Sustainability: "It's about the soil."

Lately, and for obvious reasons, I've been fond of saying that the first ironclad rule of sustainability is survival. Without respiration, the remainder is rhetoric.

Then there's crop rotation.

What Farm-to-Table Got Wrong, by Dan Barber (New York Times)

... Today, almost 80 percent of Americans say sustainability is a priority when purchasing food. The promise of this kind of majority is that eating local can reshape landscapes and drive lasting change.

Except it hasn’t.

One section is of specific interest to beer fans.

... It’s one thing for chefs to advocate cooking with the whole farm; it’s another thing to make these uncelebrated crops staples in ordinary kitchens. Bridging that divide will require a new network of regional processors and distributors.

Take beer, for example. The explosion in local microbreweries has meant a demand for local barley malt. A new malting facility near Klaas’s farm recently opened in response. He now earns 30 percent more selling barley for malt than he did selling it for animal feed. For other farmers, it’s a convincing incentive to diversify their grain crops.

It isn't for nothing that we refer to food chains, and in the case of barley (and hops), local supplies count for little absent the means to malt and process them. While it's true that many readers already know this, remember that others don't. It can make for interesting barside conversation.