agriculture

The Department of Ag Wants Your Opinion

scleaver — Fri, 28 Nov 2008 00:00:00 -0500

This week, the Department of Agriculture is starting to make it easier to grow corn that’s genetically engineered to be used for ethanol, but safety advocates are concerned that some of that genetically engineered corn might end up in the food we eat as well as in gas tanks. The corn (developed by Syngenta Seeds, Inc) would be designed to produce an enzyme that makes it easier to convert into ethanol.

On one hand, the Department of Ag insists that there won’t be any environmental, food, or human safety concern with the corn. On the other, the Center for Food Safety argues that the gene in the corn could impact allergies in humans. “This is the first crop proposed for industrial use,” Bill Freese, science policy analyst for the Center for Food Safety, told the Associated Press, “and in a widely used food crop, we need to be extremely cautious.”

The good news, by 2009, the U.S. will be using at least 9 billion gallons of alternative fuel, thanks to new federal mandates. And, already, 30 percent of U.S. corn goes to producing ethanol.

As the The Detroit News and the AP reported, before it makes a final decision, the Department of Ag is asking for public comment. (Here’s more information from The Department of Agriculture about the request for comment.) Leave your comments before January 20, 2009 at Regulations.gov.

Image from the World Community Cookbook.

Take A Stand

scleaver — Fri, 17 Oct 2008 18:45:21 -0400

If you’re going to add your signature to one food petition this year, check out the Food Declaration or the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture, started by Roots of Change. The Declaration, as the Eat. Drink. Better. blog explained, “calls for a visionary 21st Century Food, Farm, and Agriculture Policy” by moving away from the current industrial-ag system and into a cleaner, healthier system that’s more about health, accessibility, and affordability than the bottom line.

It’s currently in draft form, so check it out, comment on it, endorse it, or suggest your own declaration. You have until November 30, 2008. Next year, look for Slow Food International to be collecting signatures for the final Declaration that will, hopefully, end up in next year’s food policy agenda.

Image from Food Declaration.

A Two-Way Street

scleaver — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Rising food prices—up 4% last year, the largest increase since 1990—are affected by oil, global markets, speculation, biofuels, and…climate change. And, thanks to how we currently handle agriculture, food price increases and climate change are likely to continue together, if unchecked.

Scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography recently confirmed that global warming is affecting the hydrological cycle in the U.S. Between 1950 and 1999, as much as 60% of climate-related trends in river flow, winter air temperature, and snow were caused by us humans. As precipitation patterns and glacial melting changes, water availability will change, and that will affect agriculture—think the drought that’s already affected Australia and increased the price of wheat as a result.

As Shiney Varghese, senior policy analyst for the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy wrote, “[e]xisting irrigation and drainage infrastructure have been designed for stable climate conditions. They are very likely inadequate to cope with extreme climatic variations in precipitation and reduced water supply reliability and availability, as well as floods.” (Read the article at Alternet.org.) Irrigation uses up a lot of water and “accounts for 40% of global food production” (the other 60% of farms use rain water).

It’s a two-way street—climate change is affecting food production and food production is affecting climate change. As Varghese points out, “the two sectors in the world that use the most water, chemical intensive agriculture and fossil fuel-based energy production, are also the biggest contributors to global warming, which in turn further increases water stress in many regions.”

The solutions?

1. Protect local watersheds and wetlands for local agriculture systems, instead of huge, exporting industrial farms would help reduce the water sector’s contribution to climate change and improve resilience of local farming systems for food security and environmental concerns.

2. Change agricultural policies that are too water and energy-intensive. Opt instead for water management policies that are both sustainable and effective.

Photo from US Fish and Wildlife Service where you can learn more about irrigation farming.

City Farmers Cash In

scleaver — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:31:06 -0400

Gardens are popping up where you’d least expect them—under elevated train tracks, in partially torn-down factories, on balconies, and behind rows of apartment buildings. And, these aren’t just home gardeners growing tomatoes for the occasional marinara sauce, they’re real enterprises and can make a pretty penny.

As The New York Times reported on May 7, the urban agriculture movement that’s sprung up in New York City with farmers who grow plants in small neighborhood plots and sell the harvest to neighbors, local restaurants, or at farmers markets is growing fast. The trend is old news in some cities. Prime example: Detroit, where gardens have taken over abandoned lots and partially destroyed factory buildings.

And, like I mentioned, there's money to be made in urban ag. The Added Value Community Farm was constructed on an abandoned three-acre basketball court started in 2003, and last year, the high school students who work the Brooklyn farm sold $25,000 worth of arugula, heirloom tomatoes, and Asian greens to local restaurants, community supported agriculture organizations, and farmers markets. In Detroit, gardens with the Garden Resource Program Collaborative have set up shop in Eastern Market. In Philadelphia, a non-profit grew $67,000 of lettuce, carrots, and radishes in densely packed plots. Finally, in Milwaukee, Growing Power operates a one-acre farm that includes greenhouses and pens of animals, they grossed more than $220,000 last year.

