agriculture – Page 6

A ‘food freedom’ revolt against the government is starting

This week, we welcome back Joel Salatin to the podcast. Labeled by The Washington Post as “the most famous farmer in America”, Joel has spent his career advocating for sustainable farming practices and pioneering models that show how food can be grown and raised in ways that are regenerative to our topsoils, more humane to livestock, produce much healthier & tastier food, and contribute profitably to the local economy.

Who wouldn’t want that?

Well, the government and Big Ag for starters. Joel refers to himself as a ‘lunatic farmer’ because so many of the changes he thinks our food system needs are either illegal under the current law or mightily resisted by the deep-pocketed corporations controlling production and distribution.

And this anti-competitive restriction and stifling of small sustainable food producers is only getting worse. While dismayed at this, Salatin finds hope in the burgeoning rebellion of the “rogue food” resistence breaking out:

I’m not optimistic at all about where the government and all its bureaucracy is headed. It is getting more and more stifling. The Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA) that Obama put through, it’s absolutely stifling. It’s size prejudicial. It’s putting an inordinate price pressure on smaller producers. That’s a fact all the way across the board. And the cost of compliance is escalating — the amount of paperwork, the amount of licensing, the amount of testing and procedural stuff that’s happening on farms — is through the roof.

So on the federal level, I think it’s getting worse. Now, I think what’s happening on the local level, the other thing that’s a pushback that’s happened, is what’s now known as the food sovereignty movement.

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

Climate Change is Real – Do Droughts Last 8.6 Years?

July 27, 2018

Climate Change is Real – Do Droughts Last 8.6 Years?

It is time to begin to really investigate Climate Change for what our computer is forecasting is like a dramatic rise in volatility or a Panic Cycle to be more accurate. What does that mean? We are going to experience extremes on both sides. You will see record temperature in the summer of 100+ F and in the winter, bitterly cold freezing. The admixture of these types of trends plays hell with crops. We are looking at severe droughts brewing around the world. In Australia, we are looking at drought conditions that match the ‘Federation drought‘ which took place during the late 1880s and early 1890s. This also contributed to the rise in socialism for agriculture was the bulk of employment and droughts also terminated jobs.

The Federation drought was a major drought in the outback areas of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria and South Australia killed many animals. There was a major loss of vegetative cover that led to erosion and a dust bowl. Many native edible plant species vanished with devastating consequences. Between 1895 and 1903 there was a major drought that impacted most of the country. They came to name it the ‘Federation drought‘ which lasted interestingly 8.6 years. This event of nature is what forced many to seek employment in the Industrial Revolution and abandon farming.

The American Dust Bowl also became known as “the Dirty Thirties” which began in 1930. This too had devasting consequences for agriculture and sparked protectionism which was centered on agriculture – not manufacture. Regular rainfall did not return to the region until the end of 1939, which finally brought the Dust Bowl years to a close. The severe drought hit the Midwest and Southern Great Plains during 1930. This resulted in major dust storms that began the following year in 1931 coinciding with the Sovereign Debt Crisis. By 1934, an estimated 35 million acres of formerly cultivated land had been rendered completely useless for farming. Another 125 million acres was rapidly losing its topsoil. Once again, we have a period of 8.6 years.

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

Diet, Ignorance and the Environmental Catastrophe

July 3, 2018

Diet, Ignorance and the Environmental Catastrophe

Climate Change sounds vast and impersonal, but it’s really a very personal matter; a global crisis caused by the individual actions humanity has collectively taken. All too often such actions proceed from a position of ignorance selfishness and habit, and are undertaken with little or no understanding of the effects on the natural environment.

The debate around climate change commonly focuses on transportation, deforestation, and energy – replacing fossil fuels with renewables. This is right and urgent, and some countries are taking steps; however, what is not tackled at all is the devastating impact of a meat/dairy diet, – common to 97% of humanity. According to Reducing Food’s Environmental Impacts Through Producers and Consumers (RFEI), a detailed report published in the journal Science, consumption of animal produce is “degrading terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems, depleting water resources, and driving climate change.”

Industrial farming of cows, pigs, sheep and chickens, plus harvesting fish, for human consumption is the single greatest cause of the interconnected environmental catastrophe; unless urgent substantive change takes place this could single-handedly lead to a polluting point beyond redemption. Misinformed, irresponsible lifestyle choices are behind the environmental crisis. The vast majority of people are unaware of the devastating effects of our collective eating habits, and from this position of uninformed ignorance disaster flows; the earth is poisoned, the climate disrupted and all manner of lives are lost.

