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Méxican Seeds

November 22, 2021

Méxican Seeds

Last month’s ruling by the country’s Supreme Court fuels sustainable farming worldwide, writes Ernesto Hernández-López.

Mexico’s Supreme Court in Mexico City. (Ricardo Daniel Maldonado, CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikimedia Commons)

Last month México’s Supreme Court provided hope for biodiversity, especially in the Global South, while flaming fear for seed companies. In a historic step, it ruled for corn advocates and against genetically modified (GMO) corn. The decision was a momentous act in country where maíz (corn) carries daily and sacred significance.

This promises a way out of stale GMO debates that plague us. One side argues that genetic changes to seeds increase harvests. Seed companies and industrial agriculture make up this side. Another side says GMOs damage plant DNA.

Small-scale farmers and environmentalists stand on this side. Neither addresses the other. This standstill keeps GMO policies ineffective. The court’s decision offers a path out of this by cutting at seed company positions.

We should follow slow grown Mexican resistance to GMOs.

By emphasizing biodiversity, the ruling fuels sustainable farming worldwide. In legal terms, the decision found that it is constitutional for courts to block commercial permits for GMO corn. 

Seed companies, like Monsanto, Syngenta, Dow, and PHI, need these to sell seeds in México. They lost.  

Global GMO Push 

Inside the COP26 climate conference in Glasgow, Scotland, in early November. (UNclimatechange, Flickr)

But much more is at stake than permits and court orders. These agrochemical companies pursue a global push for GMO agriculture, not just in México. Farmers worldwide worry that companies control GMO seed use (not growers) and that seeds cause permanent environmental harm.

Frustrations persistently spread, evident at this year’s UN COP26 and UN global food summit.

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

The Future Of Better FarmingSustainable practices + smart technology = thriving soils

August 6, 2019

The Future Of Better FarmingSustainable practices + smart technology = thriving soils

While it’s *soooo* tempting to write about the stomach-churning drop/spike/dive thrill ride the financial markets have embarked on after this week’s Federal Reserve rate cut, I will resist and instead direct your attention to a topic much more important to our future.

Here at PeakProsperity.com, we’ve long warned about the dangers of inflation and of devaluation of the purchasing power of fiat currency over time. And the past decade has done nothing but validate our concerns, as the world’s central banks nearly quadrupled the money supply by printing roughly $14 Trillion out of thin air since 2008.

We’ve long encouraged investors both big and small to invest in tangible wealth (aka “hard assets”). These are assets that have intrinsic value that can’t be inflated away to nothing by a runaway printing press.

One of most desirable forms of tangible wealth is productive farmland. No matter what happens to the dollar, the Euro, the yen, or the yuan, people will always need to eat; and will trade cash, goods, services or labor for the farmer’s output.

But farmland, especially quality farmland, isn’t easy to own.

Not many folks can realistically purchase a farm. Few have the (substantial) capital to buy one, and way fewer have the expertise, energy and temperament to manage and operate one.

There aren’t many other options for investors besides purchasing shares of the publicly traded mega-producers.

But for those deeply troubled by the extractive and rapacious nature of most modern conventional farming practices — which are ruining our priceless topsoils, depleting aquifers, killing off the insects, creating toxic algal blooms and dead zones in our rivers and oceans, and producing unhealthy foods, to boot — how can you avoid supporting the evils of Big Ag?

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

Joel Salatin: The Rise Of Rogue Food

August 7, 2018

Joel Salatin: The Rise Of Rogue Food

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…

Study Indicate That Organic and Sustainable Agriculture Can Feed the Planet

March 15, 2016

Fresh produce

STUDY INDICATE THAT ORGANIC AND SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURE CAN FEED THE PLANET

The never ending debate as to whether organic food production could actually feed the globe is back at the debate table. And the data culled for this latest report suggests that turning to increased organic food production to feed the globe isn’t really a far-fetched idea. Washington State University researchers have concluded that feeding a growing global population with sustainability goals in mind is possible. Their review of hundreds of published studies provides evidence that organic farming can produce sufficient yields, be profitable for farmers, protect and improve the environment and be safer for farm workers. Critics have long argued that organic agriculture is inefficient, requiring more land to yield the same amount of food. The review paper describes cases where organic yields can be higher than conventional farming methods.

The report, Organic Agriculture for the 21st Century, authored by Washington State University Regents Professor of Soil Science and Agroecology John Reganold and doctoral student Jonathan Wachter, looks at the efficacy of organic and non-organic farming according to the four pillars of sustainability: economics, environment, productivity and community well-being. Organic production currently accounts for only one percent of global agricultural land, despite rapid growth in the last two decades.

Organic agriculture, sometimes called biological or ecological agriculture, combines traditional conservation farming methods with modern farming technologies. It emphasizes rotating crops, managing pests naturally, diversifying crops and livestock, and improving the soil with compost additions and animal and green manures. Organic farmers use modern equipment, improved crop varieties, soil and water conservation practices, and the latest innovations in feeding and handling livestock. Organic farming systems range from strict closed-cycle systems that go beyond organic certification guidelines by limiting external inputs as much as possible to more standard systems that simply follow organic certification guidelines.