There is a definite need for fresh, affordable produce for low-income residents in urban areas, something that’s often easier said than done (Even with urban ag, Detroit is still considered a food desert, with few local produce options for many residents).

Interested in starting an urban farm? It could be as easy as setting up shop on your back balcony or finding just the right plot of land. Here are resources to get you started:

1. Learn about the nitty-gritty of farming, from seeds to market: The Detroit Garden Resource Program Collaborative, Milwaukee or Chicago’s Growing Power, and Just Food in New York all offer training. For a more formal education, The Center for Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems at the University of California, Santa Cruz offers a six-month course.

2. Remember, it’s more than a farm, it’s a business. Here’s how to write an Urban Farm Business Plan.

3. Keep up with the Urban Farm Project to see how other farmers are working the land.

4. Read gardening blogs like This Garden is Illegal and A Gardening Year for another type of education, and some camaraderie.

Urban gardens have a unique set of problems and solutions:

1. Soil contaminated with lead or other contaminants? Build raised compost beds to keep your plants out of the muck that can be urban soil.

2. Got too many wildlife friends? Marigolds deter squirrels, and avoid planting crops that rodents enjoy, like corn.

3. If you’re planting on a balcony, don’t mix sun and shade plants, make sure your balcony can handle the weight, and put tall plants in back, surrounded by shorter plants. To maximize water, try an Earth Box.

4. Connect with other gardeners at Garden Web.

Photo Credit: Denver Urban Gardens.

Solving The Food Crisis

scleaver — Mon, 12 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

Food riots, protests, and rising food prices across the globe are now common news fare. But, even as food prices force Americans to eat more peanut butter or eat out less, there are larger discussions at stake, like: how do we farm and is that contributing to food unrest?

The Associated Press ran an article on just that subject over the weekend (David Koop’s “Behind the Food Riots: A Debate On How Best to Farm”). Governments, writes Koop, are applying “Band-Aid” solutions left and right—sending in troops, raising wages, banning exports, suspending trading, promising food aid—when what we should be doing is figuring out how to change how the world gets its food so that we’re not re-bandaging the food industry in the future. “However,” writes Koop, world leaders are “deeply divided about which way to go.”

1. Invest in small farmers, not in “letting them sink in a free-trade world.” The U.N. would “level the playing field” by cutting subsidies to agri-business, reducing tariffs, and upping investment in small-farms, one at a time. "This could be a window of opportunity for governments to relaunch the small-farming sector and traditional farming," Fernando Soto, the policy chief for Latin America and the Caribbean with the [Food and Agriculture Organization’s], told the AP.

2. Increase free-trade policies like NAFTA so that the current farm subsidies don’t increase and make everything worse.

Whether you’re for free-trade or against it, small farmers seem to get the brunt of this—they’re growing food, but can’t afford foreign food imports, and eventually leave farming as a result. In Mexico, since NAFTA, 200,000 Mexicans leave the country each year for cities or the U.S.

3. Get used to it: biofuels, oil prices, huge developing countries will keep demand and prices for food high.

4. Innovate: After the last 1970s food increase, the “green revolution” reduced costs. “If we don’t mess this up,” Tyler Cowen, professor of economics at George Mason University told the AP, “we can expect the same today.”

In the meantime, “the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization estimates 820 million people go hungry in the developing world, and … the crisis could force as many as 100 million people deeper into poverty,” according to the AP. The world has 420 million farms that are smaller than five acres, out of 525 million farms total. So, what should we do with those small farms and the farmers who work them, and how?

Photo from a World Bank article about Food Prices in Africa.

Building The Doomsday Vault -- Seeds to Save the Human Race

scleaver — Thu, 08 May 2008 00:00:00 -0400

The Doomsday Vault, a tunnel in the Arctic that will eventually be lined with concrete and fitted with blast-proof doors, may be the key to human survival post world disaster. The vault will be able to withstand global warming, terrorism, and nuclear war. To save our human race, we’re going to fill it with seeds.

The idea, according to Claire Hope Cummings’ new book Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds is that those seeds will be used to recreate agriculture as we used to know it after a global attack or after our world crumbles. And, the Doomsday Vault is something that’s more immediate than we may realize. As Cummings wrote in an excerpt from her book on Alternet.org, “the integrity of the seeds are threatened, in the wild and on our farms.” Technology, patents, corporations, and the overall “degradation of the environment” are all putting our seeds in peril.

Outside of biology 101, we tend to take seeds for granted, yet, wrote Cummings, “[s]eeds are essential to the regenerative capacity of the planet. We will need their natural resilience and adaptability even more as the temperature rises.” All together, seeds and the plants they produce are how the planet breathes, not to mention the food, cloth, and now fuel that they provide us.

