Fixing Food: Fresh Solutions from Five U.S. Cities (2016)

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The nation’s cities are at the frontlines of a food system that sickens and impoverishes millions of Americans every year. Local communities where people live, shop, work, and receive healthcare bear the brunt of this system’s unhealthy, unjust outcomes, which disproportionately affect communities of color and low-income Americans.

In response, many local governments and community leaders are launching innovative efforts to make healthy food more available and affordable. Fixing Food presents case studies of programs from five U.S. cities that are helping residents grow and sell healthy food, training the next generation of farmers, and bringing healthy food to places where people gather.

The case studies

We reviewed hundreds of initiatives taking place in hundreds of U.S. cities, ultimately choosing five local efforts that show how healthy food access problems can be addressed at multiple points in the food system—by facilitating local production, creating new distribution channels, or making it easier for consumers to overcome time and transportation hurdles.

The five cities chosen—Oakland, Memphis, Louisville, Baltimore, and Minneapolis—all have populations between 400,000 and 700,000, and in all of them, the percentage of residents living below the federal poverty line is higher than the national average.

We hope these case studies may provide models that other local communities can learn from and adapt to their own unique challenges and needs. But they also demonstrate the need for comprehensive national food policy reform.

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Stewardship with Vision – Episode 1: Jeff Laszlo

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As a result of the O’Dell Creek restoration, Granger Ranches has documented a 900% increase in waterfowl species and a 600% increase in species diversity. The ranch now hosts at least fifteen species of concern, including the American White Pelican, Clark’s Grebe, Great Blue Heron, White-Faced Ibis, Franklin’s Gull, Caspian Tern, Long-billed Curlew and American Bittern, Baird’s Sparrow, McCown’s Longspur, Sprague’s Pipit, Burrowing Owl, Short-eared Owl, Ferruginous Hawk. Trumpeter Swans, once gravely imperiled, take refuge on the ranch with 20-50 wintering annually. Raptor species increased from four to ten. Up to 5,000 Rocky Mountain Sandhill Cranes now make annual migratory visits. The wetlands are also supporting river otters, moose, deer, and rare and sensitive flowers.

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The pulse of life

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When pulses are removed from farming systems, synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are used… A recent study has shown that organic farming increased nitrogen content of soil between 44 and 144 per cent.

Pulses are truly the pulse of life: for the soil, for people and the planet. In our farms they give life to the soil by providing nitrogen. This is how ancient cultures enriched their soils. Farming did not begin with the Green Revolution and synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. Whether it is the diversity-based systems of India, or the three sisters planted by the first nations in North America, or the ancient Milpa system of Mexico, beans and pulses were vital to indigenous agro-ecological systems.

As Sir Albert Howard, known as the father of modern agriculture, writes in An Agricultural Testament, comparing agriculture in the West with agriculture in India: “Mixed crops are the rule. In this respect the cultivators of the Orient have followed nature’s method as seen in the primeval forest. Mixed cropping is perhaps most universal when the cereal crop is the main constituent. Crops like millets, wheat, barley and maize are mixed with an appropriate subsidiary pulse, sometimes a species that ripens much later than the cereal. The pigeon pea (cajanus indicus), perhaps the most important leguminous crop of the Gangetic alluvium, is grown either with millets or with maize… Leguminous plants are common. Although it was not until 1888, after a protracted controversy lasting 30 years, that Western science finally accepted as proved the important role played by pulse crops in enriching the soil, centuries of experience had taught the peasants of the east the same lesson.”

The monocultures promoted by the Green Revolution had a direct impact on the decline of pulse production by displacing biodiversity, and with it depleting soil fertility. Mixed cropping was impossible with the intensive use of chemicals of the Green Revolution. With the change from mixed cropping to monocultures, less pulses were planted, production reduced and with the absence of legumes, nitrogen levels in the soil got depleted.

The Green Revolution ensured India produced more rice and wheat, but our pulses have disappeared from the monoculture fields. Between 1960-61 and 2010-2011, acreage under wheat has gone up from 29.58 per cent to 44.5 per cent and rice from 4.79 per cent to 25 per cent. Meanwhile, the area under pulses has dropped from 19 per cent to 0.21 per cent, oilseeds from 3.9 per cent to 0.71 per cent, millets from 11.26 per cent to 0.21 per cent. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre and health per acre, Punjab is actually producing less food and nutrition as a result of the Green Revolution.

