Native pollinators, it seems, were once forgotten as playing an essential role in providing ecological services for food security, but no longer.  We have witnessed a surge in grassroots interest in returning pollinators to their proper place in sustainable agriculture, as witnessed by the enthusiastic participation recently seen at a workshop regarding on-farm pollinator habitat restoration in the U.S./Mexico borderlands.

The workshop featured practical teachings from Sam Earnshaw of Community Alliance of Family Farmers, who has helped plant or restore over 300 miles of pollinator-attracting hedgerows in Western states. Other speakers included Jo Ann Baumgartner of Wild Farm Alliance, Amanda Webb, Gary Nabhan and Laura Lopez Hoffman of the University of Arizona, Susan Wethington of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, as well as permaculturist Kate Tirion and ecologist Ron Pulliam of Patagonia, Arizona.  Co- sponsors included Wild Farm Alliance, Borderlands Habitat Restoration Initiative, Hummingbird Monitoring Network, the Sabores Sin Fronteras Foodways Alliance, and the Kellogg Program on Food and Water Security for the Southwest Borderlands, University of Arizona, all in support of the larger efforts of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign or “Pollinator Partnership”. Over thirty-four residents of three counties in Southern Arizona became engaged with hands-on efforts to bring a diversity of pollinators back to borderlands farms, gardens and ranches.

Following introductions, the workshop in rural Santa Cruz County was launched with lectures by special guest presenters.  Jo Ann Baumgartner began by talking about efforts by the Wild Farm Alliance to promote forms of agriculture that protect and restore wild biodiversity. She also responded to food safety concerns that wild animals on farms are a risk to production operations.  She highlighted habitat restoration strategies that minimize the potential for contaminating crops with diseases that are then transferrable to consumers in ways that might otherwise compromise human health.  She emphasized the importance of understanding how wildlife, livestock, and other biota can act as vectors or as filters for pathogens on farms.  She concluded that wild species can provide more benefits than risks to farms if ecologically managed.

Sam Earnshaw of CAFF then shared insights gained from his extensive experience implementing hedgerows, green buffers and other wild habitats on farms in California.  He presented many ways that a hedgerow can provide needed support services to a growing operation, and suggested plants that could be used for different applications.  The photos in his presentation helped illustrate how hedgerows function to address site-specific issues, the different forms hedgerows may take, and how they can support pollinators as well as other vertebrate and invertebrate species that can act as natural pest control for crops.

The hands-on portion of the workshop took the form of installing native plants as hedgerows at two different sites.  Gary Nabhan took this opportunity to talk about specific features unique to each of the sites, the crops grown there, and the desired functional outcomes for each hedgerow after it is established.  In addition to discussing how the hedgerows would support native pollinators, he led a demo on constructing and providing bee nesting structures and showed how they could be installed on-farm, at home, or in the garden.  Jo Ann, Sam, and Gary provided continual information to participants about the ecology of on-farm hedgerows through guiding presentations and interactions with individual participants.

The hedgerow designs at the two sites reflected site-specific goals of each of the hedgerows, and both were comprised of a different suite of plant species to reflect those desired outcomes.  Gary Nabhan led the design and implementation of plantings dominated by native vines, sub-shrubs and wild flowers (mostly crop relatives) alongside a mesquite retaque fence. This site was located on a clay-dominated ridge between the Native Seeds/SEARCH  and the Almunya de los Zoplilotes orchard, while  Amanda Webb, a graduate student from the University of Arizona, led the design and transplanting of woody perennials at the Rogers-Wethington orchard on a floodplain.  These examples provided participants with the opportunity to see two different applications of the forms and functions of hedgerows under local conditions.  Plant installation at both sites ultimately included transplanting woody vegetation (shrubs, vine and trees) as well as the sowing of native annual and perennial wildflower seeds.  The spent flowering stalks of desert sotol and century plants were integrated into fences to serve as nesting habitat for carpenter bees at both sites. Many on-site discussions were inspired by these hands-on experiences that give people skills in how to plant native plants, to construct  nest boxes, fences and rainwater harvesting structures, to plan irrigation regimes, and to extend the flowering season to attract and keep a variety of pollinators on the farm.

There were other scientists and farmers present who gave summaries of the related work they do with pollinators.  These included Susan Wethington who talked about the mission and work of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, Laura Lopez-Hoffman who described her research on nectar-feeding bats, and Ron Pulliam who talked about the on-going pollinator habitat restoration and education efforts of the Borderlands Habitat Restoration Initiative.  These short talks provided an expanded view on pollinator conservation and research while emphasizing that effective pollinator conservation cannot be isolated to one farm or species, but should be implemented for diverse species at the landscape or regional level with a multitude of collaborators, supporters, and projects.    The point was made to participants that the renewed planting of hedgerows on farms is an important step in this larger kind of effort.

Feedback from workshop participants has been overwhelmingly positive.  Along with hearing the lectures and participating in hands-on experiences, they left with a packet of printed information covering a wide breadth of related topics, including information on selecting plants to fit different sites. Printed materials included recommendations for planning pollinator-supporting hedgerows that can thrive in different habitats throughout Southern Arizona.

Did you know that Tucson and its Pima County suburbs have 12 times the number of mobile food services per capita than New York City?  The county reports some 941 mobile food businesses registered for business, including 235 full service food carts, 45 “dogero” push carts,  and 85 other mobile vendors in Tucson alone. Pima County appears to have tied with Los Angeles County in California for having the highest ratio of mobile street food businesses to people of any areas in the United States, with roughly one vehicle offering food on the fly for every 1,000 residents.

