Recognizing Our Roots in the Earth

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Author: Alice Cunningham | Published: November 29, 2019

What’s your connection to the earth? I ask because many who pride themselves on eating sustainably, living lightly on the planet and being mindful in their lifestyle choices are taking important steps to reduce their impact on the planet. You may be among them.

These are choices that make sense and, if taken together, can be very beneficial, having an immense and positive impact on climate, air and water quality, and resource use. These actions drive a deeper understanding of and connection to the planet, but just how connected to the earth are you? By the earth, I’m not speaking metaphorically of the planet, but rather the actual earth under your feet.

Put simply: do you see the value of the soil?

This Tuesday, December 5th, is World Soil Day. The theme this year is “Caring for the planet starts from the ground.” That’s more than a clever pun – it’s a literal fact.

World Soil Day’s activities and programs have been established by the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization to communicate the importance of soil quality to food security, healthy ecosystems and human well-being. World Soil Day emerged in 2012 as an organic expression of the critical importance of soil to nations around the world; it was quickly officially adopted by the UN in 2014, a testament to the urgent need to protect the planet’s soil. Soil is so important that it’s part of the United Nation’s mission.

But, soil itself is too often taken for granted. True, it’s underfoot and not often thought about. But, soil isn’t dirt, even though it gets treated that way.

Members of the public don’t think about soil at all. It isn’t recognized as the source of all life, but it is that exactly – the point of origin from which everything terrestrial grows, the incubator that gives birth to all the nutrients, vitamins and minerals that we need – not merely to survive, but to thrive.

Our life is literally based on the soil. A staggering 95% of the food we eat is grown in soil, but 33% of our soil globally has already been degraded. Critically, soil isn’t a renewable resource: it takes centuries to create an inch of topsoil. That’s approximately 1,000 years for an inch of healthy soil to develop, complete with strong levels of organic matter, nutrients, fungi and more. That’s 1,000 years of nature’s bounty that we can destroy in just a couple of growing seasons.

That’s why it’s so critical that we take care of the soil. And yet – in prevailing models of industrial agriculture, soil is viewed differently. Inappropriate management, population pressure driving unsustainable intensification, and inadequate governance means that soil is constantly under pressure.

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Major New Scientific Research Finds That Organic Farming Can Feed the World

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A major new scientific report reveals how organic agriculture can help feed the world whilst reducing the environmental impacts, PETER MELCHETT, of the Soil Association delves into the data.

Author: Peter Melchett | Published: November 27, 2017

New scientific research has identified the important role that organic agriculture can play in feeding a global population of 9 billion sustainably by 2050.

Published in the journal Nature Communications, by scientists from the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) and the Research Institute of Organic Agriculture (FiBL), the key question the research examines is: “whether producing a certain total amount of food, in terms of protein and calories, with organic agriculture would lead to higher, or lower, impacts than producing the same amount of food with conventional agriculture”.

The scientists’ answer is that organic agriculture can feed the world with lower environmental impacts – if we cut food waste and stop using so much cropland to feed farm animals. The authors conclude: “A 100% conversion to organic agriculture needs more land than conventional agriculture but reduces N-surplus and pesticide use.”

Unsustainable diets

However, they go on to explain that, if food waste is reduced and arable land is not used to produce animal feed, with less production and consumption of animal products, ‘land use under organic agriculture remains below’ the current area of farmland.

The authors note that organic agriculture has faced claims that far greater land use and associated deforestation would be necessary to feed the world organically due to an average yield gap of 20% on intensive production. Yet when other sensible and necessary changes are made, organic farming can provide enough food for healthy diets, and organic food is produced with far fewer unsustainable inputs.

The Soil Association welcomes this study, which rightly looks at organic farming as part of an interconnected global food system, and which highlights the need to address the impacts of unsustainable diets, animal feed production, and food waste. Other commentators have commented on the report’s findings about the role of organic farming.

Alternative food

Dr Geoff Squire, Principal Scientist, Ecological Sciences, James Hutton Institute, said: “The models suggest that certain combinations of organic production area, reduction in food waste, and transfer of feed-producing to food-producing activities on arable land, coupled with greater use of nitrogen-fixing legumes can sustain the world’s 2050 population with no more than existing farmland.”

One thing that makes this study different to others is that it has designed a new global food system model which aims comprehensively to capture organic production systems for the first time.

The SOL model takes the FAO food systems projections for 2050 of different environmental impacts, such as land use, nitrogen surplus and deforestation. It then applies alternative food system scenarios to the model, including reducing food waste, lowering animal feed production, and lower inputs, especially of nitrogen, and lower yields of organic agriculture.

