Superwheat Kernza Could Save Our Soil and Feed Us Well

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Author: Larissa Zimberoff 

Kernza’s arrival has been a long time coming. The new grain variety from the Land Institute is derived from an ancient form of intermediate wheatgrass, a perennial that is actually a distant relative of wheat. And there’s a widespread team of researchers hoping their work will pave the way for an entirely new form of food.

In development for well over a decade, Kernza is now being grown in test plots around the world, and a host of scientists, food retailers, bakers, and distillers are collaborating to help bring it to consumers.

Kernza is perennial, meaning it can be grown year-round, with roots that live on in the ground through winter. Corn, wheat, and most of the other grains we eat, on the other hand, are annual crops, which must be replanted anew every year, and require seeds, fertilizers, and pesticides for each planting. But Kernza’s most important difference–and the reason so many people have been waiting for its arrival–is the way it interacts with the soil.

Because its root system is dense, growing down into the earth up to 10 feet, Kernza can respond to shifts in soil and temperature quickly, taking in water, nitrogen, and phosphorous. Annual wheat doesn’t live long enough to develop thick roots, and requires soil tilling before each planting. But Kernza’s roots hold soil in place, preventing erosion. This is especially crucial in the farm belt, where rain washes significant quantities of soil and dissolved nitrogen into waterways, and eventually to the Gulf of Mexico. The Environmental Working Group estimates that 10 million acres of Iowa farmland lost dangerous amounts of soil in 2007.

That’s not all. Kernza also “builds soil quality and takes CO2 out of the atmosphere, which may help with mitigating climate change,” says Land Institute scientist Lee DeHaan, the driving force behind Kernza.

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Rep. Huffman Introduces Healthy Soils and Rangelands Solutions Act to Improve Carbon Capture in Federal Grazing Practices

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WASHINGTON, D.C.— Building on innovative carbon sequestration practices that have been pioneered in Marin County, Congressman Jared Huffman (D-San Rafael) today introduced the Healthy Soils and Rangelands Solution Act legislation that would direct federal land managers to rigorously evaluate how to increase the amount of carbon captured on public lands.

In 2014, Congressman Huffman invited John Wick, the Co-Founder of the Marin Carbon Project, to testify in Washington before a House Committee on Natural Resources subcommittee. Wick’s testimony focused on his groundbreaking work in Marin with a consortium of ranchers, land managers, researchers, and others, to improve rangeland productivity and sustainability through careful research and demonstration. At that 2014 hearing, the first in Congress to explore the topic, Huffman and bipartisan members of the committee explored options to improve public land management and carbon soil sequestration.

“Addressing climate change is the greatest imperative of our generation and California has always been at the forefront of this fight. We have a real opportunity to put our federal lands to work in the fight against climate change, using the groundbreaking scientific work already underway in Marin and drawing from the important bipartisan support for these ideas that we’ve already demonstrated in Congress,” said Rep. Huffman.

“This legislation holds significant promise for advancing the health of American soils, and represents a triple-win; for working lands, for producers and consumers, and for the climate,” said John Wick, the Co-Founder of the Marin Carbon Project.

“As we employ every possible tool to address the climate crisis, our shared public lands must be a part of the solution. This piece of legislation will help us be innovative in how we implement that solution.” said Josh Mantell, Carbon Management Campaign Manager for The Wilderness Society.

“Healthy, resilient working lands are key to sustainable food production and carbon farming is integral to that. On our local ranches we see the results: Sequestered carbon, yes, but also taller grasses, better soil moisture retention and an overall healthier, more profitable working landscape. The opportunity for impact—on climate change and food production—if implemented on public lands across the country is tremendous and one we cannot afford to miss out on,” said Jamison Watts, Executive Director, Marin Agricultural Land Trust.

KEEP READING ON JARED HUFFMAN: US CONGRESSMAN’S WEBSITE

Will Environmentally Restorative Practices Transform Maui’s Toxic Agriculture?

