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Gather together a group of preparedness minded folks and the conversation invariably turns to pulling up stakes and moving to the country to create a self-reliant home and life. But, for many, moving is not an option. Work, family, kids, health, personal responsibilities are all valid reasons keeping people in their present location. It may not be what we want, but it is where we are right now. We don’t have to postpone our path to self-reliance or preparing for a crisis, though, we can start where we are, with what we have.

Even though a vast country property might be ideal, a large suburban lot can be just as productive. It can be a place to learn and practice, make mistakes; a place to build skills and confidence and learn how to live a life not reliant on a consumeristic society.

When I moved to my property 15 years ago I did so with the idea that I would make it a productive mini farm, with all the pieces of a traditional farm, only smaller. Through the years we have worked and built, reevaluated and rethought what this farm can produce. It’s a creative process that relies on calculated rotation of livestock and produce for maximum production.

This is what I’d like to share, in hopes of inspiring other city dwelling pack mates to put their property to maximum use while life’s circumstances keeps them in town.

A Note to Clarify: This article is primarily about how I survive in suburbia managing my property to produce food for a two person household. I won’t be talking about alternative energy, heat, water, OPSEC, guns, ammo, or security, although those are all important topics.

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

Cuba’s sustainable agriculture at risk in U.S. thaw

March 28, 2016

Cuba’s sustainable agriculture at risk in U.S. thaw

Organic farm, Alamar. Melanie Lukesh Reed/Flickr, CC BY-NC-ND

President Obama’s trip to Cuba this week accelerated the warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. Many people in both countries believe that normalizing relations will spur investment that can help Cuba develop its economy and improve life for its citizens.

But in agriculture, U.S. investment could cause harm instead.

For the past 35 years I have studied agroecology in most countries in Central and South America. Agroecology is an approach to farming that developed in the late 1970s in Latin America as a reaction against the top-down, technology-intensive and environmentally destructive strategythat characterizes modern industrial agriculture. It encourages local production by small-scale farmers, using sustainable strategies and combining Western knowledge with traditional expertise.

Cuba took this approach out of necessity when its economic partner, the Soviet bloc, dissolved in the early 1990s. As a result, Cuban farming has become a leading example of ecological agriculture.

But if relations with U.S. agribusiness companies are not managed carefully, Cuba could revert to an industrial approach that relies on mechanization, transgenic crops and agrochemicals, rolling back the revolutionary gains that its campesinos have achieved.

The shift to peasant agroecology

For several decades after Cuba’s 1959 revolution, socialist bloc countries accounted for nearly all of its foreign trade.

The government devoted 30 percent of agricultural land to sugarcane for export, while importing 57 percent of Cuba’s food supply. Farmers relied on tractors, massive amounts of pesticide and fertilizer inputs, all supplied by Soviet bloc countries. By the 1980s agricultural pests were increasing, soil quality was degrading and yields of some key crops like rice had begun to decline.

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

Phosphate: All hopes rest on Morocco Walan et al., 2014

March 21, 2016

Phosphate: All hopes rest on Morocco Walan et al., 2014

Walan, P., Davidsson, S., Johansson, S., Höök, M. (2014) Phosphate rock production and depletion: Regional disaggregated modeling and global implications. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 93(0): 178-187

[ My summary of paper: If you look around for what share Morocco has of phosphate reserves, you’ll see figures of 75 to 85% that will last 300-400 years. But it’s not a done deal as Walan et al point out.

Phosphate is absolutely essential for high agricultural production, one of the “big 3” nutrients that boosts maximum crop growth (along with nitrogen and potassium). This paper points out that just like oil, it is the flow rate – how much is actually produced per year — that matters, not how much phosphate exists.

Phosphate can be “local”. For example, China and the U.S. use most of their phosphate domestically.

Morocco is the largest exporter and also has the largest deposits. So no worries? Hopefully not, but there are factors such as below which could lower Moroccan exports:

War
Phosphate mining is very water intensive and Morroco has little, and are mining groundwater at an unsustainable rate
Phosphate mining is energy intense, oil shortages would disrupt production
Moroccan phosphate has a cadmium, which is very toxic to plants

Inevitably, the combination of rising cost will force phosphate production to peak and then decline, even in Morocco (Bardi 2009).