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Degenerative vs Regenerative Agriculture – A Battle for Your Fork and Fashion

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Author: Jon Connors

In the fictitious Star Wars mythology, there are two sides battling for balance of the Universe. Those who serve the Dark Side, represented in the picture above with red light sabers, serve an order of hatred, anger, and absolute power. Those who serve in the Jedi order, serve according to Universal Laws and principles of goodness, fairness, balance and justice. These stories have captured our collective imagination partly because we can intuitively sense their truth in our everyday lives. In a subtle way, we are playing out the myth of Star Wars every time we sit down to eat, or choose clothing to wear; it is time to be aware of the ramifications of our actions.

In the real world, there are similarities between the Dark Side and the Jedi order when it comes down to agricultural production. The majority of agriculture in the United States is degenerative (aka the Dark Side); it pollutes the land, takes up more water than can be replaced naturally, erodes topsoil, and places carbon in the air- contributing to global warming. Most of the world’s agriculture fits this description.

Pollution: Wikipedia

Agricultural pollution refers to biotic and abiotic byproducts of farming practices that result in contamination or degradation of the environment and surrounding ecosystems, and/or cause injury to humans and their economic interests.

Water: USDA Economic Research Service

‘Agriculture… accounts for approximately 80 to 90 percent of U.S. consumptive water use.

Topsoil: University of California Division of Agriculture and Natural Resources

In the United States, we lose an estimated 6.9 billion tons of soil each year (Pimentel, 2000).

Carbon: Yale’s Environment 360

The world’s cultivated soils have lost 50 to 70 percent of their original carbon stock.

According to many scientists, the Earth’s Sixth Extinction event is underway, in large part because of global agricultural practices. What this means is that every time most of us choose what food to eat and clothing to wear, we are unconsciously participating in the rapid destruction of our planet- we are unconsciously acting like the Death Star from the first Star Wars movie.

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A Continuing Inquiry Into Ecosystem Restoration: Examples From China’s Loess Plateau and Locations Worldwide and their Emerging Implications

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Authors: John D. Liu and Bradley T. Hiller

4.8.1 A JOURNEY BEGINS

In early September 1995, after spending 15 years working as an international news television producer and cameraman, John D. Liu embarked on a life-changing assignment that ultimately prompted this section (Figure 4.8.1). Liu was part of a documentary crew flying in a small Soviet-era copy of a Fokker Friendship aircraft (dubbed the “Friendshipsky”), which landed at a small, dusty airport in Yanan in Shaanxi Province, on China’s Loess Plateau (see Box 4.8.1).

4.8.1.1 CONSIDERING THE IMPLICATIONS

The Loess Plateau has proven to be an excellent place to pursue a type of ecological forensics to witness and understand how human actions over time can destroy natural ecological function. The restoration process of the plateau is providing a living laboratory in which the potential of returning ecological function to long degraded landscapes can be studied. Essentially, what has been witnessed and docu- mented on the Loess Plateau is that it is possible to rehabilitate large-scale damaged ecosystems. This realization has potentially enormous implications for human civilization. Witnessing firsthand many geopolitical events as a journalist, including the rise of China from poverty and isolation throughout the 1980s, the Tiananmen tragedy in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union, global terrorism, and much more, provided John D. Liu with references to compare to the restoration of the Loess Plateau. He quickly came to realize that, in terms of significance for a sustainable future for humanity, understanding what occurred on the Loess Plateau would be critical.

Yanan is perhaps most famous as the mountainous hideout where Mao Zedong led the Chinese communist Red Army to escape annihilation by the Nationalists (this retreat is often referred to as the “Long March”). The typical dwellings in Yanan at the time were man-made cave dwellings dug so deeply into the soil that they were almost invisible, which made Yanan a particularly good place for a revolutionary to disappear. By 1995, the Chinese communist revolution had moved on and China’s socialist market economy was flourishing on the eastern coast and making waves worldwide. But Yanan remained virtually untouched by the agricultural changes, the industrial growth, and the increasing international influence that much of China was experiencing. Yet in this backwater, a new revolution was brewing.

The purpose of the assignment was a World Bank baseline study for an ambitious development project called the Loess Plateau Watershed Rehabilitation Project (see Box 4.8.2). The scene (as depicted in Figure 4.8.2) was of a completely barren landscape.

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How Wolves Change Rivers

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When wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone National Park in the United States after being absent nearly 70 years, the most remarkable “trophic cascade” occurred. What is a trophic cascade and how exactly do wolves change rivers? George Monbiot explains in this movie remix.