For as far back as anyone can remember, Tucson lunch wagons have supplied factory and office workers with a variety of cheap, but freshly-made fare.  But when the Sonoran hot dog craze spread from Hermosillo to Tucson nearly 20 years ago, the number of push carts and mobile food stands rose sharply. Street food is highly prized in Mexico, among both blue collar and white collar workers. As Mexican immigrants to Arizona gained the resources to start their own micro-enterprises, food wagons and push carts were among their first, capitalized ventures.

Today, it may cost as much as $50,000 to build and equip a full-service food truck to county standards, and an additional $500 to 1000 to secure permits.  But the payoff may still be worth the effort. In the case of Daniel Contreras, known in Tucson as El Guero Canelo, his Sonoran hot dog carts expanded into three restaurants. Coverage in the New York Times, on National Public Radio and song named for him by a Tucson-based band called Calexico, have made him into a legend across the border region and nation.

But it would be wrong to assume that Tucson’s mobile food wagons are exclusively hot dog carts and taco trucks. Other ethnicities and immigrants have added diversity to the street scene in Tucson and in Phoenix as well. Within Arizona’s two largest metro areas, one can find mobile vendors hawking African-American catfish and corn bread, Cajun gumbo, Carolina pork barbecue, Chinese stir-fried vegetables from a wok, Creole shrimp po’ boys, Cuban sandwiches, Guatemalan pupusas, Indian (O’odham and Yaqui) fry bread, Israeli falafels, Japanese sushi and tempura, Korean “tacos,” Neapolitan pizza, Parisian crepes, Tapatio-style posole and tepache, and Texas barbecued beef.

As Cathalena Burch wrote of the recent evolution of food wagons in the Old Pueblo, such trucks “are changing the landscape of Tucson’s street food from the ubiquitous taqueria and Sonoran hot dog to more eclectic fare: gourmet burgers, cheesesteak (?) sandwiches, savory- and sweet-stuffed crepes, organic ice cream, and deconstructed desserts, from fruit pies presented like French fries and strawberry shortcake served as a slider.”

While Tucson may have far more of these mobile micro-enterprises than the Valley of the Sun, the names of Phoenix food wagons read like poetry: Jaime’s Bitchen Kitchen; Jamburritos Cajun; Luncha Libre; Paradise Melts; Puro Sabor; Sunshine and Spice; Torched Goodness, and Udder Delights. In addition, the Phoenix Street Food Coalition has recruited 29 member-operators, and regularly holds rendezvous with music and other entertainment in the parking lot of the downtown farmers’ market within blocks of the state capital.  The Coalition has also encouraged its vendors to source their ingredients locally, and many pick up their ingredients from the Phoenix Public Maarket. Other food wagon vendors in Phoenix and Tucson are now sourcing some of their fresh produce from Market on the Move, a project of the 3000 Club that obtains discounted tomatoes, peppers, onions and other vegetables from transborder brokers in Nogales.

Of course, not everyone is gratified by the growing presence of food wagons in Arizona’s Metro areas.  It is obvious that Taco Bell and other Mexican food drive-ins can hardly beat street food vendors in terms of freshness, price or variety. What aficionado would choose a commoditized (?) hard-shell taco over soft, warm tortilla and its fixings made the same day by the seasoned hands of local women?

In Nogales, Arizona, some 35 registered Mexican food stands are established along roadsides and parking lots, and another 30 impromptu stands occasionally appear over a year’s time.  Nogales city officials and land owners have triggered controversy locally by demanding that these vendors keep moving and regularly renew their permits.  What’s more, Nogales restaurant owners who allow street vendors to use their county-approved kitchens on consignment for early morning and late-night food preparations, have maxed out their capacity. In light of this reality, Nils Urman of the non-profit Nogales Community Economic Development is proposing to use government grants to develop a community kitchen and walk-in coolers that can be rented by street food vendors. Until this effort bears fruit, low-income residents in Nogales may have less access to affordable fresh foods than theyrequire.

Despite all the dynamism in the mobile food world of Sonoran Desert cities, a few things remain certain: Low-income residents are eating a diversity of inexpensive and flavorful meals from food wagons these days. Collectively, the menus cover hundreds of items and use dozens of fresh, locally-produced ingredients. The wagons and carts employ thousands of Arizonans who might otherwise be without work during these difficult times.  They feed hundreds of thousands of desert dwellers, who return home satiated and nourished for less than the price of a Happy Meal.

Native Seeds/SEARCH, the Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona, Hayden Flour Mills, Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance, Cultivate Santa Cruz, Tubac Historical Society, Amado Farms Joint Venture, and Avalon Organic Gardens and EcoVillage will work with small-scale beginning farmers as well as low-income tortilla makers and bakers in the proposed Santa Cruz Valley National Heritage Area to increase our region’s food diversity and food security in the face of climate change and an evolving agricultural landscape.

Cereal grains are fundamental to the diets of most people in the Southwest, yet local production and processing of regionally-adapted grains is a missing element in efforts to increase our region’s food security and to offer staples to low-income populations at risk of hunger. Through a diversity of complementary approaches, the funded project aims to address this gap by re-introducing Chapalote corn and White Sonora wheat into sustainable food production regimes in the arid Southwest; establishing fruitful exchanges of information among producers, millers, bakers, and other stakeholders; and ensuring that the use of these heritage grains reaches food-insecure families in our region and that they are enlisted in producing value-added products as new sources of income.

