21 Innovative Regeneration Projects

/by

In November 2016, Regeneration International (RI) embarked on a journey in search of the world’s most inspiring, innovative projects working on regenerative agriculture, land use, or other solution-oriented concepts involving regeneration. To do this, we launched a micro-grants competition, Five Innovations for Regeneration, and the results were astounding. We received over 200 applications from 60 countries. It was difficult to do, but the “Five Innovations for Regeneration” micro-grants competition has selected five finalists and highlighted 16 honorable mentions.

Get inspired—Check out these 21 Innovative Regeneration Projects! Better yet—Sign up to RHub to engage with the projects!

Read the press release 

5 Innovations for Regeneration (Finalists)

Acacias for All | Tunisia

Acacias for All is halting desertification caused by climate change in Tunisia by planting green walls of acacia trees in collaboration with local rural populations. The project has 14 ambassadors in 13 regions of Tunisia and recently launched the “1 Million Trees for Tunisia” challenge.

Agua Santa Regeneration | Ecuador

Agua Santa Regeneration regenerates the mountain ecosystems of their ancestral Andean lands through afforestation and reforestation with native species, and with the capture and propagation of beneficial microorganisms to improve soil fertility. They provide trainings for campesino families on the importance of reforestation, conservation of natural resources, and returning to indigenous agroecological farming methods. They support community livelihoods by providing fruit trees, medicinal plants and Andean grains for family gardens. For Agua Santa Regeneration, the regeneration of soils and water goes hand in hand with regeneration of culture and ancestral knowledge.

Grow a Farmer | Uganda

Grow a Farmer combines information communication technology, permaculture and value added business into a single ‘three-dimensional model’ that is empowering a critical mass of small-scale farmers to regenerate ecosystems and build self-sustaining communities. Since 2008, they’ve worked with over 360 farmers groups and aim to train 150,000 farmers every year for the next 4 years. The farmers they work with grow coffee, fruit, corn and bananas. The project is supporting farmer to farmer learning, innovation and skill transfer, creating long-lasting impact and empowering small scale farmers to move their communities forward.

 

SOIL | Haiti

Photo Credit: Melissa Schilling for SOIL Haiti

SOIL is developing transformative social business models for the sustainable provision of urban household sanitation and waste treatment services in Haiti. SOIL’s EkoLakay social business collects and transports waste from locally made ecological toilets to a SOIL composting facility where the waste is safely treated and transformed into rich, organic compost using a process that respects World Health Organization standards. Revenues from toilet user fees and compost sales support ongoing project costs and showcase the potential to affordably and sustainably provide household sanitation in the world’s most vulnerable urban communities. Additionally, the compost produced restores soil fertility and supports reforestation.

TH Climate Park | Myanmar

In partnership with Dr. Arne Fjortoft, Secretary General of Worldview International Foundation Dr. Bremley Lyngdoh, Founder & CEO of Worldview Impact Foundation has been working to restore and regenerate the degraded mangrove ecosystems at the 750 ha Thor Heyerdahl Climate Park in the Delta Region of Myanmar to protect the lives of highly vulnerable communities. The park was created in honor of the well-known Norwegian author, scientist, environmentalist and explorer Thor Heyerdahl. Since 2012 when the project started 2.7 million mangrove trees have been planted Dr. Lyngdoh is now working with BioCarbon Engineering with a mission to plant 1 billion trees in 250,000 ha by deploying tree-planting drones and securing the resilience of the project through the creation of a blockchain structured Ecosystem Services marketplace powered by Route2.

16 Honorable Mentions

Allin Mikuy Ayllu | Peru

Allin Mikuy Ayllu is the only food consumer collective in Lima, Peru. They promote sustainable and regenerative livelihoods based on principles of food sovereignty and the solidarity economy through organizing a fair trade monthly food box scheme connecting agroecological farmers with consumers. Their goal is to strengthen relations between urban consumers and agroecological farmers for responsible consumption and sustainability. Since 2012 they have produced 35 boxes, which included 60-120 sustainable products, involving dozens of producers and hundreds of consumers. They are a part of The Urban Agriculture Platform of Lima (PAUL) and the Council of Sustainable Settlements of Latin America (CASA).

American Chestnut Land Trust: Double Oak Farms | USA

The American Chestnut Land Trust is a non-profit organization working towards a sustainable future through stewardship of the environment. A major component of the trust is Double Oak Farms. This agriculture supporting the community (ASC) operation enhances and educates the community in innovative and holistic agricultural techniques while donating 80 percent of all produce to a local food pantry. Each year the project has donated roughly 4000 lbs of produce, while the remainder goes to dedicated volunteers who log over 2000 hours each year. On approxmately 3000 acres of pristine preserved property, this operation models low impact production for the community to replicate.