Extracts from this 26 page paper are below, not in order. There’s great material on the history, location, quality, and other aspects of phosphate as well. Alice Friedemann, www.energyskeptic.com

Table 1. Main features of previous studies on phosphate rock depletion and production.
* Most countries’ reserves will be depleted in less than 100 years.
** Reserve base is included in the highest reserve estimations

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

It’s the Food Economy, Stupid!

March 18, 2016

It’s the Food Economy, Stupid!

I believe Rod MacRae (shown here) is one of a handful of experts to develop a critique of today’s food system based on its bad business case and its failure to do proper scenario planning.

If you don’t like reading arithmetic, you will find his writings tough going, but as soon as you subtract that problem, it pays to keep on reading. This is powerful stuff that more food system critics need to understand.

Just to be straight about my relationship with Rod, he’s the one who taught me food math back in the mid-1990s, when I called on him to help with the economic case that Jack Layton, Gary Gallon and I were trying to make for our newfound Coalition for a Green Economic Recovery. We enjoyed our conversations so much that we decided to work on a book together, and the result was our 1999 book, Real Food for a Change, which was also co-authored by my wife, Lori Stahlbrand. If I may say so, this book was one of the first to make the case for local and sustainable food that fostered “health, joy, justice and nature.”

Subsequently, I replaced Rod as manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, and he became a consultant and popular professor of environmental studies at York University.

Apart from knowing how to add, Rod is steeped in agriculture and ag policy. We’re different on both scores. I don’t check the math on my restaurant receipts, let alone charts in articles. And I am into the city side of food.

So, apart from presenting what Rod has to offer everyone, I will throw in my own two cents worth about how a city perspective could add new dimensions to Rod’s work.

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

Joel Salatin: The Promise Of Regenerative Farming

March 13, 2016

Joel Salatin: The Promise Of Regenerative Farming

It may well be our only long-term food solution

Front man for the sustainable/regenerative farming movement, Joel Salatin, returns to the podcast this week.

Next month on April 23rd, he’ll be joining Adam, the folks from Singing Frogs Farm, permaculturalist Toby Hemenway, and Robb Wolf at a speaking event in northern California. He’ll be speaking on the power that’s in our hands to make much smarter choices regarding the food systems we depend on:

Joel Salatin: Farmers get beat up for a number of things: producing what they produce, the way they treat animals, they way they treat the land . I want to point out that the power is not in the farmers. From a voting standpoint, prisoners/inmates are a lot more powerful of a constituency block in the culture than farmers are. So let’s put this in perspective: the power is in the customer. And so if you want things to change on the landscape, if you want things to change regarding chemicals, pesticides, GMO – name your issue — if you want change, well, you’ve got to make a change.

I think that too often consumers take the convenient way out and say ‘Well, if farmers would just do things differently, everything would be better.’ The truth is that farmers have always followed the market. If people refuse to buy genetically modified organism food, farmers won’t produce it. It’s really that simple. It doesn’t take a government agent, a bureaucracy, a police state, a new law. I mean, all of this could be changed just by consumers taking a more active and aggressive role at financing what they say they believe in from the outset.

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

Abundance From Small Spaces

March 9, 2016

Abundance from Small Spaces 03 - feat

ABUNDANCE FROM SMALL SPACES

This article derives from three sources. The blog I wrote for FAO (Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations based in Rome) to advertise the IPC (International Permaculture Conference) during UN Year of the Soil which can be read at: http://www.fao.org/soils-2015/blog/the-answer-lies-in-the-soil/en/ ; my presentation at IPC which you can see/hear and see the powerpoint that accompanied it at http://grahambell.org/the-answer-lies-in-the-soil-2/ and thirty years of my life spent creating forest gardens and fertile soils and helping others do the same on four continents. I should say ‘we’ rather than I because many people have contributed to this garden, not least my wife and children Nancy, Ruby and Sandy.