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Author: Jonathan Greenberg

Marketed as an island paradise, Maui is not the first place one would think of as ground zero in the battle for the future of agriculture. The golden beaches of Lahaina were recently ranked as the second most popular honeymoon destination in the world (after Las Vegas), and its surfing is legendary. The billions of dollars spent by tourists each year are at least 20 times greater than the value of the island’s agriculture. But amidst complex discussions about the effects of chemical farming practices on public health, whether to choose an industrial or regenerative farming model, and the profitability of future crops, Maui stands at the crossroads between America’s farming past and its green future.

This crossroads is located on 32,400 acres of what is Hawaii’s last sugar plantation. The sun swept farmland is largely owned by Alexander & Baldwin, a 145 year old company whose land holdings and controversial water “rights” grew from the colonization and gunboat diplomacy that uprooted the once independent kingdom of Hawaii. At the start of this year, with world prices for sugar down and agribusiness losses of about $30 million, A&B announced that it would close the plantation before the end of 2016, and lay off most of its 675 workers.

There is great interest across Maui in creating an agricultural future that is more economically viable than the past chemically dependent, water hungry plantation model. This, and a desire to help save agricultural jobs, have inspired Maui Tomorrow, a 26-year old environmental advocacy organization, to facilitate a discussion across the entire community. The organization recently released Mālama ‘Āina: A Conversation About Maui’s Farming Future, a detailed 50 page report (viewable here) that analyzes opportunities to grow profitable crops and market Maui-branded value-added products, using farming methods which offset climate change, end chemical spraying and crop burning, use less water, and restore soil quality. The goal is to transform the industrially farmed A&B lands into a sustainable source of food and energy crops, and diversify an island economy that now imports 90 percent of what its people consume. Maui Tomorrow is asking business leaders, farmers, activists and political candidates to present their own comments, ideas and proposals about economically beneficial and environmentally restorative alternatives to monocrop agriculture. The organization has started this process by hosting a community dialogue on its new website, at www.FutureofMaui.org.

“We believe that this unique opportunity to expand the vision of what’s possible for agriculture on Maui can result in positive outcomes for all concerned,” said Albert Perez, Executive Director of Maui Tomorrow. “Working together, the people of Maui can end the era of toxic chemical agriculture and instead embrace regenerative agriculture, which creates multiple income streams from the same land area, and improves profitability by eliminating the cost of external inputs such as fertilizer and pesticides. This type of agriculture can improve the health of our soil, water, and coastal ecosystems, and increase agricultural jobs, thus maintaining important economic diversification.”

 KEEP READING ON HUFFINGTON POST

Quitting Season: Why Farmers Walk Away From Their Farms

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Author: Debbie Weingarten

Last February, Tina Bartsch, co-owner of Walking J Farm, sat cross-legged on the floor of my Tucson apartment. We ate lunch and watched my newly mobile baby move in curious circles around the room. For the last several years, Tina and I have provided each other with moral support as we have navigated the precarious balance of farm and family.

We’ve traded homeschooling curriculum and birthday party invitations; we’ve called each other in frustrated tears and celebrated yoga teacher certifications and new babies; we’ve cursed the glut of cheap redistributed produce at the farmers’ markets and spent hours together in meetings trying to solve the food system gaps in our community.

On this particular day in February, Tina told me that she and her husband, Jim McManus, had decided to stop farming. Though many of our conversations had touched on this as a potential inevitability, this time it was real. After five years of solid record-keeping, the numbers showed the farm operating at a net loss every single year.

A month prior, Tina and Jim had presented their agribusiness success story at the second annual Arizona Food & Finance Forum. But over the course of a 20-minute presentation, McManus had shared the farm’s sobering financial reality, hoping to spotlight the disconnect between the local food craze and the farm economic reality on the ground.

