Ethical Shopping: Are We Really On Board?

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Author: Guy Chiswick | Published: October 23, 2017

Questions around ethics in the fast fashion industry have been high on the agenda ever since the tragedy of the 2012 fire at the Tazreen Fashions factory in Dhaka. This horrific incident urgently brought to our attention the human cost of fast fashion, highlighting serious health and safety concerns and paving necessary steps for safer worker conditions.

 

Documentaries such as The True Cost and the BBC’s Blood, Sweat and T-shirts have also shown us the stark reality of where fast fashion comes from – and joined the dots between our insatiable appetite for new clothes and the production processes behind it.

 

According to the 2016 Ethical Consumer Markets Report, the value of all ethical spending in the UK grew to £38billion in 2015. This trend was also mirrored in the Organic Market 2017 report, which revealed sales of organic food and drink have grown by 7.1% year-on-year, whilst non-organic food continues to show decline.

 

So what are the reasons behind this shift, and which brands are already leading by example?

Why are we shopping more ethically?

One reason we’re thinking about shopping more ethically is because of increased awareness of the impact our shopping habits have on the environment. According to Greenmatch and multiple sources including Eileen Fisher, fast fashion is the second largest polluter in the world, after the oil industry. Unilever research revealed a third of consumers (33%) are now choosing to buy from brands they believe are doing social or environmental good, with 53% of shoppers in the UK and 78% in the US saying they feel better when they buy products that are sustainably produced.

However despite this feel-good factor and our moral compass imploring us otherwise, when it comes to consumers choosing between ethical brands and the mass market, the decision can often be made based on the cost factor. Ethical products are generally more expensive to produce because of their production processes, sourcing of ethically-produced raw materials, labour costs, and commitments to environmental conservation.

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Experts Talk Keys to Profitable Silvopasture

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Author: Paul Post | Published: October 6, 2017

Silvopasture can be a valuable tool for maximizing forage quality while benefiting livestock and generating income from woodlands.

But achieving such goals requires careful planning, attention to detail and lots of hard work. These were the main points covered in a well-attended silvopasture session at the Sept. 27-29 Grassfed Exchange, which brought together more than 500 farm and ranch owners from throughout the U.S.

The event, held at The Desmond Hotel in Albany, was highlighted by farm tours in New York’s Capital Region, plus a trade show, numerous networking opportunities and a variety of presentations, including “Keys to Profitable Silvopasture Systems.”

 

“The theme of this conference is regenerative agriculture, getting fertility back into the land,” said Joe Orefice, a Cornell Extension specialist. “Silvopasture is the ultimate way of doing that.”

Orefice is a former Connecticut state forester and is chairman of the Society of American Foresters National Agroforestry Working Group. He raises beef cattle on his 76-acre North Branch Farm in Saranac, near Lake Placid, in the Adirondacks.

In contrast to open grassland, silvopasture gives animals a place to graze among trees. In summer, cows seek out shady spots to keep cool, which reduces animal stress. But they can eat at the same time.

In winter, trees provide shelter from cold and wind.

“It’s an outdoor living barn,” Orefice said. “Silvopasture can be a component of your farm. It doesn’t have to be the whole farm.”

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How Wolfe’s Neck Farm Is Combating Climate Change

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It’s all in the dirt.

Author: Mary Pols | Published: October 29, 2017

This month, Wolfe’s Neck Farm got a new name, the Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment, and officially became part of an internationally trending agricultural movement that aims to fight climate change from the ground up.

Beyond some signs referring to a TransFARMation, the changes aren’t obvious. That’s because a big part of the rebranding has to do with a mission happening underfoot. Literally. This transformation is about using the soil on this centuries-old 626-acre farm on the shores of Casco Bay to combat climate change.

As to be expected with the ever-evolving world of agriculture, there’s a buzzword for the new approach: regenerative agriculture. But it’s not yet in widespread use, and Wolfe’s Neck’s executive director David Herring finds himself defining it a lot.

“I’ve had a lot of people say, ‘What is this thing about regenerative agriculture? What is that?’ ” Herring said. He smiles the smile of a man who knows that it is a select audience who wants to hear the nitty gritty of dirt. “And so our ability to explain it succinctly has been tested.”

Start with soil health. Richer soil, more dense with organic material, is the obvious path to stronger plants and better yields. That’s what compost is all about. Every farmer engaged in sustainable agriculture is already working toward this.