As we move a world of seeds that’s more sci-fi than Mendel, biodiversity is decreasing, and we’re at a crossroads in life where, Cummings ominously forecasted: “Whoever controls the future of seeds controls the future of life on earth.” So, who do you want to control life? Industrial agriculture (Monsanto and other giant ag companies) or someone else…us, perhaps?

Read Cummings’ five reasons that industrial ag doesn’t cut it in the article: Artificial Foods and Corporate Crops: Can We Escape the 'Frankenstate'?

Photo of heirloom seed packets from Veggie Gardening Tips.

Top 10 Green Jobs

Julia — Wed, 26 Mar 2008 01:00:00 -0400

The following list comes from E Magazine’s article called “Ten Great Green Opportunities”, where they came up with a list of professions that are ready and waiting to be all greened up. Something catches your eye? Well jump right in and start creating new policies for the field!

1. Travel and Hospitality- Tourism is the largest business sector in the world economy. Ecotourism is growing at three times the rate of the tourism sector itself, and demanding more knowledgeable workers committed to sustainability.

2. Planning and Land Use- Local governments are increasingly interested in how they can reduce their communities’ carbon footprint, and turning to city planning professionals for direction.

3. Health and Medicine- According to a survey conducted in 2002 by the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM), 36 percent of U.S. adults use some form of alternative care.

4. Energy and Renewables- Renewable energy careers have the potential to re-establish America’s lost middle class. Renewable energy requires more manpower than fossil fuel—wind power creates 2.77 jobs for every megawatt produced, solar PV creates 7.24 jobs per megawatt.

5. Legal Careers- When a power plant is polluting more than its fair share, or an imperiled mammal needs recognition under the Endangered Species Act, environmental law groups go to court and fight the good fight.

6. Information Technology- In the nonprofit sector, IT work may not require extensive training. For global organizations like the Internet is a valuable tool. Be open to starting with little to no pay. It will give you the experience you need to be able to be hired by those few organizations and businesses that can afford to provide the salary that you want.

7. Green Learning- Over the past few years, sustainability coordinators—a job position that didn’t even exist a few years ago—have been joining the ranks of educational institutions looking to “go green.” Though there aren’t many schools offering degrees in sustainability, that’s beginning to change.

8. Design and Construction- Green builders already have a competitive advantage over traditional builders, according to Ashley Katz, communications coordinator for the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC). And that advantage will continue to grow as sustainable, energy-efficient building practices become the norm.

9. Corporate Social Responsibility- With companies working to establish guidelines for social responsibility, the word “corporation” could sill take on new meaning in the 21st century. To make corporations more responsive to environmental, human rights and health issues, corporate responsibility advocates start from business’ bottom line and work their way up.

10. Food and Farming- According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, land used for organic crops increased from 48,000 acres in 1997 to 122,000 acres in 2005. That increase has opened doors, especially for students seeking a hands-on experience on a working farm. Some manage organic farms without actually owning the land, leasing it through a land trust. And the market for organic food has opened channels well beyond the local farm stands.

Carbon Footprints

scleaver — Mon, 03 Mar 2008 08:56:58 -0500

The Ethicurean had an interesting blog post, Thinking About Carbon "Foodprints" on March 2nd about a recent New Yorker article that explores the topic. The basic problem: how we make and get our food produces too much carbon emissions. The Pew Center on Climate Change estimates that agriculture generates 14% of greenhouse gases worldwide, factor in the 18% produced by land use changes and forestry, and the 18% that the UN estimates are caused by livestock (in their report, “Livestock’s Long Shadow”) and it’s no wonder that we’re starting to measure food miles in terms of carbon production. But, after discussing how tricky it is to actually measure carbon footprints for something as simple as a lamb, or as complex as a jar of peanut butter (its more than transport, it’s also what type of fertilizer is used, how the peanuts were grown, etc), the solution may not be eating local. What is the solution, then? I like the idea of having carbon footprint labels on food, to let consumers know just how sustainable their hamburger or frozen pizza is, or a simpler plan might just be to tackle the key ingredients in agriculture—go meat free a few days a week (to cut down on carbon emissions from livestock), buy local produce as much as possible (to cut down on the carbon produced by clearing land for agriculture and the carbon cost to transport it), and be aware of the companies that you’re buying from (to encourage companies to reduce carbon emissions to keep your business).

Here’s the Pew Center on Climate Change Report and the Livestock's Long Shadow Report.

Photo taken from www.foodcarbon.co.uk. Check out their Food Carbon Footprint Calculator!

Want to learn more about carbon credits?

How to Measure and Price Carbon Credits

Selling Carbon Credits on eBay—Solution or Scam?

The Quest for the Perfect Carbon Calculator

How Much Do Carbon Credits Cost?