“What I’ve determined is that I can’t go on this way,” McManus said to the forum attendees. He explained that after calculating the full cost associated with producing a single beef cow, he’d figured out that the farm was losing $62 per animal when it sold them by the quarter, and averaging a mere $214 profit per animal when selling retail cuts at the farmers’ market. McManus announced that they had no choice but to raise their retail prices by forty percent; the week before, a pound of Walking J ground beef had cost $8, and this week it was going to cost $11.

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We can’t fight climate change without tackling agriculture emissions: Bob McDonald

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Author: Bob McDonald

When it comes to air pollution and greenhouse gas emissions, we generally think of the usual suspects: fossil fuel-powered electrical generating stations, vehicles and industry. But, in fact, agriculture represents roughly one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, as well as a significant amount of air pollution, and that means we need to make significant changes to the way we farm to help curb global warming and clean up the air we breathe.

Two reports released this week say that improvements in agricultural practices based on current technology will not be enough to bring those emissions down.

The first report, in the journal Global Change Biology, was from an international team that focused on emissions from gases other than carbon dioxide. Carbon dioxide is absorbed from the atmosphere when crops are planted and released after harvest, so in that sense, agriculture is carbon neutral.

Instead, the researchers looked at methane, which comes from livestock and decaying organic matter, and nitrous oxide, which is produced by fertilizer. Both are significant greenhouse gases. The report states that current mitigation plans would only reduce emissions by 20 to 40 per cent, not enough to meet the targets set by the Paris climate accord.

A second report in Geophysical Research Letters shows that agricultural practices in the United States are responsible for more particulate matter in the atmosphere than all other industrial sources. The use of nitrogen fertilizers, techniques used for soil preparation, decaying organic matter and livestock activity produce tiny airborne particles that combine with other air pollution to create aerosols that contribute to a variety of respiratory diseases and public health problems.

Reducing emissions while maintaining production

The agriculture industry faces the difficult challenge of reducing emissions without compromising food production, because more and more mouths to feed are being added to the planet every day.

KEEP READING ON CBC NEWS

What’s a Carbon Farmer? How California Ranchers Use Dirt to Tackle Climate Change

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Author: Sally Neas

For many climate change activists, the latest rallying cry has been, “Keep it in the ground,” a call to slow and stop drilling for fossil fuels. But for a new generation of land stewards, the cry is becoming, “Put it back in the ground!”

As an avid gardener and former organic farmer, I know the promise that soil holds: Every ounce supports a plethora of life. Now, evidence suggests that soil may also be a key to slowing and reversing climate change.

Evidence suggests that soil may also be a key to slowing and reversing climate change.

“I think the future is really bright,” said Loren Poncia, an energetic Northern Californian cattle rancher. Poncia’s optimism stems from the hope he sees in carbon farming, which he has implemented on his ranch. Carbon farming uses land management techniques that increase the rate at which carbon is absorbed from the atmosphere and stored in soils. Scientists, policy makers, and land stewards alike are hopeful about its potential to mitigate climate change.

Carbon is the key ingredient to all life. It is absorbed by plants from the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and, with the energy of sunlight, converted into simple sugars that build more plant matter. Some of this carbon is consumed by animals and cycled through the food chain, but much of it is held in soil as roots or decaying plant matter. Historically, soil has been a carbon sink, a place of long-term carbon storage.

But many modern land management techniques, including deforestation and frequent tilling, expose soil-bound carbon to oxygen, limiting the soil’s absorption and storage potential. In fact, carbon released from soil is estimated to contribute one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.

Ranchers and farmers have the power to address that issue. Pastures make up 3.3 billion hectares, or 67 percent, of the world’s farmland. Carbon farming techniques can sequester up to 50 tons of carbon per hectare over a pasture’s lifetime. This motivates some ranchers and farmers to do things a little differently.

KEEP READING IN YES MAGAZINE

Farming is ‘single biggest cause’ of worst air pollution in Europe

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Farming is the biggest single cause of the worst air pollution in Europe, a new study has found, as nitrogen compounds from fertilisers and animal waste drift over industrial regions.

