My Father's Garden
Bullfrog Films, $80; (800) 543-3764
The disparate experiences of
two farmers dramatize the promise and peril of U.S. agriculture in Miranda
Smith's moving documentary. Both men are innovators dedicated to producing the
best food possible. One-Smith's
father-puts his trust in technology. The other finds guidance in the land, citing
the Garden of Eden's warning to abide our place in the natural
order.
Snippets of home movies woven throughout the film tell the story of Herbert
Smith. We first see the Florida farmer, a champion of the "miracle" sprays of the
1950s, sitting atop his tractor, nearly consumed by thick clouds of pesticides.
The filmmaker, who narrates these segments, relates her father's enthusiasm for
these marvels of science with affection: "Dad was thrilled by all the new
chemicals. He was convinced that with modern sprays and fertilizers he could
produce the crops of his dreams."
While Herbert Smith embraced technology, North Dakota farmer Fred Kirschenmann
speaks of its fallout. Conventional agriculture with its reliance on synthetic
chemicals is eroding the soil, contaminating the groundwater, and polluting the
air with gases linked to global warming, ozone depletion, and acid rain. "Since
Europeans came to this land," Kirschenmann tells us, "we've lost half of our
topsoil, and most of it in the past forty years. We're destroying the resources
we need to grow food."
Shunning the energy- and resource-intensive conventional methods of modern
agriculture, Kirschenmann has found success with organics.
The filmmaker wonders wistfully whether her father might have lived past 40 if
he'd chosen such a path. For him, technology was a gift from heaven to help him
bend the law of nature. But this approach to farming, says Kirschenmann, fails to
accept nature on its own terms. We would do well to remember, he says, that such
arrogance is what spoiled
Paradise. --Liza Gross
Green Regime
The Greening of Cuba
The Video
Project, $29.95; (800) 4-PLANET
The fall of the Soviet empire in 1989 had a surprising effect on Cuba. Its ties
to Mother Russia cut, Cuba was forced to re-establish its ties to Mother Earth.
Jaime Kibben's documentary explains how the Cuban people managed to turn a
crippling food shortage into a model for sustainable organic
agriculture.
Until the late 1980s, Cuba practiced the most industrialized agriculture in Latin
America. Within a year of the Soviet collapse, the country lost 80 percent of its
pesticide and fertilizer imports, and half of its petroleum. And a beefed-up U.S.
embargo made access to other markets impossible. Without the mainstays of
industrial farming, production dropped by almost half by 1994. Drastic measures
were taken: the government broke up the huge state farms and turned them into
for-profit, worker-owned cooperatives; set up programs to research and support
organic techniques; and dispatched experts to advise farmers.
Kibben interviews farm owners and laborers, urban gardeners, and scientists, who
talk enthusiastically about reconnecting people to their food and the land.
Farmers have learned to use manure instead of chemical fertilizers, predatory
worms instead of pesticides, oxen instead of tractors-and gained a new
appreciation of how nature works.
With industrial farming, one solution creates another problem. Mechanization
depends on cultivating huge plots, which forces farmers to plant just one crop to
be efficient. But the many pests that monoculture attracts can't be controlled
without pesticides. As pest resistance increases, even more pesticides are
needed. "It's a curse, a chain of problems," says a community farm manager.
More than 27,000 organic farms have been created since the early 1990s in the
Havana area alone. Though Cubans still struggle to make ends meet, 10 of the
country's 13 principal crops reached record production levels in 1997. "All of
this has taught us to make better use of our resources," says an agricultural
co-op manager. It's also showing developing nations that there's another way of
feeding their people-without sacrificing their environment.
--L.G.
