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One Blue Earth

May 10, 2021

One Blue Earth

blue earth

Every great dream begins with a dreamer. Always remember, you have within you the strength, the patience, and the passion to reach for the stars to change the world.

– Harriet Tubman

Here are three memories from backpacking trips in the virgin wilderness of the Pacific Northwest and British Columbia:

  • Finding peace and perspective at the top of Mount St. Helens in the breaking dawn, after climbing through the night beneath the full moon
  • Watching the concentric circles ripple outward from my hand as I drink from pure, ice-cold Clearwater Lake
  • Staring from my sleeping bag in awe into the immensity of the night sky and the infinitude of stars

These experiences and other moments in nature inspire my passion for environmental activism. As a teenager, I have organized park and beach clean-ups; championed recycling and waste reduction, and joined in climate-related marches and strikes from high school. But the severity and complexity of the global threats to our ecosystems have led me beyond protesting and making demands. I want to learn more about hopeful strategies for restoring our planet and share this knowledge with others so that they also may be inspired and choose to help.

One Blue Earth

I launched One Blue Earth as a platform for change, and to be a bridge between research and action. One Blue Earth seeks to raise public awareness about the consequences of global warming and to educate our communities about current scientific and grass-roots efforts to develop workable solutions to mitigate and reverse climate change. Our goal is to spotlight and partner with specific projects. In our fundraising campaigns, we ask for individual donations of only $1 to encourage more democratic and inclusive participation. The number of people we can motivate to contribute is as important as the amounts we raise…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why the public sector needs more dynamic procurement 

May 9, 2021

Why the public sector needs more dynamic procurement 

There is a huge amount of pressure on farmers to farm more sustainably, but very little focus on how the market can support them in making the necessary changes to realise this ambition. ‘Dynamic procurement’ is a strategy to adjust procurement practices to better reflect and support sustainable farming.

Major change from industrial agriculture to regenerative agriculture involves a shift from monocultural (largely) grain crops towards a more diverse harvest with smaller volumes of different products, many of which are more perishable than grain, coming available at different times of the year. This makes long-distance distribution less feasible and farmers more reliant on the domestic market. It also requires purchasers to appreciate the seasonality of products and the fluctuations in supply and respond with greater flexibility through their menus. The public sector is ideally positioned to support local farmers and public sector caterers can provide regular business, considerable spend and reliable payments. However, typically they are not seen as an easy route-to-market.

The response of many would-be suppliers, as well as the public in general, is to assume that price is a barrier to sourcing more locally within the public sector. While this can be the case, especially on certain products like lamb, more often than not the real barriers are the procurement frameworks themselves. These often make it impossible for local businesses to fulfil the requirements, so many never apply in the first place. The frameworks tend to demand consistent supply and reliable distribution to cover the whole annual requirement for a range of products over a potentially large area. Local small and medium enterprises (SMEs) may have excellent products and even be able to outbid national suppliers on price, but they are less likely to be able to support the volumes and distribution service required.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The battle for the future of farming: what you need to know

May 1, 2021

The battle for the future of farming: what you need to know

It is widely agreed that today’s global agriculture system is a social and environmental failure. Business as usual is no longer an option: biodiversity loss and nitrogen pollution are exceeding planetary limits, and catastrophic risks of climate change demand immediate action.

Most concede that there is an urgent need to radically transform our food systems. But the proposed innovations for more sustainable food systems are drastically different. Which we choose will have long-lasting effects on human society and the planet.

Suggested innovations in food systems can be broadly understood as either seeking to conform with – or to transform – the status quo.

The future of farming is ours to decide. Raggedstone/Shutterstock.com

A technological future

Some want to keep the agriculture industry as close to existing practices as possible. This is true of the increasing number of corporate and financial actors who seek to solve the food crisis by developing new technologies. These technologies are envisaged as being part of what is being called the “fourth industrial revolution” (4IR). The “answer” here is thought to lie in a fusion of technologies that blurs the lines between physical, digital and biological domains.

