Spirit in Action
Organic Farming VS Koch Industries - Turn Here, Sweet Corn
In Turn Here, Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, Atina Diffley shares the story of the Gardens of Eagan and Atina's personal story of learning female empowerment, organic farming, and successfully taking on an oil pipeline owned by the infamous Koch Brothers. Mixing vivid stories, earth-centered spirituality, and organic expertise, Atina is a true Spirit in Action.
- Broadcast on:
- 15 Dec 2013
- Audio Format:
- other
[music] ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helpsmeat. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service. Hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred food in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world home ♪ Today's guest, Aetina Difley, combines all the elements that inspire me to bring Spirit in action to you. Although Aetina's life and work with organic farming addresses really serious problems and needs in our world, her story, told in her new book, "Turn Here, Sweetcorn, Organic Farming Works," her story is essentially a positive story instead of the mainstream, constant stream of disaster and fear. Aetina's journey is also deeply infused with Spirit, even though it is non-conventional spirituality, not connected with religion. And not only is her witness inspirational, it has, with the help of many good folks, a happy ending, although the ends not here, really. In the mid-1980s, Aetina became, with her husband Martin, part of "Gardance of Egan," the organic farm supplying the co-ops and many other places in the Twin Cities of Minnesota with organic produce. After losing their original farm to the encroachment of suburbia and eminent domain, they relocated further out, only to have the existence of their new farm eventually threatened by an oil pipeline owned by a subsidiary of the infamous Koch Brothers. The happy ending, David, or at least the Difleys, scored a victory over the Koch Goliath, a personal victory, but also an important victory for organic farms in general. Aetina Difley is an organic consultant, a great storyteller, and an infectious font of Spirit, and she joins us by phone from the Twin Cities of Minnesota. Aetina, welcome to Spirit in Action. Thank you so much for having me here. I just can't tell you what a delight it is to have you here. Just reading your book, it's a tremendous book. I love the whole experience. First of all, thank you for writing "Turn Here, Sweetcorn," organic farming works. Thank you. And even more, maybe, I want to thank you for living it out. There's a lot of blood, sweat, and tears that goes into this as well as the joy and the sunlight, but it's not necessarily an easy road that you've traveled. No, but life is just full of adventures and experiences. And as long as you grow from them and come on the other side, they're all worth it. I do have one question or issue maybe to start with. There's kind of this overshadowing that starts out the book, because the first chapter of your book is that horrendous hailstorm story. Why did you choose to start out with that one in your book? You know, I really wanted readers to understand. It's not real until the food is on the table. That farmers say so many challenges that really can be the end of the farm or the crop. And the farming since the metaphor there for all of the various challenges, there are kind of a mystery that life manages to survive. And the resiliency of life at the close of the book, the hailstorm there, really comes together for me as the writer, where throughout the book I'm just asking, why is there hell and what is its purpose? And it starts to have meaning and purpose for me in the final health term in the book, where I start to really recognize my own resiliency and also the resiliency of all life. And that is something that we really need to remember. Just how resilient life is. When things seem really bad, things do come back. Again, this is your life story that we're talking about. One of the things that's a recurrent theme comes up throughout it, something that I think Martin taught you. You had this argument at the beginning that he wanted to be a gardener and you wanted to be a farmer. And particularly he didn't want to be a blood farmer. But the way I read this book, you were a total blood, sweat and tear farmers that you stayed with it no matter what it cost you. That is true. So we would have this sort of silly semantics argument about if we were gardeners or farmers. And, you know, the man had 30 tractors. So I would say, well, how can you be a gardener? You have 30 tractors. But it was a sort of conversation that couples have. I said farmers see people and sell food. And he'd go up with market gardeners that had said between cities. So that was his basis of the definition. But his definition of a blood farmer, we actually weren't blood farmers. It's true we stuck in there through some pretty tough stuff. But his definition really doesn't include a relationship with the land. And for him, a gardener really had a relationship with land and nature. That relationship was more important than the ego attachment to being a farmer or making a lot of money as a farmer. And that was really the bottom line of why he defined himself as a gardener. So when we think about hanging in the shoe thick and thin and that concept of a blood farmer, we always sell the responsibility to the land, that spiritual relationship we have with the land and nature above that desire to be successful in the marketplace as a farmer. So the thought is that a blood farmer will rape the land in order to make the business a success is at it. I took it that it was, you know, even drained all the blood out of me, I'm going to make this work. Yeah, Martin's definition was that the identity of being a farmer was more important for the blood farmer than the relationship. And for him, the relationship with the land and the years was more important. You and I actually have a point of intersection that goes back to the early '80s, the late '70s, early '80s for you. Do you want to talk about Anita Kanan and what parts she played in your, maybe coming out of your cocoon or sprouting or however you want to put it? I'd love to talk about Anita. You know, I grew up in a family of really strong women that became before me when I think of the women in my life that are my ancestors. I just see a long line of women in the garden and feeding people and getting birth and taking care of crops and animals. They