Some farmers think this spot is a perfect place for a White House organic farm. (Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)
Some people think American agriculture needs a makeover. They question why we waste so much fuel moving food long distances. A growing movement is calling for farmers and everybody else to produce more locally-grown, organic food. Shawn Allee reports some people want the President to set a good example:
Transcript
Some people think American agriculture needs a makeover. They question why we waste so much fuel moving food long distances. A growing movement is calling for farmers and everybody else to produce more locally-grown, organic food. Shawn Allee reports some people want the President to set a good example:
Last October Michael Pollan published a letter to the President in the New York Times.
Pollan is a sort of agricultural policy gadfly. His open letter to the President was full of big, policy-wonkish ideas about how to encourage local food production. But Pollan also wrote one small suggestion. NPR’s Terry Gross picked up on it.
GROSS: “You would like the next president to instead of having a White House lawn to basically have a White House garden. The president would set an example for the rest of us by having this garden of locally-grown foods?” (laughs)
POLLAN: “Now why is that preposterous, Terry? I mean, that’s actually one of the more practical things I proposed.”
Pollan went into how the President could even share some of his veggies with food banks.
POLLAN:” So you have this powerful image of the White House feeding Americans. What could be better than that?”
Some people heard this interview or read Pollon’s article and thought, “right on” – there should be a White House farmer. One family from central Illinois was especially intrigued. Terra Brockman talked about it with her father and sister.
BROCKMAN: “Well, it’s a great idea, but why don’t we bring it down to earth and make it real?”
ALLEE: “So, basically you translated it into reality by creating a contest on a Web site. White House Farmer dot com, as I understand it.”
BROCKMAN: “Yeah, we figured it was a way that we could get it out nationally without much time or money and ask people all across the country, ‘who do you think would be a good White House farmer?’ and have people nominate their farmers.”
Now, Brockman built her contest Web site even though President Obama never even talked about the idea of a White House farmer. But she’s hopeful because the White House actually has an agricultural past. At one time sheep grazed on the White House lawn, and during World War II Eleanor Roosevelt grew a Victory Garden there.
BROCKMAN: “It’s not like this is so, so way out there. And really, whatever the President does is pretty symbolic and people do pay attention.”
People paid attention to White Houser Farmer dot com, anyway.
The site gathered around 57 thousand online votes in just a few days.
And exactly who is the unofficial new White House Farmer?
That would be Claire Strader, from Madison, Wisconsin.
Strader invited me to see the land she works.
STRADER: “We’re at Troy Gardens. It’s in a parcel of land in the city of Madison, on the North Side. I haven’t actually seen the farm for a few months because the snow’s been so deep.”
ALLEE: “Can we get closer to the farm area?”
STRADER: “Yeah.”
Strader is the head farmer at Troy Gardens. She trains city people to grow food here. She also makes the soil fertile through organic growing techniques.
STRADER: “You can just start to see now, the green flush over the whole field. That’s our cover crop of rye. It looks really good. I’m happy to see it.”
ALLEE: “Could you tear yourself away to go to DC and leave all this behind?”
STRADER: “It would be difficult to pick up and leave it behind, but it would be a tremendous honor and a lot of potential to spread the good word of organic agriculture and the positive impacts that would have on our country in the future. It would be hard to accept and hard to reject.”
Even with a White House Farmer chosen for him, President Obama still hasn’t said anything about the idea.
But Strader says she and some top contest vote-getters are trying to sway him – even if he’d pick someone else to run his garden.
Strader says she loves the idea of cucumbers and zucchinis growing at the White House… even if she’s not there to pick them.
For the Environment Report, I’m Shawn Allee.