For example, the World Economic Forum is currently supporting agricultural transitions in 21 countries through its “New Vision for Agriculture” initiative. This initiative supports “innovation ecosystems” to re-engineer food systems based on “12 transforming technologies”. In this imagined future, next generation biotechnologies will re-engineer plants and animals. Precision farming will optimise use of water and pesticides. Global food systems will rely on smart robots, blockchain and the internet of things to manufacture synthetic foods for personalised nutrition.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Here’s the catch

March 20, 2021

Here’s the catch

The journey of an agricultural pollutant from its source, along its flow path (often in surface water flooding across fields), to its end destination, where it has the potential to do damage to the natural environment, is an essential concern of Catchment Sensitive Farming officers (CSFOs) on every farm they advise. Understanding how pollutants manifest on a farm, and the journey they subsequently take into the surrounding environment, enables farm advisers including CSFOs to evaluate how to address water and air pollution from agriculture.

Successful reduction of this diffuse pollution from food production can best be achieved by the adoption of practices which stop nutrients or pesticides becoming a pollutant in the first place. This not only has benefits for the environment but also for the farmer who saves money by wasting fewer inputs. Inevitably though, some agricultural inputs (such as fertiliser and manure) escape down a field or out of a livestock shed. Here, measures to intercept the errant material along its flow path come into play.

To mitigate this, a buffer strip of grassland and trees protecting a river or a ditch from waterborne nitrates or a shelterbelt of trees trapping ammonia emanating from a poultry house are just two examples of how Catchment Sensitive Farming is helping farms to address such diffuse pollution. And in flood prone areas of farmland, these practices can also help slow the flow of surface water encountered during storm events, enough to reduce the worst of its impact further down river catchments.

It takes careful consideration of each field and cropping rotation, each hedge or drystone wall boundary, farm track and gateway for the full benefits of Catchment Sensitive Farming to be realised…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

David Burton , sustainable food trust, pollutants, farming, food production

Is Farming the Problem?

March 15, 2021

Is Farming the Problem?

Here is a story that we tell ourselves. From The Good Ancestor: “Consider the immense legacy left by our ancestors: those who sowed the first seeds in Mesopotamia 10,000 years ago, who cleared the land, built the waterways and founded the cities where we now live, who made the scientific discoveries, won the political struggles and created the great works of art that have been passed down to us.”

We don’t question this narrative. We simply accept it as “the way things happened”. But read it again with your critical brain engaged. To begin with, this ancestral narrative begins in Mesopotamia. This is not accurate. A few people in the Mesopotamian river basins started writing down what they were doing (mostly with regard to how much grain and gold were passing through their hands), but our cultural story begins long before Mesopotamia and in many different parts of the world, and ultimately, the human story begins in Africa, not the Middle East.

Farming did not begin with sowing seeds. This is a classic chicken egg of an assertion. What seeds? Where did they come from? How did humans even know to put them in the ground and expect to harvest something humans could eat? We’ll come back to this because this is the focus of this essay.

Let’s consider the assertion that humans built waterways. Yes, there are some canals, some irrigation projects, a few long-distance pipes and aqueducts. These are not generally waterways in terms of transport, which is I believe what is being referenced. Humans have not, in any case, built most of the bodies of water we use. Waterways are part of this planet, a priori; humans have done more to break rivers, lakes and oceans than to build them…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Letter From The Farm | Three Years In: Realism And Planning For Utopia

March 12, 2021

Letter From The Farm | Three Years In: Realism And Planning For Utopia

We are back on Chiara Garini’s forest farm at the foot of the Italian Alps. Three years in, her mushroom farm and forest garden is at a crossroads: should she expand or diversify? In any case Chiara is determined to bring utopia into her business plan, and tells us about an exciting new development on the farm…

Temperatures today are again close to zero. But the snow in the last days has finally started to melt after weeks pretty much spent in an unusual peace, with lots of snow and inevitably limited social interactions.