CarbonToSoil | Finland

Climate change is a real threat. The total amount of carbon on Earth is constant but currently in the wrong from: as carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. CarbonToSoil is a nonprofit project that enables anyone to help reverse climate change by adjusting current agricultural methods in order to draw carbon back into the soil. The solution: In-app purchases enable anyone to support real farms to change their agricultural methods to regenerative farming. The app also allows users to personally support food production and see how food is grown. The proceeds raised through the app are used to regenerate more land, research, education and scaling the project globally. Why just reduce climate change when we can reverse it?

Danyadara Permaculture | Spain

“Danyadara” is a simplification of two sanskrit words, “dhanya” and “dhara,” which together mean Blessed Earth. Danyadara is a not-for-profit permaculture project focused on land regeneration. They are reversing desertification in Andalucia, Spain through sustainable agriculture techniques, creating a legacy that will inspire the region for years to come. To date, over 1,000 trees have been planted on 24 Hectares, including 700 Centenary Oliver trees for production. They also host two to four permaculture courses per year.

Durga’s Den | Jamaica

Durga’s Den is a project on the North Coast of Jamaica where self-reliance and regenerative agriculture techniques are demonstrated. In partnership with the hotel industry, they are getting organic input used to feed systems such as vermicomposting, composting and animal feeding. The demo farm trains the community members wanting to participate in the regenerative practices through workshops and work exchanges. There is also a strong reforestation component through the use of agroforestry techniques.

Fresh Organic Farming | Uganda

YICEUganda is a startup social enterprise that provides rural smallholder farmers in Uganda with flexible farm loans, inputs and training services to reduce hunger and poverty. With a network of loc al farm agents, YICEUganda facilitates farmers’ access to bundled agricultural services at various levels of the farming value chain, including seed sourcing and access to farm loans. Since 2016, YICEUganda has implemented the Fresh Organic Farming Project that seeks to nurture a network of 5,000 environmentally conscious farmers to protect and conserve the environment by 2020. This comes from their desire to achieve sustainable farming for all rural smallholder farmers, ensure increased incomes and food security. The project offers three key organic services that include: organic farming trainings, production of organic fertilizers, and establishment of organic demonstration gardens.

Gaia Education | United Kingdom

Gaia Education envisions a world where communities have harmonised their social, economic and natural systems, so that they thrive within bioregional and planetary boundaries, regenerating their environment and allowing diverse human potential and all life to flourish. Gaia Education contributes to this vision by providing leading-edge online and face-to-face ‘Design for Sustainability’ programmes using their Whole Systems Design Framework. Their long-term Project Based Learning Programmes assist fragile communities to replace petrochemical agriculture with regenerative food systems, focused on well-being and resilience. They help over-consuming communities reduce their ecological and carbon footprints, whilst strengthening their regional economy and revitalizing their community.

Greening the Desert | Mexico

Pasticultores del Desierto follows nature’s way to keep their desert grasslands beautiful and healthy while making a living off the land. Nature’s way is to use a diversity of living organisms such bison and pronghorn as a herd and move on, leaving a trace of fertility while allowing land to rest. As ranchers, the team mimics the migratory patterns of large wild herbivores using cattle, water points and fence. This enables them to restore bare, unproductive land into productive, native grasslands. To date, they’ve done it on more than 200,000 hectares in the Chihuahuan desert, in northern Mexico, and are working to get up to one million hectares by 2030.

Irish Biochar Coop | Ireland

The Biochar Coop sells a kiln that burns cleanly to make a certified agricultural charcoal from waste biomass. Their SilageChar and FeedChar can increase yields, improve animal health and regenerate soils and are aimed at organic dairy and beef farmers. They also transform invasive species and scrub into a soil amendment and pollution adsorber to protect waterbodies.

Their products can help meet Irish agriculture targets to increase dairy by 50 percent without increasing GHG if used by 50 percent of Irish dairy and beef farmers in their slurry tanks and silage. And that’s just counting the GHG offsets of the carbon in the biochar. Research shows that biochar has an even greater GHG reduction effects in tank, rumen and soil over the whole milk production cycle.

Olio | United Kingdom

OLIO is a free app tackling the problem of food waste by connecting people with their neighbours and with local shops & cafes so that surplus food can be shared, not thrown away. Users snap a picture of their items and add them to OLIO; neighbours receive customised alerts and can request anything that takes their fancy. Pick-up takes place, often the same day, at the home, store, or another agreed location. Launched in January 2016 OLIO has over 185,000 users who have together shared 225,000 items of food—equivalent to almost 100,000 meals.