Chapalote flint corn and White Sonora wheat have reputations for drought tolerance, yield stability and excellent nutritional qualities, and have deep cultural ties to the desert borderlands. They are the oldest varieties of their species to reach the Arizona deserts as farmed crops, Chapalote arriving roughly 4,200 years ago and White Sonora arriving with Spanish missionaries in the late 17^th century. Both crops suffered declines in cultivation as water- and fertilizer-responsive varieties took precedence in irrigated agriculture in the Southwest. They became commercially unavailable in Arizona and adjacent areas of Mexico by 1975, though Native Seeds/SEARCH has maintained both Chapalote and White Sonora in its seed bank and has continued to make them available to growers in the Southwest. Interestingly, two of the project sites (Avalon Organic Gardens and Tubac Presidio State Historic Park) may be on the very ground where Jesuit Father Eusebio Francisco Kino first introduced White Sonora wheat to Arizona, and the Community Food Bank’s two farms are within a few miles of where the oldest Chapalote-like maize was found in the U.S.

This project seeks to reduce regional food insecurity by providing these culturally-appropriate staple grains through best practices for sustainable agricultural production which reduce water and energy consumption. The coalition’s shared aspiration is that the recovery of these arid-adapted grains into our food system will reward farmers who are willing to be good stewards of our agricultural diversity, soil and water resources, and improve the quality of life and nutritional health of low-income residents in our region. The project will educate, train and benefit others through several events and training workshops, and collaborators will produce a number of educational publications.

The agricultural community at large in the arid Southwest will benefit from the project’s documentation of soil management techniques that are compatible with winter wheat or summer maize production. The project will also serve as a regional testbed for a formal system of community seed exchange that lowers the barrier to entry for small-scale farmers while simultaneously increasing seed stocks so that additional farmers may participate. By putting such a model into practice, the project will have the effect of increasing the available seed supply of White Sonora wheat and Chapalote corn in the Southwest.

Western SARE is a program of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that offers competitive grants conducted cooperatively by farmers, ranchers, researchers, and other agriculture professionals to advance farm and ranch systems that are profitable, environmentally sound, and good for communities.

For more information about this project, please contact Chris Schmidt, Director of Conservation at Native Seeds/SEARCH, at 520-622-0830 x111 or cschmidt@nativeseeds.org. Additional information about the project participants may be obtained by visiting their websites:

Amado Farms Joint Venture: http://www.garynabhan.com
Avalon Organic Gardens and EcoVillage: http://avalongardens.org
Community Food Bank of Tucson: http://communityfoodbank.com
Cultivate Santa Cruz: http://cultivatesantacruz.org
Hayden Flour Mills: http://www.haydenflourmills.com
Native Seeds/SEARCH: http://www.nativeseeds.org
Santa Cruz Valley Heritage Alliance: http://www.santacruzheritage.org
Tubac Historical Society: http://ths-tubac.org

Native pollinators, it seems, were once forgotten as playing an essential role in providing ecological services for food security, but no longer.  We have witnessed a surge in grassroots interest in returning pollinators to their proper place in sustainable agriculture, as witnessed by the enthusiastic participation recently seen at a workshop regarding on-farm pollinator habitat restoration in the U.S./Mexico borderlands.

Gary Nabhan

The workshop featured practical teachings from Sam Earnshaw of Community Alliance of Family Farmers, who has helped plant or restore over 300 miles of pollinator-attracting hedgerows in Western states. Other speakers included Jo Ann Baumgartner of Wild Farm Alliance, Amanda Webb, Gary Nabhan and Laura Lopez Hoffman of the University of Arizona, Susan Wethington of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, as well as permaculturist Kate Tirion and ecologist Ron Pulliam of Patagonia, Arizona.  Co- sponsors included Wild Farm Alliance, Borderlands Habitat Restoration Initiative, Hummingbird Monitoring Network, the Sabores Sin Fronteras Foodways Alliance, and the Kellogg Program on Food and Water Security for the Southwest Borderlands, University of Arizona, all in support of the larger efforts of the North American Pollinator Protection Campaign or “Pollinator Partnership.” . Over thirty-four residents of three counties in Southern Arizona became engaged with hands-on efforts to bring a diversity OF pollinators back to borderlands farms, gardens and ranches.

Following introductions, the workshop in rural Santa Cruz County was launched with lectures by special guest presenters.  Jo Ann Baumgartner began by talking about efforts by the Wild Farm Alliance to promote forms of agriculture that protect and restore wild biodiversity. She also responded to food safety concerns that wild animals on farms are risk to production operations.  She highlighted habitat restoration strategies that minimize the potential for contaminating crops with diseases that are then transferrable to consumers in ways that might otherwise compromise human health.  She emphasized the importance of understanding how wildlife, livestock, and other biota can act as vectors or as filters for pathogens on farms.  She concluded that wild species can provide more benefits than risks to farms if ecologically managed.

Sam Earnshaw of CAFF

Sam Earnshaw of CAFF then shared insights gained from his extensive experience implementing hedgerows, green buffers and other wild habitats on farms in California.  He presented many ways that a hedgerow can provide needed support services to a growing operation, and suggested plants that could be used for different applications.  The photos in his presentation helped illustrate how hedgerows function to address site-specific issues, the different forms hedgerows may take, and how they can support pollinators as well as other vertebrate and invertebrate species that can act as natural pest control for crops.