Leaving aside the moments of loneliness and concerns due to the current pandemic situation, I had the chance to take a good amount of time for the necessary evaluation and (re) design of our farm enterprise.

Planning for utopia

As I wrote in previous letters multidisciplinarity is crucial for managing a newborn farm.

This time of the year is when economic skills are needed, to evaluate past year performances and work on the business plan for the coming years. I do not really enjoy this task as the economic burden puts a lot of pressure on me. Models are not always an easy tool. However I know this evaluation is fundamental. It is actually very useful to understand the pitfalls and strengths of our past and present decisions.

Starting a new farm from scratch and dealing with the reality of food production is not easy at all. It is hard to find a balance between personal objectives (with the amount of utopia they often come with) and the harsh reality of production and marketing.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Comparing Organic, Agroecological and Regenerative Farming part 1 – Organic

February 10, 2021

Comparing Organic, Agroecological and Regenerative Farming part 1 – Organic

In this new three part series we present an analysis by Dr. Andrea Beste on the similarities, differences and synergies between the organic, agroecological and regenerative farming movements.  Part one here outlines the history and current status of the organic movement. A German version of the entire series is also available at the link below.

Early pioneers, bitter resistance, globalization

The first organic farming activities in Europe emerged with the “Life Reform Movement” after the First World Wari, which turned against urbanisation and industrialisation. The aim was to return to a natural way of life: they wanted to settle in rural nature and establish a gardening existence there. This led to a focus on production techniques such as: – fertilisation with rotting organic waste, composting, green manure and green soil cover, gentle soil cultivation, nutrient supply through the recycling of composted urban organic waste and human waste, as well as rock powder.

Even then, problems such as soil compaction, soil fatigue, poor seed quality and an increase in plant diseases and pest infestations led to a rethink in farming. Rudolf Steiner (1861 – 1925) established biodynamic farming with the “agricultural course” during a seminar lasting several days in 1924, which dealt with these problems. In 1928, three years after Steiner’s death, the “Demeter trademark” was registered. Organic-biological agriculture, from which the “Bioland” association emerged, was also developed in Switzerland by Dr. Hans Müller (1891 – 1988) and his wife Dr. Maria Müller (1894 – 1969) at the beginning of the last century. The theoretical basis was provided by the German physician and microbiologist Dr. Hans Peter Rusch (1906 – 1977).

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

The awkward class

February 8, 2021

The awkward class

Time to talk about peasants, who I claim in Chapter 3 of my book A Small Farm Future will soon be returning to tend (or create) a small farm near you. Or may in fact include you or your descendants.

This claim is at odds with most of what’s been written about rural trends over the past century or so, along two dimensions. The first is historical: peasants will be liquidated by the march of progress. As Karl Kautsky (quoted on page 246 of my book) famously put it in his ‘agrarian question’ in 1899: “In what ways is capital taking hold of agriculture, revolutionizing it, smashing the old forms of production and of poverty and establishing the new ones that must succeed?”

The second dimension is sociological: internal tensions among small-scale farmers destabilize any coherent notion of ‘the peasantry’ as an enduring entity – an argument usually framed in relation to the separate class interests of ‘upper’, ‘middle’ and ‘lower’ peasants. So in the standard view, for reasons both external and internal, peasants are on their way to being something else.

There’s no denying that recent history furnishes evidence for this. Capital has certainly done its share of revolutionizing and smashing peasant agriculture since Kautsky’s day, and plenty of rural class conflict has accompanied the process. But most people heralding the demise of peasantries have been enthusiastic cheerleaders for the process rather than disinterested observers, and it’s possible they’ve enthused a little too much.

