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Growing up I knew charcoal as the square, chemical-soaked briquettes people bought in bags and poured into the barbecue grill once a summer. Like so much else in our lives it came from a store, wrapped in plastic and pre-treated for shelf life, with no sense that it shared a name with something amazingly useful, which hundreds of generations had made themselves.

Charcoal is simply wood that has been burned without oxygen, either by being heated but sealed away from oxygen or, more commonly, setting it on fire and then cutting it off from the air, keeping the wood from burning completely into ash. Most other substances in the wood are driven off, leaving a porous shape of almost pure carbon, lightweight and easy to transport.

It can purify water by soaking up impurities, as in many kitchen sink filters, and treat poison victims when crushed and drunk in a fluid. It allows people to burn fires hotter than wood, enabling people to smelt iron or shape glass in a way that wood fires cannot. It can be added to soap for abrasion, crushed to make ink or paint or mixed with minerals to make gunpowder.

Perhaps the most surprising use, one that gained a burst of attention in recent years, involves trapping carbon from the atmosphere. Frequent readers of this blog might have already heard of this and can feel free to skip ahead a few paragraphs – but for the unfamiliar, I will recap the basics.

Farmers in Brazil have long known about the “black earth,” or terra preta, found over vast areas of the Amazon. In the last decade or two archaeologists have begun to realise that the terra preta was not a naturally occurring phenomenon, but had been cultivated over centuries, if not millennia.

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

Farmers Battle WORST Drought In 100 Years: ‘It’s Dire!’

July 21, 2018

Farmers Battle WORST Drought In 100 Years: ‘It’s Dire!’

Farmers are saying the situation they’ve been presented with is “dire.” As they battle the worst drought they’ve faced in 100 years, farming families in central-western New South Wales in Australia are facing ruin.

According to The Guardian, the farmers in the affected region of central and western New South Wales continue to battle a crippling drought that many locals are calling the worst since 1902. In Warrumbungle Shire, where sharp peaks fall away to once fertile farmland, the small town of Coonabarabran is running out of water. The town dam has fallen to 23% of its capacity and residents are living with level-six water restrictions. There are real fears the town will run dry. Unable to provide food would not only mean financial ruin for the farmers but also less food for those who need it. “It’s a pretty tough old time,” says Coonabarabran farmer Ambrose Doolan. “But if you’re working with your family and everyone is looking out for each other, you count your blessings.”

Last year, the Doolan family recorded their fourth-lowest average rainfall and that poor year has been followed by even drier conditions this year. The family has begun selling whatever stock they can and spends their whole day at feeding the cattle that remain because the pastures have dried up.

Farmers in this part of NSW are importing almost all food for their livestock from as far away as South Australia as prices rise with demand. The continued cost of buying feed is causing many to question their future on the land. The NSW government recently approved an emergency drought relief package of $600m, at least $250m of which will cover low-interest loans to assist eligible farm businesses to recover.

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

What Do Farmers Want?

July 11, 2018

What Do Farmers Want?

The obvious response to the title of this post is: I don’t know; why don’t you ask one? Well, Richard Wuthnow and his researches did, at great length. The result is In The Blood: Understanding America’s Farm Families, the last (it was published in 2015) of a list of books which Wuthnow’s extended sociological study of America’s small, rural, mostly agricultural, mostly Midwestern places, and the people who live there, has produced. Earlier this year, while thinking about Wuthnow’s latest book, The Left Behind: Decline and Rage in Rural America, I ended up exploring this series by Wuthnow to learn what it can tell us about how those of us who are part of, or next door to, or have memories of, or are in other ways dependent upon, the productive world of those who work the land think about the changing world around them. In The Blood didn’t change my mind about that analysis, but it did deepen it quite a bit.

The clearest point which comes through Wuthnow’s thoughtful engagement with the dozens of farmers he and his assistants interviewed, and with the reams of data about rural populations, farm economics, and more that they assessed, is simply this: most American farmers, most of the time, are not agrarians. This is hardly news to anyone who takes conversations about localism and sustainability at all seriously–but still, for people like me, for whom the appeal of agrarian thinking is strong, such reminders are necessary. When Rod Dreher quotes, as he did just recently, Wendell Berry’s “The Work of Local Culture,” with its determined placing of hope in the few surviving rural places in America–because “rural people…see all around them, every day, the marks and scars of an exploitive national economy….

