Tim Redmond is the co-founder and co-owner of
Skinny Farm of Scio, a 1.5-acre organic CSA farm supplying 35 members, local chefs, and retailers with vegetables, as well as organic hops to local home brewers. Tim is also an owner/operator of Eat Local Eat Natural, a regional distributor of meats and dairy products produced on sustainably-managed local family farms. He is an active operating partner in
Zingerman's Cornman Farms, a local farm-based event center, and he co-founded and still serves on the
Washtenaw Food Policy Council.
Tim has a 45-year career in food production and marketing, re-introducing natural and organic foods to America. One of a handful of members in Ann Arbor's first natural foods co-op in 1967, he co-founded
Eden Foods, Inc. in 1970. In 1985, he helped form American Soy Products, Inc., a strategic joint venture between Eden and three Japanese companies to build America's first dedicated soy beverage production facility. A past president of the Soyfoods Association of America, Tim co-led development of America's first soy milk standards.
After leaving American Soy in 2002, he turned to new projects including introducing SOY FANTASTICO, North America's first soy milk targeting Hispanics, forming an early fresh-frozen organic baby foods line, and marketing Ecuadoran organically farm-raised shrimp in the USA.
In 2005 Tim and a colleague founded Blue Horizon Organic Seafood Co., Inc., another mission-driven business with an aim to developing markets for organic aquaculture production and certified sustainably-managed wild fishery catch, making and marketing frozen entrees and appetizers nationally under the Blue Horizon brand. The company was acquired in 2010.
Tim, a University of Michigan graduate, also serves on the advisory board of the local Salvation Army, and as an advisory board member for ReConsider, a local economic ecosystem firm. He and his wife of 40 years still garden, build and fix things, host dinners for friends, and welcome their four kids and growing body of grandkids home whenever they can.
Eating is an agricultural act
Wendell Berry, farmer, novelist, professor, poet, wrote: "To cherish what remains of the earth, and to foster its renewal is our only legitimate hope of survival." He also said that "...eating is an agricultural act". And so that's the big picture – survival on the earth – and the small picture – what goes in your mouth – in a nutshell. It boils down to you, me, our families, neighbors, local community, and the choices we make.
It doesn't matter that much about me, but by way of path to choices – I grew up in a Detroit middle-class WASP suburb back in the '50s and '60s, a time of plenty, indeed well-off relative to much of the rest of the world. There were ups and downs but life was a breeze and me and my pals wanted for, well, not much. Heading to college my goal was to find a way to make a lotta money, live high on the hog, and have a lot of fun. Nothing really wrong with that, per se, except that there's only so much of the high part of the hog to go around, literally, and, we can't be so ready to eat the hog that we eat both mom and dad, and run out of hogs to eat. Which is say that I began to get a sense of responsibility to be accountable to a bigger picture at a round point in my college years. I began to be aware of other ways of living in the world and became more conscious of the world around me.
And so I changed in minute painful degrees and along the path I landed by good fortune in the world of food – natural and organic food to be more precise – a continuing education and adventure. I then saw an increasingly nutrition-poor American diet leading to increasing health problems for Americans and I plunged into the food biz to try to make a positive change. And so here I am now nearly a half-century later, learning still, understanding better how much more there is to learn, more convinced than ever that we'll have a healthier community by understanding the ties between healthy soil, healthy food, and a healthy community.
Food is a big issue, right? Most of us have that down. I mean, you gotta eat to live, and that's a baseline. A step further is knowing that we are what we eat. Directly. I mean, the cells that make up our bodies are made from the foods we eat, plus of course the water we drink, and air we breathe. The health of our fellow citizenry, both physically and mentally, whether local, national, or world, is directly tied to the food choices we make every day. Malnutrition, lack of nutrition, no nutrition; obesity, heart disease, cancer, diabetes; these problems are directly related to the quality of the food, water, and air we take in. Thus Wendell Berry's urging for us to cherish, protect, and build on what remains of our earth. Food grows in soil. Without healthy, alive, nutrient-dense soil, we won't have healthy, nutrient-dense food and our community will be in danger.
Someone recently told me, and I never knew this before but it makes sense, that the word "human" derives from the word "humus". Since food comes from soil, or humus, you can understand how humans are built from soil. The point is, absent healthy soil to grow healthy food, there is no healthy food to grow healthy humans.
