Ben Hewitt: A Groundswell for Agricultural Change

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Published: March 10, 2017 

When I was a young boy, I traveled every summer to the Iowa farm where my mother was raised. There, my grandparents grew hundreds of acres of corn and soy. It was not the biggest farm in Iowa, not by a long shot, but it was plenty big enough. I remember standing at the edge of a cornfield, gazing toward the horizon, trying to discern where the field ended. And failing. I remember riding in the combine with my grandfather at harvest time, listening to the crop report on the radio, watching row after row after row of corn fall beneath the cutter bar. My grandfather didn’t talk much. Neither did I.

This was in the late ’70s and early ’80s, in this nation’s halcyon days of commodity cropping. Those who truly understood how damaging this style farming was to the land, the soil, the consumers and even the farmers themselves were relatively few and far between, while the rest of us were in the thrall of rapidly increasing yields, economies of scale and the lure of new technology.

Forty years later, we no longer have any excuse for failing to acknowledge the destructiveness of contemporary commodity agriculture and the fragility it has engendered across the spectrums of economy, ecology and human health, to name but a few. In Vermont, this is most visible in the perennially stressed commodity dairy industry, in which farmers are currently paid less than the cost of production, and over the years have been coerced to rely upon practices and products that negatively impact animal health, while playing a significant role in the degradation of our waterways and environment. This is emphatically not the fault of the farmers; as my grandparents were, so are today’s farmers caught in a tangled web of policy and economic incentives that are not of their making, yet which drive many of their decisions.

The need to reform our state’s agricultural policies and practices extends far beyond the dairy industry. Although Vermont’s local food movement has made tremendous progress, the ability for all farmers to achieve access to land and maintain a reasonable livelihood, while supporting the health of their communities and the land, is severely and unjustly compromised. The economic incentives still point in the wrong direction — consolidation, concentration, commoditization, exploitation of cheap labor and exporting of products and wealth. These incentives, coupled with policies that too often disadvantage community-scale food production, ensure that Vermont’s local food offerings remain unaffordable to a wide swath of our population. And as goes viable, accessible community-scale production, so goes the vibrant, diversified farms that once defined and nurtured Vermont’s rural landscape, fed our communities, and invigorated our economies.

Regenerative agriculture is a term meant to describe agricultural and food-production practices that return more to the land, community and farmer than they extract. Often the term is associated with improved grazing and cropping methods that grow and protect rather than deplete topsoil, in the process sequestering carbon, increasing water retention capacity (critical in the context of massive flooding events like hurricanes Irene and Sandy), and creating wildlife habitat.

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En Cuba, La Revolución de las Granjas Agroecológicas

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Autor: Laura Betancur Alarcón | Publicado: 24 de febrero

A comienzos de este año, el Rainbow Warrior, el ya conocido barco de Greenpeace, una de las organizaciones ambientales más destacadas en el mundo, atracó en Cuba, la isla caribeña, en busca de un tesoro: el conocimiento.
Granja tras granja, expertos de la ONG fueron tras el secreto de la política agroecológica de Cuba, un país destacado por la Organización de las Naciones Unidas para la Alimentación y la Agricultura por su apuesta de producir vegetales y frutas sin utilizar químicos ni afectar el suelo.

“Una persona necesita a un agricultor cuatro veces al día: cada vez que come. No tanto así requiere a un abogado, a menos que tengas muchos problemas”, bromea Franco Segesso, experto argentino en agricultura y quien conoció las experiencias cubanas para hacer recomendaciones a países de Suramérica como Colombia.

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Challenges Facing Agriculture and the Regenerative Solution

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Author: Alexis Baden-Mayer | Published: March 22, 2017 

There are three interrelated challenges facing agriculture over the next 50 years.

The first is soil loss.

In the United States, soil is swept and washed away 10 times faster than it is replenished. That costs $37.6 billion every year. Globally, all of the world’s topsoil could be gone within 60 years.

The second challenge is diet-related disease.