I called my presentations ‘The Answer Lies in the Soil.’ And it does.

First of all, though, we need air and water. Without these two things, we can’t live today. So clean air, and clean water in sufficient quantities are pre-cursors of sustainable human life. However, for long-term survival, we need soil. Not just any old soil: we need enduring well – nourished and nourishing soils which just keep getting more and more fertile. In fact, soil is demonstrably the true foundation of civilisation. That is ¬ fertile, accessible, living soil.

For soils to feed us well they need themselves to be fed well.

THE ANSWER LIES IN THE SOIL

Abundance from Small Spaces 01

SOIL AND LIFE – NEGLECT IT AT OUR PERIL

We neglect soil at our peril. Within historical memory (i.e. written records) Syria was a forest kingdom, Iraq the birthplace of agriculture and Libya the bread¬basket of the Roman Empire.

I expect anyone reading this will be familiar with the essential components of soil:

● Mineral fraction (sand, silt, clay)
● Humus
● Air and water
● Adequate soil structure to admit and retain these

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

Does Goldman Sachs care if you raise chickens? Some thoughts on accelerationism

March 2, 2016

Does Goldman Sachs care if you raise chickens? Some thoughts on accelerationism

“Goldman Sachs doesn’t care if you raise chickens” according to political scientist Jodi Dean, quoted by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams (henceforth S&W) in their recent book, Inventing the Future1. And if that title doesn’t sufficiently telegraph S&W’s line of argument, perhaps their subtitle ‘Postcapitalism and a world without work’ will help, as will the insistent demands imperiously inscribed on the book’s cover: “Demand full automation – Demand universal basic income – Demand the future”.

In other words, it’s the kind of book that probably ought to be complete anathema to me. And in some ways it is. But actually I find myself in agreement with a good deal of what S&W have to say. It’s a serious, grownup book about the challenges now facing progressive politics – the kind of book that Leigh Phillips should have tried to write instead of penning fatuous putdowns to the green movement2. By contrast, S&W’s diagnosis for the mess we’re in seems to me spot on in many ways. But I think they lose their way when they try to provide solutions. It’s plain that they don’t know much about farming or about the history of agrarian populism. I’d like to think that if they corrected this – perhaps through a long chat with a farmer over a hard day’s shared work, like the one I recently had processing and salting down my recently-slaughtered pig (not sure what Goldman Sachs’ line is on suids) – we might find a surprising amount of overlap in our thinking.

The points at issue are important, I think, if we’re to create the kind of moral/ethical polities that Steve Gwynne raised in the comments on my recent post about commons – polities of the kind I think are necessary to achieve just and sustainable societies. So let me whizz through a few aspects of S&W’s analysis in order to lay some foundations for that project.

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

Better water use can cut global food gap

February 17, 2016

Better water use can cut global food gap

An irrigation system on a pumpkin patch in a semi-arid area of New Mexico in southwestern US.
Image: Daniel Schwen via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists say that forecasts of a world food shortage need not prove as disastrous as previously thought if humans learn to use water more effectively.

LONDON, 16 February, 2016 – Although growing human numbers, climate change and other crises threaten the world‘s ability to feed itself, researchers believe that if we used water more sensibly that would go a long way towards closing the global food gap.

Politicians and experts have simply underestimated what better water use can do to save millions of people from starvation, they say.

For the first time, scientists have assessed the global potential for growing more food with the same amount of water. They found that production could rise by 40%, simply by optimising rain use and careful irrigation. That is half the increase the UN says is needed to eradicate world hunger by mid-century.

The lead author of the study, Jonas Jägermeyr, an Earth system analyst at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research(PIK), says the potential yields from good water management have not been taken fully into account.

Climate resilience

Already parched areas, he says, have the most potential for increases in yield, especially water-scarce regions in China, Australia, the western US, Mexico and South Africa.

“It turns out that crop water management is a largely under-rated approach to reducing undernourishment and increasing the climate resilience of smallholders,” he says.