Jo Ann Baumgartner of Wild Farm Alliance

The hands-on portion of the workshop took the form of installing native plants as hedgerows at two different sites.  Gary Nabhan took this opportunity to talk about specific features unique to each of the sites, the crops grown there, and the desired functional outcomes for each hedgerow after it is established.  In addition to discussing how the hedgerows would support native pollinators, he led a demo on constructing and providing bee nesting structures and showed how they could be installed on-farm, at home, or in the garden.  Jo Ann, Sam, and Gary provided continual information to participants about the ecology of on-farm hedgerows through guiding presentations and interactions with individual participants.

The hedgerow designs at the two sites reflected site-specific goals of each of the hedgerows, and both were comprised of a different suite of plant species to reflect those desired outcomes.  Gary Nabhan led the design and implementation of plantings dominated by native vines, sub-shrubs and wild flowers (mostly crop relatives) alongside a mesquite retaque fence. This site was located on a clay-dominated ridge between the Native Seeds/SEARCH  and the Almunya de los Zoplilotes orchard, while  Amanda Webb, a graduate student from the University of Arizona, led the design and transplanting of woody perennials at the Rogers-Wethington orchard on a floodplain.  These examples provided participants with the opportunity to see two different applications of the forms and functions of hedgerows under local conditions.  Plant installation at both sites ultimately included the transplanting woody vegetation (shrubs, vine and trees) as well as the sowing of seeds of native annual and perennial wildflower seeds.  The spent flowering stalks of desert sotol and century plants were integrated into fences to serve as nesting habitat for carpenter bees at both sites. Many on-site discussions were inspired by these hands-on experiences that give people skills in how to plant native plants, to construct  nest boxes, fences and rainwater harvesting structures, to plan irrigation regimes and to extend the flowering season to attract and keep a variety of pollinators on the farm.

There were other scientists and farmers present who gave summaries of the related work they do with pollinators.  These included Susan Wethington who talked about the mission and work of the Hummingbird Monitoring Network, Laura Lopez-Hoffman who described her research on nectar-feeding bats, and Ron Pulliam who talked about the on-going pollinator habitat restoration and education efforts of the Borderlands Habitat Restoration Initiative.  These short talks provided an expanded view on pollinator conservation and research while emphasizing that effective pollinator conservation cannot be isolated to one farm or species, but should be implemented for diverse species at the landscape or regional level with a multitude of collaborators, supporters, and projects.    The point was made to participants that the renewed planting of hedgerows on farms is an important step in this larger kind of effort.

Feedback from workshop participants has been overwhelmingly positive.  Along with hearing the lectures and participating in hands-on experiences, they left with a packet of printed information covering a wide breadth of related topics, including information on selecting plants to fit different sites. Printed materials included recommendations for planning pollinator-supporting hedgerows that can thrive in different habitats throughout Southern Arizona.

Many U.S. residents are amazed to learn that three-fifths of the fresh produce eaten in the U.S. comes from the West Coast of Mexico, and that much of the saltwater fish and shrimp they eat may come from Mexico’s reaches of the Gulf of Mexico, Pacific Ocean and Gulf of California. However, we should not belittle New Yorkers or Minnesotans for this lack of knowledge, since few of us who live much closer to U.S./Mexico border have an accurate sense of how much of our food comes from “el otro lado”—the lands and waters on the other side.  Despite having lived much of my life in Arizona, and within sight of Mexican farms and ranches, I have, until recently, hardly fathomed how much I’ve been nourished by the foods produced in Sonora and surrounding states.  As a means to overcome this shortsightedness, I have asked farmers, fishers, historians and border brokers to explain to me just how our food system became so binational.

Among my friends are a few archaeologists of desert foodways. They have reminded me that trade between farmers, foragers and fishers has gone on in the Sonoran Desert for millennia, long before an international boundary split the region in half.  Salt, corn, beans, turkeys, wild chiles, acorns, agaves and other foods have been part of extra-local trade in the region for at least 4,000 years. Pochtecan traders may have taken Mayan chocolate as far north as Chaco Canyon, long before Spanish soldiers, miners and priests arrived in the region. Of course, the Valley of Mexico became the prehistoric hub for food trade in Mesoamerica, while the lands we now know as the Southwestern United States were considered on the fringe of the Aztec empire, a barely developed frontier.

Historians have told me how Padre Kino and other Jesuit missionaries changed the diets of people in this region when they arrived here around 1687, bringing with them many seeds, fruit tree cuttings and livestock and poultry breeds. These propagation materials were taken and traded from one watershed to the next, across the arid region now straddled by the border.  Some items from the Sea of Cortés—like salted fish and the jerked meat of sea turtle—may have been transported many miles inland, while other items, like olive oil and altar wine from Mission grapes, were traded to missions that still lacked orchards and vineyards on the coast.

In New Mexico, Churro sheep, Corriente cattle, cultivated chiles and grafted fruit trees were brought north along the Camino de Real from Veracruz, Mexico City, Durango and Parral. This trade route remained essential to agricultural development in the border region even after the Santa Fe Trail opened access to goods brought from steamboats along the Mississippi River.