About half of all American adults have one or more preventable chronic diseases related to diet. Diet is now the number-one risk factor for disease. More than two-thirds of adults and nearly one-third of children are overweight or obese. This costs $190 billion a year. Obesity is the new malnutrition. Globally, a growing number of people have plenty to eat and yet remain malnourished.

The third challenge is climate change.

Floods, droughts, wildfires and extreme or unseasonable temperatures cause crop and livestock losses. In 2011, exposure to high temperature events caused over $1 billion in losses to U.S. agricultural producers.

Phasing out greenhouse gas emissions is important, but it won’t reverse climate change. Until we remove enough CO2 from the atmosphere to get back down below the dangerous tipping point of 350 ppm, the impacts of climate change will persist.

Luckily, there’s an inexpensive and easy-to-use technology for reliable carbon dioxide removal and sequestration. Soil.

Agricultural activities have removed roughly 660 GtCO2 from terrestrial ecosystems. The good news is we can put it back.

Shifting to agricultural practices that can draw that carbon back down to the soil would:

  • Reduce atmospheric CO2 by 40-70 ppm by 2100,
  • Build soil instead of losing it, and
  • Improve resilience to drought and floods, while
  • Producing more food that’s more nutritious, and
  • Generating higher farm incomes from increased production of nutrient-dense food.

We need more research on the microbial communities in the soil that generate carbon storage. Plants give the carbon they get from photosynthesis to soil microorganisms in exchange for water and nutrients. It works best when there are lots of different plants exchanging lots of different nutrients with lots of different microbes. The greater the plant biodiversity, the more carbon gets stored. The best way to reverse soil loss and sequester carbon is to continuously cover soil with a diverse array of living plants.

Scientists are currently documenting microbial soil carbon sequestration using carbon-13 isotope pulse labeling. Using this method, they can track the carbon flows from plants to and through soil microorganisms and identify the plants and the microorganisms that store the most carbon.

Fence line comparisons have demonstrated greater resilience to droughts and floods in carbon rich soils. Now, scientists can measure water flows through soil in three dimensions and accurately document soils’ water infiltration and holding capacity.

Grazing and pasture-raised animals can be managed to increase plant biodiversity and microbial activity. Well-managed pastures can sequester even more soil carbon than cropping systems. But we need a deeper understanding of how methanotrophs in the soil utilize methane emitted from grazing animals.

Finally we need an assessment of the socio-economic impediments to, and opportunities for, realizing the full potential for soil carbon sequestration.

If increasing soil carbon can help produce more food than you ever thought possible on less land than you can imagine, as John Jeavons would say, then why don’t more farmers do it?

If increasing soil carbon produces food that is flavorful, aromatic, and so healthy and nutritious that it could cost-effectively reverse diet-related diseases, why aren’t more consumers demanding it?

What We Need Are Farms That Support Farmers, Consumers and the Environment

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Authors: Andrea Basche, Marcia DeLonge | Published: March 15, 2017 

The past several years have been rough for many U.S. farmers and ranchers. Net farm incomes this year could fall to 50 percent of 2013 levels in a fourth consecutive year of income declines that is leading some producers to seek alternatives. At the same time, rural and urban Americans share growing concerns related to agriculture: worries that water pollution will be increasingly costly and harmful, that water supplies are at risk from extreme swings in rainfall, and that global warming due to fossil fuel burning threatens our food system and will necessitate changes in how we farm.

What if all of these challenges could find a common solution? It might just be that they can. In a commentary published this week in the scientific journal Elementa, we contend that agroecology offers a promising approach to solving food system problems while mitigating, water and energy concerns — and propose a way to overcome the obstacles to fully embracing it.

U.S. agriculture has trended for several decades — as a result of policy, economics and other drivers — toward systems that are more simplified over both space and time. This has had adverse consequences for food, energy and water.

Agroecology takes a different approach, applying ecological concepts tocreate and maintain diverse, resilient food systems. Promising research demonstrates that bringing diversity back to farms can begin to reverse the problems simplification has created. For example, scientists have found that strategically incorporating perennial plants (including food, energy or non-crop plants) into small areas of commodity crops can significantly reduce water pollution and soil loss. Studies also show that using multiple crops rather than a monoculture is associated with improvements in the amount of carbon (important to help soils hold onto more water and mitigate climate change) and nitrogen (critical for plant growth and soil function) in the soil.

