Since today is Memorial Day, we began our morning by attending a Memorial Day service at the Radcliffe Cemetery, where there are veterans buried who fought in wars reaching back to the Civil War. During the service, the names were read from all of the veterans who had fought for the United States who were buried in the cemetery, including veterans from both the Confederacy and the Union. In addition, a woman spoke about the value of those who had served in the military and how we should all be grateful for their sacrifices. I found it interesting that the speaker applied verses in the New Testament about loving one’s neighbor to the soldiers who were fighting in wars, when war is a conflict between neighboring nations where hate is manifested in violence.

Continuing our discussion of the Robert Paarlberg text, the most recent chapter we read focused on the politics of obesity. While Paarlberg does consider obesity in the United States to be a problem, he did not advocate the same solutions as the creators of Fed Up, as he ultimately saw obesity as less of a political issue than alcohol or tobacco use and advocated more of a personal solution to the problem. This may be a solution for those educated in healthy eating, but for the poor and uneducated members of the population, there is a gap in knowledge about and resources for staying healthy. I do believe that consumers should have the right to choose what they should eat, but people should be completely aware of the consequences, and no one should ever be forced to eat trash because they don’t have access to healthy, natural food sources.

Before we ate lunch, we worked in the garden at our house with Dalona. She had planted lettuce, peas, and radishes behind the house before we came so we could have our own plot to work in while we were here. Therefore, we had a lot of weeding to do today in hopes that we might be able to harvest some radishes or lettuce before we leave.

Of the two documentaries we watched this evening, the first was Symphony of the Soil, which focused on biodynamic farming practices seeking to improve soil quality while farming while using a method that mimics natural processes. This contradicted many of the views we had heard so far from the conventional producers who have been claiming that organic practices cannot match the yields of conventional practices, which are required to feed the world, especially as the world’s population is predicted to reach 9 billion people by 2050.. According to the documentary, not only can organic biodynamic farming match conventional yields, but it can actually surpass them. This film also somewhat contradicted the Paarlberg text, which said that all forms of agriculture degrade the environment. Symphony of the Soil, on the other hand, asserted that the form of biodynamic agriculture it advocated could actually add to the quality of the soil and turn areas with awful soil into highly productive ones. Not only does the biodynamic organic farming improve the health and productivity of the soil, but it also decreases runoff and erosion into the waterways and increases water absorbed down into the water table underground. A lot of the decreased erosion comes from the cover crop that is left on top of the soil due to the no-till method. The documentary promoted the same no-till practices that Glen Hodnefield yesterday, and it seemed to claim the same benefits from those practices. While these two sources agreed on the no-till method, we heard a different opinion when we heard from Denny Friest later in the evening.

The second documentary we watched was called Ocean Frontiers, and it focused on different practices used along the coastlines and within the mainland were affecting the health of the oceans. The one chapter of the documentary that was most relevant to what we are learning on this trip centered on how nitrogen runoff in Iowa agriculture is making its way into the Mississippi River and flowing into the Gulf of Mexico, creating a dead zone in the Gulf of Mexico approximately the size of Massachusetts. Denny Friest, who is our neighbor down the road, played a signfiicant role in the making of the film and was part of a group of farmers that traveled to Mississippi to meet with fisherman and politicians and talk about a plan to reduce the amount of nitrogen flowing into the Gulf of Mexico. After we watched the film, he talked to us about how regulations sometimes frustrated him as a farmer because he knows more about how to fix things on his land as a farmer than one-size-fits-all bureaucrats in Washington, D.C. While I don’t think that every farmer has the same moral fortitude that Denny might have just as it would be in any profession, it was cool to observe how farmers realized they were having a negative effect in the Gulf in the film and took the initiative themselves to fix it.