were very strong farm women, but they were also very subordinate and they very much allowed others to set their parameters and their roles in the world and their ability to be powerful and interact in the outside world outside of their families. They really limited that. So that was the model that I grew up with as a child and a lot of victim thinking and a lot of giving up of one's power as a female. So when I was, I left home at 17 and ended up taking care of a woman named Anita Kanan who was in her '90s. I was her physical caretaker, but she was really a role model for me and a spiritual mentor in an example of a different role I could have as a female. She had been a suffragette in the '20s and the teens and had lived a very unusual life for a woman of her era, never had married, had traveled the world extensively. She really modeled for me that I could set my own parameters and that I could stop giving up my power. And those sorts of lessons for a young person are very powerful because they can set us off on a new trajectory. For me, it took a long time to really develop the full understanding and the actual incorporating of this new way of being into my life. After I left Anita's home, I got married and my first marriage was violent. And I went back into victim thinking and victim patterns without even recognizing it. And it took five years before I really got to realize, "Oh, no, this isn't working for me. It might be working for him. He's not going to change it. So if I don't like it, I'm going to be the one to change it." And that was when I was able to step out of that marriage and step out of that victim role. But I included in the story, not because I wanted to talk about domestic abuse, but I wanted to show the change in my character in my own life and how often we really give up our power. If we really want to make change happen, we need to really get to the point where we say, "You know, I'm here. I'm part of this whole thing. I'm going to be engaged and really speak our own truth." And I didn't do that for a lot of my life. So that was a gift I really got from Anita, and it just took a long time to cultivate and really come into its own. And the gift I got from Anita was that she left her land, the land where you cared for her. She left that land to the Quaker meeting down in Milwaukee, Milwaukee Friends meeting. So when the meeting took control of the land, when they started preparing it, I was the first person who was designated to be kind of a steward for the land to help manage the care of the land. So I feel in some ways, even though I didn't know you at the time, that right at that time you were passing a torch on to me. It seems to me you had a very close connection with that land to the five and a half acres there right on the Milwaukee River. That land was really a sanctuary for me because I had grown up on a farm with real strong relationships with that. The piece of land I grew up on in the woods, and then when I left my parents home, all of a sudden I was living in Milwaukee and really feeling disconnected from nature. So Anita's land was really a sanctuary for me. There's actually a tree behind the Quaker building there that's a pine tree and the very top must have been bent very young because it didn't break. And it's a 90 degree angle. So you can climb that tree and get to the top and then lay out on the part that it bent like a bow right facing the sky. You can get absolutely laying on there like it's a bed. When I lived there in the late 70s, that's where I slept every night if I didn't rain on top of that tree. Well, one of the reasons I invited you on the program, Athena, is not only that you have this wonderful connection with the land, the thing that's lived out through the farms or the gardens that you and Martin provided food for the community there in the Minneapolis area for so long. But it's because as kind of a crescendo maybe of that gardening career, you had a victory over a subsidiary of the Koch brothers, which is so inspirational to us as little people, can the little people win? In some ways, I feel like the recent election that in some ways that is a sign that, okay, yeah, the big money doesn't always buy everything. Can't buy the elections, can't buy the courts. So you had this victory and it's not just your victory, it's a victory for organic farming certainly and for people who want to have good food. You want to talk a little bit about the overview of that struggle with the pipeline and the Koch brothers? Yeah, I would really love to because it really ties back to Anita and being empowered. We received a letter from Koch Industries informing us that they were intending to build a crew or pipeline and that it was going to cross through our farm. And I'm really embarrassed to tell you the first thing I did, but it's very important. I ran down the machine shop where my husband was working and we have that letter in his face and I told him about the pipeline and that it was Koch Industries, the second largest private owned company in the world. I told them he had to call them and then I went into a long spiel about what he should say. And he just looked at me and said, they put these things where they want and you have all the answers, you call them. And this is the part that's really embarrassing. I said, well, they will listen to you better because you're a man. You know, in that moment, I had a big problem and it wasn't going to work for me. I had already been through the loss of our first family farm and I knew what it meant for Bobos to come to here and tear up those fields. I knew we would never grow on that land again if those Bobos just came in here. But I didn't believe that I had any power to do anything about it. And I didn't think that I had the knowledge. I don't know anything about public utility commissions or pipelines or legal battles. And I went into this point of powerlessness. So that's such an important lesson because those fears, when we allow ourselves to believe we're not adequate or that we can't succeed and we give up, we're giving away our power. And we really have to do the reverse. We're here. We might as well engage. We're not always going to succeed immediately at what we are trying to do. But it was clearly a lesson I received from Anita. Sometimes we might not get the results we're after and we might just start something in motion. The suffragette movement took 70 years to get the vote for women. The people who started it weren't even alive to see it