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Regenerative Agriculture Reaches a Tipping Point

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Author: Chris Kerston | Published: March 15, 2017 

On a beautiful sunny March day in Southern California, a great annual gathering takes place. Marked by the bustle of pedicabs in the streets, tote bags and yoga mats flung over shoulders, and ubiquitous white badges flopping from necklace lanyards over crisp suits and hemp garb all the same, the masses ascend upon the Anaheim Convention Center to convene on the growing movement that is sustainable living. With over 100,000 people, Expo West is the largest natural and organic consumer-packaged-goods trade-show event in the world.

This is my second year in attendance. Last year I was asked to speak on a panel with Andre Leu from IFOAM and Kyle Garner from Organic India Tulsi Tea. The panel focused on soil health and we each talked about how agriculture could and must be “regenerative,” i.e. it must go beyond a zero-sum game. We are already too far out of balance, we cannot simply sustain the current scenarios, we must build equity back into the land base which supports us all, while simultaneously invigorating communities and rebuilding local economies. Journalists and brand managers frantically scribbled notes about this new term, “regenerative,” and asked many questions about the concept of going beyond sustainability. There were probably a half a dozen other presentations last year that I saw where this new concept of a regenerative narrative was presented.

For those of us on the inside, we feel like we’ve been championing for a beyond sustainable mantra for over 10 years, but a tipping point was most certainly reached in the last 12 months. “Regenerative Agriculture” was THE trending topic of this year’s Expo West.

Strong Regenerative Advocates
This year I was asked to speak on behalf of the Savory Institute on a panel called, “Positive Animal Impact; Healing Soil, Regenerating Land, Reversing Climate Change.” I was alongside two great friends, Taylor Collins the CEO and co-founder of EPIC Provisions and Will Harris CEO of White Oak Pastures. The panel was moderated by John Foraker, CEO of Annie’s Homegrown.

I met Taylor about 3 years ago, when their brand was just getting started. They wanted a product that came from truly regenerative meat sources and they wanted the Savory Institute’s help in procuring that. We share very similar core values and an entrepreneurial style, and we quickly became friends. EPIC has grown to become one of the Savory Institute’s biggest supporters.

And I’ve been a fan of Will’s for about 10 years. Prior to my time at Savory, I managed a large diversified ranch and orchard operation in Northern California that I often joke, aspired to be like Will Harris. When I started working with Savory we began talking about him becoming a Savory Hub and his ranch, White Oak Pastures, became accredited last year.

The Savory Institute is all about facilitating the large-scale restoration of the world’s grasslands in ways that are socially and culturally sound as well as economically viable and create net-positive impacts on the land. This is all accomplished through the process of Holistic Management, which is a proactive triple-bottom-line planning process. Our primary tool to accomplish this is through the promotion of regenerative grazing, where domestic livestock are managed in a way the matches nature’s rhythms and cycles. We work with a number of other NGOs, consumer brands, and private landowners to do that, but our primary mechanism for scaling this up globally is through what we call our “Hub Strategy.” When people to come ask us to come into a region, we work with a local leader where we train and equip them to become a center of innovation – a place to churn out master grazers and build a vast cadre of regenerative livestock producers that matches the local context and culture.

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Epic Provisions Co-founder: ‘regenerative agriculture is the next big movement in food’

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Author: Elaine Watson | Published: March 15, 2017

Meat and dairy often get a bad rap on the sustainability front, but not all animal production systems have the same impact on the planet, says EPIC Provisions co-founder Taylor Collins, who reckons that “the next big movement in food is coming in the form of regenerative agriculture,” which he claims is “creating a net positive return on the environment.”

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Beyond Wetiko Agriculture: Saving Ourselves From the Soil Up

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Authors: Tom Newmark and Steven Farrell | Published: March 15, 2017 

How much longer do you hope to live? How long do you hope your children or grandchildren will live?  Do you think you or your loved ones will live 60 more years? If so, you’ll be around to witness the end of food production on the planet.  Unless, that is, we become conscious of the crisis and evolve.