“These are not brand-new things,” Herring said. “None of these things are.” But there’s a growing consciousness – Herring even uses the word “revolution” – of the potential agricultural soils high in organic material have to trap more carbon, enough potential to halt or even roll back climate change.

TRAPPING CARBON

Improving soil will build a higher level of resilience; organic matter in soil absorbs and retains more water, making farms more drought and flood resistant. But the major premise behind the burgeoning regenerative agriculture movement is that improving soil health is also the ideal means to get excess greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere and into the soil. Soil already sequesters carbon. It has potential to sequester a lot more, if it has human help to increase its capacity to hold carbon. And those humans need some help figuring out the recipe to healthier soil – meaning richer in organic material that can trap the carbon. Based on the speed at which the climate is changing, the recipe needs to be developed quickly.

Which is where Wolfe’s Neck Center for Agriculture & the Environment comes in. It will continue to be the place to go for a hayride in the fall, seashore camping in the summer or a field trip to gawk at new calves and squeal at the cuteness of baby goats. It’s also still the home of a burgeoning organic dairy program designed to train the next generation of dairy farmers, thus bolstering a struggling sector of agriculture.

But it has a new role as an observatory for how known methods of enriching soil naturally are working and – this is key, given how climate change is already affecting us – a laboratory for figuring out how to improve soils rapidly.

Agriculture has to be part of the solution, Herring said, because it is a major contributor to climate change.

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Raise Your Fork Against Climate Change!

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From China, Slow Food rallies its network of food activists in 160 countries: “Let’s change the food system and stop climate change.”

Published: September 29, 2017

“We are all involved. Climate change is not tomorrow, it’s today, and it demands the united efforts of all of humanity. Each of our choices can make a difference, because it is the sum of all our individual actions that will drive change.” In front of the 400 delegates from 90 countries gathered in China to represent the Slow Food and Terra Madre network, Carlo Petrini reaffirmed that climate change is a reality, that it does not regard some distant future but the here and now. “It is Slow Food’s duty to work on climate change: There can be no quality, no good food, without respect for the environment, for resources and for human labor.”

During the Congress’s opening session delegates and experts from the Slow Food and Terra Madre network shared their experiences:

Remi Ie, Japan. President of Slow Food Nippon.

“In Japan, 2017 was a devastating year for fishers and farmers. Our country used to be known as ‘the land of four seasons’ but this year we experienced torrential rains that devastated the island of Kyushu. In the north, fishers could not catch salmon because of changes in the ocean currents; instead, fish species typical of temperate seas are being found. And everyone noticed the abnormal changes in the cherry tree blossom.”

Francesco Sottile, Italy. Lecturer in Arboreal Cultivation and Special Arboriculture at the University of Palermo.

“Europe saw a severe drought this summer, interspersed by sudden downpours that caused hydrogeological disasters. These exceptional events have dramatic effects on agriculture, history and traditional cultures, particularly in the most vulnerable rural areas. For many years climate change has been attributed to the incessant emissions from industry, and it is only recently that there is awareness about the role that agriculture and livestock farming play. But do different agricultural models exist? We have to decide to act once and for all, each of us with our own contribution at any level. Governments will have to meet targets for containing greenhouse gas emissions globally. At the same time, each one of us is able to make their own choices and contribute individually to delivering a better world.”

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Grazing Management That Regenerates Ecosystem Function and Grazingland Livelihoods

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Author: Richard Teague and Matt Barnes | Published: July 14, 2017

Adopting a systems view and regenerative philosophy can indicate how to regenerate ecosystem function on commercial-scale agro-ecological landscapes. Adaptive multi-paddock grazing management is an example of an approach for grazinglands. Leading conservation farmers have achieved superior results in ecosystem improvement, productivity, soil carbon and fertility, water-holding capacity and profitability. Their method is to use multiple paddocks per herd with short grazing periods, long recovery periods, and adaptively changing recovery periods, residual biomass, animal numbers and other management elements as conditions change. In contrast, much research on grazing management has not followed adaptive research protocols to account for spatial effects, for sufficient time to produce resource improvement, sound animal production, and socio-economic goals under constantly varying conditions on rangelands. We briefly review what management has achieved best outcomes and show how previous reviews of grazing studies were limited in scope and applicability to larger, more complex landscapes. We argue that future research can provide better understanding of how multi-paddock grazing management can improve socio-ecological resilience in grazing ecosystems, while avoiding unintended consequences of possible management options, by involving realistic scale and context, partnering with innovative land managers on real operations, applying adaptive treatments, and combining field studies with modelling approaches.