accomplished. And it was so worth it. Now we look back and it's really hard to imagine something as ridiculous as women could invoke. It's just sort of unfathomable and young women today barely can even believe it. But that's those sort of efforts that we really just all have to be engaged in. And if there's one message I really want people to get from Turn Here Sweet Corn is the importance of being involved and engaged in fighting those good fights. And as you said earlier, when the people work together, it gives us far more power than money can have. And it takes a lot of people to fight Goliath and it takes a long time and a lot of effort. But it is really doable and it is really a responsibility to do it. And so what is your estimation of why your struggle against this pipeline subsidiary of Koch Brothers? Why was it successful whereas so many people, I mean Martin's response tells it. You know, it's like they're going to take what they want. He didn't even think that he could take on Goliath or the super Goliath of Koch Brothers. You know, a lot of times it takes one person to be a leader and tell people what they need. You know, it's definitely the role that I took in that case. Nothing would have happened if someone had stepped forward and taken that role. And any of us, every one of us can take that role. We just have to decide to do it. When we work for love and for life, we have huge numbers of allies. That's something I really saw on this cold case. Just I had allies everywhere in the media at the Department of Agriculture at the Public Futures Commission because I was really working for life. When we started -- I hired a wonderful attorney, Paula Mackeby, and in our first conversation, I asked her if she thought we could stop the pipeline altogether. And when we looked at that, we saw that to stop it, we'd have to show that society didn't need the pipeline. So this was one of the great ironies of this particular legal proceeding because as organic vegetable farmers, we could show that if society adopted organic agriculture, we would use 40% less energy. We had the research to show that in a court of law, but only 0.07% of agriculture is organic right now. So we couldn't show that it was realistic in the immediate future that society would do so. So we couldn't show that society didn't need it. And the great irony was that here I was a small organic vegetable farm that produced my fertility with plants and the energy of the sun in a legal proceeding with coal, who not only is this crude oil company, but then one of the largest manufacturers is synthetic nitrogen. So that was really a pretty good irony, I thought. But what we saw we could do, we really focused on what was possible. We said if we tried to stop it altogether, we are not likely to be successful. So we cited that our goal would be that we would write an organic mitigation plan that specifically outlined the practices that the pipeline company had to practice to protect the soils and certification of organic farms. And we knew that we could prove that an organic farm was a valuable natural resource. We had the research to show that and that we could show that an organic farm provides benefits to society that will be on the food produced. So that was the argument that we presented and the research that we brought to the legal record. We talked about ecosystem services and how organic farming practices increased the carbon in the soil and in the process sequester atmospheric carbon 15 to 20% more carbon in the soils. That's a big ecosystem service for all of society, it affects climate change issues. We showed how our pest management practices involved increasing the biological diversity and providing habitat for the beneficial species that managed our pests and disease. Again, another really important ecosystem service that society received, we showed how our waterways were covered and that we were having less nitrogen loss into the water, which ends up in the dead zone of the Gulf of Mexico. We're speaking with Athena Diffley, she's author of a new book, Turn Here, Sweet Corn, Organic Farming Works. You're listening to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark Helps me, your host for this Northern Spirit Radio Production website, northernspiritradio.org and on our site. You have more than seven years of guests like Athena making great differences in the world. On our site, you can listen to those programs, you can download them, you can find the stations where we're broadcast, you can connect up via iTunes and listen via podcast and you can leave us comments. We do need to hear from you to know what's going to be helpful and meaningful for you. You can also leave donations and donations is how we pay for this work because we want to make a difference for you. You can show that appreciation by donating on northernspiritradio.org. Again, Athena Diffley is here. Athena, right away I forgot. We should mention where your name comes from. You were born, Tina. I was and I never liked my name. All the teammates I knew were sort of did see and they had a lot of learn to helplessness. So I must have known as a young child that I had to find some ways to circumvent my own learned helplessness and giving up on my power. But Athena is Anita backwards. So I simply added the A as a young woman after knowing Anita. Were you also dyslexic, Athena and Anita? I'm going to say really often people see a Tina and they say Anita. So that is common. Well, you were talking about your fight with the Koch brothers and first of all, I want to say that again, not having ever met Paula Maccabee, she deserves her own book or series of books that you described calling all of these lawyers. I don't know what it was, 20 plus lawyers or whatever you've gone through and all of them say they have conflict of interest because the long web of the Koch brothers has caught them all. You get a hold of Paula and she says, "Oh, good. I'm going to love this one." So this is going to be fun and that really was her attitude. She's born to fight and she fights for the environment. When I asked her why she wasn't already on container like everyone else, she said, "I don't take polluters." That's kind of hard because I think almost all of us are polluters, almost all of us drive fossil fuel cars or... You absolutely are, yeah. It's hard to be completely pure, but I'm so glad that her attitude was there. If you don't mind me asking, this cost you a lot of blood, sweat, tears to fight this. I mean, you