Sounds like American farmers are just a couple of decades from becoming extinct, doesn’t it?

But maybe it’s not quite as bad as it sounds.

This article, from the Economic Research Service (ERS) of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, indicates that the census of farmers may underestimate their numbers because only one “operator” is counted per farm, and that is usually the oldest person. The article lists several reasons why farmers are older than other types of workers in the labor force.

What may be more troubling is the small percentage of farmers under the age of 35: 8 percent in 1997. That doesn’t seem like enough of a base on which to build a viable future farming community. Even though the article quotes more favorable Department of Labor stats about farming, there are definitely fewer young people going into farming.

I’m going to assert baldly here that getting more people to take up farming would be a good thing. The question is, how can that be achieved?

I think the first step is to address the issue of land. I was reading somewhere last week that even as the housing market has tanked, the price of farmland has risen. If that is the case, then it would be difficult for a young farmer to purchase land.

Would a twenty-first-century Homestead Act be an appropriate response?

Of course, that’s government intervention, and the idea behind Restoration Nation is to turn restoration into some kind of profit-making activity. So how can Americans encourage more people to take up farming if land is out of reach for beginning farmers?

Here’s one answer: SPIN farming.

SPIN farming stands for “Small Plot Intensive” farming. This website claims that people doing SPIN farming can make $50,000/year on farms under an acre in size. Sound incredible? Well, maybe those numbers are suspect. I know some farmers who told me once they weren’t so sure that that kind of income is as easy to reach as the website says. But SPIN farming would be an easier way to get into farming than trying to buy a bunch of land.

Another idea is to incorporate gardens into our lives in new (old?) and unusual ways. For example, we could add gardens to rooftops, which would provide food and help reduce cities’ heat island effect (that would likely require some rezoning, however). Pollan suggests converting golf courses to farms, but somehow I can’t see the people living around golf courses going for that.

Here’s Boulder County Going Local’s assessment of the county’s ability to feed its residents. And here’s a page for Transition Colorado. I’m not sure how these groups are related, if indeed they are.

What do you think? Would you be willing to plant a large garden? Would you be willing to cobble together a 1-acre farm by combining plots from your yard and your neighbors’ yards?

(To find Michael Pollan’s article, search for “Farmer in Chief.” The original article was published in the New York Times.)

If you liked this post, please share below on StumbleUpon. I’d be grateful.

Hell, it wasn’t just grown men crying at the thought of seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker. I cried too, for all the times that some piece of land where I used to wander had been developed, for the fact that I’ll never see a flock of passenger pigeons darkening the sky.

And please understand, the men crying in these movies are hunters, backwoods types, comfortable traveling through swamps where they could float past a crocodile in their canoe. They know the area so well they “have the trees named.” (I think I saw one female researcher in this movie.)

Butler must like tough guys—his first movie was Pumping Iron, which made Arnold Schwarzenegger a star. His next movie will be about Bengal tigers in the Sundarbans (India), which he says are quickly going extinct. He hopes Lord God Bird will draw attention to the problems of extinction.

This movie is thick with the politics of ornithology. Who’d have thought there was such a thing? But in the mid-twentieth century, saying you’d seen an ivory-billed woodpecker was death to your career.

It opens with John Dennis, Jr., son of a man who said he saw the ivory-bill in the 1960s and was mocked for it. Everyone thought it had gone extinct in the 1940s.

John Dennis, Sr., became obsessed with proving himself and kept going to the Big Thicket in Texas year after year. One year he made a recording of the call, which sounds like a cartoon character saying meep, meep, and sent it off to the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to compare to their 1944 recording. They dithered around and then eventually implied he’d somehow made a copy of the 1944 recording of the bird’s call.

To his son, the search for the ivory-bill is the “search for a lost part of American heritage” and also a chance for him to vindicate his late father.

Even if you’re not a birder or would shoot a woodpecker as soon as look at it, go see this movie for the landscapes and their light. Most Americans won’t get a chance—or wouldn’t be caught dead—floating through cypress swamps, but they do make for great armchair traveling. The cinematography is stunning.

There’s so much more I could say about this movie. I could tell you about all the reported sightings, about the lone female ivory-bill calling and calling with no answer, about the men crawling up trees and vacuuming debris out of holes in the hopes of finding a feather, about the Singer Tract and the airport in the Florida panhandle that will destroy habitat (in which ivory-bills might live), about the trays and trays of dead ivory-bills shot for museum collections in the nineteenth century.

But I’ll leave you with the final image of the movie: a big man covered in shredded camouflage, sitting at the base of a huge cypress, his ivory-bill decoy moving back and forth above him, calling. He sits there, and he listens.

