Confidential contracts detailing Monsanto Co.’s business practices reveal how the world’s biggest seed developer is squeezing competitors, controlling smaller seed companies and protecting its dominance over the multibillion-dollar market for genetically altered crops, an Associated Press investigation has found.
With Monsanto’s patented genes being inserted into roughly 95 percent of all soybeans and 80 percent of all corn grown in the U.S., the company also is using its wide reach to control the ability of new biotech firms to get wide distribution for their products, according to a review of several Monsanto licensing agreements and dozens of interviews with seed industry participants, agriculture and legal experts.
Declining competition in the seed business could lead to price hikes that ripple out to every family’s dinner table. That’s because the corn flakes you had for breakfast, soda you drank at lunch and beef stew you ate for dinner likely were produced from crops grown with Monsanto’s patented genes.
Monsanto’s methods are spelled out in a series of confidential commercial licensing agreements obtained by the AP. The contracts, as long as 30 pages, include basic terms for the selling of engineered crops resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, along with shorter supplementary agreements that address new Monsanto traits or other contract amendments.
The company has used the agreements to spread its technology — giving some 200 smaller companies the right to insert Monsanto’s genes in their separate strains of corn and soybean plants. But, the AP found, access to Monsanto’s genes comes at a cost, and with plenty of strings attached.
For example, one contract provision bans independent companies from breeding plants that contain both Monsanto’s genes and the genes of any of its competitors, unless Monsanto gives prior written permission — giving Monsanto the ability to effectively lock out competitors from inserting their patented traits into the vast share of U.S. crops that already contain Monsanto’s genes.
Monsanto’s business strategies and licensing agreements are being investigated by the U.S. Department of Justice and at least two state attorneys general, who are trying to determine if the practices violate U.S. antitrust laws. The practices also are at the heart of civil antitrust suits filed against Monsanto by its competitors, including a 2004 suit filed by Syngenta AG that was settled with an agreement and ongoing litigation filed this summer by DuPont in response to a Monsanto lawsuit.
The suburban St. Louis-based agricultural giant said it’s done nothing wrong.
“We do not believe there is any merit to allegations about our licensing agreement or the terms within,” said Monsanto spokesman Lee Quarles. He said he couldn’t comment on many specific provisions of the agreements because they are confidential and the subject of ongoing litigation.
“Our approach to licensing (with) many companies is pro-competitive and has enabled literally hundreds of seed companies, including all of our major direct competitors, to offer thousands of new seed products to farmers,” he said.
The benefit of Monsanto’s technology for farmers has been undeniable, but some of its major competitors and smaller seed firms claim the company is using strong-arm tactics to further its control.
“We now believe that Monsanto has control over as much as 90 percent of (seed genetics). This level of control is almost unbelievable,” said Neil Harl, agricultural economist at Iowa State University who has studied the seed industry for decades. “The upshot of that is that it’s tightening Monsanto’s control, and makes it possible for them to increase their prices long term. And we’ve seen this happening the last five years, and the end is not in sight.”
At issue is how much power one company can have over seeds, the foundation of the world’s food supply. Without stiff competition, Monsanto could raise its seed prices at will, which in turn could raise the cost of everything from animal feed to wheat bread and cookies.
The price of seeds is already rising. Monsanto increased some corn seed prices last year by 25 percent, with an additional 7 percent hike planned for corn seeds in 2010. Monsanto brand soybean seeds climbed 28 percent last year and will be flat or up 6 percent in 2010, said company spokeswoman Kelli Powers.
Monsanto’s broad use of licensing agreements has made its biotech traits among the most widely and rapidly adopted technologies in farming history. These days, when farmers buy bags of seed with obscure brand names like AgVenture or M-Pride Genetics, they are paying for Monsanto’s licensed products.
One of the numerous provisions in the licensing agreements is a ban on mixing genes — or “stacking” in industry lingo — that enhance Monsanto’s power.
One contract provision likely helped Monsanto buy 24 independent seed companies throughout the Farm Belt over the last few years: that corn seed agreement says that if a smaller company changes ownership, its inventory with Monsanto’s traits “shall be destroyed immediately.”
Another provision from contracts earlier this decade– regarding rebates — also help explain Monsanto’s rapid growth as it rolled out new products.
One contract gave an independent seed company deep discounts if the company ensured that Monsanto’s products would make up 70 percent of its total corn seed inventory. In its 2004 lawsuit, Syngenta called the discounts part of Monsanto’s “scorched earth campaign” to keep Syngenta’s new traits out of the market.
Quarles said the discounts were used to entice seed companies to carry Monsanto products when the technology was new and farmers hadn’t yet used it. Now that the products are widespread, Monsanto has discontinued the discounts, he said.
The Monsanto contracts reviewed by the AP prohibit seed companies from discussing terms, and Monsanto has the right to cancel deals and wipe out the inventory of a business if the confidentiality clauses are violated.
Thomas Terral, chief executive officer of Terral Seed in Louisiana, said he recently rejected a Monsanto contract because it put too many restrictions on his business. But Terral refused to provide the unsigned contract to AP or even discuss its contents because he was afraid Monsanto would retaliate and cancel the rest of his agreements.