described the total exhaustion. You went through fighting this, studying. You had to approach it from so many different directions. You also had to put down some money for Paula because she's not doing this completely pro bono. If you hadn't had some spare change, would this have just been a lost cause or was the number really large? Oh, I spent about $45,000, but I will actually tell you that I went out in the kale patch. We grew about two acres of kale for the Twin Cities community. The pipeline would have gone right to that patch and one of the very first things I did was I went out to that field and I staked where it was going to go and I pounded a stake in the kale field and tied string to it and then went to the next field I would have gone to, which was a field of nitrogen sequestering hairy batch that we were going to build fertility and I pounded a stake in that field and tied the string to it. And then it went through a waterway which was the beneficial insect habitat cherry for the pest control. I put a stake in that. The next field had been rye incorporated into the soil getting it ready for planting and it was covered with a thick shimmering coat of spider webs all just ready to do our pest management for us. I pounded a stake in there and I went across the entire farm like that marking out where the pipeline would run. And when I got to the end and looked back and could see it so visually, that was a moment where I knew I had to really fight this. So I went to the kale patch and I said to the kale, I closed my eyes and I pictured little kale ferries because I do talk to the plants on a pretty regular basis and I pictured those little kale ferries and I just told the kale, we were allies in this, that I have a human voice to speak in courts, it doesn't. You know, in the United States, to protect nature, we have to show a loss to human beings. That's how our legal process works. Nature doesn't have a right of its own. We can't just say this tree, this soil, this river has a right to exist and it should be protected. So that's the legal process and you asked why we succeeded, we followed the legal process and sometimes the legal process is stupid. It's not a good process. But you don't have time when you're in the middle of the fight to change the process, you have to work with what's there. And so I said to that kale, here we are allies, I will be your human voice. That's my job of representing you. And your job is to be the healthiest, most vital, resilient plant you can be because we're going to be showing the Department of Agriculture how organic systems work. We're going to bring them out here and you're going to be the example. So you've got to be the best you can be and you have to pay for it. So I directly charged the kale crop with the task of paying for the legal counsel and it did. Our kale sales went up the exact amount that we spent on the pipeline case. $45,000? That's a lot of kale. Yeah, we sold over $80,000 a kale that year. But they haven't jumped that much and that was out of two acres. I mean, this patch did exactly what I asked it to do of really showing up everything it could be. I never saw a yield like that in my life. But you seem to have friends in high places and in low places on the earth. I think kale is in high places. There's a story you tell previously about a field that needs to be protected. You tell about how you put up a deer barrier, an imaginary one in your mind, but you sent the thought out to the deer. There was a deer barrier there that they had to go around this field. And they did it. Of course, in a future time, you did something similar and it didn't work. Why did it work the first time and not the second time? Well, I had success when I really needed it and I haven't had success when I haven't really needed it. The situation with the deer, I really needed it. But you asked why I was able to rise to this challenge and it really goes back to the loss of our first farm and the experience I had done, which when I started farming, I was a young woman and I joined my husband on his family's land. It was fourth generation. He was fourth generation. Our children were the fifth generation. And this piece of land, you know, had been in the family since 1850s and it still had intact ecosystems on it. It was 120 acres. About 30 or 40 were killable. And the rest of the land was in trees, flowers, fruit trees, bushes, there was grasses. And we at that point in my life, I didn't know the phrases ecosystem services or biological diversity had attacked. But that's how we were managing our farming systems. That impact ecosystem was just there because it had never been destroyed. So to go forward a little quicker than the book does, the city of Egan had never left any land zone for agriculture. So eventually, that land was threatened by eminent domain for school. And they only needed 20 of the 100 acres, but when they built the school, they brought the soil water across the land to service the school, which caused sewer and water assessments because the land is considered more valuable now because it can be developed. And when that happens, it's really the news around the land's neck because there's 11% interest on that assessment. That means every seven years, what is owed is doubled. So a half a million becomes a million becomes two million becomes four million. And families have to make really difficult decisions. Oftentimes, there's multiple family members. They might want different things. And in this case, there were four of Martin's Ants who owned the land, and they did decide to sell. So what happened next really affected this pipeline fight because this was the land where my children and my husband really had first gotten in touch with the divine, where they saw the life process. And the land was really the sanctuary. It was that for me too, but for my husband and my children, it was the first place that had happened. You know, because they had the experience there as infants and young children. When they started to grow those, we were allowed to farm on the land that wasn't yet developed because it took them four years to do all of it. And they came in, and they took every tree, every bush, every bladed grass, every flower, every fruit. So all of the species that were using that land as habitat for their food and shelter left, and they even removed the living soil. So there was no life left. The land that we were still farming was immediately adjacent. I mean, those bulldozers came literally