Animal agriculture is responsible for approximately 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions (GGE), according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). This is more than any other sector, including manufacturing and transportation. The principal climate change contaminate is methane (44%), which comes mainly from rearing cattle – the source of 65% of all livestock GGE’s. While methane’s atmospheric life is only decades compared to centuries/millennia for carbon-dioxide (Co2) Scientific American reports that it “warms the planet by 86 times as much as CO2,” before degrading to become CO2: So it’s a double whammy, an intensely damaging one.

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

We Subsidize the Wrong Kind of Agriculture

June 23, 2018

We Subsidize the Wrong Kind of Agriculture

Summer: the season of barbecues, baseball games, and backyard fun. It’s also the time of year when the American farming industry comes into full swing producing the crops we hold near and dear.

The pastoral ideal of golden fields of corn and wheat is what comes to mind for most people, and they’d be on the right track. Corn, soybeans, and wheat are the three biggest crops grown in this country, and — along with cows, pigs, and chicken — make up the bulk of our farming output.

There’s a reason for this: The federal government heavily subsidizes those products. In fact, the bulk of U.S. farming subsidies go to only 4 percent of farms — overwhelmingly large and corporate operations — that grow these few crops.

For the most part, that corn, soy, and wheat doesn’t even go to feed our populace. More of it goes into the production of ethanol — which is also heavily subsidized — and into the mouths of those cows, pigs, and chickens stuffed into feedlots. Those grains purchased by the feedlots are also federally subsidized, allowing producers to buy grains at below market prices.

When we do eat these foods, they’re sold back to us in unhealthy forms, pumped full of high fructose corn syrup and growth hormones. Large corporate farms and feedlots also poison waterways, drain aquifers, and pollute the air.

Meanwhile, small farmers continue to go broke, thanks to the low cost of foods subsidized by the government for corporate buyers. Even the few companies that provide seeds and equipment for farmers receive their own tax breaks from state governments, while farmers are stuck with the bill of goods sold to them from companies like John Deere and Monsanto.

Does this help feed America? Not really: We still buy most of our foodfrom far-flung places. So why is our government subsidizing this production model?

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

The True Cost of Food: An Excerpt from Nourished Planet, Publishing in June 2018

June 13, 2018

The True Cost of Food: An Excerpt from Nourished Planet, Publishing in June 2018

True cost accounting is a revolutionary way to measure the total societal impacts from food production. Nourished Planet explores ways to uncover the hidden costs of the food system.

Talkin’ bout a revolution: a response to the Breakthrough Institute

May 21, 2018

Talkin’ bout a revolution: a response to the Breakthrough Institute

The Breakthrough Institute have published a response to my critical commentary on a recent post of theirs. Here I continue the debate, because I think it might clarify some worthwhile issues. I’d like to thank Dan Blaustein-Rejto and Kenton De Kirby (henceforth B&D) for engaging constructively with me – a welcome improvement on what’s come my way from some previous Breakthrough folk.

Broadly, the issue between us is our different visions of agrarian, and therefore human, futures. I stress more people working on more small farms and a degree of deurbanisation, they stress increases in farm scale, a continued agrarian-urban transition out of agriculture and an emphasis on yield increase. On some points, I’d suggest our differences are not as great as B&D suppose: for example, I’m not necessarily for small farms and against yield increases or the use of synthetic fertiliser in all eventualities. But we’ll come to that.

I’m going to structure my response under three headings: change, ‘development’ and wealth.

Change

B&D suggest that my vision involves revolutionary change that would have to reverse robust global trends, and therefore isn’t feasible. My first response to that is to ask what makes a trend ‘robust’ and irreversible. Suppose, for example, that global trade rulings force countries with large populations of poor farmers to open their markets to rich-country agricultural commodities and to abandon food price controls and social welfare provision. We’d surely expect life to get tougher for the poor farmers and for them to seek other sources of income in place of or in addition to their dwindling farm income. Well, that’s pretty much what’s happened over recent decades. You could say that it’s a ‘robust trend’. But it’s a robust trend that’s resulted from policy decisions – and other policy decisions are possible.

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

Why Agriculture and Forestry Are Dead or Obsolete the Way They Are Practiced Nowadays

May 19, 2018

Why Agriculture and Forestry Are Dead or Obsolete the Way They Are Practiced Nowadays

ATTENTION: SOIL AGRICULTURE INCLUDING FORESTRY, AS NOW PRACTICED, IS DEAD OR OBSOLETE…

Dead if we keep doing it with our current dependency on mined finite-supply mineral fertilizers and obsolete if we hope to maintain even the current population… NO MATTER WHETHER IT’S DONE ORGANICALLY OR WITHOUT GMOs. Too little is now being done to respond to this. Our response options are to make some modifications to soil agricultural technologies, to develop new forms of food and fiber production and use more efficient ways of consumption that could support even higher human populations, or by default, to return to low-intensity soil agriculture + hunting and gathering that could support only a small fraction of our current population at much lower technological levels.