On the one hand, Marxists like Kautsky have generally tried to divvy up peasantries into the more comfortable terrain of Marxism’s Ur-conflict between free-flowing capital and free-flowing labour, making landless or land-poor lower peasants over in the image of their preferred revolutionaries, the proletariat…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

chris smaje, small farm future, class conflict, farming

New research challenges scientific orthodoxy on the role of grazing livestock in relation to emission reduction targets

February 7, 2021

New research challenges scientific orthodoxy on the role of grazing livestock in relation to emission reduction targets

 

This week we are highlighting the announcement of what we think is one of the world’s first soil carbon sequestration offsetting partnerships, between Microsoft Corporation and the Australian Wilmot Cattle Co. The reason we are drawing this news to wider attention is not because of potential for offsetting, but rather the impact of the research – which highlights the fact that regenerative farming can deliver significantly in terms of carbon sequestration.

What I found particularly interesting is that the scheme involved cattle ranches and the very significant soil carbon gains made by them: 0.8% per year of organic matter; in other words double the 4 per 1000 target set by the French Minister Stéphane Le Foll at the COP21 Paris summit where he announced his ‘quatre per mille’ scheme.

If this level of soil organic matter gain can be verified through ongoing research and monitoring using evolving and ever more sophisticated techniques for measuring soil organic matter, this represents a very significant breakthrough. In combination with the new information from Professor Myles Allen of Oxford University on the reduced impact of methane on climate change, there is a compelling argument for the scientific community to reassess the role of holistic grazing systems involving ruminant livestock – which could make a very significant contribution towards reducing climate change impacts.

This potential is highlighted in the press release from Wilmot Farms, who have calculated that were these soil carbon gains to be replicated across all the cattle farming grasslands in Australia, it would have the potential to sequester just under one quarter of Australia’s total greenhouse gas emissions. It should also be emphasised that this is a net calculation which includes the counter benefit of the methane emissions from grazing animals, which makes it even more significant.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

 

Are glyphosate-based herbicides poisoning us and the environment?

February 7, 2021

Are glyphosate-based herbicides poisoning us and the environment?

A new study, published on 27th January in the journal Environmental Health Perspectives, conducted by an international team of scientists led by Dr Michael Antoniou of Kings College London, found that exposure to glyphosate and its commercial Roundup formulation, can disrupt the function of gut microbiome (bacteria and fungi) and internal body systems with potentially serious effects on human health.

In controlled laboratory animal experiments, glyphosate was found to alter the composition and more importantly the biochemical function of the gut microbiome by the same mechanism through which the chemical acts to kill weeds (inhibition of the shikimate biochemical pathway), even at doses claimed to be safe by the regulators. Roundup was also shown to be more toxic than glyphosate alone, underpinning existing evidence that the additional substances present in commercial products, collectively known as “adjuvants”, are not “inert” as claimed by its manufacturers and regulators but highly toxic in their own right.

In-depth biochemical analysis of both the gut and the blood of the test animals showed that they were put under “oxidative stress”, a highly damaging process, by glyphosate and to a greater degree by Roundup.

From my reading, this research appears to go a long way towards vindicating the conclusions of the many organisations and individuals throughout the world who were convinced from the very beginning that it would be unlikely in the extreme that this herbicide, an agricultural poison which has the capacity to kill all green plant material except that which has been genetically modified to be tolerant to it, would not have adverse effects on the human health.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

 

Agricultural Elephant in the Room

February 1, 2021

Agricultural Elephant in the Room

Abandoned dairy barn, Willamette Valley, Oregon. Photo: Jeffrey St. Clair.

I find it strange Americans and, especially, scientists and politicians talk to little, if at all, about agriculture. And yet agriculture gives us food and, surreptitiously, threatens the future.

Vast number of Americans live in large cities like New York, Seattle, Chicago, New Orleans, San Antonio, Las Vegas, Miami, Atlanta, San Francisco and Lost Angeles. These cities have great museums and, possibly, universities, but are agricultural deserts.

City merchants, grocers and government institutions buy most of the food they need for their large population from farmers or agribusiness, which grow food as far away from cities as they can.