“I would be so tied up in what I was able to do that basically I would have no value to anybody else,” he said. “The only person I would have value to is Monsanto, and I would continue to pay them millions in fees.”
Independent seed company owners could drop their contracts with Monsanto and return to selling conventional seed, but they say it could be financially ruinous. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene has become the industry standard over the last decade, and small companies fear losing customers if they drop it. It also can take years of breeding and investment to mix Monsanto’s genes into a seed company’s product line, so dropping the genes can be costly.
Monsanto acknowledged that U.S. Department of Justice lawyers are seeking documents and interviewing company employees about its marketing practices. The DOJ wouldn’t comment.
A spokesman for Iowa Attorney General Tom Miller said the office is examining possible antitrust violations. Additionally, two sources familiar with an investigation in Texas said state Attorney General Greg Abbott’s office is considering the same issues. States have the authority to enforce federal antitrust law, and attorneys general are often involved in such cases.
Monsanto chairman and chief executive officer Hugh Grant told investment analysts during a conference call this fall that the price increases are justified by the productivity boost farmers get from the company’s seeds. Farmers and seed company owners agree that Monsanto’s technology has boosted yields and profits, saving farmers time they once spent weeding and money they once spent on pesticides.
But recent price hikes have still been tough to swallow on the farm.
“It’s just like I got hit with bad weather and got a poor yield. It just means I’ve got less in the bottom line,” said Markus Reinke, a corn and soybean farmer near Concordia, Mo. who took over his family’s farm in 1965. “They can charge because they can do it, and get away with it. And us farmers just complain, and shake our heads and go along with it.”
Any Justice Department case against Monsanto could break new ground in balancing a company’s right to control its patented products while protecting competitors’ right to free and open competition, said Kevin Arquit, former director of the Federal Trade Commission competition bureau and now a antitrust attorney with Simpson Thacher & Bartlett LLP in New York.
“These are very interesting issues, and not just for the companies, but for the Justice Department,” Arquit said. “They’re in an area where there is uncertainty in the law and there are consumer welfare implications and government policy implications for whatever the result is.”
Other seed companies have followed Monsanto’s lead by including restrictive clauses in their licensing agreements, but their products only penetrate smaller segments of the U.S. seed market. Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene, on the other hand, is in such a wide array of crops that its licensing agreements can have a massive effect on the rules of the marketplace.
Monsanto was only a niche player in the seed business just 12 years ago. It rose to the top thanks to innovation by its scientists and aggressive use of patent law by its attorneys.
First came the science, when Monsanto in 1996 introduced the world’s first commercial strain of genetically engineered soybeans. The Roundup Ready plants were resistant to the herbicide, allowing farmers to spray Roundup whenever they wanted rather than wait until the soybeans had grown enough to withstand the chemical.
The company soon released other genetically altered crops, such as corn plants that produced a natural pesticide to ward off bugs. While Monsanto had blockbuster products, it didn’t yet have a big foothold in a seed industry made up of hundreds of companies that supplied farmers.
That’s where the legal innovations came in, as Monsanto became among the first to widely patent its genes and gain the right to strictly control how they were used. That control let it spread its technology through licensing agreements, while shaping the marketplace around them.
Back in the 1970s, public universities developed new traits for corn and soybean seeds that made them grow hardy and resist pests. Small seed companies got the traits cheaply and could blend them to breed superior crops without restriction. But the agreements give Monsanto control over mixing multiple biotech traits into crops.
The restrictions even apply to taxpayer-funded researchers.
Roger Boerma, a research professor at the University of Georgia, is developing specialized strains of soybeans that grow well in southeastern states, but his current research is tangled up in such restrictions from Monsanto and its competitors.
“It’s made one level of our life incredibly challenging and difficult,” Boerma said.
The rules also can restrict research. Boerma halted research on a line of new soybean plants that contain a trait from a Monsanto competitor when he learned that the trait was ineffective unless it could be mixed with Monsanto’s Roundup Ready gene.
Boerma said he hasn’t considered asking Monsanto’s permission to mix its traits with the competitor’s trait.
“I think the co-mingling of their trait technology with another company’s trait technology would likely be a serious problem for them,” he said.
Quarles pointed out that Monsanto has signed agreements with several companies allowing them to stack their traits with Monsanto’s. After Syngenta settled its lawsuit, for example, the companies struck a broad cross-licensing accord.
At the same time, Monsanto’s patent rights give it the authority to say how independent companies use its traits, Quarles said.
“Please also keep in mind that, as the (intellectual property developer), it is our right to determine who will obtain rights to our technology and for what purpose,” he said.
Monsanto’s provision requiring companies to destroy seeds containing Monsanto’s traits if a competitor buys them prohibited DuPont or other big firms from bidding against Monsanto when it snapped up two dozen smaller seed companies over the last five years, said David Boies, a lawyer representing DuPont who previously was a prosecutor on the federal antitrust case against Microsoft Corp.
Competitive bids from companies like DuPont could have made it far more expensive for Monsanto to bring the smaller companies into its fold. But that contract provision prevented bidding wars, according to DuPont.
“If the independent seed company is losing their license and has to destroy their seeds, they’re not going to have anything, in effect, to sell,” Boies said. “It requires them to destroy things — destroy things they paid for — if they go competitive. That’s exactly the kind of restriction on competitive choice that the antitrust laws outlaw.”