Paradise Farm | Sri Lanka

Paradise Farm was created when Dr. Arne Fjortoft, Secretary General of Worldview International Foundation pioneered organic agriculture in 1996 by taking over a neglected farm and turning it into a demonstration project. The farm now holds more than 800 different plants species as part of its biodiversity strategy with value added production of organic green tea, organic virgin coconut oil, fruits and spices, all classified as highly beneficial to health. Dr. Bremley Lyngdoh, Founder & CEO of Worldview Impact Foundation later created the Green Goodness project to train students at Richmond Park Academy in the UK to rebrand and sell the organic green tea that was sourced directly from the women of Paradise Farm in Sri Lanka and promote Equal Trade.

Shanao Cacoa Collective | Peru

Shanao Cacoa Collective aims to create sustainable jobs in agroecology, which integrate community based-conservation and public health systems throughout the Alto Mayo Valley of Peru. To achieve this mission, Shanao Cacao works hand in hand with farmers to implement a regenerative village hub for growing and processing organic, native superfoods, including sacha inchi, and cacao.

The Soft Foot Alliance | Zimbabwe

The Soft Foot Alliance is dedicated to improving the lives and landscapes of the people living on the boundary of Zimbabwe’s Hwange National  Park. They are a husband and wife team and along with their son they try to “walk the talk,” living in a self built natural homestead, finding simple solutions for people and wildlife to coexist. They regenerate degraded landscapes by offering sustainable alternatives to environmentally harmful practices through permaculture, holistic management and sweat.

Soil Carbon Coalition | USA

Soil Carbon Coalition’s learning materials about soil-health and watershed-function and their open-source monitoring/mapping platform are aimed at creating a generation of farmers, policy makers, scientists & citizens who can: think in systems; see and track how soil health is impacting public health, flooding, drought, erosion, climate, biodiversity, & food and water security; understand the power of photosynthesis, soil biology & land management to improve local & global conditions; and engage that power as they create healthy communities around them. Soil Carbon Coalition is collaborating with the USDA-Climate Hubs, 4-H, the Future Farmers of America (FFA), schools, and other community and farming groups.

RegenSoil Project | United Kingdom

Since 2015, the International Year of Soil, Glyn Mitchell of the Credible Food Project has been working with farmers to build soil microbe levels to reduce the amount of chemical fertilizers used to poison and strip carbon from soils in the Jersey Channel Islands (famous for the Jersey Cow). With more and more carbon smart biotic farmers realizing the advantages of farming soil microbes first, crops second, soil becomes healthier, plants benefit from a better balanced microbial biomass surrounding their crops rhizosphere so carbon trading for minerals and nutrients between plants and microbes can take place. As long as regenerative practices continue, farmers soon discover it is easier and cheaper to work with the microbes than against them. Earlier this year, RegenSoil Project had already trained 20 people in 2 months, and so far no one has returned to using chemicals.

Witnessing Trees | Philippines

Witnessing Trees by Green Releaf tells the story of how grassroots and community leadership are developing resilience in climate and conflict vulnerable areas through regenerative solutions for food security, livelihood and ecosystem restoration in the Philippines. Their hope is to reclaim spaces as sacred for collective healing through ecovillage and permaculture solutions. It was inspired by a tree at the COP21 in Paris where the landmark climate agreement to end the fossil fuel era was drafted. Trees symbolize hope in terms of carbon capture and as source of food, shelter, safety and even refuge during and after disasters.

Regeneration International Announces Winners of Five Micro-Grants for Innovative Regeneration Projects

/by

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 31, 2017

Contact: Alex Groome, alexandra@regenerationinternational.org, +52 1 415 138 4478; Katherine Paul, katherine@organicconsumers.org, 207-653-3090

MINNEAPOLIS, Minn. – Regeneration International (RI) today announced the winners of five micro-grants awarded to innovative regeneration projects.

The winning projects, selected from a field of 216 entries from 60 countries, are: Acacias for All (Tunisia); Agua Santa Regeneration (Ecuador); Grow a Farmer (Uganda); SOIL (Haiti); and TH Climate Park Myanmar (Myanmar).

For the competition, titled “Five Innovations for Regeneration,” the RI Steering Committee used The Regeneration Hub (RHub) as a tool to identify innovative, scalable and replicable regeneration projects around the world. The Committee selected five finalists and highlighted 16 honorable mentions.

The RHub aims to accelerate adoption and development of scalable and replicable regenerative projects across the globe by inspiring and facilitating collaboration between project holders, individuals, funders and communities focused on regenerative agriculture and land-use projects and other related concepts that address multiple global challenges, including climate change and food security.

Meet the Five Innovations for Regeneration

Acacias for All is halting desertification caused by climate change in Tunisia by planting green walls of acacia trees in collaboration with local rural populations. The project has 14 ambassadors in 13 regions of Tunisia and recently launched the “1 Million Trees for Tunisia” challenge.

Agua Santa Regeneration is restoring highly degraded ancestral lands in the high Andes of Ecuador and supporting the families of surrounding communities by supplying fruit trees for their gardens and offering trainings in agroforestry.