In theory, the gains could be massive, but the authors acknowledge that getting local people to adopt best practice remains a challenge.

They have been careful to limit their estimates to existing croplands, and not to include additional water resources. But they have taken into account a number of very different water management options, from low-tech solutions for smallholders to the industrial scale.

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

Weather extremes slash cereal yields

January 10, 2016

Weather extremes slash cereal yields

Wheat and other cereal crops in developed countries such as Australia have been decimated. Image: CSIRO via Wikimedia Commons

Increasing intensity of heat and drought as a result of global warming may have caused worldwide cereal harvests to be cut by up to a tenth since the mid-1960s.

LONDON, 8 January, 2016 – Climate change may have already begun to take its toll of agriculture. New research suggests that drought and extreme heat in the last 50 years have reduced cereal production by up to 10%. And, for once, developed nations may have sustained greater losses than developing nations.

Researchers have been warning for years that global warming as a consequence of rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere – in turn, a pay-off from increased fossil fuel combustion – will result in a greater frequency or intensity in extremes of weather.

They have also warned more recently that weather-related extremes could damage food security in Europe, Africa and India.

Global cost

But a study in Nature journal by Navin Ramankutty, professor in global food security and sustainability at the University of British Columbia in Canada, and colleagues is perhaps the first to identify the global cost of weather-related disasters in the last half of the 20th century.

The researchers looked at 2,800 extreme hydro-meteorological disasters – floods, droughts and extremes of heat and cold – reported between 1964 and 2007 from 177 countries, and matched the data with production figures for 16 cereal crops.

They could detect no significant influence from floods or ice storms, but they found that drought and extreme heat reduced average national cereal production by between 9% and 10%.

Drought reduced both cereal yield and the area under harvest, while heat mainly affected yield. This is likely to be a consequence of different timescales: droughts can last for years, but heatwaves tend to be counted in no more than weeks.

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

Organic Agriculture Systems Continue to Outshine Conventional Systems in Multiple Studies

January 4, 2016

Planting a seedling

ORGANIC AGRICULTURE SYSTEMS CONTINUE TO OUTSHINE CONVENTIONAL SYSTEMS IN MULTIPLE STUDIES.

Though organic agriculture currently occupies a surprisingly low 1% of global cropland, several agricultural studies have recently favored organic systems over conventional systems in terms of profitability, crop yields, and environmental safety and health concerns.

Rodale Institute has conducted one of the most substantial studies of organic and conventional agriculture. The Farming Systems Trial consists of more than 30 years worth of side-by-side comparison of conventional chemical based systems vs organic manure based and legume based systems. The findings were impressive; organic yields consistently match conventional yields, even outperforming those yields during times of more moderate drought. Organic systems also build soil matter, making it more sustainable versus conventional systems’ tendency to deplete it.

Not only does organic farming use 45% less energy, but it also produces less greenhouse gas emissions.

Rodale also suggested in a conclusion of its 30 year trial that organic agriculture is the solution for feeding the world now and in the future. A report from the Food and Agricultural Organizations of the United States (FAO) stated “organic agriculture has the potential to secure a global food supply, just as conventional agriculture is today, but with reduced environmental impact.”

The evidence of the profitability of organic systems in this, and many other studies, cannot be argued. Profitability is determined by many factors; crop yields, labor costs, price premiums, and cost savings.

Not only do cost savings due to reduced usage of nonrenewable resources and chemical pesticides increase profitability of organic crops, but cost-benefit analysis shows that it also helps to offset increased labor costs due to the need for manual labor versus mechanical labor that organic systems present. With this in mind, the need for manual labor presents a huge advantage not only for organic agriculture itself, but economically through job creation as well, providing 30% more jobs in rural areas.

