Looking Forward - another poem

I wrote this last year while pushing the baby stroller on the remaining paths through the fields of rural Switzerland, where I now live.  I was thinking about sprawl and the farms of home.  You see, the land here is so pricey, people build large rectangular apartment buildings in former corn fields straight up to the sky in order to maximize the price per square meter.  The landscape is changing so quickly, we cannot remember what things looked like a year or even a month ago.  Can you imagine it in your own backyard?  Here is another poem:

Feet on the ground

Family farm

Head in the clouds

Building ground

Planning our Paradise

My kids and I

High-rise rectangles

Touch the sky

View past the lake

Unobstructed

Cell phone towers

There constructed

Top of the hill

Valley below

Green

And brown

And yellow glow

Asphalt

Concrete

Black and white

Sunlight bouncing

Steals my sight

The hoof

The boots

The little shoes

Follow the path

That is the view

Under the fence

Or over the bale

Leaving only

Some pony tail

In the grass

Ankle deep

Under rocks

Where crayfish sleep

Hidden treasures

Predator, prey

Along the creek

Slipping away

Gone are the fences

That never excluded

Absent the stink

That hadn’t intruded

Soon sitting clean

In cozy apartments

With a view at the back

To the neighbors’ compartments.

excerpt from "The Chain Letter Incident" by Cathy Lynn (c) 2011

A Food Producer’s Business Model: the impact of sprawl on “local” food

We recently sent a letter asking local food retailers and producers to support us.  We presented them with the scenario that for every acre of dairy land that “moves” 50 miles away, it costs milk producers an additional $205 per acre per year.  Here is how we did our math using data published for Western New York in November 2011:

1.        How much land produces how much milk?  

7 gallons of milk per cow per day at 1.5 acres per cow =  10.5 gal per acre per day

We then converted to find that the hypothetical cow produces 15 Tons of milk per year (assuming 365 days of production which is only necessary for this model)

Using a milk price published on November 16, 2011, we came up with $610 per ton of milk.

Running the numbers again, that amounts to about $9,000/acre/year.

2.        For this hypothetical, we assume milk has to be hauled an additional 50 miles as local farms disappear.

3.        What is the additional annual transport cost per acre that is an additional 50 miles away? Using a truck capacity of 30 tons, and assuming an additional $1 in transportation costs per load, we calculated an additional $25/acre/year in hauling costs.

4.        Assume a quality deterioration loss for the additional time and transport :

2% loss x $9,000/acre/year = $180/acre/year in quality deterioration

5.        Exclude ecological costs of the additional diesel fuel, which is still relatively cheap compared to its carbon footprint,  and an estimated but realistic cost to consumers for every acre of local farmland lost is

$205/acre/year.

Now ask the question, “how local is 'local'?” the next time you go to buy
fresh milk, vegetables, or meat;
and then ask whether you are paying
for the trip or the food.