Why? All life on the planet (with a few very rare exceptions…organisms living on heat near underwater volcanic vents instead of using photosynthesis) depends on a very thin layer at the surface of earth’s topsoils and the photic zone of the earth’s surface waters to provide life-supporting minerals like K, P, Mg, Fe, etc. This layer, call it the life-support mineral nutrient layer (LSMNL), where photosynthesis occurs and where minerals are bioavailable (in ionic form dissolved in water)and physically accessible by photosynthesizers is where the food web begins. The soil agriculture that provides us with our endosomatic energy (food kilocalories) and our own life-support mineral nutrient needs is carried out in the LSMNL.

Agronomics as it’s done today…the selling of plant products without the return of mineral nutrients in human biowastes back to the growing soils, inevitably takes minerals out of the LSMNL much faster than they are replenished by natural processes…weathering of rocks (mechanical or biochemical) and volcanic ash deposition. Deposition of sediments in riverine flood zones can also act to replenish flood plain areas’ mineral nutrient supplies but only a small portion of the earth’s total agriculture occurs on such flood plains.

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

Farming and Food for the Soul

May 18, 2018

Farming and Food for the Soul

When Cuba’s industrialized agriculture crashed in 1989, women were among the new small-scale farmers who fed the nation.

Cuba’s former agricultural system—large-scale, mechanized, and “modern”—relied on a steady flow of resources from the Soviet Union. Before 1989, the Soviet Union sent vast amounts of agricultural supplies, including petroleum, pesticides, fertilizers, and livestock vaccinations, to fuel Cuban production of cash crops such as sugar cane, tobacco, coffee, and bananas. The Cuban government prioritized the export of cash crop products and imported 80 percent of what the country consumed: rice, beans, grains, and vegetables. To the north, the United States enforced el bloqueo, an economic blockade against Cuba first established in 1960, prohibiting the flow of goods, including food and medicine, to and from the socialist island. When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989, severing the supply of food and farming supplies, Cuba woke up to a major economic crisis. Without food imports to stock the grocery store shelves, how would Cuba feed 11 million people? How would Cubans till the soil without diesel to run the tractors? How could farmers stimulate yields without synthetic fertilizers? Agricultural production plummeted dramatically. State farms and factories shut down. Livestock perished. Precious cash crops rotted in the fields and, as a result, revenue from exports crashed.

Fidel Castro, the ruling leader of the communist state, referred to the economic crisis as El Período Especial, or the Special Period During the Time of Peace. He urged the Cuban population to work resourcefully with the meager supplies they had. Remarkably, people did just that: they began to grow vegetables and herbs in pots and containers on rooftops, to plant avocado and mango pits in their backyards, and to raise smaller, more efficient meat sources such as rabbits and guinea pigs.

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

America’s ‘Cadillac Desert’: Is there a substitute for fresh water?

May 14, 2018

America’s ‘Cadillac Desert’: Is there a substitute for fresh water?

Thirty years after Marc Reisner penned Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water his prophesy is being fulfilled. As the chalky rings which mark previous higher water levels around Colorado River reservoirs grow ever wider, Grist reports that major disputes are now afoot over the remaining water supply.

Modern economists have long told us not to worry about resource scarcity. Higher prices will bring on new supplies whenever resource supplies decline. And, if a resource truly is becoming unobtainable, then we’ll always find a substitute.

When I hear this, I often counter: “There is certainly some truth to what you are saying. But, please tell me what the substitute for potable water will be.” The response is usually to change the subject—for the obvious reason that there is no substitute.

A Scientific American article in 2012 put world freshwater usage at more than 9 trillion cubic meters for per year. Per capita, Americans, not surprisingly, consumed more than twice the world average. Certainly, there is much room for water conservation in America and in the American West.

But what does conservation mean when 70 percent of the world’s fresh water is used for agriculture? Of course, it means that conservation is going to affect food production. At first, it might mean simply making irrigation systems more efficient through, say, drip irrigation.

But once conservation has achieved all that it can achieve, what will we do? It is important to remember that what is normally measured when it comes to water consumption is “freshwater” consumption. The water optimists will point to the vast brackish aquifers still available to us humans, not to mention the almost limitless supply in the oceans. The fact that the U.S. Geological Survey was asked by Congress to survey brackish water availability in the United States is an indicator of how serious the situation has become.

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

Agriculture & Global Cooling

April 23, 2018

Agriculture & Global Cooling

QUESTION: Mr. Armstrong; Are you familiar with Professor Easterbrook of Western Washington University who agrees with you and is projecting a decline in temperatures for the next three decades? It seems that those who simply claim that it has been getting warmer live in a bubble of biased news. One even said to me that it has been getting warmer for the past 10,000 years because of civilization. I asked what was the solution? Should we just commit suicide to save the planet? Just can’t understand these people who deny there are cycles within every trend.