According to a recent United Nations FAO report, due to human ecological malfeasance we have only 60 harvests left on this wasting planet. That’s it: 60 more years of food and then the industrial agribusiness frenzy is over. And it might actually be far worse: the just-issued report of the Environmental Audit Committee of the British House of Commons warned that “Some of the most productive agricultural land in England is at risk of becoming unprofitable within a generation through soil erosion and loss of carbon, and the natural environment will be seriously harmed.” Indeed, in some places it’s already happening. Food systems around the world are breaking down, and the resulting food shortages have led to wars and revolutions. Starving people are risking everything as they flee to areas where there is still food. Why is this happening?

It’s simple: business interests chasing enormous short-term profits have waged war against the productive topsoil of the planet, and we’ve already lost between 50% to 75% of life-sustaining soils worldwide. Using chemical pesticides and fertilizers, industrial agribusiness is burning through 10 tons of soil per hectare per year of cropland, which is soil loss that is up to 20 times the amount of food being produced on that land. And what do we get for that? We get food fit for factory farming and factory nations.

Why would humans destroy the very soils that have long sustained civilizations?  The First Peoples of North America have an explanation for this form of suicide: the wetiko psychosis. Wetiko, also known by some First Peoples as wendingo, is a cannibalistic spirit that devours the flesh of humans or, ecologically, eats the flesh of Mother Earth. Like all memetic thought-forms, wetiko is transferred from person-to-person or through larger cultural forces through values, beliefs, ideologies, behaviors and practices. The wetiko psychosis, then, is the mental derangement that leads our species to consume life-giving soils, and some will say that the psychosis is caused by spirit possession. Others might say it’s caused by governments under the control of indifferent corporations that enslave and crush the spirits of the free. And others might say it’s the result of clever marketing or meme warfare. But it’s the wetiko psychosis we’re seeing: the diagnosis is clear.

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What’s the Second Most Polluting Industry? (We’ll Give You a Hint – You’re Wearing It)

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Author: Marina Qutab | February 15, 2017 

Have you ever taken a moment to look at the tag on your clothes to see where your clothes were made? Chances are, the tag will read: “Made in China” or another country outside of the USA. Although the label may seem harmless because a lot of our products are manufactured in different countries, there is so much more to the story than just a “made in ____”  label. We live in a “fast fashion” world, where companies produce high volumes of low-priced clothing at the expense of the environment and workers. Companies like Forever 21 and Zara process one million garments per day. Just imagine the resources involved, both human and otherwise. In the world’s least developed countries, an estimated 40 million people sew more than 1.5 billion garments in 250,000 factories and sweatshops each year. In many cases, these workers are not provided with basic workers rights, fair wages, and ethical working conditions.

The Environmental Consequences of Fast Fashion

Cotton, one of the fashion industry’s most frequently used materials, is among the most pesticide-intensive crops on the planet. It’s estimated that one pound of cotton requires at least one-third of a pound (136 grams) of pesticides. To help you understand, it takes half a pound (227 grams) of cotton to make the average t-shirt. In addition, cotton is a water-intensive crop. To produce one pair of jeans, it takes more than 1,800 gallons of water. It’s no wonder then that the $3 trillion fashion industry is the second most polluting industry, just behind oil.

Uzbekistan, the world’s sixth leading producer of cotton, is a clear example of how cotton can negatively impact a region’s environment. In the 1950s, two rivers in Central Asia, the Syr Darya and the Amu Darya were rerouted from the Aral sea to provide irrigation for cotton production in Uzbekistan and nearby Turkmenistan. Today, water levels in the Aral are less than 10 percent of what they used to be just 50 years ago. As the Aral dried up, the communities and especially the fisheries that depended on the water supply crumbled. Over time, the sea became over-salinated and encumbered with synthetic pesticides and fertilizers from the nearby fields. Dust from the arid, exposed lakebed, containing these toxins and salt saturated the air, which created a public health crisis, negatively affected the farm fields for growing crops, contaminating the soil. The Aral is increasingly transforming into a dry sea, and the loss of what used to be a large body of water has caused the region’s summers to become hotter and drier and the winters to become much colder.