It was not until the 1850s—immediately following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo and the so-called Gadsden “Purchase”—that there was enough pretense of a border to begin true “binational commerce.” In 1851, boundary surveyors Emory and Bartlett headed south from Tucson and Calabasas to assist the commissary of their expedition by replenishing food and other supplies in Magdalena.  But they found little more than fruits, tortillas, cakes and mescal to keep their bellies full. And so they ventured as far south as Ures—Sonora’s scrappy little capital at that time—to gather the rest of the foods they required for their journey across the Great American Desert to the California coast.

During the 1850s, Pima Indian farmers who irrigated crops along the Gila River floodplain began to produce enough surplus wheat to supply Gold Rush prospectors in northeastern Sonora and northern California. With the advent of the Civil War, Hispanic and Anglo commodity traders helped the Pima expand their market for White Sonora wheat flour to both Rebel and Yankee troops, so that these Pima farmers became Arizona’s first to engage in “export agriculture.”

Sonora, too, reshaped its production for export markets, developing trade in livestock, grain and fruits through its port at Guaymas with the help of Wells Fargo’s first brokerage banks in Mexico around 1860. By 1880, railroad lines up the west coast of Mexico began bringing live cattle up to Tucson and El Paso in extraordinary volumes, consolidating the livestock industries of the borderlands into a single food production system. By World War II, American dependence on northern Mexican-born, grass-fed Corriente cattle was so large that virtually all the beef in K-rations came from this source. While regulations and protocols for Hoof-and-Mouth disease outbreaks since World War II have reduced the ease of flow of cattle across the border, beef production remains a transborder business in many ways to this day.

It was not until 1906 that transborder trade accelerated, due to railroad tycoon Edward Harriman, who developed railcars with icehouses and refrigerators. Fresh produce from the west coast of Mexico could now enter the U.S. marketplace and arrive at its destination in a matter of days. As Harriman’s Pacific Fruit Express became the largest operator of refrigerated railroad transporters in the world, fresh produce from the binational Southwest grew from a negligible portion of the U.S. grocery market share to 40 percent of the U.S. produce sales in 1929. (Some of my neighbors are the descendants of Nogales, Arizona’s pioneering produce brokers, and they remain engaged in cross-border food trade to this day.)

At the same time, Harriman’s railroad cars carried agricultural technologies south into Sonora and Sinaloa, ushering in the era of groundwater extraction and mechanized cultivation. Colonies of American and European entrepreneurs developed large-scale irrigated agriculture in southern Sonora and northern Sinaloa, usurping lands from both Yaqui and Mayo Indians.

In the late 19^th Century, U.S. citizens bought land for cultivation around the port town of Topolobampo, in northern Sinaloa, to establish a socialist, utopian community.  Their project, called the Credit Foncier of Sinaloa, lasted only a few years in that hot and cactus-studded environment.  But these efforts paved the way for larger-scale agricultural enterprises, which bought up the best farmland in the Fuerte river valley by the early 20^th century, and had diverted most of the region’s surface waters.  The sugar plantations they developed later gave way to today’s massive vegetable exportation operations.  Today the area forms part of the larger northern Sinaloa ketchup and salsa belt, producing more tomatoes than any other region in Mexico.

Around the same time, and further north in the Mayo and Yaqui Valleys, another engineer, Carlos Conant, landed a concession from the Mexican government for close to 500,000 acres of coastal thornscrub.  In exchange, he was charged with platting, subdividing and spearheading agricultural development.  The U.S.-based Richardson Construction Company (CCR) bought out Conant by the early 19^th century, just before the 1910 revolution.  However, the company did have enough time before the war to begin laying the infrastructural foundation for what would later become one of Mexico’s premier grain-producing irrigation districts.  Agricultural development came at a high price for the Yoemem (the Yaqui Indians) who had lived in the valley for thousands of years; to this day, they continue to struggle with state and federal officials to gain full recognition of their legal rights to ancestral lands, and to the waters of the Yaqui River.

Around present-day Hermosillo, near the coast, binational families such as the Ronstadts began to export wagons, tractors and tillage equipment to the German, Dutch, French and Italian agribusinessmen who developed large irrigated land holdings in these southern reaches of the Sonoran Desert.  This kind of exportation also occurred around the Port of Guaymas.  Today, many of these families continue to play prominent roles in Sonora’s agricultural production, as well as in industry and government.

While the Mexican Revolution led to repatriation of some of the lands that had been lost to smallholder farmers, it also fostered clandestine trade in alcohol and firearms with businesses in Arizona and New Mexico. With Arizona’s statehood and the Prohibition era, barrels of tequila and bacanora were bottled and shipped by Julius Rosenbaum out of Tucson, but these products were still grown and distilled on the west coast of Mexico. Guaymas harbor became the region’s major, international shipping port for a variety of beverages, grains, fruits and vegetables.

In the 1920s, the demand for air bladders of the totoaba—a presently endangered fish in the Sea of Cortés—ushered in a new wave of marine resource exploitation. Motorized boats allowed the movement of fishermen back and forth across the sea, where they established new camps, depleted the local fisheries, and moved on. By 1935, Kino Bay had its first “collective” or ejido of Mexican fishermen.  Ever since, most of Sonora’s fish catch has been destined for Arizona and the broader United States. Around the same period, the Kino Bay Club of American anglers had been ramping up sports fishing along the coast, and in 1941 the United States government fostered its spread by helping Sonora build a paved 65-mile highway between Puerto Peñasco and Lukeville, then known as Kahlilville. During that time, sea turtles and lobsters were transported live, in tubs, up to Ajo and Phoenix.

