Farming the future

With every project we bring forth, The Waters Wheel provides fresh, organic foods and enables truly sustainable gardens and farms in places where the ability to grow is limited by poor terrain, infertile soil or lack of soil, lack of space, or shortage of water. Even a busy schedule or lack of farming experience pose no limitation to a system of growing that is self-feeding, self-irrigating, requires no weeding or tilling of soil, is not plagued by earth-burrowing pests, produces more in less space, and grows food faster by magnitudes.

Our most recent installation is atHollygrove Market and Farm, New Orleans LA. This project supports the community in and around the Hollygrove District community of New Orleans and is offering families a chance at self-sustainability where decent, affordable markets are still scarce in the years-long wake following hurricane Katrina and the BP oil disaster. Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, The Waters Wheel is actively supporting the LAUSD School Gardens Project with placement of vertical gardens at Micheltorena School and Thomas Starr King Middle School. We are also actively engaged in bringing relief to victims of flooding and tornadoes in Alabama and Missouri, projects that were just beginning to take form when those disasters emerged... at least we're there and able to provide assistance and hope. 

Find out how you can get involved... rafael@waterswheel.org ... 
You can help, or you can have your own garden, single or multiple Towers.

Why do we focus on children? Because we farm the future and the future is theirs. If we fail to tend that garden, we fail the future. In time, it will be shown, there is nothing more important for concerned people to nurture. As we build a better future, the most critical structural component is a firm foundation... We can no longer afford to leave any child uncared for or forgotten. The future is built on them.

In mid-2009, prior to founding The Waters Wheel, I did a survey of child nutrition in the United States. I focused firstly on Native Americans in the United States, the smallest and least privileged minority among us. I visited several reservations, interviewed social services groups, the people themselves, community agencies, and leaders of tribal government. 

In many reservation settings, where fresh foods are scarce, few farming opportunities exist. The authors of original treaties routinely relegated native tribes to unfarmable land, hardscrabble in the best cases. In worst cases, the land was re-visited in modern times by industry under color of government authority, exploited and left wasted or poisonous. Since the Cold War era, the Navajo nation is unable to farm land that was left damaged and radioactive after Oklahoma-based Kerr-McGee Corp. came in to operate uranium mines under U.S. government  contracts, removing four million tons of ore that went into making  nuclear weapons and fuel. These stories are repeated everywhere, throughout the thorny history of civil rights that we have inherited from our forebears. 

As a consequence of these factors, processed foods, low on nutrition and high in unhealthful ingredients, are common in reservation towns. Child obesity and Type 2 Diabetes are common there, for a complex of reasons discussed below. 

In southern Louisiana, early in the 20th century and along the Gulf of Mexico, ancestral native lands were crisscrossed without permit by the oil industry. Companies routinely trenched through the wetlands to lay their pipelines. Combined with the effect of levee construction, logging of the cypress forests, and the historic BP failure in 2010, land along the coast is today disappearing at the rate of a football-field's area (cumulative) every 38 minutes. 

There, the coastline disintegrates as saltwater infiltrates where trenching creates breaks. Salt parches the grasses, steadily widens the cuts. From the early 1900s through today, originally narrow trenches have exponentially expanded, 2x their width every 10 years. By 2011, the sea has swallowed up vast tracts of Pointe-au Chie and Houma Lands. Agriculture, if it exists today, is rarely productive. The area is remote and people are left to fend for themselves. Typically, they build above water, on stilts, where roads have disappeared and access is by boat. Here, stores and markets are few. The history is raw, painful, in these places, where the land gives in daily to a relentless sea. Nutrition becomes a catch-as-catch-can proposition.

Beyond the reservation, in many American cities, a similar pattern of nutrition takes hold, although in starkly different ways. Although the higher tide of seeming affluence helps to lift urban and suburban neighborhoods, food deserts are common throughout America. Overall, nineteen of the 48 contiguous states are rated by USDA as below average for food security. Everywhere, underprivileged communities have become a prime marketplace for purveyors of cheap, fast-foods, laden with salt, sugar, and fats. These foods are addictive by design, meaning that the satiating of hunger compels the poor toward unhealthful lifestyles and habits. 