When the nitrogen compounds are mixed with air already polluted from industry, they combine to form solid particles that can stick in the fine lung tissue of children and adults, causing breathing difficulties, impaired lungs and heart function, and eventually even premature death.

The compounds come from nitrogen-rich fertilisers, which have been in common use for decades. Nitrogen, the major content of the air we breathe, is essential for plant growth, and enhancing that growth has led to a massive industry in putting nitrogen – already naturally present in soils – back into the ground in greater quantities.

Ammonia, whose chemical composition is nitrogen and hydrogen (NH3), is a byproduct both of fertilised fields and of animal waste, as it can come from the breakdown of livestock excretions.

Links between fine particulate pollution and ammonia from agricultural sources have been slow to be firmly established, but an increasing body of research suggests that this is now a leading source of air pollution.

Europe, much of the US, Russia and China have been found to suffer from the problem, in the latest research from the Earth Institute at Columbia University, in the US, published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.

When ammonia in the atmosphere reaches areas of industry, the pollutants from combustion, which include nitrogen oxides produced by diesel vehicles, and sulphur compounds from power plants and some other industrial processes, the chemicals combine to create very small particles, about 2.5 micrometres across.

KEEP READING IN THE GUARDIAN

Over-grazing and desertification in the Syrian steppe are the root causes of war

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Author: Gianluca Serra

Civil war in Syria is the result of the desertification of the ecologically fragile Syrian steppe, writes Gianluca Serra – a process that began in 1958 when the former Bedouin commons were opened up to unrestricted grazing. That led to a wider ecological, hydrological and agricultural collapse, and then to a ‘rural intifada’ of farmers and nomads no longer able to support themselves.

Back in 2009, I dared to forecast that if the rampant desertification process gripping the Syrian steppe was not halted soon, it could eventually become a trigger for social turmoil and even for a civil war.

I was being interviewed by the journalist and scholar Francesca de Chatel- and was feeling deeply disillusioned about Syrian government’s failure to heed my advice that the steppe, which covers over half of the country’s land mass, was in desperate need of recuperation.

I had just spent a decade (four years of which serving a UN-FAO project aimed at rehabilitating the steppe) trying to advocate that livestock over-grazing of the steppe rangelands was the key cause of its ecological degradation.

However, for the Syrian government’s staff, it was far too easy to identify and blame prolonged droughts (a natural feature of this kind of semi-arid environment) or climate change (which was already becoming a popular buzzword in those years). These external causes served well as a way to escape from any responsibility – and to justify their inaction.

In an article on The Ecologist, Alex Kirby writes that the severe 2006-2010 drought in Syria may have contributed to the civil war. Indeed it may – but this is to disregard the immediate cause – the disastrous over-exploitation of the fragile steppe ecosystem.

Before my time in Syria, as early as the 1970s, international aid organizations such as the UN-FAO had also flagged the dire need to not apply profit-maximization principles and to therefore not over-exploit the fragile ecosystem of the Syrian steppe.

KEEP READING IN THE ECOLOGIST

How Processed Foods Wreak Havoc on Your Health

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Authors: Elaine Catherine R. Ferrer and Ronnie Cummins

It’s safe to say that most American consumers probably can’t recall the last time they ate a meal prepared entirely from wholesome, farm-to-table ingredients, without any canned or prepackaged products. That’s because most Americans today consume mostly processed foods—foods produced with pesticides, GMOs and synthetic chemicals, routinely laced with too much sugar, salt and unhealthy fats.

In fact, processed foods make up as much as 70 percent of people’s diets– meaning only 30 percent of what they consume consists of wholesome, natural, or organic foods!

But here’s the truth about processed foods: Long-term consumption of these “food products” spell bad news for your health.

Processed vs. ultra-processed: What’s the difference?

The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) defines “processed food” as any raw agricultural commodity that has been subjected to processing methods, including canning, cooking, dehydration, freezing or milling. This means that the only time a food can be classified as “fresh” is when you’ve taken it straight from the source (washing it is okay, and would not be classified as a form of processing) and eaten it. By this definition, most foods would be considered processed.