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A Growing Number of Young Americans Are Leaving Desk Jobs to Farm

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Author: Caitlin Dewey | Published: November 23, 2017

Liz Whitehurst dabbled in several careers before she ended up here, crating fistfuls of fresh-cut arugula in the early-November chill.

The hours were better at her nonprofit jobs. So were the benefits. But two years ago, the 32-year-old Whitehurst — who graduated from a liberal arts college and grew up in the Chicago suburbs — abandoned Washington for this three-acre farm in Upper Marlboro, Md.

She joined a growing movement of highly educated, ex-urban, first-time farmers who are capitalizing on booming consumer demand for local and sustainable foods and who, experts say, could have a broad impact on the food system. 

For only the second time in the last century, the number of farmers under 35 years old is increasing, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s latest Census of Agriculture. Sixty-nine percent of the surveyed young farmers had college degrees — significantly higher than the general population.

This new generation can’t hope to replace the numbers that farming is losing to age. But it is already contributing to the growth of the local-food movement and could help preserve the place of midsize farms in the rural landscape.

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Gear News: The North Face Launches New Carbon-Offsetting Beanie

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Author: Hayley Helms | Published: November 13, 2017

The North Face has come up with a unique way of offsetting the carbon effects that are associated with modern farming by implementing new practices at the ranch that produces the wool for their “climate beneficial” Cali Wool beanie ($45).

One of the brand’s suppliers, Bare Ranch, located in Sunrise Valley at the border of California and Nevada, has implemented methods that, according to Fast Company, “sequester around 4,000 metric tons of CO2, offsetting the emissions from roughly 850 cars” per year.

The process started when Fibershed, an organization that focuses on regional textile production, reached out to Bare Ranch as part of its research; they then worked with The North Face to help develop a “carbon farming” plan.

In all farming, carbon is produced. It’s part of the natural cycle of growing crops. The key in reducing the effects of carbon emissions isn’t to completely get rid of carbon – that’s just not possible. Instead, farms and ranches can redirect that carbon, and make sure that it stays in the soil, not in our atmosphere.

Methods of removing more carbon from the air than produced at Bare Ranch include planting intermittent, short term crops between crops that need to be replanted every few years, avoiding bare soil where carbon can escape, adding complimentary crops to fields that help enhance soil, planting trees that will lock carbon into the soil, and managing where sheep graze all help keep carbon in check.

For The North Face, they determined that the most environmental impact of its products happened in production and manufacturing, which is why they switched to wool, which has a lower impact than other materials.

The North Face plans to add more wool into their 2018 line, but acknowledges scaling the program to produce more, while remaining sustainable, will be a challenge.

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How a Seed Bank, Almost Lost in Syria’s War, Could Help Feed a Warming Planet

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Author: Somini Sengupta | Published: October 13, 2017

TERBOL, Lebanon — Ali Shehadeh, a seed hunter, opened the folders with the greatest of care. Inside each was a carefully dried and pressed seed pod: a sweet clover from Egypt, a wild wheat found only in northern Syria, an ancient variety of bread wheat. He had thousands of these folders stacked neatly in a windowless office, a precious herbarium, containing seeds foraged from across the hot, arid and increasingly inhospitable region known as the Fertile Crescent, the birthplace of farming.

Mr. Shehadeh is a plant conservationist from Syria. He hunts for the genes contained in the seeds we plant today and what he calls their “wild relatives” from long ago. His goal is to safeguard those seeds that may be hardy enough to feed us in the future, when many more parts of the world could become as hot, arid and inhospitable as it is here. But searching for seeds that can endure the perils of a hotter planet has not been easy. It has thrown Mr. Shehadeh and his organization, the International Center for Agricultural Research in the Dry Areas, or Icarda, squarely at a messy intersection of food, weather and war.

Icarda, though it received no state funding, was once known as a darling of the Syrian government. Based in Aleppo, its research had helped to make Syria enviably self-sufficient in wheat production. But a drive to produce thirsty crops also drained Syria’s underground water over the years, and it was followed by a crippling drought that helped to fuel the protests that erupted into armed revolt against the government in 2011.

Icarda, in turn, became a casualty of the war. By 2014, the fighting drew closer to its headquarters in Aleppo and its sprawling field station in nearby Tal Hadya. Icarda’s trucks were stolen. Generators vanished. Most of the fat-tailed Awassi sheep, bred to produce more milk and require less water, were looted and eaten. Mr. Shehadeh and the other scientists eventually sent out what they could — including a few of the sheep — and fled, joining half the country’s population in exile.