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

Are city start-ups a help or hindrance to local food?

June 17, 2018

Are city start-ups a help or hindrance to local food?

In the last few decades, there has been a quiet revolution in food as more farmers have increasingly sold their produce direct to the public. By circumventing the supermarket system, farmers are strengthening local food systems, rebuilding connections between people and the source of their food.

This direct sales home delivery model has long been the domain of the Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement. However, thanks mainly to online technology, this revolution is ratcheting up a notch with the arrival of a raft of new companies backed by city finance.

HelloFresh, founded in 2011 and now active in seven countries, was valued at around £2 billion in 2015; Gousto, founded in 2012 and backed by Unilever, recently drew an additional £28.5 million from backers; and Farmdrop, founded 2012, attracted £7 million from investors in 2017 including Skype co-founder, Niklas Zennström.

The question that arises, is whether these new models enhance or weaken sustainable local food systems? On one hand, the idea of encouraging people to cook – from ‘scratch’ using recipe boxes for a fantastic array of meals, with exact ingredients and directions provided – is to be celebrated. On the other hand, could this very choice seduce the public away from supporting their local farmer?

Small-scale farmers are the foundation of a sustainable food system. Organic, biodynamic and other sustainable agriculture systems regenerate soil, support wildlife and produce a variety of fresh local food which increases local and national food security. Selling direct enables farmers to keep their small-scale values – and their profits. By buying direct from a farmer, a food citizen is supporting economic and environmental sustainability.

Pioneered by small-scale organic farmers in the 1980s, the CSA model of direct sales and home delivery by-passes the supermarket system and its pulverising demand for industrial uniformity. The humble veg box has been crucial in establishing a direct connection between shopper and farmer – as well as reducing plastic waste and fuel miles.

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

Down-to-earth policy: Improving soil health

June 1, 2018

Down-to-earth policy: Improving soil health

In recent years there has been a surge in research, education and advocacy efforts to catalyse agricultural policies that help farmers actively improve the health of their soil. Healthy soils are essential to agricultural and rural prosperity, to improving food security and nutrition and to enhancing vital biodiversity and ecosystem services. Unprecedented policy and soil data developments are helping to fill critical gaps in soil governance. However, concrete action and strong leadership are still needed at the regional, national and global level to guarantee healthy soils for a food-secure future.

The foundation of life

Countless cycles of birth, death, fertility and decay have transformed soil into the matrix of life on Earth: just a handful of terrestrial soil contains more organisms than there are people on the planet. These microorganisms work endlessly to provide a range of ecosystem services that are vital for the functioning and resilience of the environment. The Earth’s soils function as its largest water filter and storage tank, filtering and cleaning tens of thousands of cubic kilometres of water that pass through them each year. Soils store more carbon than is contained in all above ground vegetation, while regulating emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Soils also consume, digest, cycle and store nutrients that serve as the molecular building blocks for plants, animals and all forms of life.

Recognising the fundamental value of soil, a handful of forward-looking countries, such as Switzerland and Germany, established national legislation decades ago, to protect this natural resource. However, according to senior soil expert Dr. Luca Montanarella, the world’s soils have largely been considered a second-tier priority. As a result, the state of global soils has rapidly deteriorated, with human pressures on soil resources reaching critical limits.

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

Community-Supported Agriculture

May 22, 2018

Community-Supported Agriculture

We think of innovations in cars or computers, but rarely of innovations in farming and food. Yet a new type of farm has caught on rapidly in recent years, in both America and Europe – Community-Supported Agriculture, or CSA.

CSAs are small farms owned, jointly, by a nearby community, and that supplies food for people who live nearby. Sometimes townspeople will buy a plot of land close to town, hire a farmer to work it for them, and share all the crops. Other times the community can sell the surplus for a profit.

In some circumstances the farm is affiliated with a farmer’s market that sells the produce back to local people, giving the town a source of civic income; in other cases, townspeople simply own shares in the farm and get part of the harvest as profit. Still other times the farm is more like an allotment, with families owning their own sections. There are almost as many models as there are farms.