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

From Growth Economics to Home Economics: Towards a Peasant Socialism

December 21, 2015

From Growth Economics to Home Economics: Towards a Peasant Socialism

As a student in the 1980s, I was educated by probably the last generation of academics who found it possible to identify wholeheartedly with Marxism. They were good people and clever thinkers, and I suppose I became a Marxist myself for a time under their influence. I never made a good revolutionary, but I believed in science, progress, rationality and, above all, equality. I was acutely conscious of how lucky I was to be a privileged citizen of a privileged country – privileges that in many ways were built on the backs of less fortunate people. So, if I thought much at all about the kind of society I wanted to see, I suppose it would have been one in which everyone could live a life like mine – an urban wage labourer working in the knowledge economy, shopping in the supermarket, and getting away for the odd weekend to the mountains to reconnect with the wilder side of life.

Decades later, I’m a mostly self-employed farmer working a small piece of land, growing a fair slice of my own food, with few opportunities to ‘get away’, but absorbed in the daily wildness of creating sustenance from the earth. I still believe in equality, and I still believe in science, progress and rationality, although in a more conflicted way than before. And when I now think about the kind of society I’d like to see – which I do more often than I used to – I imagine one in which a lot of people live a similar kind of life to my present one. I have, in short, become an advocate for peasantisation, localisation, agrarian populism, anti-globalisation and degrowth – a cluster of ideas that I think of as an economics of the home¹.

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

Ultimate Weapon in Existential Struggle: Using the TPP for Hostile Takeover of Mexican Agriculture

November 23, 2015

Ultimate Weapon in Existential Struggle: Using the TPP for Hostile Takeover of Mexican Agriculture

Resisting Monsanto, the world’s largest, most influential GMO giant, is an almost impossible task. The corporation boasts more back channels and revolving doors with national governments and regulators than just about any other company on the planet, not to mention a fearsome army of corporate lawyers and lobbyists.

Few countries are more aware of this fact than Mexico, where a small collective of activist groups, scientists, artists and gourmet chefs have been engaged in a titanic legal struggle with Monsanto. Although they keep winning crucial battles, the war is still likely to be won by Monsanto, thanks to one key weapon in its arsenal: the Trans-Pacific Partnership.

An Existential Struggle

For Mexican smallholders and consumers, the struggle with Monsanto & Friends is an existential one. In a 2013 ruling banning the cultivation of GMOs in Mexico, Judge Manuel Zaleta cited the potential risks to the environment posed by GMO corn. If the biotech industry got its way, he argued, more than 7000 years of indigenous maize cultivation in Mexico would be endangered, with the country’s 60 varieties of corn directly threatened by cross-pollination from transgenic strands.

In the last two years scores of appeals were brought against Zaleta’s ruling by the likes of Monsanto, Syngenta, and Dupont as well as Mexico’s Ministries of Agriculture and Environment. All of them were quashed. But then in August this year, a judge with a more sympathetic ear overturned Zaleta’s ruling [read… Mexican Gourmet Chefs Sharpen Knives in Global Food War]. The resistance, it seemed, had finally crumbled.

But a lot can happen in three months. In early November, federal judge Benjamin Soto Sánchez “upheld a provisional suspension prohibiting federal agencies from processing and granting the privilege of sowing or releasing into the environment of transgenic maize in the country.” In other words, Monsanto & Friends were back to square one.

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

Groundwater Not as Renewable as Thought, Study Finds

November 21, 2015

Groundwater Not as Renewable as Thought, Study Finds

Findings ‘a call to better manage and protect the resource,’ says UVic researcher.

Tap-Groundwater

Just over 40 per cent of Canada’s agricultural productivity depends on groundwater. Irrigation photo via Shutterstock.

Groundwater, the globe’s most dependable water insurance system, is not as renewable as researchers once thought and its availability varies greatly around the world.

A new study published in the science journal Nature GeoScience found that just six per cent of the groundwater in the upper two kilometres of the Earth’s crust is actually renewed over a human lifetime.

As a consequence, the vast majority of groundwater now being consumed at a rapid rate by agriculture, human communities and the oil and gas industry took hundreds, thousands or even millions of years to collect in the earth. (Some groundwater in Canada is more than a billion years old.)

