Down on the Harvard Farm

Jim Ward cuts an unimposing figure in his torn jeans, soil-smeared shirt, and high wellie farming boots as he crosses the strawberry patch to greet us. Jim and brother Bob, both self-described “tree huggers,” have quietly developed Wards Berry Farm into a 150-acre experiment in sustainable agriculture since their father bought the land just outside Boston in 1981. Now their farm could become the newest supplier to Harvard University Dining Services (HUDS) as Harvard seeks out green food sources.

Nationally, the organics movement is surging. The Whole Foods-buying, hybrid-driving, compulsively-recycling Generation X has transformed an experiment on a 1960’s Hippie commune into a $12 billion per year industry. But with two thirds of American supermarkets now stocking organic produce, what does sustainable food mean, and is HUDS providing it?

To Mr. Ward what matters is the “stewardship of air, soil, and water.” He describes the tomatoes, squash, and peppers his farm grows in terms of the “experiences” they evoke, and every spring dozens of suburban Bostonian teenagers come to his farm to experience the lost art of sustainable farming. If HUDS signs on, Harvard students may soon be following suit.

Back in Cambridge, Ted Mayer, HUDS’ executive director, told me that the drive for more sustainable food “mostly came from students” concerned about health, the environment, and the ethics of what they’re eating. He argued that the mandatory nature of the dining plan gives HUDS a unique responsibility to cater to the ethical concerns of students.

A preliminary scorecard on HUDS shows promising steps in produce—with up to 40 percent of HUDS’ fruits and vegetables in the fall now locally grown at farms like Wards Berry—and in processed foods, with HUDS the first college nationally to go trans fat free.

But making Harvard’s meats sustainable remains the biggest challenge, and it’s here that HUDS should devote its efforts. Every meat entrée served at Harvard requires 1300 pounds of meat, meaning that every day HUDS is using over 5000 pounds in its 14 dining halls. That makes sourcing locally tough—Susan Burgess, HUDS’ procurement director, points out that most New England farms lack sufficient capacity—but also gives Harvard tremendous power to shape the industry.

Given the environmental spill-over costs of factory farmed meats, HUDS should exert this power. As food prices worldwide spike, most of the world’s corn and soy crops are fed to animals—with grain-fed beef requiring 10 times more grain to produce the same amount of calories as direct grain consumption. This, coupled with absurd ethanol subsidies, incentivizes monoculture production of corn across the Midwest, which in turn erodes soil and creates nitrogen run-off into the Gulf of Mexico.

Moreover, factory farming affects global warming. A 2006 report by the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization found that livestock production generates more greenhouse gas emissions—18 percent—than the entire transport sector. This is because the gases that factory farms produce, nitrous oxide and methane, have, respectively, 292 and 23 times more Global Warming Potential than carbon dioxide. The CO2 emissions required to transport HUDS’ meats by truck from its producers in Ohio, Canada, and California don’t help either.

Changing meat suppliers could also reduce the cruelty that animals on factory farms suffer. HUDS’ main meat wholesaler, US Foodservice, doesn’t enforce meaningful humane standards on its producers, with the result that pork can come from pregnant sows confined in crates so narrow they can’t turn around and chicken from slaughterhouses with no humane slaughter laws. In such conditions, antibiotics are the only way to keep animals alive, and farm antibiotic overuse is diluting the efficacy of human medicines.

Student pressure has the potential to change this. Last year HUDS spent $30,000 on shifting 25 percent of its egg supply from Kreider Farms after 1,000 students signed a petition protesting the battery cage conditions that chickens are kept in at the farm (see kreidercruelty.com). For now all liquid eggs still come from Kreider.

But HUDS is sensitive to the need to further reform its producers. In an e-mail sent as this piece was going to press, Ms. Burgess assured me that “I and HUDS do not tolerate animal cruelty … We would never conduct business with any entity that would do such things.” Last week Mr. Mayer told me that HUDS is open to pursuing more humanely produced meats if students demand them, and suggested that soaring gas prices might make local pasture-fed meats more economical.

Back on Wards Berry Farm, there’s a vision of what the sustainable future of food might look like. Between a new peach orchard and a tomato field, a series of outdoor enclosures, and hoop barns house egg-laying hens and wool-bearing sheep. The chickens are free to scratch in the dust and the spring lambs to graze on grass. The manure that the animals produce is used to fertilize the crops and no antibiotics or hormones are needed to keep these free-ranging animals healthy.

For now this serves more as a 4-H club exhibit than a commercial farm. But as HUDS seeks to extend its sustainable foods, this could be the ideal model for hormone-free, land-preserving, more humane animal agriculture. For the sake of animals and the environment, let’s hope HUDS’ reforming impulse succeeds.

Lewis E. Bollard ’09 is a social studies concentrator in Kirkland House. His column appears on alternate Thursdays.