Such community ventures solve many problems at once. First, they find a use for plots near towns that otherwise might go unused. They provide work for farmers in an age when their numbers are diminishing – and if the community hires young people as hands, they give wages and rural skills to local youths.

In an interview with Global Public Media, community farmer Jay Martin made the point that many farmers must go deeply into debt in order to begin or keep farming – and when they have a successful crop, he says, they must deal with transport and the uncertainties of the market. When he turned his farm into a CSA, on the other hand, the costs were covered by the community, and he had no transport costs and a built-in market.

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

Farmers Reeling From High Oil Prices

May 22, 2018

Farmers Reeling From High Oil Prices

As the summer driving season approaches, drivers are already paying more for gasoline due to the oil price rally in recent months.

But higher oil prices affect not only the gasoline bills of retail consumers. The higher price of oil is also pushing up diesel fuel prices as the harvesting and planting seasons for various crops are already in full swing.

Farmers in the United States and around the world see their diesel fuel expenses jumping and eating into their profits that have been already constrained by depressed prices of some crops.

Ultra-low sulfur diesel is used for farming equipment and for transportation of crops, and the May price of that diesel is the highest it’s been since 2014, just before the collapse of crude oil prices.

“You just kind of all of a sudden realize, ‘Wow, it’s pretty high,’” farmer Glenn Brunkow from Wamego, Kansas, tells Reuters.

For next year, Brunkow is considering locking in diesel prices for the first time ever to save on future rises in diesel fuel prices.

This year, farmers are struggling with higher fuel costs as a result of the advance in crude oil prices in recent months.

In the U.S., where America’s farms output contributed US$136.7 billion—or about 1 percent of GDP—to the economy in 2016, total production expenses this year are expected to be flat on 2017, but spending on fuel and oils is expected to jump 10.2 percent, forecasts by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) show.

Spending on fuels and oils, which accounts for nearly 5 percent of cash expenses, is expected to increase by 10.2 percent, or by US$1.4 billion, on top of a 13.9-percent, or US$1.7 billion, increase for 2017.

…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…

Cutting a Farm into a Forest

April 6, 2018

Cutting a Farm into a Forest

Many modern back to the land stories unfold on neglected farmland that is ready to be brought back to life with attention and care. The piece of property on which my story takes place had evolved past neglect: it was simply abandoned to the forest. When we looked out the windows of our old home in the early years, we didn’t see fields onto which we could project agrarian dreams, but walls of vegetation that were wild and unwelcoming. If we wanted to make a farm, we would have to cut it into a forest.

We purchased our home on ten acres in 2011 because of its location — 10 minutes by car to the college where I teach and 3 minutes by foot to my wife’s family’s home — not because of its agricultural potential. Nine of the ten acres were entangled in a web of noxious weeds and vines climbing up through box elders and Russian olive, pioneer plants whose natural function is to reclaim fields for forests. My affection for the place was not yet rooted in time and memory, so I couldn’t help but see my woods as an obstacle to idealized ends. What we wanted for our place and what it had become required me, in the words of Aldo Leopold, “to write my signature on the face of the land.” But how?

The industrial solution to land “development” involves strip-mining sites of their flora, fauna, and topsoil, embodying practices Wendell Berry laments in his poem, “Damage”: “The trouble was the familiar one: too much power, too little knowledge.”

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

In praise of stupid: for a self-systemic farming

April 5, 2018

In praise of stupid: for a self-systemic farming

I’ve been blogging for over six years under this ‘Small Farm Future’ moniker, without devoting much effort to defining what a ‘small farm’ actually is. So I thought I’d try to make at least some minor amends on that score in this post. Strangely, I think the results bear on recent discussions here, including the one under my last post on regenerative agriculture.

The standard response to the question ‘how small is a small farm?’ is the same as the standard response to most questions – it depends. A small peri-urban market garden may be a fraction of an acre, whereas a small upland livestock operation may be hundreds or even thousands of acres. So a quantitative definition in terms of land area doesn’t get us far. The same of course holds true for defining large farms. Blank quantification doesn’t elucidate the essential difference between ‘small’ and ‘large’.