up to the edge of the crops. So we were growing crops on land that was adjacent to land with no life, and we couldn't do it. It was a complete ecological disaster collapse. So we didn't have any species to manage our pests, and we were overrun by pests and disease. When it would rain, there was no soil life to take in the water. And so the subsoil on the adjacent land would just run into our fields and bury them. So seeing their soil real, you know, we learned in like fourth grade about ecosystem services, only they didn't call them that when I was a kid. But we learned about how the trees purify air, and the soil purifies the water, and the provisioning services, and the atmospheric management services. And that's just intellectual. We don't feel it as kids. It's in our heads. I didn't really understand it at a heart level until I went through this experience of that. We are utterly dependent upon nature. We simply cannot survive about it. And as a society, we just don't really talk about that that much. We do talk about environmentalism, but this utter dependency isn't on most people's consciousness. So when I was faced with the pipeline, I really went back to that past experience and knew what it meant. And that I really had an obligation to protect this land and other organic farms, and to really take this as an opportunity to make a legal record about why organic farming systems are different, how they're different, and why it matters. So on the one hand, I accomplished very little. All I really accomplished was that the Public Utilities Commission, Department of Commerce, the state of Minnesota has a better understanding of organic systems, and that there are protections in place now to protect them. But doing that was a really important step for the bigger goal of changing our agricultural systems to systems that continue to provide the food and the needs that we have, but also protect the environment and nature. That is the ultimate goal. You said something in the course of talking about that, you compared the amount of servings of food that you get out of an organically farmed vegetable patch like yours, versus what a commercial farm does. And it's something mind-stabbing. Do you remember the proportions? Well, you know, I have that page open here. It's actually not a comparison with a non-organic farm. It was just a listing of what we produced on our farm. But it is a nice little paragraph. It says, "How many servings does Gardens vegan produce in a year?" I start with broccoli. In 2005, we shipped 117,950 pounds. All in one place, it would have filled 7.2 semis. It sounds like quite a bit of broccoli, but I start to understand the impact a small farm can have on its community when I figure out it's approximately 535,000 servings. It's still abstract until I calculate 133,440 moments of sweet corn pleasure. That is human faces smiling. As are the 618,651 servings of watermelon. Finally, I calculate the entire farm. In 2005, nearly 3 million servings of produce were sold. Does that answer the question? Why does it matter if we have local organic food? This is about food security and stability. We need a lot more local organic farms, and we need to protect and preserve them. A lot of times, we get caught up in the question of yields and nutrition as organic versus non-organic, more high yield and nutritious. I think we're really asking the wrong question there. We do know that organic is capable of the same yields. We've seen that again and again, and we've seen that organic systems feel better in drought and times of weather distress because of the organic matter in the soil. They have more resiliency. They're based on a broader base of biological diversity and capacity of water-holding hydrology and other type of microbial benefits. There isn't any question about whether organic systems are capable of feeding people. Even though I know there's not a question, the wrong question. Albert Einstein has a really great quote that if he had a serious problem to solve and he had one hour to solve it, he would spend 55 minutes figuring out what the question is, and then he would have answered 5 minutes. That's really what we need to be doing as a society right now is really getting the right question. We get somewhere and the right question is not organic farming capable of feeding the world because we know organic farming is actually crucial to see the world. That research has been well done and it's true even more so in several countries than in the United States. They need organic systems to survive when we look long-term. For me, the question really has to have a long-term look and it has to go thousands of years. What do we need to be doing in our food and agricultural systems to ensure that we are protecting these resources that are so crucial to our survival? Absolutely crucial. Again, the book we're talking about is Turn Here Sweet Corn, Organic Farming Works by Athena Diffley. She's joining us today for Spirit in Action. You know, Athena, the thing that I was remembering, I was mixing up a couple different things in the book, it was actually, you refer to how much productivity you get off different farms. On page 311, you say that a conventional field crop, the value on a per acre basis of conventional field crops is only in the range of $200-$300 per acre and that gardens of egan yields range between $4,000 and $70,000 and we've heard so much about this loss of family farms. But there's been a growth in small farms but it's been in the CSA, it's been in this organic field and I guess that's a literal and metaphorical field I guess here. Your career with Gardens of Egan I think went from 1985 up to 2008, you must have seen an immense number of other organic farmers emerging out of the woodwork. Yeah, you know, I want to say a couple of things about that and one I just want to be clear for the listeners who don't have the whole book in front of them that that comparison and dollars was between corn and soybean crops and organic vegetable crops. So it's a very different crop, it's not just an organic versus non-organic comparison. And also, rural corn and soybeans are worth much more than that right now. We've had this huge increase in those costs just to be clear. But what we have really seen as the commodity systems moved into rural communities in the 50, 60, 70s, is we really saw this collapse of rural communities. People who third want their neighbors land when they wanted their neighbors. So we went through a real transition