Grow a Farmer combines information communication technology, permaculture and business into a single ‘three-dimensional model’ that will build a critical mass of small-scale farmers to enable them to regenerate ecosystems and build self-sustaining communities. The organization has worked with over 360 farmer groups since 2008 and aims to train over 150,000 farmers every year over the next four years.

Sustainable Organic Integrated Livelihoods (SOIL) is a non-profit organization dedicated to protecting soil resources, restoring the environment, promoting the growth of local economies, and empowering communities through transforming waste into resources such as compost in Haiti. They are now providing over 1,000 households with dignified, in-home sanitation and transforming more than 320 tons of human waste annually‒ a powerful example of how to affordably and effectively increase access to sustainable sanitation services worldwide.

In 2012, the Worldview International Foundation (WIF) team started a pilot project with two local universities to restore 750 ha of mangrove forest. So far, the project has planted 2.7 million trees and is now replicating in other parts of Myanmar to contribute to the restoration of 80,0000 Ha of mangrove forests. An underlying aim of the project is to benefit the communities who are bearing the brunt of the impacts of climate change.

See the 16 honorable mentions

Watch this video to learn more

Sign up today

###

Regeneration International, a project of the Organic Consumers Association, is building a global network of farmers, scientists, businesses, activists, educators, journalists, governments and consumers who will promote and put into practice regenerative agriculture and land-use practices that: provide abundant, nutritious food; revive local economies; rebuild soil fertility and biodiversity; and restore climate stability by returning carbon to the soil, through the natural process of photosynthesis.

Regeneration: The Next Stage of Organic Food and Farming—And Civilization

/by

Regenerate—to give fresh life or vigor to; to reorganize; to recreate the moral nature; to cause to be born again. (New Webster’s Dictionary, 1997)

When a reporter asked him [Mahatma Gandhi] what he thought of Western civilization, he famously replied: “I think it would be a good idea.”

A growing corps of organic, climate, environmental, social justice and peace activists are promoting a new world-changing paradigm that can potentially save us from global catastrophe. The name of this new paradigm and movement is regenerative agriculture, or more precisely regenerative food, farming and land use.

Regenerative agriculture and land use incorporates the traditional and indigenous best practices of organic farming, animal husbandry and environmental conservation. Regeneration puts a central focus on improving soil health and fertility (recarbonizing the soil), increasing biodiversity, and qualitatively enhancing forest health, animal welfare, food nutrition and rural (especially small farmer) prosperity.

The basic menu for a Regeneration Revolution is to unite the world’s 3 billion rural farmers, ranchers and herders with several billion health, environmental and justice-minded consumers to overturn “business as usual” and embark on a global campaign of cooperation, solidarity and regeneration.

According to food activist Vandana Shiva, “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis, and the crisis of democracy.”

So how can regenerative agriculture do all these things: increase soil fertility; maximize crop yields; draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soils, plants and trees to re-stabilize the climate and restore normal rainfall; increase soil water retention; make food more nutritious; reduce rural poverty; and begin to pacify the world’s hotspots of violence?

First, let’s look at what Michael Pollan, the U.S.’s most influential writer on food and farming, has to say about the miraculous regenerative power of Mother Nature and enhanced photosynthesis:

Consider what happens when the sun shines on a grass plant rooted in the earth. Using that light as a catalyst, the plant takes atmospheric CO2, splits off and releases the oxygen, and synthesizes liquid carbon–sugars, basically. Some of these sugars go to feed and build the aerial portions of the plant we can see, but a large percentage of this liquid carbon—somewhere between 20 and 40 percent—travels underground, leaking out of the roots and into the soil. The roots are feeding these sugars to the soil microbes—the bacteria and fungi that inhabit the rhizosphere—in exchange for which those microbes provide various services to the plant… Now, what had been atmospheric carbon (a problem) has become soil carbon, a solution—and not just to a single problem, but to a great many problems.

Besides taking large amounts of carbon out of the air—tons of it per acre when grasslands [or cropland] are properly managed… that process at the same time adds to the land’s fertility and its capacity to hold water. Which means more and better food for us…

This process of returning atmospheric carbon to the soil works even better when ruminants are added to the mix. Every time a calf or lamb shears a blade of grass, that plant, seeking to rebalance its “root-shoot ratio,” sheds some of its roots. These are then eaten by the worms, nematodes, and microbes—digested by the soil, in effect, and so added to its bank of carbon. This is how soil is created: from the bottom up… For thousands of years we grew food by depleting soil carbon and, in the last hundred or so, the carbon in fossil fuel as well. But now we know how to grow even more food while at the same time returning carbon and fertility and water to the soil.