The reason for the separation of the city from the country was the original sin of America: the savaging of the Native Americans and the outright theft of their land.

There was a second grabbing of land, what the British called enclosure. This time, during the twentieth century, large farmers and agribusiness put out of business small family farmers. This substantial amount of stolen land made agribusiness and large farmers kings in the countryside.

These agrarian monarchs remade rural America into toxic cornucopia gardens and feudal mills of animal feeding and slaughter, disease factories of pandemics.

Urban food deserts

This political economy employs millions of the most exploited Americans in our midst. This explains, to some degree, the illiteracy and apathy of urban people for what sustains life: food and drinking water.

Urban people don’t know how to grow food. As long as they have the money to go to the “super market,” they will continue to be divorced from life, to the point that, in fact, some have already reached, believing that bread and milk come from the refrigerator.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Farming as the climate changes

January 25, 2021

Farming as the climate changes

The world is facing a climate crisis that is dramatically impacting farmers and growers across the world. As temperatures rise, rainfall becomes increasingly unpredictable, extreme weather events happen more frequently and soils are eroded through desertification. These changes mean that crop yields are increasingly inconsistent, and agricultural businesses are struggling to adapt.

However, in the United States, climate change divides opinion with many still questioning its scientific validity. Former President Trump said climate change was ‘an expensive hoax’ and curried political favour by pulling the US out of the UN Paris Agreement in 2017. However, under President Biden, the new administration has put climate change at the heart of its plans. Within hours of being sworn in on January 20th, President Biden ensured that the US re-entered the Paris Agreement and he reversed President Trump’s authorisation of the Keystone XL pipeline. For many Americans, the Biden Harris administration offers hope that the US will take its climate responsibilities seriously once more, with the goal of keeping us within the two-degree Celsius limit.

In light of this new US leadership, the Sustainable Food Trust talked to farmers across the US to understand how they view climate change and what steps (if any) they were taking to address it. Over the course of 2020, the SFT interviewed a range of American farmers, growers and producers, in order to hear how they are farming as the climate changes. This report provides a summary of those conversations.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Extreme flooding from slow hurricanes a danger to farms

January 1, 2021

Extreme flooding from slow hurricanes a danger to farms

Preface. Yet another danger from climate change for agriculture will be slow hurricanes and cyclones dumping a foot or more of rain over a few days such as the recent hurricanes Harvey (2017), Florence (2018), and Dorian (2019).

Journal reference: Zhang G, et al. 2020. Tropical cyclone motion in a changing climate. Science Advances.

***

Le Page M. 2020. Slower-moving hurricanes will cause more devastation as world warms. NewScientist.

Hurricane Harvey caused catastrophic flooding in 2017, killing 68 people and costing $125 billion in damages. One reason it was so destructive is that it moved unusually slowly and remained over the same area for days – and as the world warms, there are going to be a lot more slow-moving tropical cyclones like Harvey, according to high-resolution climate models.

A slow-moving tropical cyclone dumps far more rain in one place than a fast-moving storm of a similar size and strength. The winds can also do more damage, because they batter structures for longer.

Harvey, for instance, dumped more than a metre of rain in parts of the Houston area. “Imagine that much water falling in one spot,” says Gan Zhang at Princeton University. “It is too much for the infrastructure to handle.”

Other recent storms, including Hurricane Florence in 2018 and Hurricane Dorian in 2019 have also been slow-moving, leading to suggestions that climate change is increasing the odds of slow-moving storms.

Now Zhang and his colleagues have run about 100 high-resolution simulations of how tropical cyclones behave in three types of conditions: those between 1950 and 2000, those similar to the present and also various future scenarios.

They saw a marked slowdown as the world warms, due to a poleward shift of the mid-latitude westerly winds. It is these prevailing winds that push cyclones along and determine how fast they travel.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Running Out Of Soybeans?