”It begs the question of what is renewable in terms of groundwater,” said hydrologist Tom Gleeson at the University of Victoria and one of the paper’s authors. ”When we talk about groundwater, it can be 100, 1,000 or 10,000 years old and it was all at some time precipitation. But it all comes down to timescale.”

Scientists classify groundwater, the water that supplies aquifers and wells, as ”young” or ”modern” if it has seeped and pooled in the earth for only 25 to 100 years. It is generally more readily available and of better quality than old or ancient groundwater and is more vulnerable to contamination.

The study, which used extensive computer modelling, mapped the extent of young groundwater around the world by tracking tritium, a radioactive tracer, in thousands of groundwater samples from around the world.

Tritium is a byproduct of atmospheric nuclear testing during the 1950s and 1960s. The element fell to the ground in rainwater and is now a standard measurement for mapping young groundwater.

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

Global warming drains the water of life

November 15, 2015

Global warming drains the water of life

Melting snowpack in Turkey’s Lesser Caucasus mountains. Image: Dario Martin-Benito

New research warns that rising temperatures are reducing the mountain snow on which billions of people in lowland areas depend for their water supply.

LONDON, 13 November, 2015 – Up to two billion people who depend on winter snow to deliver their summer water could see shortages by 2060 as upland and mountain snowpacks continue to dwindle.

An estimated 300 million people could find, 45 years on, that they simply won’t have enough water for all their needs, according to new research.

Climate change driven by rising atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide – in turn, fed by human combustion of fossil fuels – may already be affecting global precipitation. Researchers have consistently found that much of the world’s drylands will increase as global average temperatures rise.

But warmer temperatures increasingly also mean the water that once fell as snow, to be preserved until the summer, now falls as winter rain, and runs off directly. The snow that does fall is settling at ever higher altitudes and melting ever earlier.

Reliable flow

This is bad news for agricultural communities that depend on a reliable flow of meltwater every summer.

California is already in the grip of a sustained drought, made worse by lower falls of snow. Great tracts of Asia depend on summer meltwater from the Himalayan massif and the Tibetan plateau.

Justin Mankin, an environmental scientist at Columbia University’s Earth Institute in the US, and colleagues report in Environmental Research Lettersjournal that they studied 421 drainage basins across the northern hemisphere

They took account of the water used now and the patterns of population growth, and tested the impact of global warming, using computer simulations of a range of possible future patterns.

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

Will Indonesian Fires Spark Reform of Rogue Forest Sector?

November 5, 2015

Will Indonesian Fires Spark Reform of Rogue Forest Sector?

Massive fires in Indonesia caused by the burning of forests and peatlands for agriculture have shrouded large areas of Southeast Asia in smoke this fall. But analysts say international anger over the fires could finally lead to a reduction in Indonesia’s runaway deforestation.

The fires that blazed in Indonesia’s rainforests in 1982 and 1983 came as a shock. The logging industry had embarked on a decades-long pillaging of the country’s woodlands, opening up the canopy and drying out the carbon-rich peat soils. Preceded by an unusually long El Niño-related dry season, the forest fires lasted for months, sending vast clouds of smoke across Southeast Asia.

Fifteen years later, in 1997 and 1998, a record El Niño year coincided with continued massive land-use changes in Indonesia, including the wholesale draining of peatlands to plant oil palm and wood pulp plantations. Large areas of Borneo and Sumatra burned, and again Southeast Asians choked on Indonesian smoke.

Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images

Smoke last month in South Sumatra, Indonesia, from illegal burning of forests and peatlands.

In the ensuing years, Indonesia’s peat and forest fires have become an annual summer occurrence. But this summer and fall, a huge number of conflagrations have broken out as a strong El Niño has led to dry conditions, and deforestation has continued to soar in Indonesia. Over the past several months, roughly 120,000 fires have burned, eliciting sharp protests from Singapore and other nations fed up with breathing the noxious haze from Indonesian blazes.

The pall of smoke still drifting over Southeast Asia is the most visible manifestation of decades of disastrous policies in Indonesia’s corrupt forestry and palm oil sectors.

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

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