Quarles said some of the Monsanto contracts let companies sell their inventory for a period of time, rather than be required to destroy it. Seed companies also don’t have to pay royalty fees on the bags of seed they destroyed.
“Simply put, it was designed to facilitate early adoption of the technology,” he said.
Some independent seed company owners say they feel increasingly pinched as Monsanto cements its leadership in the industry.
“They have the capital, they have the resources, they own lots of companies, and buying more. We’re small town, they’re Wall Street,” said Bill Cook, co-owner of M-Pride Genetics seed company in Garden City, Mo., who also declined to discuss or provide the agreements. “It’s very difficult to compete in this environment against companies like Monsanto.”
To me, the organic food movement has become dizzyingly, surreally chic. Farmers have become rock stars; the most exclusive restaurants name-check them so much you can almost see dirt on the menu. But before organic produce exploded into a $25 billion industry, before city gardening became cool, I grew up in a Hmong refugee community, living the urban organic lifestyle not because it was fashionable, but because we were poor. I couldn’t wait to leave it behind.
I grew up in Del Paso Heights, a mixed-race inner city of Sacramento, Calif. — the kind of neighborhood that had just two grocery stores between endless fast-food and liquor shops, and where we all paid for our groceries with food stamps. It was where we grew organic food and raised chickens in our backyards to survive. And where we did it in secrecy.
Like most Hmong in the United States, our community was from Laos, transplanted here after an alliance with the CIA turned our isolated tribe of farmers into mercenaries — a failed secret war against the Communist Vietnamese that left Hmong as the targets of ethnic cleansing. Lifelong farmers-turned-international refugees, the older generation was ill-prepared to thrive in modern America. They settled into inner cities where many turned to social services as safety nets.
I remember watching grown-ups lose their identities and self-worth, slip into depression and cycles of poverty, illness and suicide. These were clan leaders who once commanded the respect of entire villages, tough guerrilla soldiers trained by the CIA — like my father — and proud providers who had, without writing, committed to memory centuries of the best farming practices. And they were humbled, receiving welfare and food stamps because there was no opportunity then in urban America for their main skill. Still, they farmed in the city for two necessities: food and a wistful connection to the old way of life.
We grew crops in every plot of soil that hinted of fertility — parking lots, front lawns, even inside discarded paint buckets, which made terrific homes for lemongrass and chili peppers. When I was in elementary school, the families in our apartment building worked a farm just outside of Sacramento. Every person, every age, had a job. Meals were planned around what we gathered: We scraped fresh cucumbers, serving them with sugar over ice on hot summer days; we pounded the signature Hmong mix of hand-picked peppers, cilantro, green onions and lime in a mortar and served it as a dip for meat and sticky rice. I remember loving our imperfectly shaped cucumbers because I got to watch each one grow into its own unique shape and thought they all had more character than the “beautiful” ones wrapped in plastic at the grocery store. And I loved mustard greens, which grew in abundance once a year but could be pickled for year-round consumption.
We bartered with each other. We raised chickens in the backyard, letting them out to roam and feeding them by hand. We didn’t have a label for this back then, though now I suppose people call it “free-range,” and it costs more. We slaughtered our own hens, sometimes with rituals honoring the sacrifice of the animal’s life.
With the costs of vegetables offset by our gardens, all the families pitched in to buy a pig or cow from the closest farmer, dividing the meat. This way, we could also afford to buy rice.
But we had to keep our locavore tendencies secret. America’s food rules, which seemed to us to go against nature, left us fearful of punishment. At the time, exactly one person from our clan had attended an American college and became our cultural broker, translating to shamans the world of Western medicine, and to lifelong hunters and fishermen the rules of hunting and fishing. What license was needed for what, how many of what thing could be caught during which season, if you could take fruit from a tree depending on which side of a fence it hung. All of it was too complicated to keep straight, and so it felt safer to keep our food producing regimens to ourselves. I can’t remember how many times my father built, tore down and rebuilt the chicken coop, afraid that neighbors who heard crowing would report us.
“Don’t tell the Americans,” my mother would always say, and, eventually, as I grew into adolescence, I couldn’t agree more. I was afraid of being judged.
My mother sprinkled only fresh-cut grass in her garden, swearing by its ability to grow bigger and tastier vegetables. She often crossed dangerous lanes of traffic to get to a pile of lawn clippings. My sisters and I would jump out of the car to bag the grass, and we did it with the speed of a NASCAR pit crew, terrified of being seen by friends.
The parking lot of our neighborhood Kmart was a regular pickup spot for lawn clippings. In my teens, when merely being accused of shopping at Kmart was an epic embarrassment, you can imagine the horror I felt about being spotted stealing grass from its parking lot. “If anyone sees me, MY LIFE IS OVER!” I’d say. Unfortunately, dramatic teenage declarations of “life being over” didn’t fly in Hmong households, not when there would always be someone around to remind you of the time he narrowly escaped the death camps.
As the adolescent me tried to find her groove, navigating deeper into the treacherous social maze of an American high school, I tried to talk my mother out of picking cilantro and scallions from her garden, cleaning and separating and selling them for 50 cents a bunch at a local Hmong store. It never made her more than $20 a week, but she didn’t care. She was obsessed with the idea of doing something she knew how to do, something that could earn money.