A 2015 article in the Guardian summarizes some of the most important practices of Regenerative Agriculture:

Regenerative agriculture comprises an array of techniques that rebuild soil and, in the process, sequester carbon. Typically, it uses cover crops and perennials so that bare soil is never exposed, and grazes animals in ways that mimic animals in nature. It also offers ecological benefits far beyond carbon storage: it stops soil erosion, re-mineralizes soil, protects the purity of groundwater and reduces damaging pesticide and fertilizer runoff.”

If you want to understand the basic science and biology of how regenerative agriculture can draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and forests (in combination with a 100-percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions) to not only mitigate, but actually reverse global warming, read this article by one of North America’s leading organic farmers, Jack Kittridge.

If you want a general overview of news and articles on regenerative food, farming and land use, you can follow the newsfeed “Cook Organic Not the Planet” by the Organic Consumers Association (OCA), and/or sign up for OCA’s weekly online newsletter (you can subscribe online, or text “Bytes” to 97779.)

You can also visit the Regeneration International website, where you’ll find this list of books on regenerative agriculture.

Solving the soil, health, environmental and climate crises

Without going into extensive detail here (you can read the references above), we need to connect the dots between our soil, public health, environment and climate crisis. As the widely-read Mercola newsletter puts it:

Virtually every growing environmental and health problem can be traced back to modern food production. This includes but is not limited to:

  • Food insecurity and malnutrition amid mounting food waste
  • Rising obesity and chronic disease rates despite growing health care outlays
  • Diminishing fresh water supplies
  • Toxic agricultural chemicals polluting air, soil and waterways, thereby threatening the entire food chain from top to bottom
  • Disruption of normal climate and rainfall patterns

Connecting the dots between climate and food

We can’t really solve the climate crisis (and the related soil, environmental, and public health crisis) without simultaneously solving the food and farming crisis. We need to stop putting greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere (by moving to 100-percent renewable energy), but we also need to move away from chemical-intensive, energy-intensive food, factory farming and land use, as soon as possible.

Regenerative food and farming has the potential to draw down a critical mass of carbon (200-250 billion tons) from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and living plants, where it will increase soil fertility, food production and food quality (nutritional density), while re-stabilizing the climate.

The heavy use of pesticides, GMOs, chemical fertilizers and factory-farming by 50 million industrial farmers (mainly in the Global North) is not just poisoning our health and engendering a global epidemic of chronic disease and malnutrition. It’s also destroying our soil, wetlands’ and forests’ natural ability to sequester excess atmospheric carbon into the earth.

The good news is that solar and wind power, and energy conservation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. And most people are starting to understand that organic, grass-fed and freshly-prepared foods are safer and more nutritious than chemical and GMO foods.

The food movement and climate movements must break through our single-issue silos and start to work together. Either we stop Big Coal, Big Oil, fracking, and the mega-pipelines, or climate change will soon morph into climate catastrophe, making it impossible to grow enough food to feed the planet. Every food activist needs to become a climate activist.

On the other hand, every climate activist needs to become a food activist. Our current system of industrial food, farming and land use, now degenerating 75 percent of all global farmland, is “mining” and decarbonizing the soil, destroying our forests, and releasing 44-57 percent of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide, and black soot) into our already supersaturated atmosphere, while at the same time undermining our health with commoditized, overly processed food.

Solving the crisis of rural poverty, democracy and endless war

Out-of-touch and out-of-control governments of the world now take our tax money and spend $500 billion dollars a year mainly subsidizing 50 million industrial farmers to do the wrong thing. These farmers routinely over-till, over-graze (or under-graze), monocrop, and pollute the soil and the environment with chemicals and GMOs to produce cheap commodities (corn, soy, wheat, rice, cotton) and cash crops, low-grade processed food and factory-farmed meat and animal products. Meanwhile 700 million small family farms and herders, comprising the 3 billion people who produce 70 percent of the world’s food on just 25 percent of the world’s acreage, struggle to make ends meet.

If governments can be convinced or forced by the power of the global grassroots to reduce and eventually cut off these $500 billion in annual subsidies to industrial agriculture and Big Food, and instead encourage and reward family farmers and ranchers who improve soil health, biodiversity, animal health and food quality, we can simultaneously reduce global poverty, improve public health, and restore climate stability.

As even the Pentagon now admits, climate change, land degradation (erosion and desertification), and rural poverty are now primary driving forces of sectarian strife and war (and massive waves of refugees) in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. U.S. military intervention in these regions, under the guise of “regime change” or democratization, has only made things worse. This is why every peace activist needs to become a climate and food activist and vice-versa.

Similarly corrupt, out-of-control governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $5.3 trillion dollars a year, while spending more than $3 trillion dollars annually on weapons, mainly to prop up our global fossil fuel system and overseas empires. If the global grassroots can reach out to one another, bypassing our corrupt governments, and break down the geographic, linguistic and cultural walls that separate us, we can launch a global Regeneration Revolution—on the scale of the global campaign in World War II against the Nazis.

