This Man Is Helping the Entire Country of Bhutan Go Organic

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Author: Clarissa Wei | Published: October 5, 2016

Located on the eastern side of the Himalayas, Bhutan is a tiny country with a population of around 750,000 people. It is known for being one of the happiest nations in the world, and the government puts a heavy emphasis on its unique Gross National Happiness metric, which measures progress through the spiritual, physical, social, and environmental health of its citizens.

It is also the first country in the world on track to becoming 100-percent organic.

For the 14,824-square-mile nation, going entirely organic was not that far of a stretch. The majority of food already comes from small farmers, and agriculture in the country never required much in the way of inputs. It wasn’t until the 1980s when synthetic agro-chemicals like fertilizers and pesticides were introduced that things began to change.

In 2011, the country decided to phase out those chemicals. Their goal: to make the entire country’s agricultural system organic by 2020.

The man behind that transition was Dr. Appachanda Thimmaiah. Thimmaiah is currently the associate professor of sustainable living at Maharishi University of Management in Iowa, and from 2008 to 2013 he served as the organic agriculture consultant to Bhutan.

He literally wrote the book on Bhutanese organic certification, so we called him up to talk about his plan for Bhutan and if such a strategy could be applied to the States.

Spoiler alert: The secret is cow piss.

MUNCHIES: So, how did you get invited to Bhutan?
Appachanda Thimmaiah: I have a consultancy company in India. We were the first consultancy company in biodynamic agriculture in India and we were the first to develop large agricultural projects transitioning to organic agriculture. The Bhutanese government wanted to see large successful projects in organic agriculture. I invited them to India and showed them some of my projects and after that, they sent a group of 30 officials from the government to get training for a week. A week training program doesn’t give you the entire experience. Then they were looking for somebody to come help them for organic agriculture development and I was chosen by the ministry of agriculture as a consultant.  It was funded by a couple of NGOs and eventually my work was for two years.

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The Regeneration at Studio Hill: A Slideshow

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Published: December 5, 2016

I had the pleasure of presenting the story of our farm—from it’s roots as a dairy in the ’30s right up to it’s current iteration as a regenerative farm—at this year’s Vermont Energy & Climate Action Network (VECAN) Conference at the beautiful Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, Vermont.

I was joined in our workshop by Didi Pershouse of the Soil Carbon Coalition and Andrea Colnes of the Energy Action Network. Our session was put together by Paul Cameron.

Our workshop presented the side of climate change that you don’t often here in today’s discussions: hope and practical action. Didi did a wonderful job explaining and demonstrating why it is vital for us to include soil as an ally in our fight against climate change—carbon sequestration, water retention, etc.

I focused on presenting the practices we employ on our farm to sequester atmospheric carbon into the ground: management-intensive grazing, perennial tree crops, and no-till vegetables.

There are four carbon sinks on the planet: the atmosphere, the ocean, the soil, and the forests. Two of these carbon sinks are full: the atmosphere and the ocean. Two of these carbon sinks are in dire need of carbon (aka: regeneration): the soil and the forests.

To our own detriment, we earthlings only ever talk about one carbon sink: the atmosphere.

In an effort to raise awareness about the other carbon sinks on planet Earth, I gave the following slideshow showing the (reletively) immediate positive effects that can be had by restoring the natural carbon cycles of a piece of land to sequester atmospheric carbon back into the soil and the trees.

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Can Radical Transparency Fix Global Supply Chains and Slow Climate Change?

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Author: Steve Zwick | Published: December 3, 2016

Kevin Rabinovitch stands straight and speaks in clear, clipped tones – more like a naval officer than a corporate quant – as, on the screen behind him, a daunting mass of threads and whorls illustrates the global flows of Brazilian soybeans from thousands of individual municipalities across Brazil, through specific exporters and importers, to countries around the world.

“We buy a lot of soy from Brazil,” he says. “But we also buy things that eat soy in Brazil before we buy them,” he continues, referring to the chickens and cows that end up in pet food manufactured by food giant Mars Inc, where he’s Global Director of Sustainability.

Known for its ubiquitous Mars and Milky Way candy bars, privately-held Mars, Inc also makes Whiskas cat food, Wrigley’s chewing gum, and dozens of other products that require tens of thousands of tons of cattle, soy, and palm oil – all of which are packaged in products derived from pulp & paper.

These are the “big four” commodities responsible for most of the world’s deforestation, and they achieved that status because thousands of companies buy them from hundreds of thousands of farmers around the world, and many of those farmers chop forests to make way for plantations.