Best quote from a movie so far
“Get on the pecker bench.” (Florida)

Bird continuity
Count Basie’s band used to play at Birdland.

If you liked this post, please share below on StumbleUpon. I’d be grateful.

I like to see documentaries at the Starz Denver Film Festival because they don’t show at nearby theaters. We truly are doubly blessed in the Denver-Boulder area: we have the film festival, and when that’s over, we can go to Video Station, which has everything, including a large collection of documentaries.

The first and last thing I noticed about this Count Basie movie was how cool the director, Gary Keys, was. His first film played the Denver Film Festival in the 1980s. Before that, he was an art director at MOMA and concert promoter, so that’s how he met all these jazz types. He knew Sinatra, Basie, Ellington, Dizzy Gillespie, Miles Davis.

He produced the first pop concert at Lincoln Center (the Supremes) and sold them as the “modern-day Andrews Sisters.” The crowd at Lincoln Center was so hyped up at the end of the show that staff wanted to call the police, but Keys said, “No, no,” and had the Supremes come back out and sing the line, “Stop, in the name of love!” I wondered if he was having us on.

The first thing I noticed about Basie himself in the movie was his lovely eyes. I would call them “Egyptian eyes.” I’ll bet he had the ladies coming and going.

The movie spent most of its time listening to members of Count Basie’s band, sitting around a table, reminiscing. And one of them—speaking of ladies coming and going—recalled a night soon after his wedding, when his new wife was in the audience and his mistress started following her around. He got so mad he ran off the stage and chased the mistress out of the theater and still managed to make it back for the end of the song.

No word on whether he kept the old mistress or got a new one.

They talked about Lester Young, how he did everything different—how he famously held his tenor saxophone up sideways—”he was from somewhere else,” one of them said.

I went to this movie to listen to the music, and I wasn’t disappointed. When the director said, “Count Basie made you want to dance,” he was so right. There was a lot of great music, including vocals by Billie Holiday and Joe Williams and Ella Fitzgerald (at the very end), but I did wish Keys would have included more entire songs.

My husband didn’t like it as much as I did. He wanted more about Basie himself. To be honest, I got the impression that the movie might not be quite finished, that its makers were using the film festival as a way to gauge audience reaction. One of the questions on the survey form was about the title, which I disliked, and the television footage shown in the film was just awful (Todd’s suggestion was “video tiling”).

Amazing and Hilarious
Two passages from the movie in which Jerry Lewis pantomimes Basie songs. You can see them in “The Errand Boy” and “Jerry Lewis Does the Dishes” on YouTube.

Another Reason to See Blazing Saddles Again
Basie’s band plays in the middle of the desert.

A Memorable Gesture
To get his huge band to go all out, Basie would raise his index finger.

If you liked this post, please share above on StumbleUpon. I’d be grateful.

MSNBC has posted a story titled, “Gay Animals Out of the Closet?” I’ve heard this stuff before, but this article is very informative. Check it out.

REI is closed, and it may be dangerous to sit down here by myself, but I am nothing if not happy.

I can see the dial of the clock tower on the 16th Street Mall. I can see “Qwest” in blue at the top of one tall building.

Joe Nacchio was the only telecom executive who didn’t sell us out. He ran Qwest until 2002, and in 2007 he was convicted of insider trading. In 2008, his conviction was overturned.

He says the government retaliated against his refusal to cooperate with warrantless wiretapping.

I say, I have no love for take-no-prisoners CEOs.

But I am grateful to him.

The other day I came across his article “Farmer in Chief,” directed to President-Elect Barack Obama. I’m going to write about it on Fridays for a while, not just because it was actually 12 pages long when I printed it out, but because there are so many points in it to explore that seem to express the ideas of Restoration Nation.

(The best way to find the article is to search for “Farmer in Chief.” The article was originally published in the New York Times, but at some point they’ll start charging for it.)

In my first Restoration Nation post, I asked this question: How do we move restoration into the private sector without “privatizing” it? That is, without turning it into an activity that enriches the few?

In a way, American agriculture has been “privatized” as I define it: there are fewer people farming now than at the turn of the twentieth century, and the number of farms has decreased as they have become larger. But according to Pollan, all that was a result of government subsidies for monocropping, for converting the munitions industry into a fertilizer/herbicides/pesticides industry after World War II, and for making agriculture dependent on fossil fuels.

I can understand why: the United States had just begun to recover from a Depression and had won a war, and the government wanted prosperity to continue, especially for the soldiers returning home. And food was cheap when it was produced on farms that emphasized one crop and supported it with fertilizer and other chemical products.

So it would be incorrect to say that the process of making agriculture in the United States “industrial” was a process that enriched the few. There are gigantic food corporations, yes, but the people as a whole benefited from cheap food—at least in their wallets.