Watch More Videos on Sustainable Human’s Youtube Channel

Main Street Project

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Our food and agriculture system is not working. Consumers experience declining nutritional quality and increasing health risks; agricultural workers endure long hours and low wages; rural communities are declining economically; and the environment suffers from soil depletion, chemical inputs and toxic waste.

The current structure of ownership and control of our food and agriculture system concentrates power in the hands of a select few, regards consumers merely as a source of revenue, and treats the environment as nothing more than the source of the products that capture that revenue. And we all pay the price.

We can do better. And at Main Street Project, we are. Main Street Project is developing a regenerative agriculture system that can equip farmers to solve our nation’s food crisis and has the power to change how food is produced around the world.

Learn More About Main Street Project

Interview: Scientist, Author, Activist Vandana Shiva Leads Movement to Restore Sovereignty to Farmers

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Acres U.S.A. is North America’s monthly magazine of ecological agriculture. Each month we conduct an in-depth interview with a thought leader. The following interview appeared in our January 2016 issue and was too important not to share widely.

Americans who visit India often come back more or less overwhelmed by its vast size and complexity, and if they are not stunned into silence they are at least much less willing to engage in generalities. Timeless beauty, explosive economic growth, persistent poverty and about a billion people all make for an intense experience if you’re used to the predictable movements of cars and shoppers. One thing that does emerge from the ancient nation’s recent history, though, is the way societies that seem chaotic and disorganized to outsiders actually offer opportunities for their citizens who are willing to act with boldness, imagination and fierce resolve. Gandhi was one such actor, and Vandana Shiva may well be another. Increasingly well-known here as an author and lecturer, her popularity makes her a pain in the neck to proponents of industrial agriculture. (Corporate ag apologist Michael Specter recently honored her with an attack in The New Yorker.) It’s a whole other story back in India, however — there Shiva is a force for change not only among the commentariat but also on the ground. She agitates for legislation and political change at one end of society while leading a movement to empower farmers at the other. Shiva is that rarity in modern life, an intellectual who sees possibilities for action in the world outside her study and moves to set them in motion, working with fellow sojourners to build and sustain a counterforce opposing the corporate status quo over the long haul. On a recent trip to California, Shiva spoke with Acres U.S.A., covering an amazing amount of ground. Readers who need a little context are advised to consult Wikipedia on the Bhopal disaster — a 9/11-scale tragedy linked to agricultural chemicals — in particular and modern Indian history in general.

Read the Interview on EcoFarmingDaily.com (PDF)

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#LovePulses: 10 Ways to Celebrate the International Year of Pulses

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Authors: Danielle Nierenberg and Emily Nink

2016 is the United Nations International Year of Pulses (IYP). Pulses, or grain legumes, include 12 crops such as dry beans, dry peas, chickpeas, and lentils, which are high in protein, fiber, and micronutrients.

In celebration of the global launch of IYP, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) created a short video highlighting unique opportunities for pulses to contribute to the future of food security. Pulses offer many opportunities for reducing the environmental footprint of food production, especially by fixing nitrogen to improve soil quality.

Just 43 gallons of water can produce one pound of pulses, compared with 216 gallons for soybeans and 368 gallons for peanuts. And production of pulses emits only 5 percent of the greenhouse gas emissions associated with beef production.

Furthermore, improvements in pulse productivity could be especially impactful in the developing world. “Pulses are important food crops for the food security of large proportions of populations, particularly in Latin America, Africa and Asia, where pulses are part of traditional diets and often grown by small farmers,” says FAO Director-General José Graziano da Silva. Just one serving of chickpeas contains 1.5 times as much iron as a 3-ounce serving of steak, and pulses are a fraction of the cost of other protein sources.

“Pulses can contribute significantly in addressing hunger, food security, malnutrition, environmental challenges and human health,” adds UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. The water efficiency of pulses allows the plants to enrich soil where they grow and reduce the need for chemical fertilizers.

Keep Reading on Food Tank

Think…Small?

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Think you, personally, can’t do much about global warming? Think the solution(s) will all have to come from genius scientists, engineers or entrepreneurs? And involve all manner of Big Ideas and complex technologies?

two_percent_solutionsThink again.

Courtney White, author, archaeologist and activist, wants you to think small. Because, he says, thinking big can have a paralyzing effect on taking action.

Whites’ latest book, “Two Percent Solutions for the Planet,” is chock full of engaging, inspirational stories, stories that point the way for how all of us can do something to help regenerate our soils, our souls and life on this planet.

If you’ve never read one of White’s books, maybe now’s the time?

Order Courtney White’s Book