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World Hunger Is Increasing Thanks to Wars and Climate Change

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Author: Leah Samberg, The Conversation | Published: October 22, 2017

Around the globe, about 815 million people — 11 percent of the world’s population — went hungry in 2016, according to the latest data from the United Nations. This was the first increase in more than 15 years.

Between 1990 and 2015, due largely to a set of sweeping initiatives by the global community, the proportion of undernourished people in the world was cut in half. In 2015, UN member countries adopted the Sustainable Development Goals, which doubled down on this success by setting out to end hunger entirely by 2030. But a recent UN report shows that, after years of decline, hunger is on the rise again.

As evidenced by nonstop news coverage of floods, fires, refugees and violence, our planet has become a more unstable and less predictable place over the past few years. As these disasters compete for our attention, they make it harder for people in poor, marginalized and war-torn regions to access adequate food.

I study decisions that smallholder farmers and pastoralists, or livestock herders, make about their crops, animals and land. These choices are limited by lack of access to services, markets or credit; by poor governance or inappropriate policies; and by ethnic, gender and educational barriers. As a result, there is often little they can do to maintain secure or sustainable food production in the face of crises.

The new UN report shows that to reduce and ultimately eliminate hunger, simply making agriculture more productive will not be enough. It also is essential to increase the options available to rural populations in an uncertain world.

Conflict and Climate Change Threaten Rural Livelihoods

Around the world, social and political instability are on the rise. Since 2010, state-based conflict has increased by 60 percent and armed conflict within countries has increased by 125 percent. More than half of the food-insecure people identified in the UN report (489 million out of 815 million) live in countries with ongoing violence. More than three-quarters of the world’s chronically malnourished children (122 million of 155 million) live in conflict-affected regions.

At the same time, these regions are experiencing increasingly powerful storms, more frequent and persistent drought and more variable rainfall associated with global climate change. These trends are not unrelated. Conflict-torn communities are more vulnerable to climate-related disasters, and crop or livestock failure due to climate can contribute to social unrest.

War hits farmers especially hard. Conflict can evict them from their land, destroy crops and livestock, prevent them from acquiring seed and fertilizer or selling their produce, restrict their access to water and forage, and disrupt planting or harvest cycles. Many conflicts play out in rural areas characterized by smallholder agriculture or pastoralism. These small-scale farmers are some of the most vulnerable people on the planet. Supporting them is one of the UN’s key strategies for reaching its food security targets.

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An Epic Success Story

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Katie Forrest and Taylor Collins hit it big with their meaty protein bars. Now they’re determined to improve the lives of farm animals and the lands they graze

Author: Kimya Kavehkar | Published: October 10, 2017

One July morning, blessedly before the excruciating heat of summer descends, I’m hiking the Barton Creek Greenbelt with a couple of fit thirtysomethings and Lakota, their 8-year-old chocolate Labrador retriever. A thin haze drapes the sun, and the bone-dry creek bed we cross—in more verdant times a spot where people wade through rushing waters with beer cans in hand—is mostly dust.

Katie Forrest, a mountain biker and Ironman triathlete, and Taylor Collins, also a triathlete and a marathon runner, gracefully navigate slippery rocks and fallen branches along the trail with impressive speed. My short legs and not-at-all-athletic frame make it a struggle to keep up, as I try not to pant too heavily, even though I’m asking a lot of questions. The only other sounds are the jangling of Lakota’s collar, as she leads our pack confidently, and the crunching of the forest detritus beneath our feet.

The conversation turns to Forrest and Collins’ infant daughter, Scout.

“I think about the way she eats versus the way that I was raised to eat, and it’s so fundamentally different,” Forrest says, a baseball cap pulled low over her eyes. “Last night she had a grass-fed ribeye. She was just sucking the fatty part. I think her first solid food was pastured egg yolk, and the second was bone marrow. My first food was rice cereal and then mashed peas.”

Maybe Scout’s next solid meal will be the bison-bacon-cranberry bars her parents sell through their line of gourmet, grain-free, soy-free, dairy-free, gluten-free jerky products, Epic Provisions.