However, in layman’s terms, processed foods can refer to sodas, potato chips, candy, baked pastries with extended shelf life–basically, “convenient,” easy-to-eat products that have been altered through the addition of artificial or ingredients, synthetic flavorings, fillers and chemical or genetically engineered additives. But this type of description actually refers to “ultra-processed food.” Researchers from the University of São Paulo and Tufts University define “ultra-processed” as:

Formulations of several ingredients which, besides salt, sugar, oils, and fats, include food substances not used in culinary preparations, in particular, flavors, colors, sweeteners, emulsifiers and other additives used to imitate sensorial qualities of unprocessed or minimally processed foods and their culinary preparations or to disguise undesirable qualities of the final product.

But most people use the term “processed food” and “ultra-processed food” interchangeably when talking about these consumer products. Conventional processed foods today come in a variety of forms. These include:

• Canned and frozen fruits and vegetables
• Canned meats (luncheon meat and sausage, corned beef, and meatloaf)
• Breakfast foods, including cereals, oatmeal, energy bars
• Canned, bottled, or tetra-packed fruit juices, energy drinks, and soda
• Jarred baby foods and infant cereals
• Foods “fortified” with nutrients
• Ready to eat meals, microwave dinners
• Ramen noodles
• Pastries, including cookies, breads, frozen pizza, and pies
• Condiments, seasonings and marinades, salad dressing, and jams
• Yogurt and other commercially made fermented foods

The simplest way to determine if a food is processed is by looking at the ingredient list at the back of its packaging. The longer the ingredient list, the more processed a food is likely to be.

After more than 20 years of struggle by consumer activists and public interest groups such as the Organic Consumers Association, major food manufacturers are finally being forced to label GMO ingredients in processed foods sold in grocery stores. Because of this, many of them are starting to remove GMOs from their products, along with other artificial chemicals and additives.

KEEP READING ON THE ORGANIC CONSUMERS ASSOCIATION

Regeneracion de suelos y ecosistemas: La oportunidad para evitar el cambio climático. Bases para una necesaria política climática y agrícola europea.

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Autor: Íñigo Álvarez de Toledo, MSc

SUMARIO

Nos encontremos en el momento más crucial de la historia de la Humanidad , debido a los cambios que estamos produciendo en el clima con las emisiones de Gases Efecto Invernadero (GEI) y la destrucción de biodiversidad. Por citar unos ejemplos:

Tales cambios están a sus vez procurando otra serie de efectos que aumentan la complejidad a la que nos enfrentamos y muy probablemente multiplicará la velocidad del caos climático1, si no lo está haciendo ya.

En este informe se argumenta la necesidad de dar prioridad absoluta a la Regeneración de suelos y ecosistemas como objetivo básico en nuestros trabajos y economías. La Sostenibilidad es un concepto lleno de buenas ideas, pero se ha visto superado por dos motivos: la manipulación del mismo, fácil dada la laxitud de su significado; y la realidad de que desde la Cumbre de la Tierra (Río 1992) tantas cosas no han mejorado y muchos indicadores han empeorado -entre ellos los referidos a las emisiones globales a la atmósfera y la erosión del suelo.

La Regeneración ecológica y agroecológica implica un cambio demostrable a mejor, una toma de posición constructiva y positiva, y la alegría de generar tendencias con beneficios para todos los seres vivos. A todos: pues es el modo de, no ya reducir las emisiones de CO2 a la atmósfera, sino de conseguir que los suelos naturales, agrícolas y ganaderos reabsorban tales gases, alejando la temible amenaza del empeoramiento del Cambio Climático.

Mejora además la calidad de las producciones y de las propiedades, no sosteniendo las mismas, sino llevándolas a un futuro de enriquecimiento a plazo breve, medio y largo; solventando con ello los siempre más graves problemas de justicia intergeneracional. Ello significa también la aún más importante adaptación al Cambio Climático.

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