And Icarda’s most vital project — a seed bank containing 155,000 varieties of the region’s main crops, a sort of agricultural archive of the Fertile Crescent — faced extinction.

But the researchers at Icarda had a backup copy. Beginning in 2008, long before the war, Icarda had begun to send seed samples — “accessions” as they are called — to the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the so-called doomsday vault, burrowed into the side of a mountain on a Norwegian island above the Arctic Circle. It was standard procedure, in case anything happened.

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Climate-Smart Agriculture Sourcebook Summary

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Published: November 21, 2017

This booklet presents a summary of the contents of the second edition of the Climate-Smart Agriculture Sourcebook. The revised digital CSA Sourcebook contains updated versions of the original 18 modules and includes five new modules: Climate change, adaptation & mitigation; Integrated production systems; Supporting rural producers with knowledge; The role of gender; A guide to evidencebased implementation at the country level.

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Greenspace: Better Soil, Better Farms — That’s the Aim of New Program

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Author: Ryan Faircloth | Published: November 14, 2017

A collaboration between the Minnesota Board of Water and Soil Resources and the University of Minnesota Water Resources Center aims to promote best practices for soil health.

The two organizations last week announced a joint program, dubbed the Minnesota Office for Soil Health. The program will help teach farmers, conservationists and others how to best manage soil health.

The program will be run by University of Minnesota and state staff, and stakeholders from the Natural Resources Conservation Service and the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The Post Bulletin spoke with University of Minnesota Water Resources Center Director Jeff Peterson about the new partnership.

How did the idea for a Minnesota Office of Soil Health come about?

It’s certainly been a topic that’s of interest to a growing number of people. Our interest in it from our center stems from a lot of it being things that are beneficial, just like a win-win, because things that are beneficial for soil health also are beneficial for water resources. It’s a win-win from the perspective of, at least in the long term, there’s growing evidence … that it’s helpful for farmers and their production. It builds conditions for them to be more resilient to drought, for example.

Can you tell me a little bit about what the mission of this office is going to be?

We’re bringing the university’s resources to … be able to bring science-based information, or new evolving understanding of soil health, out to state … and federal agencies and the local units of government, the community of conservation professionals that work with farmers and ultimately producers themselves so that people can enhance their understanding from a solid research base of how to build soil health.

So a lot of outreach then?

It’s mostly education and outreach, but also a research component that will be helping to largely coordinate a lot of the research that’s already been going on and connect it. I should mention that economic analysis is part of the research and outreach piece too, in addition to soil science.
 
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Sustainable Style: Will Gen Z Help the Fashion Industry Clean up Its Act?

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Author: Emine Saner | Published: April 25, 2017

This week marks the fourth year since the Rana Plaza disaster, where 1,135 garment workers were killed, and thousands injured, when a building collapsed in Dhaka. Fashion Revolution Week was set up to mark the anniversary, when the myriad issues with fast fashion are much reported: the fossil fuels burned; the chemicals released; the landfill sites brimming with discarded clothes; the human cost of poor working conditions and pitiful wages. You don’t have to be a hardened environmental and social activist to realise this is an unbelievable mess. In a decade or two, we might look back at this period of mass consumption and wonder what on earth we were thinking.

That’s the hope anyway. Unravelling and remaking the entire clothing industry seems a daunting if not impossible task, but there are signs that a younger generation of consumers will demand something different, and a wealth of new brands are offering it. Sustainable clothing is, finally, being seen as a desirable option, with a smattering of cool brands rejuvenating the market. And a sprinkling of young celebrities championing it – perhaps most notably Emma Watson, who recently set up an Instagram account to document her eco-friendly fashion looks.

One brand, Reformation, has been heralded by Vogue, has more than 640,000 Instagram followers and its many fans include Taylor Swift and Alexa Chung. Yael Aflalo set up the ethical clothing company after a trip to China where she was shocked by the amount of pollution that textile and clothing manufacturing was causing. At the time, she says, people thought “I was crazy – there were basically no options for sustainable clothes that were actually cute.”

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Switching to Organic Farming Could Cut Greenhouse Gas Emissions, Study Shows

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Study also finds that converting conventionally farmed land would not overly harm crop yields or require huge amounts of additional land to feed rising populations

Author: Fiona Harvey | Published: November 14, 2017

Converting land from conventional agriculture to organic production could reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the run-off of excess nitrogen from fertilisers, and cut pesticide use. It would also, according to a new report, be feasible to convert large amounts of currently conventionally farmed land without catastrophic harm to crop yields and without needing huge amounts of new land.

