Growers Cover Up Local Produce

  • If the hydroponics trend continues, strawberries could be available locally everywhere. (Photo courtesy of the USDA)

It’s the middle of winter and you’re craving some fresh,
juicy strawberries. Go to your local grocery store and
you’ll find lots of packaged strawberries shipped from the
west coast or down south. For locally grown strawberries,
you have to wait till June if you live in the Midwest. But
that’s starting to change. Jennifer Guerra has the story:

Transcript

It’s the middle of winter and you’re craving some fresh,
juicy strawberries. Go to your local grocery store and
you’ll find lots of packaged strawberries shipped from the
west coast or down south. For locally grown strawberries,
you have to wait till June if you live in the Midwest. But
that’s starting to change. Jennifer Guerra has the story:


I like strawberries. A lot. There’s strawberry rhubarb pie
for starters, strawberry and spinach salad, strawberry
shortcake. But I’ve been on this kick lately of trying to
buy only locally-grown produce, which is admittedly hard to do when you
live in the Midwest, especially with strawberries. Most of
the year, they’re shipped in from Florida and California,
but there is one place in Michigan were you can still pick
strawberries as late as October.


(Guerra:) “The redder the better…that’s too green”


It’s snowing out. I’ve got on the winter coat, the hat, the gloves,
and I’m picking strawberries with Kelly Bowerman.


(Guerra:) “So, which one is this?”


(Bowerman:) “This is a tribute. We have aroma, diamante, and
tribute. Aroma is a nice big berry, diamante’s even a bigger berry,
but it just don’t turn red, it’s oranged-colored, and tribute is smaller with a lot more
flavor.”


(Guerra:) “Alright, let’s get all three. Let’s get a
variety.”


Bowerman calls his strawberries three finger berries, which
he says are roughly the same size as the ones shipped in
from California


(Bowerman and Guerra try strawberries)


And frankly, the strawberries better taste
good, seeing as how Bowerman spent 60,000 dollars on them.


Well, not on the actual berries themselves, but on the
hydroponics system he uses to grow the berries. With
hydroponics, he still grows his strawberries outside, but
instead of planting them in the ground, the runners sit in
pots above the ground in a solution of warm water and
minerals. And since there’s no soil, the strawberries can
grow from June to October without the roots freezing over at
the first sign of cold weather. Still, there’s only so much
a hydroponics system can do on its own:


“He’s gonna find out that people want strawberries at
Christmastime, and so the next step will be to put a
greenhouse over that system and then we have 12 months.”


Merle Jensen is a professor of plant science at the
University of Arizona and he knows his hydroponics. He
knows growers all across the country who’ve started moving
their hydroponics systems inside greenhouses so they can
artificially light the crops. That way, they can produce
year round. But wait, there’s more:


“All of our leafy vegetables – high value fruits like
strawberries – will all be under cover in the next 5 years.
I’m sure of that. It’s a rapid expansion, not only in the
United States, but we see it in Canada, Mexico. So, this is the wave
of the future.”


A future that Jensen swears will taste delicious:


“You know what? I can say that because we can control the
nutrition, the salinity within the root system such that we can
program that product to have more acid and more sugars and better
flavor, and we can do that through hydroponics at will. And local growing is
becoming bigger and bigger all the time. It’s just got an
image of being better.”


Of course in the Midwest, “local” is still pretty relative.
Our Michigan farmer, Kelly Bowerman, says he gets people
from up to 50 miles away to pick his strawberries:


“One guy bought $28 worth of strawberries, and he said that ain’t
no big deal cause it cost me $40 worth of gas to
get here and back.”


And he’ll have to continue putting in that kind of travel
time if he wants to eat locally grown strawberries in the
middle of winter. Unless of course Jensen’s right and
hydroponic greenhouse systems really are the wave of the
future. If so, it might not be too long before Bowerman’s
strawberries show up year round at your supermarket.


Oh, and by the way, I liked the tribute strawberries the
best. They were my favorite.


For the Environment Report, I’m Jennifer Guerra.

