An updated list of Farmers Markets with dates and times of operation is available at the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette website.  Included is an interactive map for market locations.

If you know of a market that is not on the list or map, please contact Bob Batz Jr. at 412-263-1930 or bbatz at post-gazette dot com.

With the arrival of fall, farm markets are remain open around the region. To help locate a market near you, Arlene Burnett at the Post-Gazette  compiled a list of places where you can obtain locally grown farm products.

by Donald L. Gibbon

Industrial agriculture rules the market place. That’s the common wisdom. But… there is a backlash. A growing segment of the population realizes that this is not good for their health – physical, emotional and economic health. They have become disconnected from the earth and that disconnection is degrading their lives in well-documented ways. Chronic diseases are on steep increase: diabetes and obesity are two of the most visible.

John Muir’s adage, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.” never had a more perfect application than right here. Growth of cities may be near the end of the tangled ball of string. Cities grow because of industrialization which itself has grown because of inventions of new ways of manufacturing and because of population growth. Movement from the farms to the cities calls for new ways of farming to produce more by each farmer that remains on the farm. Growth of cities means loss of farmland near the cities and disconnection from the earth itself and loss of familiarity with the pleasures and value of really fresh food, that being likely to have led to the development of the suite of illnesses called “The Western Diseases” (problems with teeth, heart and artery problems, obesity, diabetes and so forth). All of these things are reinforced by the advent of new forms of transportation which have led to bringing food to market from ever greater distances, which increases the amount of petroleum fuels used per unit of food. These forms of transportation have led to development of crops more able to survive the long-distances and times of transportation, which have led to harvesting earlier and less ripe, which means the crops have not developed their full nutrition capacity, which leads to less value per food unit, which degrades the health of the eater. Processing the food also inevitably degrades its food value. And finally and most insidious of all, advertising, driven by short-term profit demands of investors, creates high-profit, low nutrition items which displace nutritious foods from the dinner plate. And the cycle goes on.

But - all is not lost. The backlash mentioned above is small but real. How to reinforce it? How to make food once again healthy and farming a viable lifestyle for those who produce it sustainably? How to make our cities secure against all the instabilities inherent in the modern model of agri-business? Again, how to find the end of the string? Or at least some place in the tangle that can be used to unravel it?

Another comforting adage here is “Don’t let what you can’t do prevent you from doing what you can!” We can’t solve all these problems at once, but we can tackle some of the segments that are within our vision and energy ranges. Here in Pittsburgh we have approached these problems in many interlocking ways. One of these is exemplified in the organization “Grow Pittsburgh” which is working to teach citizens the joys of hands-on growing of food in the city. Another is “Sustainable Pittsburgh” which works with governments, business and agencies of all kinds to better understand how to control land use so that city sprawl is slowed and land is preserved for uses other than rapid development.

Mildreds’ Daughters’ Farm, in Stanton Heights, PA. 5 acres with 125 years of continuous farming, right up to today with Grow Pittsburgh.

A third is the PA Association for Sustainable Agriculture, which is devoting its energies to helping small farmers who want to make a living growing high-nutrient-density crops in ways that improve rather than degrade the environment.

Still, these efforts reach a relatively small part of the population. How can we broaden the outreach, so that these matters, the solutions to these problems, become more nearly common concerns? The answer, amazingly, may lie in the All-American tradition of Apple Pie. “You can’t be serious!” I hear you exclaim. But, yes, I am serious. Let me explain, with specific reference to southwestern Pennsylvania.

Apple orchards have been a major part of the southwestern PA landscape for over 200 years, ever since the days that John Chapman (aka Johnny Appleseed) got his seeds from Pittsburgh cider mils to go out into the Ohio valley and plant apple trees. Apple cider was a major beverage back then and the apple harvest was a traditional community-building time of year. The story of how that has changed is long, but much of it is referenced in the second paragraph of this essay. Market forces, transportation and advertising have pushed Washington apples (or Chilean or heaven forefend, even Chinese apples!) onto our shelves and Pennsylvania apples off. It has become harder and harder to make a living growing apples or making cider here in SW Pennsylvania. If our famers are going to compete, we are going to have to consciously fight for them, support them, choose to buy from them, pay what they need to be paid to survive and thrive. That’s the long and the short of it. Having Pennsylvania apple farmers, eating Pennsylvania apples, drinking Pennsylvania cider… these things are going to have to become important for us as a community. In other words, we are going to have to change from being disconnected from our food supply (exemplified here by apples) to being consciously connected to it. We are going to have to make different choices, because the results matter to us. We are going to have to learn that making these new choices is in our best interest.