Perhaps we get closer to the crux if we say that a small farm is one that serves its local community. A small farm is not one that sells its produce into national or international commodity markets, but one that usually sells directly to local customers. I think this definition is serviceable, but it obscures some details that need highlighting. Most ‘local communities’ in wealthy countries – and, in fact, generally in the world today – are not fundamentally organised with respect to local space and resources. In this sense, a small farm serving its local community is anomalous. Further, because of the non-localism of local economic space, many of the inputs used in small farms are necessarily not that local. The result is that most of us who produce food for local sale have to compromise in various ways, and expect our customers to understand the nature of these compromises sufficiently to keep buying from us rather than simply going to the supermarket.

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

Is Britain sleepwalking into a food crisis?

April 4, 2018

Image: Andrew Stawarz, CC BY-ND 2.0

On May 8^th the government will end its consultation period on a new agricultural policy for England. Revealingly, its policy document – called ‘Health and Harmony: The future for food, farming and the environment in a Green Brexit’– has more to say about the environment than either food or farming. The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) wishes to end the direct subsidies that farmers have received under European Union policies, and environmental schemes are at the heart of its proposals. The policy seems likely to go through, with firm support from environmental groups.

But this is curious in two ways. Policy for the environmental consequences of agriculture is very important. As we read this week, “In the past 50 years in Britain, through the intensification of agriculture, we have destroyed well over half of our biodiversity, and the populations of birds, butterflies and wild flowers that once gave the landscape such animation and thrilling life have been utterly devastated”.

The measures will be beneficial and they flow on from those of the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), 87 per cent of which in England now goes to agri-environment schemes. However, they mainly concern indirect effects of agriculture. DEFRA has little to say about its immediate impacts on the soil itself and through emissions of methane and other greenhouse gases. The report’s 64 pages make no mention of the damage done to soils by modern industrial agriculture as such.

Soil scientists now understand the varied roles that soil microbes play in these areas and more: nutrient cycling; carbon, nitrogen and phosphorus utilisation; carbon sequestration; methane mitigation; soil fertility; and plant nutrient density. Carbon sequestration means a healthy soil will counter climate change since it absorbs carbon dioxide. This has stimulated a farming method called regenerative agriculture, which rebuilds organic matter and restores biodiversity in the soil, ‘resulting in both carbon drawdown and improving the water cycle.’ But DEFRA says nothing about that.

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

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…

Agricultural Innovation with John-Paul Maxfield

March 22, 2018

Agricultural Innovation with John-Paul Maxfield

John-Paul founded Waste Farmers with $9,000 and a belief that idealism and capitalism can coexist. Waste Farmers has evolved into an innovator respected by leaders in the global community for developing simple solutions to the complex problems of modern agriculture and food security.
Mar 20, 2018

John-Paul Maxfield | Photo by Joshua Lawton

Woody Tasch: What made you go into the soil business?

John-Paul Maxfield: I started with the desire to push toward a more sustainable food system. Soil is the place to start. We saw an opportunity to innovate around products and technology that reconnect people to soil. Long term, we want to be an agricultural innovation company.

Soil seems like a funny place to start with innovation . . . as basic as it can be.

Soil is incredibly complex. Just as with the human microbiome project, there is so much we have yet to discover. If we want to fix climate change, the answer is literally right beneath our feet. Da Vinci had it right when he said we understand the movements of the heavens better than we understand what is happening underfoot. We understand the soil at an intuitive level but not at a practical level.

What do you mean by the “intuitive level”?

It’s the place where all life comes from and to which it returns. We all pretty much know this. It’s not an accident that kids gravitate toward playing in the dirt.

What do you mean by the “practical level”?

We need greater understanding of how to work with soil to achieve broader goals of feeding people without destroying humanity’s ability to continue living on the planet.

So, what was the first thing you did as an entrepreneur?

I was working in private equity, but I was a square peg in a round hole. I’d always admired my grandfather. We’d drive along I-25 to go visit my grandparents in Wyoming, looking at corn fields as we went. My great-grandfather was the largest sheep producer in the country, pre-WWI. He lost everything in the Great Depression. My grandfather had feedlots and corn farms and had one of the largest livestock-sale barns in the country. It was not a mom-and-pop operation. It was vertically integrated. He was a tough old cowboy. My father and brothers sold the operation to their employees back in the ’90s. Torrington Livestock is based in Torrington, Wyoming. But I hope that, if he were here now, he’d recognize the need to redesign the food system.