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Cities Cope With Pesticide Pollution

  • Farmers are using fewer pesticides these days. (photo by Don Breneman)

Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland. Farm pollution is one of the biggest contamination problems in the country. But unlike other industries, there are very few pollution restrictions on agriculture. In the second story of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Lester Graham reports when cities clean up pollution from pesticides, the cost ends up on their citizens’ water bills:

Transcript

Today, we continue our series on pollution in the heartland. Farm pollution is one of the biggest
contamination problems in the country. But unlike other industries, there are very few pollution
restrictions on agriculture. In the second story of our week-long series, the GLRC’s Lester
Graham reports when cities clean up pollution from pesticides the cost ends up on their citizens’
water bills:


Every city in the Corn Belt that gets its water from surface supplies such as lakes and rivers has to
deal with pesticide contamination. For the most part, the pesticide levels are below federal
standards for safe drinking water. But water treatment plants have to test for the chemicals and
other pollutants that wash in from farm fields.


Some cities have had to build artificial wetlands or take other more expensive measures to help
reduce pollution such as nitrogen, phosphorous and pesticides.


Craig Cummings is the Water Director for the City of Bloomington, Illinois.


“Well, you know, it is an expense that, you know, we would rather not bear, obviously. We
don’t, you know, particularly like to pass that on to our customers. But, again, it’s understood
that we’re not going to have crystal clear, pristine waters here in the Midwest. But, that’s not to
say that we should stick our head in the sand and not work with the producers. At least here in
our little neck of the woods we think we have a great working relationship with the producers.”


Part of that working relationship is a liaison with the farmers.


Jim Rutheford has worked with farmers in the area on soil conservation issues for decades. He’s
showing me the artificial wetlands that the City of Bloomington is monitoring to see if it can help
reduce some of the contaminants that end up in the city’s water supply. The wetlands reduce
nitrogen runoff and filter out some of the pesticides such as atrazine that otherwise would end up
in Bloomington’s lake.


“The atrazine was used back several years ago in high concentrated amounts. Its effects were if
you get a flush of rain after your atrazine is put on, it comes into the lake.”


Rutherford says for a very long time atrazine has been popular with corn farmers.


“It’s the cheapest, but it’s also gives more problems as far as water quality is concerned.”


Because atrazine has been so popular, a lot of farmers use it and it’s polluted some lakes to the
point they exceeded safe drinking water standards.


In one test during spring applications of atrazine, National Oceanic and Atmospherica
Administration scientists found so much of the chemical had evaporated from Midwest farm
fields that rain in some parts of the East Coast had atrazine levels that exceeded safe drinking
water levels.


But atrazine levels have been going down. It’s not so much because of artificial wetlands or
because farmers are concerned about pesticide pollution, although some of them have expressed
concern. Atrazine has not been as much of a problem because more and more farmers are
switching to genetically modified crops such as Round-Up Ready soybeans and more recently
Round-Up Ready corn. The Monsanto seed is genetically altered so that the Monsanto pesticide,
Round-Up, can be applied to the fields and not hurt the crops. And Round-Up doesn’t cause the
kind of water pollution that atrazine does.


Mike Kelly is a farmer who’s concerned about reducing storm water runoff from farm fields.


“A lot of the herbicides that we’re using attack the plant, not the soil. For example, Round-Up
does not hang around in the soil. Now, I do still use atrazine. It does attach to soil particles. But
there’s where the advantage of no-till–the soil staying put in the field–as you said, we’re not
getting as much erosion, so it stays put and breaks down the way it’s supposed to.”


Kelly use a conservation tillage method that doesn’t plow up the soil the way traditional methods
do. That means less soil erosion so pesticides aren’t as likely to end up in waterways. And Kelly says low-till and no-till methods are beginning to get a hand from nature:


“Definitely conservation tillage and no-till is going to help keep herbicides in the field. Again, he
do see increased infiltration through better soil structure and also through earthworms coming
back, creating holes about the size of a pencil three to four feet deep in our soils. That is a nice
avenue for water to infiltrate rather than run off.”


And if more of the water percolates down into the soil, less of it is going to end up polluting
water supplies such as the City of Bloomington’s lake.


Water Director Craig Cummings says they city encourages voluntary efforts like Mike Kelly’s.
Cummings says the city depends on the farming community too much to point a finger, accusing
farmers of pollution.


“We recognize that we’re in the breadbasket of the world here. And we’re going to see with the
kind of agricultural practices that we have here in the Midwest or United States, we’re going to
see some of these contaminants.”


Cummings says it’s not a matter of eliminating pesticide contamination at the source, but
rather a matter of the city keeping levels low enough that the water is safe to drink.


For the GLRC, this is Lester Graham.

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