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Law Professor Outlines Steps to Achieve Global, Sustainable Agriculture

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Author: Mike Krings | Published: December 13, 2016

Around the world, more land is being converted into agricultural production to feed the growing global population. However, the current model of agriculture is unsustainable, uses unprecedented amounts of fossil-carbon energy and contributes to pollution, water degradation and other problems. A University of Kansas law professor has written a book calling for support of a revolution in agriculture and outlines the legal, national and international political innovations that would be required to make it happen.

John Head, Robert W. Wagstaff Distinguished Professor of Law at KU, has written“International Law and Agroecological Husbandry: Building Legal Foundations for a New Agriculture.” The book first outlines the “extractive agriculture” system the modern world has used for the last few centuries and its unsustainability. Head then explores the prospects for transitioning to a system that could produce grains perennially and achieve adequate yields to feed the world while reducing problems such as climate change and soil degradation.

“How can we use international law and international institutions to facilitate the transition to a natural-system agriculture? My impression has been that those engaged in crop research efforts feel that if they come up with the right answer as a scientific and technological matter, then agriculture will be somewhat easily changed,” Head said. “I doubt that will be the case. I see it as a progression that has several elements and will take a great deal of international cooperation.”

Head, who grew up on a farm in northeast Missouri and has practiced international and comparative law, emphasizes his support for research being done at organizations such as the Land Institute in Salina. The institute, along with other research bodies around the world, is studying how to develop high-yield grain crops that could produce food year after year without replanting. Drawing inspiration from native grassland ecosystems such as those of the prairies that once covered North America’s Great Plains, the scientific efforts aim not only to develop crops that are perennial — wheat, for instance, that would not require yearly land preparation, planting and intense weed and pest control efforts — but that are also grown in mixtures with other plants. If successful, research efforts at the Land Institute and elsewhere would revolutionize the way agriculture can be practiced around the world, Head wrote.

“What they’ve achieved makes it pretty clear that it is possible to move from annual crops in a monoculture to perennial crops in a polyculture and produce adequate yields,” Head said of research at the Land Institute and other organizations.

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Chestnuts: A Regenerative Food Crop and The Next Health Craze

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Author: Harry Greene | Published: October 7, 2016 

Propagate Ventures’ mission is to accelerate the widespread implementation of agroforestry in cold climates, via the establish of profitable tree crops. We envision highly productive, ecologically-sound landscapes that produce food, fuel, and fiber for humanity. 100 years ago, the United States had a booming chestnut economy. The American chestnut, castanea dentata, was an overstory species from Iowa to Northern Georgia, to Maine. In 1904, a parasitic fungus known as the “chestnut blight” arrived from Japan, and killed as estimated 4 billion trees. 100 years later, Chinese chestnuts and Chinese-American hybrids blight-resistant, but pure American chestnut stands are few and far between. Pure American chestnuts are beautiful, productive forest trees, but for our purposes, Chinese chestnuts are just as good, if not better for food production.

Red Fern Farm

Red Fern Farm is a 25-year-old chestnut orchard in Wapello, Iowa. Kathy Dice and Tom Wahl own and run the property. Jeremy and Harrison of Propagate Ventures recently visited the farm to learn about chestnut production. Tom Wahl is an ecologist by trade, and in 1990, saw and foresaw the ecological and culinary benefits of chestnuts in comparison to annual crops such as corn and soy. Often in the regenerative agriculture sphere, figureheads with productive farms like to speak loudly about their operations. Kathy and Tom are much more modest, but nonetheless run an extremely productive, profitable business that we should pay attention to.

For the farmers among us, we’d like to go through some of the nuances of chestnut production at Red Fern Farm. We’ll do so with photos.

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New Report Ranks Countries on Food Waste, Nutrition, and Sustainable Agriculture

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Author: Marisa Tsai | Published: December 2016

The newly released 2016 Food Sustainability Index (FSI), developed by the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) with the Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition (BCFN) Foundation, ranks countries on food system sustainability based off three pillars: food loss and waste, sustainable agriculture, and nutritional challenges.  The index, presented at the 7th International Forum on Food and Nutrition in Milan in December 2016, aims to encourage policy makers to place food and its production issues as high priority items in their policy agendas. According to the FSI, The world population is projected to reach 8.1 billion by 2025. The vast majority of the growth, 95 percent, will come from developing countries, many of which are dealing with the double burden of hunger and rising obesity. Meanwhile, climate change is presenting new challenges to the agriculture sector. By highlighting performance of different countries and identifying best practices, the index establishes a comparable benchmark for leaders around the world to reference and measure their progress in establishing a sustainable food system.  According to the authors, “The FSI is a tool for policymakers and experts to orient their action, for students to be educated, and for the public to conscientiously adjust their behavior for the food of our health and our planet.”

