Why Owning Your Own Farm Isn’t Necessarily a Ticket for Financial Well-being

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 Author: Michael Colby & Will Allen | Published: December 10, 2016 

These are economically tragic times for America’s farmers. This year, the average on-farm income for a farm family will be -$1,400. Yes, negative. In other words, they’re paying to produce the nation’s food and fiber. And it’s been going on for decades, all the result of a food system, from production and processing to sales and regulations, that is dominated and controlled by a handful of integrated corporate behemoths. That control, coupled with an economic model centered on the devaluation of production (farming!), has spelled nothing but doom for farmers.

While it’s happening everywhere, we live amidst its damage in Vermont, seeing firsthand the impact commodity-priced dairy is having on our agriculture. It’s a horror, really, with thousands of farms lost in the last few decades, all squeezed and pinched and eventually forced to leave the only thing they knew—working the land. And again, it’s all the result of a cheap food model, dictated by the corporate few and allowed by a largely shrugging public.

There’s plenty of money in food. It’s just not getting to the farmers. Vermont’s dairy industry, for example, is dominated by two well-known corporate giants: Ben & Jerry’s and Cabot Creamery. Last year, Ben & Jerry’s grossed around $600 million and Cabot and its parent, Agri-Mark, grossed nearly a billion dollars. Both have bragged in financial reports about how well they’re doing, with increased executive pay and all kinds of bells and whistles for the office set. Ben & Jerry’s makes so much money that they have a foundation to give some of it away.

Lost in the largesse are the farmers producing the dairy for the ice cream and cheese. An average-sized Vermont dairy farm is losing more than $100,000 a year to produce the cheap commodity milk that in turn is making Ben & Jerry’s and Cabot a lot of money—$1.6 billion between them.

KEEP READING ON ALTERNET 

La Cría de Cabras Reduce la Vulnerabilidad al Cambio Climático

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Autor: Busani Bafana | Publicado: 19 diciembre 2016

La familia de la pastora sudafricana Bongekile Ndimande perdió más de 30 cabras por la sequía devastadora de la temporada pasada, y las que sobrevivieron ahora son su caja de ahorro de cuatro patas.

En términos económicos, la sequía le impidió a Ndimande ganar más de 21.000 dólares. Cada cabra valdría unos 714 dólares si hubieran sobrevivido al calor, la sequía y el entorno rocoso de su aldea de Ncunjana, en la provincia de KwaZulu Natal, golpeada por la falta de agua que afectó al sur de África.

Más de 40 millones de personas necesitan alimentos tras la peor sequía que se haya registrado en la región; incluso, la Comunidad de Desarrollo de África Austral (SADC, en inglés) lanzó un llamado de emergencia para reunir 2.800 millones de dólares para hacer frente a este problema.

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Cultivos de cobertura

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Autor: Vero Reynoso | Publicado: 18 noviembre 2016

Los cultivos de cobertura (cover crops) es una manera fácil de recargar de energía y mejorar los nutrientes del suelo. Antes de cultivarlos, debemos de conocer la región en donde estamos y saber qué cultivos son los que funcionarán mejor. Por otro lado, también debemos de saber qué espacio tenemos disponible. Existen muchas plantas que no solamente nos sirven para mejorar el suelo sino que adornan nuestros huertos, por ejemplo  la scabiosa o azulejo (Centaurea cyanus) y  el trébol blanco (Trifolium incarnatum).

Hay tres maneras principales para mejorar nuestro suelo:

  • Cultivos de cobertura verde
  • Acolchado o mulch biodegradables.
  • Agregar composta o nutrientes naturales

Todos estos métodos tienen sus pros y contras, que dependen de la disponibilidad de materiales y espacio que tenemos. A continuación mencionaremos los distintos métodos de cobertura natural, algunos ejemplos y su manejo.

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Methane Emissions Surged in Last Decade, Study Finds

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Author: Justin Worland | Published: December 12, 2016

Emissions of global warming-causing methane gas are on the rise across the globe and reaching levels unseen in at least two decades, according to a new study, indicating researchers must pay closer attention to the potent greenhouse gas as they work to combat climate change.

The new study, published in the journal Environmental Research Letters, shows that methane levels began to increase dramatically around 2007 and even more so in 2014. Atmospheric methane concentration increased by about 0.5 parts per billion annually in the early 2000s. That number had jumped 20-fold by 2014, according to the study.