A few hours later I’m at Epic’s South Congress Avenue headquarters. Forrest and Collins had invited me to a lunchtime potluck during which they’re showing their staff a PowerPoint presentation about regenerative farming. The design of their offices can best be described as Anthropologie-meets-your-uncle’s-ranch-cabin. I head to the basement where about 20 employees are filling their plates in the kitchen and cracking open icy Topo Chicos before settling into their seats. I notice that one person is barefoot.

Forrest, 31, and Collins, 34, are at the front of the room fidgeting with the projector remote and a stack of notes in nearly the same outfits that they’d gone hiking in that morning; Collins has switched out his tennis shoes for flip-flops.

Epic looks, feels, and acts every bit an Austin born-and-bred company. The lack of pretention of its husband-and-wife founders is matched by their quiet determination to succeed and devotion to their mission to build much more than merely a thriving business.

Ever since Epic was purchased by packaged food titan General Mills in January 2016, Forrest and Collins have been able to step away from the day-to-day slog of running a profitable company and put themselves in the position of thought leaders hell-bent on altering the prevailing relationship between farm animals and grazing lands. Terms of the General Mills deal were not disclosed, but with Epic boasting annual revenue of about $20 million, one source told financial news site TheStreet that the purchase price was about $100 million.

That’s why they’ve gathered their staff here, to view slides depicting grasslands in various states of growth and to learn what words like “ruminants” mean. (The term refers to animals like goats and cows that must regurgitate their partially digested food to be chewed more than once.) “Once people start to learn about regenerative agriculture, it starts to change everything for them,” Collins says.

Long before they became evangelists for rotational grazing, they were students who first crossed paths in an Austin High School hallway in 2001. “It was the most intense emotional experience of my life, like earth-shaking,” Collins remembers of seeing Forrest for the first time. She felt much the same, but because they were a few years apart in age they had few opportunities to interact during that single year they overlapped at AHS.

They didn’t reconnect until three years later as students at Texas State University. They kept seeing each other when they walked through the same park every day to get to class. Then Forrest, a women’s studies major, called Collins, a physical therapy student, and asked if they could carpool. For their first date, they went to a modern dance performance as extra credit for one of her classes and grabbed a bite afterward at Magnolia Cafe. After dating for just three months, they moved in together, much to the chagrin of her parents.

Among the things that bonded them was their competitive spirits and shared pleasure in pushing their bodies to their physical limits. They didn’t fit the lazy college kid stereotype. For fun they’d take 10-hour bike rides together and participated in marathons and triathlons.

“Anything that gives us a little resistance that we can push into that helps us work towards accomplishing something is very, very rewarding in our lives,” Collins says.

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Women Farmers Are Leading Northern India From Subsistence to Regeneration

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The feminization of agriculture could mean healthier soil and forests, organic produce for urban markets, higher incomes for rural families

Author: Esha Chhabra | Published: October 20, 2017

Shanti Devi is racing around her farm in her sari, shooting at monkeys with a slingshot. Her tiny plot, at nearly 7,000 feet, has a glorious view across a tiered valley to the Himalayas. She grows herbs, onions and potatoes, and looks after wild apricot trees.

Devi works the farm alone — her husband works in a nearby village and her children work at jobs in Delhi. For additional income, she sells apricot shells to a local non-profit, which turns them into beauty products for markets in north India and Delhi. Her goal is simple: She wants to earn enough on the farm so her family can afford to return. Monkeys that pillage the fruit deprive her of income she badly needs.

“If they eat it all, what will I have left over?” she asks in Hindi.

New narrative

Women like Devi are changing the storyline in India’s remote rural regions, where in many places farming doesn’t produce even enough food for families. For decades, men and young people have left their small plots and migrated to India’s cities. The average farmer “is a 50-plus-year-old woman in the hills,” says Kalyan Paul, co-founder of the Pan Himalayan Grassroots Development Foundation, an organization based in Almora, Uttarakhand, the northern Indian state where Devi farms.

Those women are not letting their farms and villages slide into neglect. Rather, these unlikely entrepreneurs are leading a rural revival. Devi is part of a grassroots, women-led movement that is finding new sources of income. They are restoring the land with regenerative farming techniques that supply the country’s metro areas with organic products, medicinal plants and herbs.

Working cooperatively and newly networked with India’s urban centers and global markets, small-scale farmers, primarily women, represent a new force in Indian agriculture. Growing these women-led efforts will be an important part of meeting Sustainable Development Goal №13 for climate action (including “Strengthen resilience and adaptive capacity to climate-related hazards”) and №15 for “Life on Land” (including “promote the implementation of sustainable management of all types of forests, halt deforestation, restore degraded forests”).