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

Urban and Small Farm Agriculture

March 20, 2018

Urban and Small Farm Agriculture

We often read about the environmental damage and unsustainable practices of modern agriculture. Some people have proposed urban gardens and small farms as a pathway to food resiliency; repairing environmental damage, reducing fossil fuel use, and improving our health and well-being. Others conclude that it takes too much effort; people aren’t going to change; no one wants to slave away in the garden, kitchen, or on the farm; it can’t be done in every country; small farms and gardens can’t feed the world’s population. All these arguments have some merit, but I have found the reality of growing local food becomes quite different once the transformation begins.

I have always believed that wherever climate and conditions favor it, local food production on small farms, in backyards, community gardens, and empty urban lots will become an increasingly important source of fresh food. And if one uses season extension or poly covered tunnels and drip irrigation we can expand the growing area to much wider climate conditions. It’s nice to read scientific research that confirms my thinking, that there are positive benefits and potential from urban agriculture. A news brief recently published by the Earth and Space Science News describes how expanding agriculture into cities could improve food security, ecosystem health, and more. “With more than half of the world’s population currently living in cities, and that percentage expected to increase significantly by 2050, production of food in urban areas may become a necessity and certainly should be considered essential for local resilience.”

Researchers from several universities in the US and China collaborated on the project to measure potential benefits of urban agriculture (UA). They used data collected from satellite imagery (Landsat 5 Collection 1 archive) and compiled results of several variables using Normalized Diﬀerence Vegetation Index (NDVI) computed from a cloud-free median composite of 3 years (2009–2011). They assessed global aggregate ecosystem services from existing vegetation in cities and calculated the potential of UA based on estimates of urban morphology and vacant land. They concluded that “there is the potential of annual food production of 100-180 million tonnes, energy savings ranging from 14 to 15 billion kilowatt hours, nitrogen sequestration between 100,000 and 170,000 tonnes, and avoided storm water runoff between 45 and 57 billion cubic meters annually. The value of these ecosystem services could be as much as $80 to 160 billion, but there will be significant differences in country-to-country variability.”

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

The great agricultural resettlement or the next chapter of the fall

March 13, 2018

The great agricultural resettlement or the next chapter of the fall

Here’s my own picture.

I am a farmer and that is where my world begins. What is an agriculture? I say it is a culture of cities, towns and villages, bridges, roads, canals, harbours – of trades’ people and the trades, which have been created by the specialised cultivation of fields. The industrial revolution was a revolution within agriculture – germinated by fossil fuels, so that today, nearly every culture on Earth is an agriculture. The farmer has a lot on her shoulders, because the greatest towering city, and all its goings-on, is utterly dependant on her crops – although in my Utopian picture, trades and pleasures of every kind bear their own egalitarian apportionment of the weight, so that the labours of fields gain new springs to their steps.

Farms disrupt natural systems. The more husbandries imitate and integrate with natural systems, so the less they disrupt – but still they will disrupt to some degree. Good husbandry reflects our ordered minds more than the complexities of nature. Nevertheless, it imitates, as best it can, the cyclic behaviours of organisms. The highest crop yield will be achieved by the closest integration. “You never enjoy the world aright, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars”, wrote Thomas Traherne in the Seventeenth Century. To which the farmer pragmatically adds – and shod with soil fauna, shaded with green leaves, watered by clear springs and fed by lives we’ve fed in return.

I must note that true yield is output minus input – massive inputs massively reduce true yield, so that organic methods out-yield all others.

So, in attempting to do the best we can, we choose the least worst farming techniques. This is important to keep our humility and gratitude intact. It is also an important part of discussions on climate change. There have been outrageous claims of carbon sequestration (so-called negative emissions) by a variety of farming techniques, such as grasslands, or organically-managed lands – or regularly-felled woodland, or coppice. But the most these can achieve is a balance and that balance, given the flawed nature of all human practitioners is unlikely. As climate change accelerates and weather grows more unpredictable, so that balance will become still more unlikely.

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

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