Researchers largely attribute the spike to agriculture, though methane emissions that escape during energy development also play a role. The emissions mostly come from the tropics, likely due to rice patties and cattle ranches there, according to the study. Still, researchers said that precise details about what caused the spike remain unclear.

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Grow-ing Disaster: The Fortune 500 Goes Farming

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Published: December 15, 2016

Thousands of greenhouses cluster along the valleys of Lam Dong province in the central highlands of Vietnam. At night, the strong glow from their lights illuminates a flow of trucks carrying fruit, vegetables, flowers and herbs to Ho Chi Minh City or to nearby ports for export. Competition among traders here is intense. The climate is ideal for the production of a number of high-value cash crops, and companies fight to secure their supply of farmers’ products or for a share of the lucrative market in chemical inputs, seeds and farm equipment such as plastic greenhouse covers or drip irrigation piping.

Farming in the highlands is a high-stakes business. Each season, farmers gamble on which crop will pay the highest price or which new seed variety will reach the yields promised by dealers. Sometimes the payoffs are big. But losses resulting from crop failures, a sudden drop in prices or scams by traders are just as frequent. Debt weighs heavily on the area’s farmers.

Money is not the only problem. There’s a looming water crisis from the depletion of water tables and the pollution caused by pesticides and fertiliser run-off, which is generating a public health crisis. Land conflicts are escalating too, especially in the hills where indigenous communities live. Finally, there is a potential threat to food security from producing so many crops that local people don’t eat. Most farmers seem to agree that the government is doing little to address these challenges.

It is in this context that some of the world’s largest transnational food companies are rolling out a program promising “market-based” solutions. Vietnam’s central highlands are the showcase for Grow Asia, an agricultural program led by Nestlé, PepsiCo, Monsanto and other food and agribusiness giants. Grow Asia is the Southeast Asian leg of a global initiative under the World Economic Forum’s “New Vision for Agriculture”, which promises to increase food production, environmental sustainability and economic opportunity globally by 20 per cent each decade. Also under the Grow umbrella are Grow Africa, Grow Latin America and several national programs.

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Morocco Plants Millions of Trees Along Roads to Fight Climate Change

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Author: Justin Catanoso | Published on: November 17, 2016

MARRAKESH, Morocco – On the new highway that runs southeast from Marrakesh and ascends toward the snow-capped Atlas Mountains, the roadside shows evidence of climate-change progress. Recently planted trees at least ten feet tall with trunks some four inches in diameter stand in short intervals for miles and miles.

Morocco lost about 5 percent of its remaining dense tree cover between 2001 and 2014, according to data from the University of Maryland.  But the data, visualized on the forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch, also show large areas of tree cover gain during the same period, indicating reforestation and afforestation — the planting of trees where they didn’t originally occur.

In hosting the 22nd United Nations Climate Conference, representatives from the Moroccan government are eager speak out and demonstrate that they are serious about tackling climate change and providing a model for other African nations to follow.

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Eco Architect William McDonough Unveils New Language to End the War on Carbon

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Author: Tafline Laylin | Published: November 20, 2016

The first way to end the war on carbon, according to the co-author of Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things, is to stop calling it a war. Architect and designer William McDonough, who recently unveiled plans for the ‘Silicon Valley of Agriculture’ in Denmark, has established a new language for carbon that acknowledges the way the element can be used “safely, productively and profitably.”“Climate change is the result of breakdowns in the carbon cycle caused by us: it is a design failure,” McDonough said in a press release. “Anthropogenic greenhouse gases in the atmosphere make airborne carbon a material in the wrong place, at the wrong dose and wrong duration. It is we who have made carbon a toxin—like lead in our drinking water. In the right place, carbon is a resource and tool.”

In the same way that the Cradle-to-Cradle movement taught movers and shakers in the sustainability sphere to rethink the way we make things to reduce, or even obliterate waste, McDonough’s new carbon language is designed to help us model human designs on the “life-giving carbon cycle, and to perceive “closed-loop flows of carbon nutrients” as an asset, rather than something to demonize.

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How Can Agriculture Address the Growing Economic and Environmental Pressures of Climate Change?

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Published on: November 18, 2016

The devastating consequences of climate change threaten our natural resources, food security, and the productivity and economic viability of farming operations. Agriculture has an important role to play in helping us mitigate and adapt to climate change, and as we approach a major administrative transition and early discussions around the 2018 Farm Bill, the connection between agriculture and climate change will need to be further explored. The National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) and our members believe that by giving farmers the tools to invest in their soil and become an active part of climate change mitigation, we can develop effective strategies that work for farmers, the environment, and the economy.