where if growth communities were very dependent upon each other and had very tight-knit communities, they really were a regional food and farming system. And that became unimportant and that goes a little bit back to Martin's definition of the blood farmer about what's really important to be creating here. So we really saw a collapse in all rural communities for the most part. There's very few communities in the United States that are rural and farming communities that didn't suffer this in school of clothes and husband's clothes and main streets were deserted. And one of the main things we've seen reversing this trend is small scale, direct marketed and organic or agroecological types of agriculture. It's made it possible for beginning farmers to enter agriculture and to be part of that economic cycle. The economic realities of commodity agriculture right now are really difficult for beginning farmer to enter the price of land, the cost of equipment, getting involved in that scale of production is pretty impossible. These are some pretty serious issues because the average age of an American farmer is in the late 50s. In the next 15 years, the estimate is that over 50% of agricultural land is going to change hands. So the question of who our future farmers are going to be is really a big one. And we hear a lot about a lot of bashing of industrial agriculture and the problems associated. And I want to really make the point that we should continue to be really grateful to all of our farmers. We need them all and not be blaming them for the problems. They really are doing what society has asked them to do and the system and the universities have asked them to do this. So it's important that we start asking them for something different to change the agricultural practices to really protect the environment, to create these regional food systems so we have security and stability. And to support them in that act of doing so. And there's so many ways we can support them. The advantages that those direct farm markets are having is that support is very direct. And it's the quickest and easiest way to really make this system change on our own personal level is by purchasing direct from a farmer who has practices that are benefiting society. And if you don't have someone like that in your community, if you can buy from a retailer who buys direct, that's another great way to do it. That market support really enables a farmer to get out there and make the decisions that are going to be really beneficial for the land. Other ways we can support this transition and on a larger scale with farmers at our commodity farmers and not producing foods that are sold direct to consumers is through policy. Get involved with the farm bill, get involved with the USDA. It doesn't take a lot of work and the information is easily available. I encourage people to sign up for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition Action Alert. You can go online to their website. That's the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition. And they'll just send out a simple action alert when letters are needed to the legislators or calls made. It doesn't take a lot of time. They'll have all the information there in a real simple format to help you understand the issues. Those calls make all the difference in the world, and I didn't mention this on a Coke case. Over 4,500 people wrote letters to support our one little effort. They made all the difference in the world, and this was informed citizen input, not public rhetoric. They didn't just shout angry words. They talked very articulately about organic farming systems and how they work and why they were important and what they meant in their own personal life. Those calls to our legislators, that changes the USDA's policies and changing those policies really changes what happens on the land. And I'm so thankful that you've been leading this kind of effort. You gave their website, but you haven't mentioned your own yet. You can find the book, "Turn Here, Sweet Corn, Organic Farming Works" by AtinaDiffley@AtinaDiffley.com. And Atina is A-T-I-N-A. Diffley is D-I-F-F-L-E-Y.com. You can of course find a link from Word and Spirit Radio, and you can also find a link to the organic consulting business that she and her husband Martin do. It's called Organic Farming Works, and so you'll find that at organicfarmingworks.com. The book is marvelous. All of you listeners, you hear this, read this book. You'll find not only the heart of people and the heart of nature, you'll find facts. And you were just talking, Atina, about commercial farmers and the incredibly dedicated and hard work that they do. But you do talk about some of the chemicals that are the norms there, and you talk about genetically modified organisms, and you talk about pesticides. You mentioned some stuff about anhydrous ammonia that I hadn't known. Evidently, one of the reasons we got into all the chemical fertilizers that we have following World War I is because we had this material that was being used to produce weapons during World War I that now we wanted to find a peacetime use for, so anhydrous ammonia is evidently one of them. Yeah, it was originally invented for weapon making as the source of nitrogen needed in bombs. And then once that was accomplished, it was peacetime conversion from more time use. So it is very interesting that that's true also about a number of our pesticides and the basics of our pesticides. A lot of some of our pesticides come from mustard gas, for example. So they turn weapons of mass destruction become crop protection farmers. It's funny how the same substance can have two such different purposes. How can something go from being a weapon of mass destruction to being crop protection? But, you know, the word "side" on the end of pesticide and herbicide and fungicide, the meaning of it is to kill killer. It's just very important to know and to remember that when we use those products, they kill the species that we're trying to kill, but they also kill other species. And many of these species are somewhat invisible to us. We don't see that it's happening or know that it's happening, especially below the soil in the ground. There are more species in one tablespoon of soil than there are above ground on the entire planet. You know, very few people know that a tablespoon of soil has over 50 million microbes. It's got miles of fungus. How can it be miles of something in one tablespoon? It's a very minute species. There's 10,000 