One thing we the grassroots share in all of the 200 nations of the world is this: We are sick and tired of corrupt governments and out-of-control corporations degenerating our lives and threatening our future. The Russian people are not our enemies, nor the Chinese, nor the Iranians. The hour is late. The crisis is dire. But we still have time to regenerate our soils, climate, health, economy, foreign policy, and democracy. We still have time to turn things around.

The global Regeneration Movement we need will likely take several decades to reach critical mass and effectiveness. In spreading the Regeneration message, and building this new Movement at the global grassroots, we must take into account the fact that most regions, nations and people (and in fact many people who are still ignorant of the facts or climate change deniers) will respond more quickly or positively to different aspects or dimensions of our message (i.e. providing jobs; reducing rural and urban poverty and inequality, restoring soil fertility, saving the ocean and marine life, preserving forests, improving nutrition and public health, eliminating hunger and malnutrition, saving biodiversity, restoring animal health and food quality, preserving water, safeguarding Mother Nature or God’s Creation, creating a foundation for peace, democracy, and reconciliation, etc.) rather than to the central life or death message: reversing global warming.

What is important is not that everyone, everywhere immediately agrees 100 percent on all of the specifics of regenerative food, farming and land use—for this is not practical—but rather that we build upon our shared concerns in each community, region, nation and continent. Through a diversity of messages, frames and campaigns, through connecting the dots between all the burning issues, we will find the strength, numbers, courage and compassion to build the largest grassroots coalition in history—to safeguard our common home, our survival, and the survival of the future generations.

Ronnie Cummins is international director of the Organic Consumers Association and a founding member of Regeneration International.

La Importancia de la Agricultura de Conservación de los Suelos Vivos, Para los Viñedos de La Rioja

/by

Autor: Ecoticias  | Publicado: 22 mayo 2017

La Asociación Española de Agricultura de Conservación Suelos Vivos (AEAC.SV) ha presentado el estudio ‘Beneficios de la Agricultura de Conservación en un entorno de cambio climático’, en el que se analiza el impacto positivo que la Agricultura de Conservación, técnica agrícola consistente en evitar el laboreo del suelo y en la preservación de una cubierta vegetal sobre la superficie del suelo, tiene para el medio ambiente y la agricultura en un entorno de cambio climático.

La presentación ha contado con la participación del Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente, a través de Carlos Cabanas, Secretario General de Agricultura y Alimentación y Fernando Miranda Sotillos, Director General de Producciones y Mercados Agrarios, así como con Jesús Gil Ribes, y Rafael Espejo, presidente y vicepresidente respectivamente de la AEAC.SV.

Como señala el estudio, si los efectos del cambio climático no revierten, la zona de clima Continental de Europa, entre la que se encuentra La Rioja, podría tener que enfrentarse a un aumento del riesgo por inundaciones.

Según datos oficiales de Ministerio de Agricultura y Pesca, Alimentación y Medio Ambiente, La Rioja destina casi el 10% de su superficie agrícola a la práctica de Agricultura de Conservación.

LEER MÁS AQUÍ
LEER MÁS ARTÍCULOS EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ

Vandana Shiva Se Presentó Ante la Corte Suprema Argentina solicitando Audiencia Pública Por la Soja Transgénica de Monsanto.

/by

Autor: Naturaleza de Derechos | Publicado:  22 mayo 2017

Vandana Shiva, científica ecofeminista, filósofa y escritora de la India, ademas una de las principales promotoras del Tribunal Monsanto, se presentó, en el día de la fecha, ante la Corte Suprema de Justicia de la Nación Argentina, en el juicio que Naturaleza de Derechos inició contra la empresa transnacional Monsanto y el Estado Nacional para prohibir la liberación y comercialización de la Soja Transgénica RR2 en el territorio argentino.

La causa judicial, que se encuentra en la Corte Suprema Nacional desde hace una semana, llega a la máxima instancia por el recurso extraordinario interpuesto por Naturaleza de Derechos, contra la sentencia que no hizo lugar al pedido de medidas cautelares consistentes en; 1) la prohibición de la comercialización de la Soja transgénica Intacta de la empresa Monsanto, 2) suspensión de la Resolución 318/13 del Ministerio de Agroindustria que reduce la evaluación de riesgos y 3) la exhortación al Estado Nacional a que se abstenga de aprobar semillas modificadas genéticamente sin la previa participación ciudadana.

La Sala III de la Cámara Contencioso Administrativo Federal de la Ciudad de Buenos Aires, el 9 de Mayo de 2017, había concedido el recurso extraordinario.