One of Pollan’s first conclusions is that cheap food has made us sick.

“Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. . . . There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount—from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. . . . You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.”

I’ll stop there for today. I was planning to talk about “restoring” agriculture to be more regional, but I see now it’s going to take me a while to get there.

I’ve never eaten at a place quite like D Bar. It’s a tiny restaurant located right next to Strings on Restaurant Row in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood. The interior is modern, with light blue walls contrasting with counters and 5 tables in dark brown. You can face in and watch the owners and other chefs making desserts only a foot or two away, or you can look out the windows onto 17th Avenue and a view that characterizes Uptown for me: a weedy undeveloped lot in front of condos.

In contrast to the simple décor, all the food I’ve had there has been luscious.

Or perhaps I should say dessert, since I’ve had only one non-dessert item: the dressed avocado. That was on my first visit, when I ate two desserts and took two home. The avocado and greens drizzled with nutty-tasting dressing were the perfect beginning to an hour of dessert sampling.

I was impressed that the waitress brewed me a pot of decaf and charged me for only a cup, although I drank three. And I was even more impressed when the owner came out to clean up broken glass with a broom and dustpan.

The oatmeal raisin cookie (my favorite type of cookie) tasted nourishing, not just sweet, and the chocolate truffle was good, although I didn’t love the crust or the garnish. I would have preferred the chocolate by itself.

However, when my husband and I returned a few days later and ordered the “molten chocolate thingy everyone has on their menu,” I did love the garnish, a stained-glass biscuit that formed the crispy top of the molten chocolate cake. The contrast in textures raised that been-there dessert above the average. (I thought the chef called it an “Australian glass biscuit,” but perhaps I misheard.) An added bonus was the chef’s detailed description of exactly which ingredients went into the sauce. She also explained that they build the molten cake out of crumbs left over from the chocolate cakes featured in their case.

If I could eat desserts all day, I’d sit at the counter at D Bar and do just that. I think that as long as the restaurant isn’t too crowded (which it hasn’t been during the late afternoons I’ve eaten there), the staff wouldn’t care if you stayed for a while.

D Bar is also a wine bar, offering red, white, sparkling, and fortified wines by the glass, and joining Tastes Wine Bar and the soon-to-be-open Caveau Wine Bar in making 17th Avenue “Wine Bar Central” in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood (Caveau was supposed to open in the summer of 2008, but D Bar beat them to it). And if you want something more substantial than liquor or sweets, you can do what the elderly couple at the counter did: order Kobe sliders and a salad (or mac and cheese, or a panini). They said they came in once or twice a week for the sliders.

In short, D Bar is a friendly place to be. It can also be an expensive place, if you start ordering wines by the glass, but you can get a meal and a cookie and coffee there for about $15.

D Bar was opened by Keegan Gerhard and his wife Lisa Bailey in the summer of 2008, making it probably the newest thing in Denver’s Uptown neighborhood.

If you liked this post, please share it below on StumbleUpon. I’d like that.

I’ve been to each of the three Mexican joints listed in the Local Flavor guide, and today I’m writing mainly about two of them, Bocaza Mexican Grille and Las Delicias I, which I promised to do in this old post about Uptown.

Bocaza Mexican Grille
1740 East 17th Avenue, Uptown, Denver
303-393-7545
Bus directions: from Market Street Station, the 12 and the 20 go down 17th Avenue

The funny thing about Bocaza (”big mouth”) is that it’s a few blocks east on 17th Avenue from Qdoba, also a Mexican burrito chain that started in Denver but is now owned by Jack in the Box. Qdoba claims it offers “original flavors you won’t find anywhere else,” but you can find similar items (and more variety) at Bocaza. And with only three locations (one in Grand Junction), Bocaza is still close enough to its roots to avoid that chain vibe.

Todd and I went there about 5 o’clock on a Saturday night, and the neighborhood in general and Bocaza’s in particular were sleepy and slow and a bit cool after a warm day. Todd ordered a pork torta (a Mexican sandwich on toasted bread) with jalapenos, which we both liked. I ordered hibiscus tea, which was fine, and the green chile pesto burrito, which I thought was really good. I didn’t eat it as instructed: I took it out of the foil, which was a mistake, because the sauce swam all over. I wanted to stuff every bite in my mouth but had to leave some.

The man at the counter was kind enough to tell me all the ingredients in the pesto, though I had to ask him to repeat his answer because he said pinoñes the first time, and I don’t have enough Spanish for that. To square everything between us, he had me repeat “piñon nuts” for him.

Las Delicias I
439 East 19th Avenue, Uptown, Denver
303-839-5675
Bus directions: from Market Street Station, the 12 and the 20 go down 17th Avenue; the 28 goes down 19th Avenue

Down at the northwestern end of Uptown Denver is Las Delicias I, which has been in business for thirty years in Denver. There are five locations total.