LR

ANSWER: I know. We are closer to the lows than the historic highs in temperature. Our model does agree with Professor Easterbrook that the immediate decline in temperatures should extend out for about 43 years from 2007. It was unseasonably cold in Florida and snowed in the northern regions also for the first time since the Blizzard of 1899 and even that was about 120 years before. It was excessive snow and gold in Britain, Japan, and China, as well as Russia. They ignore these reports as one-time flukes.

The Global Warming crowd tries to deny that there are also cycles set in motion by the Sun and they attribute everything to human activity. Nobody wants air we cannot breathe. I lived in London back in the 1980s when the busses were blowing out diesel. It was horrible. But to stop pollution by distorting history or claiming the trend is really warmer for 10,000 years is the danger. That is like saying the Dow Jones Industrials is only in a bull market since 1932 pretending there are no corrections. We must understand that nature is bigger than we are and the Sun just maybe the majority of climate change.

800,000-year Ice-Core Records of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide (CO2)

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

“Sustainable Agriculture and Healthy Food Consumption Behaviors Go Together”

April 20, 2018

“Sustainable Agriculture and Healthy Food Consumption Behaviors Go Together”

Interview with Professor Jules Pretty, author and academic whose work focuses on sustainable agriculture and the relationship between people and the land.

GREEN Foundation is Reversing Negative Effects of the Green Revolution

April 9, 2018

GREEN Foundation is Reversing Negative Effects of the Green Revolution

How the Cult of the Colossal Imperils American Agriculture

April 3, 2018

How the Cult of the Colossal Imperils American Agriculture

Stressed-out farmers today only grow food for global consumption, and that is leading to a crisis at home.

Jurga Jot/Shutterstock

The 2018 farm bill is currently at a standstill as congressmen debate proposed changes to the bill’s SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program) provisions. SNAP is a huge and important welfare program, one that reminds us that the USDA and the farm bill are not focused exclusively on farms, but are also responsible for a bevy of other rural development issues (such as rural energy programs, the rural housing service, and rural utilities service).

But this pause in the farm bill process also gives us an opportunity to talk about what this bill does not usually do well: namely care for the nation’s small to midsize farmers and incentivize sustainable farming methodologies.

This deficit in focus and care is not new. The farm bill’s bias towards bigness has existed for decades now, and was doubly reinforced during the 1970s by USDA Secretary Earl Butz (the man who notoriously told farmers to “get big or get out”). Many of the agricultural revolutions we’ve seen over the past few decades—from small family farms to large-scale factory farms, from crop diversity to commoditized homogeneity—emerged most prominently in the 1970s and 1980s under Butz’s leadership at the USDA. At the time, our understanding of agriculture and its purposes were also shifting: what had formerly been understood as a local enterprise meant to feed local inhabitants was increasingly viewed as a global enterprise meant to foster trade relations and massive corn and soybean sales overseas.

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

Soil Microbes “Key to the function of agricultural systems”

March 30, 2018

Soil Microbes “Key to the function of agricultural systems”

Interview with Dr. Kristine Nichols, Chief Scientist at the Rodale Institute, an independent research institute for organic farming.

We know how food production needs to change if crisis is to be avoided – so why isn’t this happening?

March 29, 2018

We know how food production needs to change if crisis is to be avoided – so why isn’t this happening?

As the world races toward a projected 9 billion inhabitants, the failings of dominant food systems are impossible to deny. Current food production methods are severely polluting. They are the cause of malnutrition. They are also inequitable, and unjustifiably wasteful. And they are concentrated in the hands of few corporations. Entangled in the multiple crises humanity is facing, establishing global food security is considered a key challenge of our time.

Against the backdrop of climate change, resource shortages and urbanisation, the question of how to ensure adequate food supply for everyone looms rather large. The usual responseemphasises intensifying the output of agriculture through the common model of petrochemical, large-scale, one-crop, intensive farming.

But business as usual is no longer an option for food and agriculture. The global agriculture system will have to be radically transformed to avoid further environmental and social problems, as was concluded by a three-year study commissioned by the UN and the World Bank involving more than 400 scientists. This report, as well as subsequent international studies by the UN Conference on Trade and Development and the UN Special Rapporteur on the Right to Food, have convincingly demonstrated that agroecology – farming that imitates natural ecosystems – is the most promising pathway to sustainable food systems on all continents.

Industrial soybean farming in Brazil. Alf Ribeiro / Shutterstock.com

Agroecology

Agroecology is based on the idea that farms should mimic the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems. In ecosystems, there is no “waste”: nutrients are recycled indefinitely. Agroecology aims to close nutrient loops – returning all nutrients that come out of the soil, back to the soil. In the case of vegetable farming, for example, this could be achieved through composting of vegetable scraps, human and farmyard manure.

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

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