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The Smarts of Climate Change Agriculture

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Author: Paul Harman | Published: December 12, 2016 

US President-elect Donald Trump has made no bones about his dismissive stance towards climate change – an approach our farmers can ill afford to emulate. It just makes sense for them to adopt sustainable farming practices – for the environment, as well as their bottom line.

But, for our farmers to adopt sustainable farming practices, we need robust support structures in place, especially from the government.

The South African government and industry associations have indeed provided support to farmers to help them farm sustainably – starting in the Western Cape, and hoping to branch out to the rest of the country.

This support comes in the form of initiatives such as SmartAgri, the Greenagri portal, GreenCape’s sector desk, FruitLook and other interventions focused on community-based adaptation and disaster risk reduction and management.

The Western Cape Department of Agriculture and the Western Cape Department of Environmental Affairs and Development Planning launched SmartAgri in 2014.

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FAO: el cambio climático pone fuerte presión a la agricultura

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Autor: Javier Orellana | Publicado: 5 diciembre 2016

La agricultura de El Salvador enfrenta fuertes retos por la escasez de recursos y el alto nivel de población. Las dificultades se agravan con los efectos del cambio climático. De acuerdo con Yerania Sánchez, oficial economista de la oficina subregional para Mesoamérica de la Organización de Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura, la presión está sobre la capacidad de los sistemas agroalimentarios de poder satisfacer una demanda creciente y en los productores, que están en contacto directo con las tierras.

De acuerdo con la experta, en los países centroamericanos no nacen tantos niños como antes, no obstante, las tasas siguen siendo altas en relación con otros lugares. Los datos del Banco Mundial revelan que en El Salvador nacen menos niños por cada mujer que el promedio latinoamericano; sin embargo, el país ya está sobrepoblado con 6.127 millones de habitantes y c

La agricultura tiene el reto de alimentar a esta población creciente y esto ya sería un reto suficientemente grande si no hubiera cambio climático porque hay que producir más con menos”, explicó Sánchez. El problema se agrava, según la economista, porque los recursos para la agricultura se están reduciendo y las tierras pueden rendir menos por el cambio climático, lo que pone más presión para el país.

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How to Rehab Our Soil for a Changing Climate

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Author: Wanqing Zhou | Published on: December 13, 2016

“Climate is changing. Food and agriculture must too.”

This year’s message from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization for World Food Day is timely as the planet emerges from yet another summer of record heat. With changing climates and increasingly frequent extreme weather events, the world is facing real challenges with food production, exacerbated by the declining capacity of soils to hold water, buffer temperature shocks and supply nutrients to food crops.

In global climate negotiations and agreements, agriculture is listed primarily as a victim of adverse climate impacts.

While this is true, it is equally important to recognize that food production is also a major contributor to climate change. The silver lining? Recognizing that food production is a major emitter of greenhouse gases could open a new range of solutions to climate change.

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FAO Potencia Agricultores para Contrarrestar los Efectos del Cambio Climático

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Autor: Magdalena Reyes y Pedro Carlos Mancía | Publicado: diciembre 11 2016

Los huertos caseros son una opción para que las familias mantengan alimentos cerca y no dependan de la importación de alimentos, que muchas veces se vuelve escasa.

Durante el año pasado, la sequía agravada por los fenómenos asociados al cambio climático como El Niño y La Niña afectó el corredor seco centroamericano, dejando a miles de productores al borde de la hambruna y provocando  pérdidas agrícolas por $100 millones solo en El Salvador.

Con el propósito de paliar dicho problema, la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura (FAO), se ha dado a la tarea de trabajar paralelamente con varias organizaciones productoras nacionales y entidades de Gobierno.

“En los últimos cuatro años se han dado periodos de sequía recurrentes debido al cambio climático que afecta a todo el mundo, con especial efecto negativo en zonas secas, semidesérticas que tienen mayor vulnerabilidad como el corredor seco de Centroamérica, en el que El Salvador se encuentra en el medio”, señaló Alan González, director de país de la FAO.

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