nature as something to be subdued or abhorred to nature as the information base, holding answers to questions that we don't know yet to ask."

Consuming Sprawl
The challenge of agricultural sustainability, of course, is to preserve the land upon which we farm — not only its quality, but its very existence. Will local farms disappear altogether under the marching advance of urban sprawl?

Kane County is at the front line of the development juggernaut in this region, as are Will and McHenry Counties. Kane County's land-use plan was designed with an eye to preserving both agricultural and natural lands. But though its vision has been roundly applauded by regional planners and advocates of smart growth, the county has found it lacks muscle. The Mayor of Hampshire in western Kane County recently announced plans to annex 728 acres of unincorporated land — designated as open space by the land-use plan — for a development project encompassing seven million square feet of offices, warehouses, and up to 560 housing units.

Why should we care? planning officials ask. Because having food production near where we live is an important part of having sustainable communities — reducing transportation costs, taking advantage of better quality agricultural lands closer to cities, providing markets and jobs.

For instance, a group of predominantly African-American farmers from Pembroke Township in Kankakee County, a mere 45 miles from Chicago, has been supplying organically grown produce to the farmers' market in the Austin neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. "What we're trying to do on a farming level will help make our community sustainable," said one of the farmers in a local publication. "When agriculture is healthy and strong and when dollars stay in the community, then stores and businesses stay, young people find jobs, and many other opportunities open up for the community."

Cities have always depended on the productivity of the countryside for their livelihood, Paul Heltne of the Chicago Academy of Sciences pointed out at a recent symposium for the Humans in Nature project of The Hastings Center. "Until about 1800, the relationship remained balanced by some measures," he said, "but future urbanization will occupy the best remaining farmland and draw down all potable water, so where will all the food come from?"

Such are the challenges facing us in Chicago Wilderness. For hopeful signs, look to the Green City Market.

For a list of purveyors from Chicago's Green City Market, go to <www.chicagocooks.com/menu/clubPage.asp?sectionID=366&menuID=85>.