Just as we're learning that in order to be healthy we have to have a teeming system of bacteria working for us in our gut, the soil our food comes from has to have a teeming system of bacteria working in its gut too, under the top layer of soil. It's those bacteria in the gut that do a good deal of the work for us breaking down food into the nutrients that we can absorb to keep us going. And it's the bacteria life in the soil that breaks the nutrients present in the soil into the simpler form that a plant's tiny root tendrils can gobble up to make the plant thrive and resist pests and disease. And for the plant, like for us, we're talking about a long list of nutrients. Not just the N, P, and K that farming in our modern age has concentrated almost solely on, but the many, many elements we don't even know about yet that make a plant, and thus a human, healthy.
Eating is an agricultural act. When we eat, we encourage an agricultural model of one sort or another and it's helpful to realize that. I don't want to say that all big ag is bad but I do want to say that I'm all for small farms and making it possible for young people to look with hope and excitement at a vocation of farming good fresh food for their communities. There is a place, done properly, for large-scale commercial agriculture. But the thin concern for soil health and sustainability typical of large-scale commercial farms, continually plowed and cropped in the same way year after year, is simply headed toward a dead end, and we can't keep moving in that direction much longer.
Instead of one 3,000-acre farm dependent on off-farm inputs of machinery and fuel and nutrients and fertility and crop protection chemicals and dangerous seed genome manipulation – and employing just a few people, kicking people off the farms and into factories to make all those things that replace them on the farm – I want to see 100 thirty-acre farms employing several people each, or thirty 100-acre farms, growing diversified crops that feed people locally, operated by farmers who understand the need to build the ability the soil to grow healthy food for generations into the future. I'm convinced personally, moreover, that the best way to solve the world's hunger problem is by encouraging small sustainable farms instead of big farm/big machinery/big inputs models, thus getting people back out of the cities and back onto farms, caring for community soil, building it up, and providing good honest work for millions and millions in the process.
I must say that I was rather encouraged a week or so ago when, at a farming conference, in a talk about soil health, I listened to a USDA official say how the USDA is beginning to make a U-turn on tillage and fertilizer and spraying recommendations, turning toward systems that keep the vital bacterial life of soil intact. Hallelujah!
So this is a food request to you, fellow citizens: be conscious of the choices you make in getting the food you eat. Every dollar spent on food, every dollar, is a vote in support of a system of producing that food. It could be your most important vote – most certainly a vote that directly impacts both your inner health and the outer health of your community, environmentally and economically. Even if you don't like farming or haven't ever been on a farm, as Wendell Berry says, "We all farm by proxy".
Information on local, state, and national groups advocating for local food systems
I'm a member of the relatively new
Washtenaw Food Policy Council, formed recently by the county commissioners to "increase and preserve access to safe, local, and healthy food for all residents". Its bi-monthly meetings are open to the public, and its five Policy Action Teams (Farmers, Waste & Packaging, Zoning & Planning, Access & Nutrition, and Education) are open to anybody who wants to work on those things.
Local groups:
- The many
local farms supplying healthy food to our local markets.
- Seek out local restaurants and stores that make a point of buying from local farms.
-
Selma Cafe,
FSEP,
Slow Food,
Fair Food Network,
Food Gatherers,
Growing Hope
- Segments of our local institutions: (UMs SNRE, Public Health, Public Policy, Health System, EMU, WCC, St. Joe, etc) that make an effort to empower a healthy local food system
State groups:
State groups and Institutions like MSU’s Student Organic Farm, ,
Michigan Good Food,
Michigan Organic Food and Farm Alliance (MOFFA),
Michigan Food & Farming Systems (MIFFS),
Michigan Small Farms Council,
Michigan Young Farmer’s Coalition, and many more…
Marty Gerencer of the MMC (Michigan Merit Curriculum) says, "…food related initiatives are win-win for people, growers and all food stakeholders, the local economy and the state of Michigan. Local food is about more than any one of us, it is about all of us."
National Groups:
The
National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) - an alliance of grassroots organizations that advocates for federal policy reform to advance the sustainability of agriculture, food systems, natural resources, and rural communities.
The
National Young Farmer's Coalition (NYFC) represents, mobilizes, and engages young farmers to ensure their success, envisioning a country where young people who are willing to work, get trained and take a little risk, can support themselves and their families on smaller independent family farms, supporting practices and policies that will sustain young, independent and prosperous farmers now and in the future.
And a Final Word on Organic and Biodynamic Farming systems:
Biodynamic farming is a system that works systematically, creatively and lovingly with the subtle energies of nature to enhance the health of the farm and the quality and flavor of food. Biodynamics parallels organic farming in many ways but is set apart by its emphasis on life energies, on balancing the physical and non-physical realms, acknowledging cosmic and terrestrial forces that influence life energy.