protozoas and nematodes in that one tablespoon of soil. There's billions and billions of bacteria in from the cells. And those are absolutely crucial to the universe. So when we look at many of the major problems that we are now facing today, whether it's climate change, whether it's world hunger, whether it's water pollution, the solution to many of these problems is really in how we treat our soil. So it's really great that we understand so much more about ourselves now than we did in the past. You know, we actually have science now that can trace the DNA of soil microbial life. So we're developing much deeper understanding now of how our farming practices affect that soil life and how the different forms of soil life interact with each other and what we can do to maximize them. They have a lot of disease fighting properties. So when we encourage the ones that fight crop diseases can be a great way to replace pesticides by simply building our soils and creating healthy or soil systems. So those understandings are getting much bigger every single day. We're getting a lot of new research on that sort of information and it's getting that much easier to develop organic farming systems that are that much more resilient. Before like when I started farming, we didn't have a lot of bad information. We had centuries old practices on soil building and we knew that soil building worked and that it was a very effective way to create fertility and disease and pest management. But we didn't have the information to find tweak it, which is what we're starting to get now. So it's a very exciting time. We still have a number of laws and practices that make this an uphill battle. Unfortunately, people like you and Martin are fighting these battles. And so we do have victories over pipelines and the Koch brothers as they do business as usual. One of the things that you talk about in the book, and again, at the same time that I was reading a very intense personal journey of yours, yours, Martin, and also for your kids, Eliza and Maize. At the same time that I was reading that, I was getting so much information. For instance, I hadn't really thought about the drift that happens between a commercial farmer and right next to an organic farmer. And not just the pesticides, but the GMOs, the genetically modified strains that are all of a sudden infecting and ruining your food. Is there any hope for that in the future? What has to happen? That is a really tough one. The GMOs drift is not going well out there. No one's really winning lawsuits where they get drifted off. There's been lawsuits where the GMO company has sued farmers whose crops were contaminated by drift with a pollen from a GMO plant. And the farmer that had actually been drifted upon was being accused in court of stealing the genetic material, and they lost. So this one is really serious, and I don't really know how that one's going to move forward because it's just really not succeeding right now. It's a good thing for people to know some of the costs that organic farmers face that make the product more expensive. A good example would be that an organic farmer has a buffer strip around their production to help protect them from chemical drift and GMO drift from their neighbors. So that means that farmer has to actually take land out of production. We have about 30 foot wide strips on ours, and we have tried to plant them to trees and other physical barriers. That's an expense. And why is it falling on the organic farmers' responsibility? It really should be the person who's using the chemical. It's actually is illegal to drift in most states to take on that cost. So there are a lot of associated costs to being certified organic, or to just practicing organically, whether one's certified or not, and it does come out in the price. A number of the other things affecting the price of organic are scale issues because organic is still a small portion of the whole agriculture and food system. It just costs more to get the products we need and the services that we need on our farms. They're not as readily available. So that's an economy of scale issue. And the people that are supporting organic now, they're really change makers. They're supporting the change to this new system. My hat is really off to them for their commitment to make that commitment and support to make this happen. We can't do it without them. And we need future generations to live on the continuing battle, the continuing struggle in this direction. And I want to ask you something, it may be a tender issue when you lost the first land, the first home of Gardens of Eagan. That was particularly hard. You describe how Mays just lamented it. He wept about it. But you also describe how Eliza went inward. And now Eliza, I believe, is a nurse. And Mays is working with solar power, both two wonderful people doing good work, but they're not on the farm. And I sometimes figure that personally speaking, I have an uncle whose son was growing up and was going to take over the farm. And so my uncle made the extra effort to continue the farm. At one point he was saying maybe I should give this up. But he's got a son and then his son made the decision not to stay on the farm. And that was heartbreak for the family. And I can't imagine it having been less than difficult for you. Of course, your kids have to be themselves. But the fact that we need to pass this on to future generations seems so much at the heart of what we need to do to have a different world. Yeah, you know, for our kids we really told them to follow their hearts and finally they loved. So that was what we told them all along. So as much as you really wished your kids would do the farm, I think we were pretty realistic that that's not what we necessarily wanted for them unless it was their passion. And it really wasn't either their passion. They both had a passion for the relationship with land. And to me, that was more important. There's a huge revolution going on right now of people that want to farm and want to get back to the land. And those people with a little support, they are going to be our future farmers. So maybe our kids don't farm. We've had so many workers over the years. We've incubated beginning farmers here on our own farm by setting aside a few acres for them. And they've had their own farm and then gone on to buy land and upscale their farm and become a successful farm. To me, there are beginning farmers and I feel really that they carry on the work. That's as important