…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…

Joel Salatin: The Pursuit Of Food Freedom

June 29, 2015

Joel Salatin: The Pursuit Of Food Freedom

A right worth fighting for

Sustainable farming activist Joel Salatin and author of Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal returns this week to talk about the importance of a basic human right: to choose what to eat.

In past podcasts, he’s described the challenges facing farmers who want to grow organically. This week, he sheds light on the additional challenges consumers face in getting access to quality produce and meats.

The bottom line is our industrial system (or, as Joel puts it, the “fraternity”) seeks to protect itself and its existing revenue streams. Research is commissioned to discredit the claimed benefits of organic farming. FDA nutrition guidelines favor the mono-crops grown by factory farms, despite mounting evidence these guidelines are not in the public health’s interest. Pesticides and herbicides are used in ever-greater amounts. Distribution infrastructure doesn’t enable small-scale delivery trucks (which most organic farms use) to plug into it. For those not living in an area concentrated with small farms, being able to identify and purchase healthy food options is difficult.

Joel recommends we elevate “food freedom” to the same status as we demand for other core personal liberties like public safety and legal equality:

We need to celebrate and energize the public to defend the freedom to acquire the food of our choice from the source of our choice. This whole orthodoxy thing we’ve been talking about is militating right now against being able to choose for ourselves the kind of fuel we want for our own bodies. I look at this whole food freedom effort as rectifying something that was missed in the Bill of Rights. We’ve got the right to own a gun, the right to assemble, the right to worship, the right to speak, the right to be secure in our persons without a search warrant. There are all sorts of wonderful rights. But we did not get the right to choose our food.

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

 

 

Paul & Elizabeth Kaiser: Sustainable Farming 2.0

May 25, 2015

Paul & Elizabeth Kaiser: Sustainable Farming 2.0

Producing more food, and more profits — sustainably

Here at Peak Prosperity, we’re continuously on the hunt for new models that offer promise for a better future. These tend to be models of stewardship and sustainability, which contrast starkly with society’s current focus on resource consumption and exploitation.

The farming model being pioneered at Singing Frogs Farm, a small micro-farm in northern California is one such example of doing things “right”. Developed over years of combining bio-intensive land/forestry management theory with empirical trial & error, the farming practices at Singing Frogs have produced astounding results.

First off and most important, no tilling of any kind is done to the soil. No pesticide/herbicide/fungicide sprays (organic or otherwise) are used. And the only fertilizer used is natural compost.

These practices result in a build-up of nutrient-dense, highly bio-rich topsoil. Where most farms have less than 12 inches of ‘alive’ topsoil in which they can grow things, Singing Frogs’ extends to a depth over 4 feet(!).

This high-carbon layer of soil retains much more water than conventional topsoil, requiring much less irrigation than used at most farms (a very important factor given the historic drought the West is suffering).

All these advantages combine to enable Singing Frogs Farm to produce 5-7 harvests per year on their land, vs the 1-2 harvest average of other farms. And since the annual crop yield is so much higher, so is the revenue. Most other farms in northern California average $14,000 in gross revenue per acre. Singing Frogs grosses nearly $100,000 per acre — a stunning 5x more.

On this week’s podcast, we’re joined by the husband-and-wife team behind Singing Frogs Farm, Paul and Elizabeth Kaiser, who are eager to help other food producers understand the science behind their success, and to replicate and improve upon it wherever possible.

…click on the above link to listen to the podcast…

Soil Science Spelled It Out A Whole Century Ago

May 22, 2015

Soil Science Spelled It Out A Whole Century Ago

An organic farm marketer brought me a strange book to read and I can’t get it out of my mind. It was written by Cyril Hopkins, an agronomist at the University of Illinois in 1911. Already a century ago, science had committed the wisdom of the ages about maintaining soil fertility (Hopkins quotes Cato, Varro and Virgil from ancient Rome) to the finely wrought analysis and statistics of science. Soil scientists knew very well how to practice sustainable farming a century ago but then as now many people, including some fellow scientists, paid little attention. The strangeness of the book comes from the author’s efforts to write “The Story of The Soil” in the form of a novel, embedding his treatise on soil science in a more or less fictional love story.  He had already written a factual book on how to restore and maintain fertility in America’s declining soils but, surprise, surprise, hardly anyone read it. I suppose he figured that maybe people would pay attention if a little sexual intrigue were woven into his pages of dry facts and figures about manure, lime, rock phosphate and clover rotations and what happens when you don’t do it correctly. I doubt his ploy worked except with those of us who think sustainable farming is a pretty sexy subject all by itself.

At the beginning of the twentieth century there was plenty of evidence that yields of farm crops were in decline, despite all the blazing glory shouted from the rooftops about the limitless fertility of our soils. All that was staving off a clear realization of that fact was that for two centuries and more, we always had new land to move to and repeat the process of mining the virgin nutrients out of it.

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

 

Olduvai IV: Courage
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Olduvai II: Exodus
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