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Role of the Fashion Industry in UN’s Sustainable Development Goals

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Author: Karen Newman and Cara Smyth | Published: October 23, 2017

Fashion is not a sector that exists in a vacuum. In fact, the fashion industry is not unlike any other key economic drivers; it is a key component of a global economy and certainly an important sector to consider when thinking about the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs).

Most remarkably, a new exhibit in New York at Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) explores just this. Curated by Paola Antonelli and Michelle Millar Fisher, Items: Is Fashion Modern? examines the impact that items of clothing and accessories have had on the world today, including what were considered revolutionary items including, the “Little black dress” and Levi’s 501 jeans.

But beyond the exploration of how such mainstream items like the sari and white t-shirt have shaped culture and influenced consumers, the exhibit features another important offering: providing a large-scale illustration depicting Glasgow Caledonian’s Fair Fashion Center and a process called the Quantum Redesign of Fashion.

The art form which takes up three large walls in the Museum may very well be the first of its kind to link to the work of the United Nations; in this case using the momentum of the new 2030 Agenda, to demonstrate the larger context of the complex apparel industry and how it informs the global marketplace.

The 2030 Agenda was adopted two years by more than 193 member states at the United Nations and were painstakingly negotiated to be universally applicable and integrate economic, social and environmental dimensions as part of 17 goals and 169 targets, which are also known as the Global Goals or SDGs.

Why Fashion?

So, what do the goals mean for an industry like fashion? If you consider that the fashion industry is one of the largest employers in the world, especially of women, with some estimates that women make up roughly 80% of the supply chain, it makes sense that fashion and apparel are involved in not only sustainability discussion– but development- where the sector is a powerful driver of job creation.

And not for nothing, fashion is a $2.5 trillion-dollar industry and considered a top user of natural resources and polluter of the communities in which it operates. It’s not surprising then that fashion as an industry is now having a moment, especially in the sustainability dialogue.

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Insectageddon: Farming Is More Catastrophic Than Climate Breakdown

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The shocking collapse of insect populations hints at a global ecological meltdown

Author: George Monbiot | Published: October 20, 2017

Which of these would you name as the world’s most pressing environmental issue? Climate breakdown, air pollution, water loss, plastic waste or urban expansion? My answer is none of the above. Almost incredibly, I believe that climate breakdown takes third place, behind two issues that receive only a fraction of the attention.

This is not to downgrade the danger presented by global heating – on the contrary, it presents an existential threat. It is simply that I have come to realise that two other issues have such huge and immediate impacts that they push even this great predicament into third place.

One is industrial fishing, which, all over the blue planet, is now causing systemic ecological collapse. The other is the erasure of non-human life from the land by farming.

And perhaps not only non-human life. According to the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, at current rates of soil loss, driven largely by poor farming practice, we have just 60 years of harvests left. And this is before the Global Land Outlook report, published in September, found that productivity is already declining on 20% of the world’s cropland.

The impact on wildlife of changes in farming practice (and the expansion of the farmed area) is so rapid and severe that it is hard to get your head round the scale of what is happening. A study published this week in the journal Plos One reveals that flying insects surveyed on nature reserves in Germany have declined by 76% in 27 years. The most likely cause of this Insectageddon is that the land surrounding those reserves has become hostile to them: the volume of pesticides and the destruction of habitat have turned farmland into a wildlife desert.

It is remarkable that we need to rely on a study in Germany to see what is likely to have been happening worldwide: long-term surveys of this kind simply do not exist elsewhere. This failure reflects distorted priorities in the funding of science. There is no end of grants for research on how to kill insects, but hardly any money for discovering what the impacts of this killing might be. Instead, the work has been left – as in the German case – to recordings by amateur naturalists.

But anyone of my generation (ie in the second bloom of youth) can see and feel the change. We remember the “moth snowstorm” that filled the headlight beams of our parents’ cars on summer nights (memorialised in Michael McCarthy’s lovely book of that name). Every year I collected dozens of species of caterpillars and watched them grow and pupate and hatch. This year I tried to find some caterpillars for my children to raise. I spent the whole summer looking and, aside from the cabbage whites on our broccoli plants, found nothing in the wild but one garden tiger larva. Yes, one caterpillar in one year. I could scarcely believe what I was seeing – or rather, not seeing.

KEEP READING ON THE GUARDIAN