Vandana concretamente le solicita a la Corte que antes de tomar una decisión judicial, se convoque a una audiencia pública y se abra una instancia de Amigos del Tribunal, para que se permita la opinión de expertos independientes sobre los Órganos Genéticamente Modificados (OGM). Asimismo le señala al tribunal argentino que la autorización y la liberación de la Soja Transgénica RR2 de la empresa Monsanto Argentina SAIC – denominada comercialmente INTACTA – “representa un riesgo de daño grave e irreparable a la agricultura tradicional, salud humana, ambiente y biodiversidad.”

LEER MÁS AQUÍ
LEER MÁS ARTÍCULOS EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ

La Oportunidad de Conservar los Suelos, Es También la Esperanza Para Evitar su erosión

/by

Autor: Paola Gutiérrez Galindo | Publicado: 23 mayo 2017

El suelo, capa superficial de la corteza terrestre, elemental para los procesos ecológicos  del planeta e importante por ser un ecosistema compuesto por millones de especies como micro organismos o pequeños invertebrados, que realizan importantes funciones ambientales como la degradación de materia orgánica, regulación de actividades de infiltración de agua y como almacenes de carbono, éste último representa el aspecto a considerar en la elaboración de planes de mitigación y adaptación ante el cambio climático.

Otro aspecto en el que el suelo impacta de manera importante es en el económico, debido a que es la base de la producción primaria en actividades como:

la agricultura, ganadería y desarrollo forestal, aunado a otros usos como la producción de bienes a partir de la cerámica y construcción de viviendas; sin embargo, de la misma forma que el agua o la atmósfera, no está exento de la problemática actual, ya que en todo el planeta millones de hectáreas de tierra fértil o con alguna otra utilidad, se pierden a causa de la erosión y degradación.

LEER MÁS AQUÍ
LEER MÁS ARTÍCULOS EN ESPAÑOL AQUÍ

Rebecca Burgess and Fibershed

/by

Author: Susan Clotfelter  | Published: May 6, 2016

In 2010, Burgess decided to spend an entire year wearing only apparel that had been produced within 150 miles of her home in Northern California. “I think of [Fibershed] as a framework, an open door,” Burgess says. “You’re invited to make relationships with farmers and ranchers and dyers and spinners, and learn things about compassion and care, and become of your place.” In California, the last cotton mill was closed in the 1990s, and the wool industry (including the milling sector) had shrunk considerably.

Burgess is the author of Harvesting Color, a book on botanical dyes. She has also spent time studying textile production in Southeast Asia, so she possessed a clear vision of her ultimate, if far-off goal. “I had physical, real-time experience working in small communities where people were growing dye plants, growing their fibers, and growing their food in multigenerational families and trading those textiles to get goods they couldn’t produce themselves,” she says. She had also examined urban textile production, where workers were housed in dormitories, separated from family and tradition. “They were structurally isolated and displaced from the land base, because there’s work in the city. There are multiple reasons why people move to the city, but the one that people talk about is jobs.”

Burgess noticed the intangible price textile workers were paying for those jobs. “I saw a lot of people who were not very happy,” she recalls. “There was such a contrast. In the textile villages, people were physically healthier, there was less crime, the elderly were taken care of, the children taken care of. There were multigenerational families centered around a strategic land base. And you start to realize that in the West, we’ve become so disconnected from production cycles, from how our consumption is impacting communities.”

KEEP READING ON INTERWEAVE

6 Reasons Local Food Systems Will Replace Our Industrial Model

/by

Author: John Ikerd  | Published: May 25, 2017 

A local, community-based food system certainly is not a new idea. It’s simply an idea that is being reassessed in response to growing public concerns about the current global food system. When I was growing up in south Missouri in the 1940s and early 1950s, our family’s food system was essentially local. I would guess close to 90 percent of our food either came from our farm or was produced and processed within less than 50 miles of our home. There were local canneries, meat packers, and flour mills to supply grocery stores and restaurants with locally grown food products. Over the years, the local canneries, meat packers and flour mills were consolidated into the giant agribusiness operations that dominate today’s global food system. Supermarkets and fast-food chains replaced the mom-and-pop grocery stores and restaurants.

Today, I doubt there are many communities in the United States who get more than 10 percent of their foods from local sources, as official estimates put local foods at well less than 5 percent of total food sales. Estimates of the average distance that food travels from production to consumption within the United States range from 1200 to 1700 miles. More than 15 percent of the food sold in the United States is imported, with more than 50 percent of fruits and 20 percent of vegetables coming from other countries. More than 30 percent of U.S. farm income is derived from agricultural exports to other countries. The local food system of my childhood has been transformed into the global food system of today. Most of these changes took place during a 40-year period, between the late 1950s and the late 1990s.

Today, we are in the midst of another transformation.