The character and key trigger to failed and undernourished development in our society is hunger that stands side by side with overeating of low-nutrition, convenience-foods. Health problems result from diets heavy in processed chemicals that are light on fresh, living foods. Eventually, this is what buries people, where no alternative exists. Children are the worst loss. As time passes, child victims become prisoners  to a life of indolence, addiction, and despair. Where there is access to nutritious foods, the opposite is true.

There are two "Golden Rules" of declining civilizations: (1) He that has the gold makes the rules and (2) Where inferior foods flood the marketplace, nutritious foods become unaffordable. 

The clear, bright line that this dynamic establishes is what causes disparity between rich and poor communities, the uneven access to healthy living. In general, processed food industries see poverty as an opportunity. They resist any attempt to require improvement in the food they sell and lobby hard against any kind of regulation. No surprise to discover obesity and diet-related disease occurring among urban and suburban children. Among those afflicted, a great number are destined for lives limited by health issues. Poorly equipped to participate in a highly competitive society, many of those most closely situated at the precarious edge become the first to fall, homeless or worse, further victimized by their circumstance and those who prey on the desperate. This is the circle that must be broken. Even as we debate Medicare and health insurance in the halls of Congress, these are the factors that work against any solution EVER being successful. Food security is foundational to our health, to the health of our economy, to national security, and the continued success of American democracy. How many generations will continue to ignore that reality? Clearly, the answer is, as many as it takes for us to fail or, conversely, as many as it will take for us to succeed. Much is said about free will... There is no better proof of it than this: We get to choose our future.

In the last twenty years, mechanized food production has consolidated its economic hold over an expanding population of poor people. Slick marketing, catchy jingles and tunes, toys and games offered to children, confusing and misleading labeling by manufacturers are weapons brought to bear by profit-hungry food industries against the hungry. Furthermore, because health problems associated with deficient nutrition take time to emerge, fast-food industries are able to effectively marginalize the production of healthful, organic foods by cynically attracting the purchasing power of the unsuspecting poor. Therefore, demand for quality foods is pushed to the other end of the spectrum, to those who can afford higher priced foods, and, again, the circle is unbroken... only the affluent can afford to eat healthfully. Overpopulation and poverty has served the economic needs of processed food industries (and other processors, as well) hemming producers of healthful foods into a tightly limited marketplace of affluence, where more money is held by fewer people. 

Running in parallel, industrial agriculture has become dependent on synthetic (petrochemical) fertilizers, pesticides, preservatives, and genetically modified organisms for production of major food staples needed to supply processed food producers. THAT'S WHERE THE MONEY IS. 

By now, It's clear: market forces are developing a permanently handicapped underclass that will be useful only for consumption of low-quality, but cheap, processed foods, useless for little else but very good at keeping high the cost of healthcare. Who set us up to fail so miserably... you have to ask yourself?

Globally, about one billion are hungry and one billion are overweight. Hunger feeds industries that grow by providing low-quality foods to the poorest and most overpopulated societies. And because that deficient fare is distributed only in places where a profit can be made for the effort, the poorest of the poor get no nutrition at all. On down the scale of affluence, the marginally poor tend to be overweight or morbidly obese, the penniless are starving. Which is not to say that rich people don't suffer from obesity, lack of exercise, and poor nutrition; it's just that they enjoy access to alternatives. The poor do not.

How do we achieve a more hopeful future? The answer is teaching children, affluent, middle class, and the poor to grow their own nutritious foods WHERE THEY LIVE and to learn an appreciation for the value of farming practices. Farming is a knowledge that has become all but obliterated in modern times, as we have become too well-trained in leaving food production in the hands of industrial monoliths that, in turn, are unshakeable in their tendency to be self-serving. It's time to return to the garden.

By September, 2011, The Waters Wheel will also pursue placement of Aeroponic Towers at New Orleans public and private schools; also in schools and community gardens in Birmingham and Montgomery AL, and St. Louis MO. We will provide the tools for making a difference.

Who are we, the humans, after all is said and done? Flesh and bone and the blood of ancestors, we are a verb of this Earth and our children extend us to the future. All of us, every man and woman, are fathers and mothers of times to come. More than anything else, who our children are, what they do throughout their lives is  the measure of who_we_are and how everything we will have done will be remembered. The character of our actions today is how our story will be told tomorrow.