I went to the Uptown neighborhood restaurant on October 25, while my husband was amusing himself at Mile Hi Con.

The host seated me kittycorner from the kitchen, in what I suspected might be the hide-the-woman-dining-by-herself maneuver—I could see the trashcans in the kitchen over my shoulder.

The dining room is somewhat narrow but quite long. When I was there on Saturday in the early afternoon, it was not crowded. Las Delicias is comfy, not fancy, and full of light from the windows facing 19th Avenue. The music was audible but not too loud, and college football was on the TVs.

My waitress was efficient but not especially friendly, and the food came quickly. I ordered a chicken chimichanga (with LOTS of chicken) and then wondered if that is the sort of dish that screams “Tex-Mex amateur” to the staff at a Mexican restaurant (this site has a history of the dish, down the page a ways).

The guacamole that came with the chimichanga tasted fresh but unremarkable, and the chimichanga could have been a little crispier, but it tasted good. As far as I could tell, there was red chili mixed in with the chicken on the inside, and green chile on the outside. I liked everything I ate, especially the green chile. It made my nose run.

I ordered one sopapilla for dessert, which was also good. It was huge and brown and smelled yummy.

Maybe my feelings about Las Delicias have to do with eating there alone, but I didn’t get the greatest vibe from the place. And the woman’s bathroom smelled bad.

Some of the reviews I read online indicates it’s gone downhill, but I’m willing to give it another try sometime, especially after the sopapilla.

If you liked this post, please share below on Digg or Delicious. I’d like that.

When I was young, I wanted to leave my family, had to go as far away as possible. I was going to explore. Now I think of my thirty-year voluntary separation from them and wonder if it’s time to wander home.

I’ve been retracing my steps this past month, pacing a neighborhood, circling and returning to locations I’ve already visited. And I find new corners in them.

Maybe the city of my childhood also has a new face to show me?

Principle #6: Markets are usually a good way to organize economic activity.

Adam Smith made the observation that households and firms interacting in markets act as if guided by an “invisible hand.”

Because households and firms look at prices when deciding what to buy and sell, they unknowingly take into account the social costs of their actions.

As a result, prices guide decision makers to reach outcomes that tend to maximize the welfare of society as a whole.

I see some problems with these statements, which I’ll elaborate on below.

After I got my hair cut in the Uptown Denver neighborhood the other day, I sat on a bench and took notes. Across the street two men were cleaning up the leaves that covered the sidewalks and curbs. One of them wore a mask and was pushing what looked like a large vacuum cleaner.

Later that afternoon, I was about to leave D Bar Desserts when the waitress knocked over a glass. The owner came over with a broom and dustpan and carefully cleaned up the shards of glass.

In what different ways do these two methods of cleanup “organize economic activity”?

In the first case, what’s being provided is a service, which is probably paid for as part of rent or homeowner’s association dues.

The goal is to do it in the most efficient way possible, hence the massive leaf-sucking machines.

The second is part of the day-to-day efforts of running a restaurant. Because that particular restaurant is so small, the owner is more likely to come out and clean up a mess. Maybe that restaurant doesn’t even use a vacuum to clean up—maybe it just uses mops and brooms. I’ve never worked in the restaurant business, so I don’t know.

It seems to me that I witnessed economic activity that afternoon, but in the case of the leaf cleaners it is indirect. It’s more direct in the case of the restaurant. I was impressed that the staff worked so well together. It made me want to go back.

The first activity is negative—you notice it only when it is neglected. The second activity is positive.

I want to take this discussion in a certain direction. I want to say that for the purposes of Restoration Nation, brooms are better than vacuum cleaners.

But I don’t know how to get there from here.

I also don’t think the quote listed above accurately captures the “social costs” of using motorized equipment to clean up leaves. For example, making the vacuums requires resources (plastics, metals) and energy, and powering them requires more energy. A broom, in contrast, might be made of wood, or of leftover materials, such as wood chips or wood dust. The energy is human, which is powered by food.

Of course, the vacuums could also be made of recycled materials. Even the fuel could be (if the vacuums used biodiesel).

If we got rid of the vacuums, and made the brooms from something we would otherwise throw away, would we save enough “money” (in the form of fuel costs and resource costs) to employ enough people to get the job done as quickly with the brooms?

I believe that simplicity reduces social costs.

But can simplicity get us to Restoration Nation?

Feel free to comment on the “logic” of this post. I don’t think it’s very logical. It’s stuck between my ignorance of economics and my desire for a certain kind of society.

If you liked this post, please share it below on Digg or Delicious. I’d like that.