Shrimp trawlers from Guaymas started raking the sea bottom clean in the 1940s, taking and then discarding 10 to 40 pounds of live “bycatch” for every pound of saleable shrimp they caught in their nets.  A combination of government subsidies and private investment had overcapitalized the open-sea shrimping sector, swelling the size of fleets, and dramatically increasing the scale of the assault on marine resources.  By 1990, less than a half century later, trawlers had so depleted the northern and central reaches of the sea it became impossible not to notice the many rusted-out hulls of bankrupt trawlers scattered around port towns like Yavaros, Guaymas, and Puerto Peñasco.  The decline in the wild shrimp fishery inevitably led to efforts to farm shrimp (so-called “aquaculture”) in confined areas along the coast—first accomplished in Guaymas by Monterrey Tech in the 1960s. The spread of shrimp farming along the Sonoran and Sinaloan coast caused the destruction of some mangrove lagoons—the natural nursery grounds for the wild-caught “Guaymas shrimp.”  Mostly, though, shrimp farming’s most visible impact is has been the fragmentation of delicate coastal landscapes. Today, shrimp monoculture all along Sonoran and Sinaloan shores is plagued with introduced diseases, though it still generates more products for export than Mexico’s entire wild harvest shrimp sector.   Despite prompting the loss of one fish stock after another, the 40-50,000 fishermen in the Sea of Cortés still haul in 60 percent of all seafood caught in Mexican waters. Roughly 150,000 to 170,000 tons of seafood are exported from Mexico to the U.S. each year, and three quarters of what is caught or cultured by Sonorans is served at American tables.

While the aquamarine (or “blue”) revolution ramped up along the Sonoran coast in the 1960s, large-scale hybrid grain production was getting a jumpstart in Ciudad Obregón with the Green Revolution, led by Minnesota-born plant breeder, Norman Borlaug. The first releases of Borlaug’s dwarf, fertilizer-responsive wheat—like Sonora 64—hit the marketplace in the early 1960s.  It quickly drove the White Sonora heirloom bread wheat to near-extinction. The fertile floodplain soils of the Rio Yaqui, Mayo and Fuerte valleys were suddenly transformed into a contiguous wheat belt; outside of the Bajío region, it is one of Mexico’s most important granaries.

Ironically, just as irrigation infrastructure and chemical fertilizer plants began to dominate the Sonoran landscape—a massive federal investment intended to boost basic grain production—farmers suddenly converted to higher-value tomatoes, cucumbers, watermelons and peppers, rather than staple crops like wheat. Much of the winter produce exported to the U.S. from Sonora and Sinaloa is now grown in these northern and northwestern irrigation districts that were originally developed to produce staple crops for Mexico’s burgeoning population. In exchange for this nourishment provided by northern Mexican laborers, lands and waters, Arizonans deliver five to six billion dollars of goods and services to their neighbors south of the border each year in the form of farm equipment, computerized technologies and vehicles, in addition to stone fruits, corn-fed feedlot beef, frozen processed foods. Metro areas near the border have become the staging areas for Wal-Marts and other food franchises that have now cropped up all over Mexico.

Several years ago, at a reception hosted by the Sonoran Department of Tourism in Kino Bay, I noticed a table filled with uniform mini-chimichangas—an offering to the snowbirds wintering along the coast.

“Did you have some women here in the community make that many chimichangas for the reception?” I asked a state official.

“Oh, no, we buy them frozen from the Wal-Mart in Hermosillo. By the time we drive them out to the coast here for receptions, they’re already thawed, so all we need to do is microwave them, and they’re ready to serve! It really helps cut our costs by purchasing them in bulk…”

I was speechless. My mind began wandering back and forth across the border, and through time as well. If alive today, what would the innovative woman who fashioned the very first chivichanga—made with hand-made tortilla from White Sonora wheat flour—think of these mass-produced facsimiles of her homegrown invention?

A novel approach toward helping young people ensure biodiversity in our world is studying seeds in the wild and planting them for food in the garden.

Called “seed schools,” they should be in schools everywhere.

According to Native Seeds SEARCH’s Seedhead News, Gary Paul Nabhan, sometimes called “the father of the local foods movement,” was recently named to an endowed chair at the University of Arizona’s Sustainable Food Systems Program.

Nabhan helps seed school students name their own plant (garden-bred or in the wild). “Once it’s in print and described,” he says, “you can’t patent it. It becomes public domain.”

Most Americans probably aren’t aware of the pervasive practice of corporations claiming ownership of common plants and seeds, giving them exclusive use.

Seed School’s Bill McDorman, Native Seeds SEARCH’s executive director, notes that land grant universities were in part established to provide seeds for farmers, but most of their research now supports further privatization of what was once part of the public trust.

In recent years, multinational corporations have bought up many seed companies, discontinuing production of many varieties and substituting their own patented genetically modified seeds (GMOs).

According to the Center for Biodiversity and Conservation, 96 percent of food crops available in 1906 are no longer available.

The American public has all but given away its ability to grow its own food to profit-making corporations and the government. Once that ownership is gone, we’re all serfs to those who own the seeds and plants that feed us.

Local heirloom food explained: A wonderful book on indigenous heirloom foods in Mississippi (Appalachia and the South, too) is The Moving Feast by Allan Nation (Green Park Press; 2010; $ 25.60).

It’s called that because Native Americans would move their crops from field to field, creating the parklike forests early settlers found. Food grew abundantly without artificial chemicals. Such practices, Nation explains, continued until the 1930s. Organic farming, Nation says, is essentially another name for those practices.