Uzbekistan is not the only example of how the conventional cotton farming industry has wreaked havoc on the environment and our health. Regions such as Australia’s Murray-Darling Basin, Pakistan’s Indus River, and the Rio Grande in Mexico and the U.S.

Although organic cotton is a much more sustainable alternative, this farming mechanism is rarely used – at only one percent of all the cotton worldwide being grown this way. Organically growing cotton does have its challenges, however. The crop is still water intensive and the clothing made from it may still be dyed unnaturally with chemicals and shipped to be sold globally.

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Ellos sí Saben de Autoconsumo: Enseñan a Niños a Cultivar Hortalizas

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Autor: Carlos Javier | Publicado: 4 de marzo,2017

A su corta edad, ya saben cultivar sus alimentos. Son niños de entre 3 y 4 años que cosechan las hortalizas y vegetales que se consumen en el jardìn de niños Francisco Gabilondo Soler, la primera escuela preescolar en San Agustín Etla y la capital, que enseña esta labor ancestral.

Nicole, Alejandro, David y otros 15 pequeños que estudian el preescolar en la “escuela de Cri Cri” -como le llaman-, son una generación más de este proyecto gestionado por el artista plástico Francisco Toledo y el Centro de las Artes de San Agustín (Casa), el cual inculca a los niños el valor de cosechar los alimentos en una huerta y la responsabilidad con el medio ambiente.

“Este jardín fue reconstruido y rehabilitado por el maestro Toledo; desde el 2012 comenzó la idea del huerto, quería que los menores comieran productos sanos y orgánicos para mejorar su alimentación; para dejar de comprar los productos decidió crear un huerto escolar para consumir lo cosechado”, comentó la directora comisionada del jardín, Marcela Elizabeth Rojas Hernández.

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Letters to a Young Farmer: Stone Barns Center Releases Its First Book

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Author: Danielle Nierenberg | Published: March 2017 

Today, Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture released Letters to a Young Farmer, a book which compiles insight from some of the most influential farmers, writers, and leaders in the food system in an anthology of essays and letters.

The United States is on the cusp of the largest retirement of farmers in U.S. history, with more farmers over the age of 75 than between the ages of 35 and 44. Letters to a Young Farmer aims to help beginning farmers succeed through advice and encouragement, while inspiring all who work in or care about the food system. Among the 36 contributors to the book are thought leaders Barbara Kingsolver, Bill McKibben, Michael Pollan, Dan Barber, Temple Grandin, Wendell Berry, Rick Bayless, and Marion Nestle. I was honored to contribute to the book as well!

Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture is a nonprofit sustainable agriculture organization with a mission to create a healthy and sustainable food system that benefits all. The organization trains farmers, educates food citizens, develops agroecological farming practices, and convenes changemakers through programs such as a Summer Institute for High School Students and a two-day Poultry School conference.

Food Tank spoke with Jill Isenbarger, CEO of Stone Barns Center, about Letters to a Young Farmer, the need to encourage young farmers, and hope in the future of the food system.

Isenbarger says “we created this book to give voice to farmers and illuminate the choices that can lead to a stronger future, for them and for all of us who eat. It reminds us that farming has always been a political act. These young farmers, who choose to farm rather than go into law or medicine or finance—they are taking a stand; they are expressing their commitment to the land, to their communities, to the food movement.”

Food Tank (FT): Why do young farmers need encouragement? 

Jill Isenbarger (JI): Farmers are becoming an endangered species. The number of farms and farmers continues to shrink, and farmers are aging off of the land at an alarming rate. The average age of a farmer in the United States is 58.3 and climbing, and only six percent of farmers are under the age of 35.

Young farmers need encouragement because our society doesn’t value them the way they should be valued. “You’re just a farmer” is the common refrain. Barbara Kingsolver, Wendell Berry, and Bill McKibben all write about this in the book. We’ve also lost many agricultural traditions based on community, a common history of stewardship and hard work.

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