My family searched for new places to grow food while I became increasingly afraid that outsiders would find out we lived in a replica Hmong village, built to resemble what the older generation knew as “home.” Then one day, I was outed by a classmate as a food stamp user as I stood in the collection line to count money for my mother. That was the day that I decided I hated everything about the way we got food — from the paint-bucket chili peppers to the communal pig, cut up in pieces, ready to be bagged and shared. I wanted to run away from this mess. I wanted to be one of the cool kids. I would feed myself like they do.
Now, as an adult, I don’t have a garden. Years after I finished college and was well into the working world, long after credit cards made checks obsolete at the grocery store, I still insisted on writing checks to pay for my brand-name groceries. The defiant child food stamp user in me still needs the validation that comes from putting pen to paper and declaring, in writing, that I earned the right to take this food home.
But who’d know that, just as I finally shed a former life of organic necessity, my mother would be the hip one? Now I go to the market and hear people boasting about the eggs in their backyards, or how much their garden looks like the one on the White House lawn. My best friend, also a former Hmong child gardener, laughs with me about collecting lawn clippings. If only we had had cool recyclable cloth bags with eco-friendly slogans, we joke. If only we could be heroic, claiming to be launching a food revolution. But for us, there was no room to think about glamour. That life just felt backward.
I imagine now how many “I told you so’s” my mother would impart on me if she could grasp the enormousness of today’s food movement: Pesticide-free produce, hand-fed chickens, cuisines boasting minimal ingredients all represent billions of dollars to be made. And, irony of ironies, now people’s food stamps can’t even cover the costs of organic and local produce at our markets.
But I stood recently at a popular farmers’ market in San Francisco, where I now live and where my relatives have a vegetable stall. Surrounded by a flurry of patrons enthusiastic about locally grown food, I felt … proud. Proud that Hmong farmers owned their own stalls, their tradition of necessity now trendy and profitable. That day, my uncle gave me a bag of cucumbers and tomatoes from his stall. He said he had heard all about my schooling and my travels, and that he was proud I had made it. But as I looked at my bag and at all the customers flocking to his stall, I couldn’t help thinking he was making it in his own right.
Pha Lo is a freelance writer/nutrition educator and teaches food budgeting skills to low-income parents.
A few weeks ago, I had the honor of addressing the august Southern Foodways Alliance Symposium, which would be the finest food conference in the country even if it didn’t dedicate a least one entire evening to various forms of fried catfish and booze.
The subject of my talk was the global influence on the South, as shown in the diverse people of Biloxi, Miss. — shrimpers and the children of shrimpers, bakers and market tenders. It’s a subject — and these are people — dear to my heart, and I found myself unexpectedly emotional as I told their rich stories: of FoFo Gilich who grew up working in a cannery and was nearly mayor of Biloxi; of Richard Gollott, who is the man literally responsible for the establishment of a vibrant Vietnamese community in this town; of Sue Nguyen, whose “Vietnamese bakery” became, over time, simply Biloxi’s bakery; and more.
I’d like to share those stories with you here. If you’d rather not listen to me yap, below the video is one of these stories in written form, on Mr. Leroy Duvall, a retired shrimper and the president of a Cajun social club. And if you’d like to read more of the oral histories I collected in this part of the world, please visit the Southern Foodways Alliance’s website.
SFA 2010: “Cajuns, Croats, Vietnamese: On Land and Sea in Biloxi” presented by Francis Lam from UM Media Documentary Projects on Vimeo.
Mr. Leroy and the French Club
This story originally appeared on Gourmet.com.
I just watched a table the size of a twin bed get piled with crawfish. Twice. So this is how they roll at the French Club. Outside, in the parking lot, half a dozen beer-fueled men watched propane-fueled pots, sending an eventual 1,500 pounds of crawfish to their hot and spicy ends.
I have to confess that I wasn’t thrilled at first about showing up at the Fleur de Lis Society. This was months ago, and I was looking for stories of Cajun fishermen, but clubs kind of weird me out, with their odd little exclusivities and mutated social hierarchies. On my way over, I imagined arcane secret-society stuff: handshakes and passwords and rituals in funny hats with the window shades down. Who knows what these people are all about? I’ve seen movies. I don’t want to end up at the bottom of the Gulf, strapped to a sack of crawfish heads.
I pulled up to their imposing meeting hall, a dead ringer for an airplane hangar, with nerves firing, and walked in to find … a couple of guys watching SportsCenter at a bar. I met Mr. Leon, Mr. Ben, Mr. Tee, friendly men in Hawaiian shirts and pleated jeans who pulled up a chair for me and chatted the way uncles do. Leroy Duvall, the club’s president, came over and shook my hand, a slight, taut man with a head of white and skin that’s been in the sun his whole life. He apologized for the ruckus as I set up the recording gear. It was a big day. Three years after Katrina took their home they’d just gotten into their new building, and the first thing he did was call in a beer order, now clanging in on hand trucks and dollies.
Seventy-five years ago, Cajun fishermen looking for work moved into Biloxi from Louisiana. In a strange town far from home, they settled into a tight-knit community in East Biloxi. They founded the French Club, as everyone called it, as a place to have dinners and dances together, and occasionally raise some money for members in bad shape.