December 24, 2020

Several factors are conspiring to weaken the reliability of our food production systems, warns Christian Westbrook, publisher of the website IceAgeFarmer.com

We’re seeing a shortening of the growing season for important crops due to weather trends and changes in the solar cycle.

Our food production system, which is highly dependent on chemical inputs and fossil fuels, is becoming increasingly brittle.

And we have more vulnerability due to the global nature of modern food supply chains. Crop shortages/failures in one part of the world impact all markets now.

For example, soybean supply is tightening as bad weather in South America and increased buying by China are hitting at a time when global stocks are already low.

As the world population grows, climate instability continues, and more countries are able to economically compete for resources, experts foresee future demand that may prove overwhelming vs supply:

What if several of the world’s biggest food crops failed at the same time?

In the past several decades, many of the world’s major breadbaskets have experienced shocks – events that caused large, rapid drops in food production. For example, regional droughts and heat waves in the Ukraine and Russia in 2007 and then again in 2009 damaged wheat crops and caused global wheat prices to spike by substantial amounts in both years. In 2012 heat and drought in the United States slashed national corn, soybean and other crop yields by up to 27 percent. And yields of important food crops are low and stagnating in many countries due to factors including plant diseases, poor soil quality, poor management practices and damage from air pollution.

At the same time, many experts assert that world food production may have to double by 2050 to feed a growing population and satisfy rising demand for meat, poultry and dairy products in developing countries.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Rekindling Family Farming at Owl Oak Acres

December 18, 2020

Rekindling Family Farming at Owl Oak Acres

Just before the sun sets, Evelyn (Evie) offers up the evening feed to all the animals on her family’s small ranch, Owl Oak Acres, in Red Bluff, California. She goes around from pen to pen, patiently throwing dinner over the fences to the eighteen ewes, the thirteen lambs, the two rams, the two goats, the twenty chickens, and the two horses. At twelve years old, she’s more than competent; in fact, it seems like second nature to her. But, for a young kid, it’s not always the most fun thing to do.

Her mother, Dawn Graham, explains this well. “When it’s dark, rainy and cold, and Evie has to put on her muck boots, overalls, and coat; when she has to go slop through the mud and deal with screaming animals and drive out to the barn to keep the feed dry… Yes, she gets very frustrated. But, there’s this understanding: ‘this is where my food and clothing come from. I’m the one doing this.’”

Dawn knows very well the rewards of this deep intimacy of relationship, as she was raised this way just a few miles down the road. “Growing up,” Dawn says, “we didn’t have a whole lot of money, but we ate what we raised.” This was, she states, a truer wealth. “We lived on a creek, so we had fresh blackberries. Mom would make soups, broths, sauces; she was always canning vegetables and spinning wool.”  Dawn’s mother, Jane, was the one who started it all. She got a few Corriedale sheep and never turned away from them. “We were too poor to have a TV growing up, so I would sit with her and scour a fleece with her. We’d flick it, card it, comb it. I remember collecting oak galls and dying the fleeces with them too.”

When it was time for Dawn to attend college, she left the farm and moved to upstate New York. There, she met her husband, John, and with him, a very different life’s journey began. They traveled all over the country together, living from suburb to suburb. They started a family — a son, Jarod, and daughter, Evie. Eventually, Dawn began dreaming of returning to the country. It wasn’t until five years ago that they auspiciously ended up finding a home within a few miles from where she grew up.

It was six weeks or so before Evie’s 8th birthday when Dawn and Evie went to look at a farmhouse on 40 acres in Tehama County that John had found on Zillow. Evie walked into the house, took one look, and immediately said, “yep, this is the one. I’m home!” And so it was. For the first year, Evie and Dawn hunkered down at the farmhouse while Jarod and John lived closer to the city, for John’s work. After that first year, they were all able to live together at the ranch. They started collecting a few sheep so that Evie could participate in the local 4H club. Their herd grew quickly, and currently, they manage eight Merino sheep for wool and twenty-five Dorper sheep for meat.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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