Nation, publisher of The Stockman Grass Farmer magazine, is something of a hero across the U.S. for his promotion of raising cattle naturally.

Such luminaries as celebrity farmer/author Joel Salatin swear by his work, extolling heirloom foods and natural processes (often called ecofarming) with his magazine in Ridgeland.

Nation’s book should be on every organic farmer’s bookshelf as a reminder that although, as the teacher says, there is no new thing under the sun, there is plenty of old lore worth remembering.

It’s available at www.stockmangrassfarmer.com, 1-800-748-9808 or P.O. Box 2300, Ridgeland MS 39158-9911.

Contact Jim Ewing at (601) 961-7036, email jewing@clarionledger.com, on Twitter @OrganicWriter, or Facebook: http:// bit.ly/cuxUdc.

The most powerful transnational corporation you’ve never heard of—Glencore International PLC, the world’s largest diversified commodities trader—currently controls one tenth of the world’s wheat supply, and one quarter of the global harvest of barley, sunflower and rapeseed. You may have never heard of the Swiss-based Glencore because it operates under many names in some thirty countries. Even its subsidiaries are among the owners of other grain and oilseed conglomerates, such as the Moreno Group in South America.  Its total assets amount to more than $79 billion dollars, including minerals, cereals and biofuels.

Glencore is also one of the largest farm operators in the world. And yet, according to The Guardian, it has a considerable record of environmental fines and worker fatalities at its operations. But what of its contributions to the countries where it is based, other than its products and jobs? Well, it paid only two million dollars of taxes and royalties on the billion dollars of European-based revenues it garnered in 2010. Go figure that.

While there have been allegations by reputable journalists that Glencore sometimes profiteers off hunger and famine, I have no way to judge whether such scattered reports are true, let alone systemic. But what I do worry about is a world grain market that has put far too many eggs—or wheat kernels– in one basket.

Why I farm several heritage grains, forty-five varieties of historic fruits and nuts, and dozens of more heirloom vegetables is because of my belief that diversity truly matters. I value food biodiversity, structural diversity in agricultural industries, and functional microbial diversity in the soil. The lack of diversity in our grain markets makes us all vulnerable to pestilence, plague and price-fixing, but these stresses differentially affect the poor. That’s why the over-consolidation in any agricultural industry is a food justice issue, just as monoculture in any agricultural landscape is.

The dozen acres of White Sonora wheat and Chapalote corn I grow with my friends Duncan and Susan are hardly a drop in the bucket compared to the three hundred thousand acres that Glencore manages for its crops. But I am but one of many farmers who are now reviving heritage grains in our local foodsheds, and getting them to artisanal millers, bakers, brewers and chefs who no longer want to treat our rich agricultural patrimony of grains merely as commodities. There’s my friend Glenn Roberts of Anson Mills in South Carolina, who now engages over a hundred Southern farmers in providing exquisite grits, rice and wheat to a thousand restaurants and homes in “Corn Bread Nation.”  There’s Amber Lambke of Skowhegan Maine, recently featured in the Smithsonian article, “Amber Wave.”  Amber and her collaborator Michael Scholz have organized annual Kneading Conferences and turned the old Skowhegan jail into a locally-owned grain mill. There are my Arizona neighbors in the Gila River Indian Community, Ramona and Terry Button, who grow durum wheat on Gila River Indian Community lands. And like their Ramona Farms, the San Xavier Co-op and Community Food Bank of Southern Arizona also grow heirloom grains for their own families, low-income neighbors and community events.

None of the heritage grain growers I know position themselves as little Davids, as if they are out to slay the Goliath-like cereal commodity corporations of the world. Instead, what they are offering to us is taste, texture, nutrition and hope that can deeply change our relationship to food. It may simply be that Glencore’s subsidiaries cannot truly give us what we want, what we value, and what may make the world a better place. Alternatively, it may be that Glencore’s head of sustainability, Michael Fahrbach, ultimately fathoms that sustainability and diversity must inevitably go hand and hand, and begins to move the corporation onto a less perilous path. Write him. Encourage him. And in the meantime, find some artisanally-milled flour from some heritage grains, bake with it, eat it with friends, giving thanks for any daily bread that has been grown caringly and equitably.

Gary Paul Nabhan is author of the newly-released book, Desert Terroir, available from the University of Texas Press. Utne Reader honored him this last year as one of twelve visionaries changing the world for the better.

All roads lead to Rome, but chief among them was the Via Appia, a storied path from the capital to the heel of Italy traveled by everyone from Cicero to Monty Python. Robert A. Kaster traces their footsteps in ‘‘The Appian Way’’ (University of Chicago Press, $23).

In ‘‘Desert Terroir’’ (University of Texas Press, $25), Gary Paul Nabhan forages in the borderlands, where he connects dishes like capirotada, a Mexican bread pudding, to the Levantine cuisine of his Arab ancestors.

‘‘High Street’’ (V&A Publishing, $35) is a facsimile of a rare book, published in Britain in 1938, that included gorgeous woodcut illustrations of many shops of the day, from an oyster bar in the Strand to an undertaker who preferred to be called a ‘‘funeral director’’ (he said there are too many jokes about undertakers).