The local food movement is the leading edge of a change that ultimately will transform the American food system from industrial/global to sustainable/local. Organic foods had been the leading edge of the movement, growing at a rate of 20 percent-plus per year from the early 1990s until the economic recession of 2008. Growth in organics sales have since stabilized at around 10 percent per year. The organic food market reached $43.3 billion in sales in 2015—more than 5 percent of the total U.S. food market. Today, organic fruits and vegetables claim more than 10 percent of their markets. As organic foods moved into mainstream food markets, many consumers turned to local farmers to ensure the integrity of their foods. The modern local food movement was born.

How we got here

To understand the local food movement, it’s important to understand the birth of the modern organic movement. The organic movement has its roots in the natural food movement of the early 1960s, which was a rejection of the industrialization of American agriculture. Following World War II, the mechanical and chemical technologies developed to support industrial warfare were adapted to support industrial agriculture. The “back to the earth” people decided to create their own food system. They produced their own food, bought food from each other, and formed the first cooperative food buying clubs and natural food stores.

Concerns about the health and environmental risks associated with the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were not the only reasons they chose to grow foods organically. They were also creating and nurturing a sense of connectedness and commitment to taking care of each other and caring for the earth. The philosophy of organic farming was deeply embedded in their communities. To these food and farming pioneers, organic was as much a way of life as a way to produce food.

Organic farming and food production remained on the fringes of American society until the environmental movement expanded into mainstream society and science began to confirm the environmental and public health risks associated with a chemically-dependent, industrial agriculture. As organic foods grew in popularity, organics eventually moved into mainstream supermarkets. Except for restrictions on use of synthetic agrochemicals and food additives, organic foods then began to seem more and more like conventional industrial foods.

Consumers who were concerned about the ecological and societal consequences of industrial agriculture then began looking to local farmers to ensure the ecological and social integrity of their foods. Between 1994 and 2015, farmers markets increased in number from 1,755 to nearly 8,476. In the 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture, there were 12,000 CSAs (community supported agriculture) and an estimated 50,000 farmers selling direct to consumers by all means. Many farmers who use organic production practices don’t bother with organic certification. Their customers know and trust them to produce “good food.”

A more recent development in the local food movement has been the multiple-farm networks of local farmers. The networks may be food alliances, cooperative, collaboratives or food hubs. Grown Locally, Idaho’s Bounty, Viroqua Food Coop, Good Natured Family Farms and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative are examples of food networks of which I am personally aware. These alliances range in size from a couple dozen to a couple hundred farmers. The National Good Food Network lists more than 300 “food hubs”—although I cannot vouch for their success or authenticity.

Why local food is part of a larger movement that could actually “change everything”

The local food movement is so decentralized and dispersed that it is impossible to accurately estimate the size or importance of the movement. The USDA estimated the value of local food sales by farmers at $9 billion in 2015. This figure does not reflect the “retail value” of food sold by farmers to local restaurants or retailers. Virtually everywhere I go, I discover new local foods initiatives.

KEEP READING ON ALTERNET

Ranching’s Role in Building Healthier Soils, Video by UC Davis

/by

Author: University of California Davis | Published: April 2017 

Skyelark Ranch uses rotational grazing while raising sheep in Northern Calif. This can benefit plant growth, drought resistance, and the climate.

Skyelark Ranch is a pasture-based livestock ranch in Yolo County’s beautiful Capay Valley. In 2010, after several years of working in environmental conservation, Alexis and Gillies followed their passion for combining local, high-quality food production with sound environmental stewardship practices to a begin a life in sustainable livestock production.

WATCH THE VIDEO HERE

Superlative Alternative: Organic Cotton

/by

Author: Eleanor O’Neill | Published: May 25, 2017 

Today, cotton is the second most used fiber in apparel manufacture, after synthetics.

And I’ve found the subject of organic cotton one of the most frequently discussed when talking about sustainable fashion. Perhaps because it’s an easy concept to understand, in theory, and also because it is now widely accessible.

But what does organic really mean when it comes to cotton?

I’m often asked, what are the environmental benefits of organic vs conventional cotton production? How much more, on average, does a garment made of organic cotton cost? Is there a difference in the way it feels against your skin? And to be frank, there were only a few answers I felt comfortable giving until now. So I decided to dig a little deeper for everyone’s benefit.

Let’s start with a clear and digestible summary of what organic production means.

It is ‘a production system that sustains the health of soils, ecosystems and people. It relies on ecological processes, biodiversity and cycles adapted to local conditions, rather than the use of inputs with adverse effects.’ It ‘combines tradition, innovation and science to benefit the shared environment and promote fair relationships and a good quality of life for all involved.’ (Life Cycle Assessment for Organic Cotton, 2016).

What is organic cotton?

In a nutshell, it’s cotton that is not grown with the aid of chemicals or artificial substances but in a way that gradually and naturally builds soil fertility, and protects biodiversity.

KEEP READING ON THE HUFFINGTON POST