I asked whether the Club tries to preserve French culture. Mr. Leroy nodded, talking about the dances they put on, but then said, “I don’t really speak very much French. I wish I did but I don’t, and a lot of us don’t … the younger people, you know.” There wasn’t a trace of irony in his voice when he referred to himself as one of the younger people, despite his 64 years.
Mr. Leroy worked on shrimp boats for most of his life. He misses it. “No traffic jams,” he said to me. “No 9 to 5. You just worked. But it was just the pleasure of being out there; the freedom and the good fresh air.” It’s demanding work, physical work, but I imagine of the kind that makes your body still feel young at 64 if it didn’t make you feel old at 32.
But the realities of age still stand. I asked him why the club only has 300 members now, instead of the 600 it used to have. “The older people got older,” he said. “East Biloxi started dying away. And then Katrina finished it off by taking everything out. A lot of the older people are too old to try to come back down here and start over.”
I asked if he keeps in touch with his displaced members. “That’s one reason we put the club back down here,” he said. “After Katrina took our building away there was no consideration about going anyplace else. Our people — no matter where they’re at — they know whenever they come back, the French Club is still here. A lot of our members passed away; we have a lot of older people. Every day we see them they ask when we’re going to open. They want to come back and we’re trying to get it back. For the people.”
Behind us, men loaded the new coolers with beers and Cokes and Barq’s Root Beer.
I’ve come back a few times since hoping to catch the club in action, but every time I drive by, it’s just Mr. Leroy’s old pickup in the parking lot. I poke my head in the dark hall. It’s an awfully big room for one man to be in. I say hello, he smiles warmly, counting change or taking out the trash. He tells me, every time, that I just missed everyone, that I should come by for dinner. We chat, I thank him, and leave him to his chores.
But today, I walk into the French Club and my eyes need a few minutes to adjust to the darkness from the Mississippi sun. When I can see again, the tables are crowded with people piling high the spent bodies of crawfish. The aisles are crowded with couples dancing to Cajun music played by a man with a Croatian name. I can barely make my way through the crowd, taking pictures to go with my interview, and looking for Mr. Leroy. When I finally find him, my photos all taken, he asks, “Did you get any crawfish?” I regretted saying that I had to go. “Well,” he says. “You’re welcome here anytime. You know that, don’t you?”
I smiled back at him. “Yes, I do, Mr. Leroy. Yes, I do.”
If fish can be heroes, salmon have a heroic story — returning after years out in the world, they fight their way upriver back to where they were born, slipping past eagles and dodging bears to find a place for their children. But the natural order is both grislier and more beautiful than that. Those eagles and bears will stave off their hunger and snatch their fill of fish from the water. And the salmon that survive will spawn, wither and then die, their bodies nourishing the ecology with nutrients collected from the ocean.
Bristol Bay, Alaska, is home to the largest wild salmon run in the world. Every summer, up to 50 million sockeye come pounding through the bay, turning it silver. The salmon run is what brings life back to this place. It defines it. “It’s incredibly moving to see the first fish surge,” Kate Taylor, a wilderness guide, said to me. “That’s when everything starts. You see the bald eagles come out, the osprey, the wolves, the bears. Soon, you see trout up the river feeding on the salmon eggs. All this life starts to come out of this barren landscape.” And then there are the people: the fishermen gearing up for the season. The natives who have subsisted on this fish for nearly 10,000 years. The thousands of workers who come here, swelling these villages to 20 times their off-season size.
But what if the salmon don’t come? The future is unclear, as Bristol Bay also happens to be an enormous copper deposit, and Canadian and British energy corporations are planning a massive mine at the headwaters of the bay. Considering that the Pebble Mine is in a seismic zone and will require what is essentially the world’s largest earthen dam to hold back the lake of sulfuric acid it will produce, many are fearful that, whether catastrophically or just through seepage, the mine will destroy this nearly untouched wild habitat, where the air smells all the time of tundra, a perfume of herbs and flowers and moss. But for now, as I looked out to the water, waiting for a tug on my fishing line, I thought what an incredible privilege it was to be here, at the very cusp of watching a whole world come awake, and to meet some of the people who live among the salmon.
The fisherman
David McRae has fished for sockeye salmon in these waters, under this enormous sky, for 30 years. A handsome man in the Eastwood vein, his face is strong, rectangular. His hair is short and gray, his skin weathered to a toughness, and yet he smiles easily, almost beatifically, which was a relief when I hopped clumsily into his boat, nearly tripping on the nets piled on the floor. I tried to find a spot to stand, suddenly conscious of how goofy I am in my too-big borrowed rubber jacket.
His nephew Jay was also on the boat, solidly built and quiet in that way that may mean that he’s shy, or that may mean that he’s there to fish, not make friends with people with cameras and notepads. As David motored us toward their site, I could see in the distance the decaying remains of an old cannery, a reminder of how long people have been fishing here. The permit for this site has been in their family for generations. When his watch ticked to the official opening of the day, David and Jay launched into a flurry, unfurling their net into the bay.
Later we worked the gear, which means we took the skiff to one end of the net and, with our arms and backs as the motors, tug our way to the other side, picking salmon out of the webbing. The boat felt light and I pulled with excitement, but 15 minutes into it, my back announced some displeasure. I imagined what it would be like to pull a boat sagging with 1,200 pounds of fish back and forth across the gear, all day long, for the entire season.