‘‘Traveler of the Century’’ (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, $30), the prize-winning Spanish novel by Andrés Neuman, is about an itinerant romantic who holes up between Saxony and Prussia, joins a local literary salon and falls for a minor noblewoman: delicious philosophical debates ensue.

http://tmagazine.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/08/bookshelf-17/

Monsanto and Cargill rise to top of food movement’s ire

SAN FRANCISCO: On February 27, an unprecedented alliance of more than 60 Occupy groups and 30 environmental, food and corporate accountability organizations have joined together for Occupy our Food Supply, a global day of action resisting the corporate control of food systems.

The call to Occupy our Food Supply, facilitated by Rainforest Action Network, is being echoed by prominent thought leaders, authors, farmers and activists including the Indian environmentalist Vandana Shiva, Food Inc.’s Robert Kenner, music legend Willie Nelson, actor Woody Harrelson, and authors Michael Pollan, Raj Patel, Anna Lappe, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Marion Nestle, among others. (See quotes in release below). The central theme uniting this diverse coalition is a shared sense of urgency to resist the corporate consolidation of food systems and create socially and environmentally just local solutions.

“Nothing is more important than the food we eat and the family farmers who grow it,” said Willie Nelson, Founder and President of Farm Aid. “Corporate control of our food system has led to the loss of millions of family farmers, destruction of our soil, pollution of our water and health epidemics of obesity and diabetes. We simply cannot afford it. Our food system belongs in the hands of many family farmers, not under the control of a handful of corporations.”

From Brazil, Hungary, Ireland, and Argentina to dozens of states in the US, thousands of people will be participating in the February 27 global day of action.  Participants will be reclaiming unused bank-owned lots to create community gardens; hosting seed exchanges in front of stock exchanges; labeling products on grocery store shelves that have genetically engineered ingredients; building community alliances to support locally owned grocery stores and resist Walmart megastores; and protesting food giants Monsanto and Cargill.

“Occupy our Food Supply is a day to reclaim our most basic life support system – our food – from corporate control. It is an unprecedented day of solidarity to create local, just solutions that steer our society away from the stranglehold of industrial food giants like Cargill and Monsanto,” said Ashley Schaeffer, Rainforest Agribusiness campaigner with Rainforest Action Network (RAN), of the day of action,

Never have so few corporations been responsible for more of our food chain. Of the 40,000 food items in a typical US grocery store, more than half are now brought to us by just 10 corporations. Today, three companies process more than 70 percent of all U.S. beef, Tyson, Cargill and JBS. More than ninety percent of soybean seeds and 80 percent of corn seeds used in the United States are sold by just one company: Monsanto. Four companies are responsible for up to 90 percent of the global trade in grain. And one in four food dollars is spent at Walmart.

The overwhelming support for Occupy our Food Supply underscores the unity between farmers, parents, health care professionals, human rights activists, food justice advocates and food lovers around the world who are increasingly viewing their concerns as different manifestations of the same underlying problem: a food system structured for short term profit instead of the long term health of people and the planet.

Supporting groups include: Bay Localize, Berkeley Association for Animal Advocacy, Biosafety Alliance, California Food and Justice Coalition, Chiapas Support Committee, Family Farm Defenders, Food Democracy Now, Food First, National Family Farms Coalition, PAN (Pesticide Action Network), Pesticide Watch, Planting Justice, Organic Consumers Association, Occupy Big Food, Occupy Claremont, Occupy Cargill, Occupy DC, Occupy Delaware, Occupy Denver, Occupy Farms, Occupy for Animal Rights, Occupy Fort Lauderdale, Occupy Food, Occupy Gardens Toronto, Occupy Jacksonville, Occupy Maine, Occupy MN/Seeds of Change, Occupy Monsanto, Occupy Philly (Occupy Vacant Lots), Occupy Portland, OWS-Food Justice, OWS Puppets, OWS Sustainability, Occupy Santa Cruz, Occupy SF Environmental Justice Working Group, and Occupy the Food System- Oakland, among many others.

For the full list of supporters and more information on the events planned for Occupy our Food Supply, visit www.occupyourfoodsupply.org.

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http://www.treehugger.com/economics/consolidation-food-us-infographic.html

To savor the terroir of the borderlands, Nabhan presents a cornucopia of local foods—Mexican oregano, mesquite-flour tortillas, grass-fed beef, the popular Mexican dessert capirotada, and corvina (croaker or drum fish) among them—as well as food experiences that range from the foraging of Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions to a modern-day camping expedition on the Rio Grande. Nabhan explores everything from the biochemical agents that create taste in these foods to their history and dispersion around the world. Through his field adventures and humorous stories, we learn why Mexican oregano is most potent when gathered at the most arid margins of its range—and why foods found in the remote regions of the borderlands have surprising connections to foods found by his ancestors in the deserts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. By the end of his movable feast, Nabhan convinces us that the roots of this fascinating terroir must be anchored in our imaginations as well as in our shifting soils.

Gary Paul Nabhan is an internationally celebrated desert explorer, plant hunter, and storyteller of the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, as well as a pioneer in the local foods movement. Nabhan is author or editor of twenty-four books, including Chasing Chiles: Hot Spots Along the Pepper Trail, The Desert Smells Like Rain, and Coming Home to Eat. This book reunites him with Paul Mirocha, the illustrator and co-conspirator of their award-winning Gathering the Desert. Nabhan has received a MacArthur “genius” fellowship and the Vavilov Medal, and he currently holds an endowed chair in sustainable food systems at the University of Arizona. At his home near the Mexican border, he tends an orchard of heirloom fruits and heritage crops.

Find out more about Desert Terroir, and Purchase a copy today.