72 bushels of Jonagold apples on Kistaco Farm, heading for the cider press where they’ll make 300 gallons of cider.

How do we go about helping people see this logic, this new way of thinking for them? We are going to have to become aware of the sources of our food. We are going to have to know who the farmers are, be proud of them, care about them. I suggest that one way to foment that change is through Apple Pie, pies made with apples from southwestern Pennsylvania. With that in mind, we have declared it to be our intent to make Pittsburgh the Apple-Pie Capital of the World as a specific means of reversing all the ills outlined above. How will this work? We can illustrate the process by outlining what we have already done.

On November 10, 2007, we held “An Apple Festival for All Ages” in Highland Park at the Union Project. Almost 400 people, averaging probably in the range of 20-30 years old or younger, came to the Festival. There were two major components to the Festival: the apple growers and cider makers themselves (there are at least 13 orchards and 7 cider makers in the Pittsburgh region) and the 3rd Annual Pittsburgh Regional Pro-Am Apple-Pie-Baking Contest. Six of Pittsburgh’s best chefs and 26 amateurs entered pies. It was a huge Lake-Wobegone-style neighborly event, great fun… and after the jurying all the pies were eaten, of course! Check out a summary of the festival from Slow Food Pittsburgh.

In summary, we did for this crowd exactly what we have described above: we changed their consciousness of apples in the Pittsburgh market economy… and for this day and time at least, it mattered to them. It tasted good and it was fun.

Can you believe that on November 5th, 2008, five days before the event, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had five whole pages on the Festival and local apples? Table, Pittsburgh Magazine and the City Paper all had extensive coverage of the Festival in the week and month prior to it. We had radio ads on all three non-commercial stations. We had fabulous publicity for this event. And it worked.

I believe that we can do this again, bigger and better. We have already scheduled the next festival on November 8, 2008. We can – and will - work more closely with the grocery stores, with the extension agency, with the farmers, with the media, with the schools, with the Culinary Institute, with conservation organizations. The results will be that the farmers make a better living and that the people have better food. While we may not be able to measure the change from this single event in health indices, I believe that they will be positively affected. And if we replicate this model in other areas of the diet, we can have similar effects… and they will eventually be measureable.

The result will be a Pittsburgh region which has lower transportation costs per unit of food. We will have lower impact on global warming, a smaller carbon footprint. We will be more secure in case of interruption of petroleum supplies. We will be healthier and happier as a people. We will be more closely connected with the earth. All because of apple pie.

by Bruce Sundquist

Note: This is the Abstract of Bruce’s analysis of reviews of the global literature on the degradation of soils, croplands, forest lands, grazing lands, irrigated lands and fisheries. The full article is available on his website.

Overall, the sustainabilities of the world’s outputs of food, wood and freshwater are disturbingly low. This is true even when we neglect major peripheral issues such as fossil fuels and climate change (as this document does). Neglecting these implies an overly optimistic bent to this document. But this permits us to analyze the various components of sustainability with greater clarity and thereby serve as a starting point for future more sophisticated (and more realistic) analyses. Research by this author on sustainability issues during the past few decades finds significant differences between different geographic regions of the planet as to how sustainability is viewed. These differences tend to carry over into all the other components of the natural life-support systems on which humans depend. This suggests that sustainabilities are mainly culture-dependent. This observation, coupled with the history of the effects of sustainability issues on human civilizations, suggests that environmental determinism theory decides how each region of the globe deals with sustainability, and how each is affected by its views and public policies toward sustainability. (Recall that environmental determinism theory says that the evolution of human cultures reflects primarily adaptations to changing forms and degrees of environmental stress.) A broad-brush approach finds it useful to divide the world into three regions – (1) the developing world, (2) the older portions of the developed world (mainly Europe and parts of the Far East) and (3) the newer portions of the developed world (mainly North America and Australia). These three regions view sustainability issues in far different ways and for far different reasons – and suffer far different consequences. (more…)