We pulled up an occasional salmon. The easy ones fall out of the net with a gentle tip. But others come up tangled, the fish suspended in a thin, wiry web that would have M.C. Escher gnashing his teeth. Fish after fish, Jay directed me: “Give that one a good hard shake. Flip the net around. Pull that one up and over.” I had no idea what he was looking at, how he could see a path for the fish out of the gear, and he took over. Plunk, plunk — the salmon fell to the deck. At peak season, they catch a dozen fish for every couple feet of net. “Throw in a 30-knot wind at night in the rain with headlamps and the boat rolling,” David laughed. “Like trying to figure out puzzles in a washing machine.” While playing a 12-hour game of tug of war, my back reminded me.
He mentioned proudly that despite its small size, his boat consistently comes in over the catch average — even against the big boats drifting out on the horizon, their bows a dozen feet off the water, mechanical winch nets hauling fish up through the air like they were climbing Jacob’s Ladder.
“How’d you get into this?” I asked him, and he talked about family and heritage — fishing with grandparents; an aunt and uncle who took him onto their boat when he was in high school. He spoke in years by the dozens, but then said something that surprised me: “I’ve never really identified with being a fisherman.”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“It’s something I really enjoy, but you can go to school, be creative, do art, do architecture, or fly airplanes: all these other things I love to do. But my roots here are very tangible. I’ve seen the same family names on those set net sites for decades. It’s a community.”
He’d retired from fishing entirely to fly planes, but he decided to come back when Jay asked him to. “Jay’s mom and I used to work that site, just the two of us. He started helping us out when he was 14. I don’t want to make it too flowery and romanticized, but there’s a feeling of wanting to pass on the ways,” David said.
The home pack
“Welcome to our crazy little fish plant,” Izetta Chambers said when we arrived at Naknek Family Fisheries. It’s a new-looking facility of gleaming stainless steel … in what is not much larger than a shack. She giggled when she picked up a broom to bang a light on and then introduced us to her grandmother, Violet.
A bright-eyed woman with a round face and rounder curls, maybe 5 feet tall if you give her a shoebox to stand on, Violet is the kind of person you want to hug immediately. Her hands were covered in blood and wielding 12 inches of sharpened steel. I didn’t want to hug her that badly.
She was cutting fish for smoking, part of the family’s “home pack” — the catch you keep for yourselves.
Bristol Bay has an unemployment rate at times nearly double statewide figures. It’s a real problem — one Pebble Mine proponents point to constantly — but the numbers may be misleading, because they count off-season fishermen among the unemployed, and because out here, there is a real subsistence economy, which is a planner’s dead-dull way of saying that most people here hunt and fish for a lot of their food. For many native families, nearly 80 percent of their calories can come from the land, starting with the salmon they catch and preserve for the rest of the year.
“Do you sell your smoked salmon?” I asked Violet.
“No,” she said with great seriousness. “We take care of ourselves first.”
“Do you trade it for anything?” Subsistence fishing permits don’t allow you to sell your catch, but do allow for barter.
“Yeah, cash!” she laughed.
Violet laid her fillets on a board her husband made for her, with slits in it to guide her knife, cutting it into even strips like she learned to do 70 years ago. I asked for her brine recipe. “Oh, the brine,” she said. “I put a potato in the brine to see if it’s right — it floats when there’s enough salt.” I nodded excitedly, getting ready to write down a recipe. “But I didn’t have a potato today, so I’m just guessin’,” she laughed. I put my notebook away.
We chatted lightly as she kept cutting. When I mentioned the Pebble Mine, though, her head jerked up. “Ah!” she exclaimed, putting down the salmon in her hands. “We cannot have Pebble come. We cannot have Pebble come,” she said. She looked down at her brine. “Sometimes I try to imagine what life would be without fish,” she continued, saying that last word as the locals do, with a long, soft tailing off: fisssssshh. “And I can’t imagine it.”
Once Violet hung the strips of salmon like red icicles on rods to go into the smokehouse, Izetta led us to the smokehouse out back.
In her 30s, Izetta started fishing at 9. She moved away, to Arizona, where she went to college and eventually law school before coming back home to open this little plant, where she cleans, cuts and markets fish caught by the fishermen in her family.
“You have to really love it,” she said. “It wrecks your clothes, you get fish blood all over you.”
“So do you love it?” I asked.
“Sometimes, I have to get torn out of that plant. I work in education, where you’re trying to change attitudes and beliefs, but it’s so ethereal. But in the plant, I can count what I’m doing, how many meals I’m going to provide.”
We got to the smokehouse, which really is a shed. She lit a fire and started chuckling. “My daddy came up from North Dakota, wanted to find a native lady, have her put up a bunch of salmon and treat her like a ‘squaw.’ My mom was like, ‘You’ll have to go farther away for that!’” And Izetta began putting up the salmon.
The processor
Leader Creek Fisheries is hundreds of times the size of Izetta’s little fish plant, but it might be just as crazy. For years, its strategy has been to actively decrease the number of fish it handles and sells. Izetta told me about treating the fish as other than a commodity — not in a touchy-feely spiritual sense, but in the “canned goods commodity food” sense. Better handling, higher quality is what distinguishes her product, and Norm Van Vactor, Leader Creek’s manager and three decades removed from when he was on the cutting floor himself, was showing how that idea plays out at scale.