The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, found that by combining organic production with an increasingly vegetarian diet, ways of cutting food waste, and a return to traditional methods of fixing nitrogen in the soil instead of using fertiliser, the world’s projected 2050 population of more than 9 billion could be fed without vastly increasing the current amount of land under agricultural production.

This is important, as converting other land such as forests, cerrado or peatlands to agricultural use would increase greenhouse gas emissions from the land. The authors found that an increase in organic farming would require big changes in farming systems, such as growing legumes to replenish nitrogen in the soil.

 

However, other scientists were cautious over endorsing the report’s findings, pointing out that the size of the world’s agricultural systems and their variability, as well as assumptions about future nutritional needs, made generalisations about converting to organic farming difficult to make.

Sir Colin Berry, emeritus professor of pathology at Queen Mary, University of London, said: “As for all models, assumptions have to be made and what weight you attach to which item can greatly change outcomes. The assumption that grassland areas will remain constant is a large one. The wastage issue is important but solutions, not addressed here, to post-harvest- pre-market losses will be difficult without fungicides for grains. Some populations could do with more protein to grow and develop normally, despite the models here requiring less animal protein.”

Les Firbank, professor of sustainable agriculture at Leeds University, said: “One of the question marks about organic farming is that it can’t feed the world. [This paper] concludes organic farming does require more land than conventional methods, but if we manage the demand for food by reducing waste and reducing the amount of crops grown as animal feed, organic farming can feed the world.”

He warned: “[These] models can only be viewed as a guide: there are many assumptions that may not turn out to be true and all these scenario exercises are restricted by limited knowledge [and] are fairly simplistic compared to real life, but realistic enough to help formulate policy. The core message is valuable and timely: we need to seriously consider how we manage the global demand for food.”

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Path to the 2018 Farm Bill: A Comprehensive Approach to Food and Farm Policy

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Published: November 1, 2017

NSAC Editor’s Note: On October 24, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) released its 2018 Farm Bill policy platform, An Agenda for the 2018 Farm Bill. NSAC has been a leader in agricultural policy for over 30 years, and has been instrumental in helping to develop some of our nation’s most successful agricultural programs for conserving natural resources, advancing the next generation of farmers, supporting agricultural research, and creating farm to fork market connections. NSAC’s 120 member organizations put together these recommendations after months of working closely with each other and with grassroots stakeholders. An Agenda for the 2018 Farm Bill provides a comprehensive vision for a more sustainable farm and food system based on the recommendations and experience of American family farmers and the organizations that represent them.

This is the first post in a multipart series on NSAC’s policy platform for the 2018 Farm Bill. The second post is on Beginning and Socially Disadvantaged Farmers and Ranchers, the third on Conservation, fourth on Local/Regional Food Economies, fifth on Seed Breeding and Research, and the last post will be on Crop Insurance Modernization.

Over the last year, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition (NSAC) held farm bill listening sessions, conducted surveys, and ran workshops across the country in an effort to gather feedback from farmers, ranchers, and food producing communities. The goal of these outreach efforts has been to better understand what programs and policies would best support a sustainable, equitable, and profitable agricultural system. Together with our 120 member organizations, NSAC used this stakeholder feedback to develop our 2018 Farm Bill recommendations and policy platform.

This initial post of our 2018 Farm Bill platform series is meant as an introduction to the platform and to NSAC’s overarching goals and priorities for the 2018 Farm Bill. In upcoming posts, we will introduce readers to the key takeaways and themes from our platform, including: Beginning and Socially Disadvantaged Farmers; Conservation; Regional Food Economies; Public Seed Breeding and Research; and Crop Insurance Reform.

Increasing Opportunity: Beginning and Socially Disadvantaged Farmers

Nearly 100 million acres of farmland (enough to support tens of thousands of new family farms and ranches) is set to change hands over the next five years – during the course of our next farm bill. To keep our agricultural economy strong, we need to facilitate the transfer of skills, knowledge, and land between current and future generations of family farmers. Like beginning farmers, socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers face many, often deep-seated barriers to accessing assistance from the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). The 2018 Farm Bill should support aspiring and socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers by:

  • Expanding access to credit, crop insurance, and affordable farmland
  • Increasing technical assistance and outreach services to underserved communities
  • Empowering farmers and ranchers with the skills to succeed in today’s agricultural economy
  • Encouraging a heightened commitment to advanced conservation and stewardship
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