or more than it was happened to be my own blood children that took it on. And I think for my kids, the trauma they experienced when they lost their first farm was really so severe that I think it would have taken an awful lot of them to actually come back here and farm. For my daughter, for both of my kids, this really was the land there and even on our first farm really was where they got in touch of the divine. And so to see absolutely no regard for that spiritual relationship at such a young age was an extreme trauma. It really taught them very young that their parents were not all powerful beings who could protect them from anything, which is a hard lesson for a young child to learn. Usually young teenagers figure that out and they go through their cynical stage and seeing everyone as hypocrites, but they learned it before they showed up. That's really what the loss of naivety is and it was like, it was like a rape for them. The land was being raped and there was no regard for the life there and they felt that because that's where the thing was got is that land. So they reacted very differently. My daughter really withdrew from our relationship and our family. We really were a family farming, not just a farm family. And she stopped engaging in the field. She wouldn't help at our roadside stand. She became a compulsive health cleaner. These were all really classic rape victim symptoms, not that I look back. And when we got to our new farm, she didn't reattach. She really went a different route as a young teenager. Her way of healing really was two relationships with people. My son reacted differently. He was very young. He was three or four when it started. And he became very violent and aggressive and destructive, really acting up the violence that he witnessed on land. And when he got to our new farm, he did reattach and really had a good relationship with this land. I always thought that it was partly because he had expressed it, not repressed it. My daughter really held it in. So they just have a really different reaction to the same loss. And that's very powerful in the book turn here is requiring because the reader has the opportunity to go through that experience vicariously. I find they tend to then get in touch with their own grief about loss of relationship, whether it's with nature or with other people or with animals. And that is very powerful because they really come to it on the other side, getting white matters. This relationship is really crucial to our wellness. And then they become powered by the coke legal battle at the end and leave the book, not only getting white matters, but in power to do something about it. So if there is one thing that I want your listeners to really leave this interview with is the concept of engaged optimism. Because it's so easy to get discouraged, many of these battles we have to face, whether it's civil rights, whether it's sexism or racism, whether it's environmental issues. We're up against some really powerful forces. Oftentimes it can just take so long to even see any level of success. So that engaged optimism is a really important attitude that we're here and we might as well get engaged. And that every one of us engaged in our own communities, it really adds up. Sometimes our efforts might seem small. It might be teaching a child about how to plan a seed or helping someone plan a garden or taking really good food to your community. Food is a great place to make these intersections. Everybody eats when you bring really good food together at the table. It really makes it a lot easier to talk about some of our differences because we're focused on our commonality. And that level of engagement from whatever we are with whatever strengths we have and staying on top of the despair, practicing a form of optimism is really crucial. We need everybody's efforts. And I think we also need, besides community, we need that touch of the divine. And you referred to it several times. And there's one place in the book where you mentioned about God in the rain or God is the rain, the life-bringing hope for our future. You note that life-giving part of rain, that is God, but you also note the destruction that can happen like in the hailstorm or whatever, or the flooding. That emerged as a message for me at Quaker Meeting, a week ago, where, yeah, our ideas about the divine and the blessing that it is for us sometimes looks like a disaster too. You also mentioned for you that the outdoors is your church, which I just find the whole book. "Turn Here Sweet Corn" is just a wonderful, wonderful book of a personal and a spiritual and a communal and a very earth-based journey for our future. And I thank you for writing about it, and I thank you for being here today for spirit and action. Thank you for having me. Let me see if we'll be a treat. You know, when we face challenges in life, it's just important to really see them as opportunities. When I would get really discouraged with the Koch brothers, I would just say to myself, how many people have the opportunity to take on one of the largest privately owned companies in the world? You know, I found one way to just kind of boost myself up. If it took a little bit of a dare and maybe a little bit of a breaker to attitude, it didn't matter. It helped me see it as an opportunity to do something and make a change and to get engaged. And if we all go out watching for those opportunities and when bad things happen, say, what's the opportunity? And that's, I think we'll find we have plenty of places to engage and really make a difference. And you do make a difference, Athena. Again, Athena Difley, you can find her via organicfarmingworks.com. She also has a site, atinadifley.com. You can come via nordonspiritradio.org. The new book is "Turn Here Sweet Corn Organic Farming Works." Thanks again, Athena. Thanks to you. Have a great day. The theme music for this program is "Turning of the World," performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world home. With every voice, with every song, we will move this world home. And our lives will feel the echo of our healing. You
In Turn Here, Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works, Atina Diffley shares the story of the Gardens of Eagan and Atina's personal story of learning female empowerment, organic farming, and successfully taking on an oil pipeline owned by the infamous Koch Brothers. Mixing vivid stories, earth-centered spirituality, and organic expertise, Atina is a true Spirit in Action.