As we toured, Norm explained how each step in his process preserved the quality of the fish. Standing at a conveyor where the salmon are pumped out of the boats was like a “Daily Show” “Moment of Zen,” watching fish fall through the air into a pool frothy with other fish. “The water keeps them from getting bruised; they’re not all banging into one another,” Norm said.
We walked through the line, past all the heading, the gutting, the trimming, and, well, in an objective sense, it wasn’t pretty. But for an operation of this scale, it was strikingly clean, orderly, panic-free and efficient.
“Too little time, too much volume is all you used to hear people say when they talked about Bristol Bay salmon,” he said to me. But Leader Creek is happy to buy fewer fish for more money — offering fishermen nearly a quarter more per pound, for fish that’s harvested slowly and treated with more care.
The remaking of this commodity into a high-quality product is, to Norm, a form of activism. Higher quality can command higher prices and a higher profile … and more of an economic argument to protect this place.
“I only live here during the season,” he said, calling himself a “Gussick,” a native term for an outsider. “But in many ways, this is really my home. Up here, everybody is so interconnected, and all my best friends live in these villages. I could become destitute tomorrow and know that I would never go hungry. Someone would offer a roof over my head. It’s just the way these folks are.”
He grew up the child of travelers, and he first came to Alaska in college to make money during summer. As he spoke, I thought of how growing up constantly on the move might compel you to fall in love with a place where people live where their ancestors did.
Norm is a fierce anti-Pebble Mine activist, but not when he first heard about it eight years ago. “Back then, the seafood industry wasn’t doing well. If there was a better place for my employees to be, I wanted to help them get there. I come from South Dakota gold miners; I’m not anti-mining.” He invited the Pebble Partnership to come by. It was early then, before lines were drawn, and the discussion was candid: A marine biologist the miners hired said he doubted the mine could keep its toxins out of the water. “I couldn’t sleep after hearing that,” he said, so the next day he flew his plane over the Pebble site, looking down at the mesh of land and water, and said, “That’s the heart of Bristol Bay. It’s where it all comes together.”
“Still, who was I, a Gussick, to come and tell people, ‘You gotta keep this industry outta here’?” he said. “But I heard villagers say, ‘What we have is more important. This is short-term pay for some, and we have a way of life that’s been here for 10,000 years.’” And so he’s been fighting the mine since. He told me about a package he happened to receive the day before, trinkets from an airport gift shop. They were from an elderly native woman, with a note: “I want you to have souvenirs of Alaska always, because of what you’ve done for my community.”
We walked out of the plant through the roe room, where workers separated sacs of fish eggs according to size. There was bright orange oil and slime coating their hands, but the eggs sat, bright and bubbly, like jewels. “Isn’t that beautiful?” Norm asked.
We piled into our van and shut the door, but Norm trotted out and stuck his head in. “Hey, I’m sorry, I should’ve said this at the beginning,” he started. “But … thank you. Thanks so much for coming this far away to see what we’re all about up here.” He paused. “Thank you for coming to see this place.” He closed the door and turned to go back to the fish. He was crying.
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For some of us, shopping at Whole Foods, despite its inherent promise of establishing you as an esteemed member of the socially conscious, politically correct, seriously foodie upper middle class, can be a wholly unwholesome experience. You have to battle the snaking lines, the overly cutesy labels, and the overwhelming mass of organic-heirloom-tomato-toting liberals. Entirely too plebeian.
So, come Sept. 23, you can trade your brown-and-green paper bag for a designer gown and head over to Sotheby’s for a vegetable auction. You can also trade your rather ordinary orange pumpkin for one that almost sounds like a strip club — the pink banana pumpkin. Also on the auctioning block will be the Turkish orange eggplant, the Black Sea man tomato and the ridiculously diva-like Lady Godiva squash. The price of a crateful of these charmingly named veggies? A thousand bucks.
Yes. 1-0-0-0.
The benefit, called “The Art of Farming,” promises to provide a platform for “local farmers” and “high-profile New Yorkers” alike over the “shared interest in the vitality of the Greenmarket.” The event, for which tickets are priced at $250, will feature a silent auction of heirloom vegetables, along with a request for a donation of $1,000 so that a crate of the vegetables can be given to a local food bank. The money earned through the event will go to GrowNYC, a charity that helps immigrants become farmers, and to the Sylvia Center, which teaches children to eat better. The idea, of course, is to promote non-mass-produced vegetables and local farming.
To be sure, it’s an event that has its heart in the right place. The proceeds will go to charities, and local farmers will be recognized for the hard work that goes into growing even a single plump, full-bodied tomato.
Unfortunately, it’s also the kind of event (it was conceived by Dr. Brent Ridge, one-half of Discovery’s “The Fabulous Beekman Boys”) that furthers the notion that eating well is an exclusive preserve of the rich. Putting an astronomical price tag on a box of vegetables only exacerbates the ever-widening cultural gulf between the Whole Foods-ers and those who have to make do.