The Economic Impact of Climate Change

A new report released by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) warns that the impacts of climate change will cost taxpayers hundreds of billions of dollars. The report, “Climate Change: The Fiscal Risks Facing the Federal Government,” provides analysis showing that the fiscal impact of climate change is already very real. According to the report, those risks will only continue to grow over the next century unless we take ambitious action to reduce greenhouse gas emissions (GHGs) and adapt to a changing climate.

The report lists several significant economic threats facing the nation as a result of climate change, including increases in: the need for disaster relief and flood insurance to address the heightened frequency of storms; investments to protect, repair, and relocate federal facilities impacted by rising sea levels and heavy rain events; health care costs as a results of degraded water quality, air quality, and unpredictable weather conditions; costs for fire suppression as a result of an increased frequency and intensity of wildfires across the country; and risk management for the nation’s farmers and ranchers who most directly feel the impacts of changing weather patterns and increased storm intensity. On this last point, OMB estimates there will be a 50 percent increase in the cost of the federal crop insurance subsidy program due to a changing climate in the coming decades.

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Nigeria: Agricultural Policies and Climate Change

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Author: Martins Eke | Published: December 19, 2016 

Climate change has emerged one of the most challenging environmental issues of the 21st century. As a driver of many kinds of environmental changes, climate change poses risk to fresh water supply, food production and economic development. The massive shrinking of the Lake Chad in the North-East geopolitical zone of Nigeria which played a key role in predisposing the people of the zone to enlistment into Boko Haram terror group is a clear example of how far-reaching the consequences of climate change can be. Agriculture has being identified as having huge potential in the adaptation and mitigation of climate change. However, the ability of the government to formulate good climate change policies and effectively implement the agricultural sector strategies of the policies are key to the fight against climate change.

One major policy of the Nigerian government in the fight against climate change is the National Adaptation Strategy and Plan of Action on Climate Change for Nigeria (NASPA-CCN). This strategy envisions a Nigeria in which climate change adaptation is an integrated component of sustainable development, reducing the vulnerability and enhancing the resilience and adaptive capacity of all economic sectors and of all people particularly women and children to the adverse impacts of climate change, while also capturing the opportunities that arise as a result of climate change. Some of NASPA-CCN strategies for the agricultural sector includes: Increase access to drought-resistant crops and livestock feeds; adopt better soil management practices; provide early warning/meteorological forecasts and related information; increase planting of native vegetation cover and promotion of re-greening efforts. Considering the huge adverse effects of climate change, Nigeria has no other option than to move from business-as-usual model of agriculture to climate-smart agriculture. Capturing the opportunities arising from climate change entails taking full advantage of the employment opportunities arising from climate change in terms of the new and sustainable jobs it will create through use of new and improved ways of doing things. Planting of native vegetation cover and promotion of re-greening efforts will provide employment for those producing nursery bags as well as those on the field who plant and nurture the trees.

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Insectos benéficos en nuestro huerto

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Autor: Vero Reynoso | Publicado: 11  noviembre 2016

En nuestro huerto siempre vamos a encontrar insectos, algunos son malos y otros buenos. Pero, ¿sabes identificar a los insectos benéficos y cómo ayudan a tu huerto? Conoce algunos insectos buenos, cómo identificarlos y su función.

Existen dos tipos de insectos benéficos, los que controlan plagas y los que ayudan a mejorar nuestro huerto. Dentro de la gama de insectos que controlan plagas, encontramos a los depredadores y parasitarios. Mientras que los polinizadores son insectos que ayudan a nuestro huerto.

Catarinas:

Las catarinas también son conocidas como mariquitas o vaquitas dependiendo del país. Estos pequeños insectos pertenecen a la familia de los coccinélidos, existen más de 4000 especies y en su mayoría son benéficos. Se caracterizan por medir entre 0.1-1cm, su cabeza y antenas son color negro y pequeños. Cuentan con 3 pares de patas negras. Su “caparazón” (alas o élitros) puede ser de color amarillo, naranja o rojo con pequeñas manchas negras. La más conocida es roja con puntos negros, conocida como catarina de los 7 puntos. Las larvas de catarina parecen pequeños cocodrilos color negro con algunas manchas naranjas.

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