But the problem may be about more than just bad publicity. The event purportedly holds up heirloom vegetables as a symbol of everything that is wrong with agribusiness today. But some of these vegetables became heirlooms precisely because they didn’t grow as well, or perhaps because they were harder to tend to, regardless of whether they tasted better. The simple economic principle is that anything that is rare or harder to grow will inherently be more expensive, and as a result, out of reach for millions of shoppers.
“People are drawn to these seeds more as a result of ideological disposition than actual agricultural knowledge,” says James McWilliams, an environmental historian at Texas State University. So what’s at stake here is the idea that we like these vegetables because we see them as a way to thumb our noses at big business. But will they help bring sustainable agriculture to the poor or address larger questions about food security?
McWilliams doesn’t think so. “If we were to actually bring these vegetables back in a big way, we’d need a lot more land to grow them because they’re so low-yielding. So we’d have to clear out more forests, which is actually a lot less sustainable,” says McWilliams. In fact, he says, we’re already seeing this play out in Brazil and Argentina where farmers are clearing rain forest to create grazing areas for grass-fed beef.
The Sotheby’s event will certainly do what it set out to: create awareness about the “art form” that is heirloom farming. But along the way, it may also end up furthering the misconceptions that plague the food world today.
Some things — asparagus, summer turnips, green beans, peas, lettuce, plums, certain apples — taste obviously different when they are taken directly from the tree or soil rather than purchased in a supermarket. Yet very few of us know that from harvesting our own plants and trees. The closest we come is buying such produce at a farm stand or farmer’s market. The supporters of small-scale growers and farmers’ markets, which were once few and cheap and are now so much more plentiful and expensive, are sometimes accused of impracticality and elitism. But there’s no reason to deprive anyone of a choice between higher and lower quality. And small-scale producers sometimes show the way for mass-producers, as they did and continue do in the case of organic production.
Idealistic market gardeners came first, but of course large corporations have dominated the U.S. supply of organic food for years. The federal government’s much-negotiated definition of “organic,” when it came into force in 2002, was strong evidence of the big money to be made. At first, the small-scale growers were worried that it would be hard to compete.
Eliot Coleman, the fine market gardener who lives on the coast of Maine, has no doubt that well-raised organic food is superior to conventional, but after the government defined “organic,” he concluded it was “dead as a meaningful synonym for the highest quality food.” He cares equally about benign agricultural methods, the healthfulness of food, and the way it tastes, and part of what he found missing from the definition was a concern for freshness and ripeness. Coleman thinks a good grower not only makes such obvious choices as avoiding the use of poisonous chemicals but does a host of small things that are impossible to capture in a set of rules. Those things include choosing the exact kinds and amounts of fertilizer, the amount and timing of water (if any), the particular cultivar of fruit or vegetable, and the timing of harvest. The kind of individual grower Coleman believes in is motivated by the satisfactions of producing high quality and doing good as well as by the desire for profit.
Such market gardeners are sometimes criticized for being expensive boutique growers, for sounding morally superior, and for being unrealistic about how much money, time, and energy most people can afford to devote to shopping for food. (Of course, what it really costs to produce reasonably good food is a lot more than we typically pay for food, if you factor in agricultural subsidies, soil erosion, air and water pollution, the environmental cost of using so much petroleum-based fertilizer, the health problems of those who work in certain farm environments, and more.) Most American farmers, whatever they might prefer to do, now compete to produce as cheaply as possible in order simply to stay in business. How good can food be if the main goal is to reduce the cost of production?
To promote better food, in an article that appeared some years ago in Mother Earth News, Coleman proposed an attractive, romantic new post-”organic” term based on the Greek word authentes — “one who does things for him or herself.” To have an “authentic” label, food would have to be sold directly by the person or family who grew it — no middleman. (Of course, many farmers don’t have the time or desire to do their own retail selling. But if they did, customers could give useful feedback on varieties, ripeness, and taste.) “Fresh fruits and vegetables, milk, eggs, and meat [would be] produced within a 50-mile radius of their place of final sale,” Coleman wrote, suggesting possible standards. “The seed and storage crops (grains, beans, nuts, potatoes, etc.) [would be] produced within a 300-mile radius.” Only “traditional processed foods” — cheese, bread, wine — could claim to be “made with authentic ingredients.” Growers wouldn’t cease to be organic. But rather than focus on ways to combat pests and diseases, they would focus on creating healthy plants as well as animals, which would be raised on pasture as much as possible. Coleman especially likes the definition of “authentic” as “local, seller-grown, and fresh” because that meaning couldn’t be taken over by national and international producers. “Authentic” food would be a worthwhile point of reference. The idea is as timely now as when he first proposed it.
Click here to read more from the Art of Eating on Salon, and visit artofeating.com.
(Credit: Vic Valbuena Bareng) 
Andrew "FoFo" Gilich for mayor! 
(Credit: Unknown) 
Elena Green, 3, helps her mother buy berries at the Westmoreland Berry Farm stand at the Arlington Farmers' Market in Arlington, Virginia in this picture taken June 28, 2008. While price hikes are rippling through farmers' markets across the United States, they are doing little to deter shoppers looking for local produce. Picture taken June 28. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst (UNITED STATES) To match feature FOOD-USA/FARMERSMARKET(Credit: © Jonathan Ernst / Reuters) 
