Improving Africa’s Soils to Cut Emissions and Boost Food Security

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Authors: Keith Shepherd and Rolf Sommer | Published: August 2nd, 2017 

How we manage soils is crucial to tackling climate change. Today is Earth Overshoot Day, which aims to highlight the moment each year when our use of the planet’s resources tips into “overdraft”. The day helps to highlight why restoring landscapes, particularly soils, has benefits for food security, livelihoods and the climate.

The top metre of soils around the world contains about three times as much carbon as in our entire atmosphere. This means that soils can be a double-edged sword for tackling climate change.

Land-use change and degradation, such as clearing land for farming, releases the carbon bound up in soils, adding to the CO2 accumulating in the atmosphere. On the other hand, managing soils carefully and restoring their fertility means they can take up more carbon, helping to mitigate our CO2 emissions and thereby limiting climate change.

In a recent comment article in Nature, leading climate scientists identified achieving zero emissions from land-use changes and deforestation as one of six milestones that must be met within the next three years if we are to meet the goals set out in the Paris Agreement.

Restoring degraded lands is one promising option. For example, the 4 parts per 1000initiative (“4p1000”) aims to increase the carbon stored in the world’s soils by 0.4% per year in order to sequester the human-caused CO2 emissions that aren’t already absorbed by the land or oceans.

Recent analysis shows that 25-50% of this target (equivalent to 0.9-1.85bn tonnes of carbon per year) could be achieved on the 16 million square kilometres of suitable farmland across the world. This would sequester about 6-13% of all CO2 emissions from human activity.

Our research has identified several relatively simple, low-cost options for restoring African landscapes to help cut emissions from soils and even turn them into carbon sinks.

Here are three that are key to reaching zero emissions from land:

Soil and water conservation

Water is essential for productive soils, but it can also be disastrous. Heavy rainfall events – likely to become more intense as the climate warms – washes soil off the land, particularly hillsides or in areas with highly erodible soil types. This strips the land of its nutrients, reduces agricultural productivity, and clogs waterways and reservoirs, thus increasing costs for purifying drinking water.

KEEP READING ON CARBON BRIEF 

Carbon Farming: California Focus on Soil to Meet Climate, Water Goals

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Author: Enrique Gili | Published: July 31, 2017 

Soil’s ability to capture carbon and store water has led to an upsurge of interest in this often overlooked natural resource.

In California, a new program called the Healthy Soils Initiative is about to put unorthodox farming practices to the test. With modest grants of up to $50,000 administered by the California Department of Food and Agriculture (CDFA), a network of farmers and ranchers throughout the state will embark on a series of experiments in carbon farming.

The term refers to improving soil health by biological processes that limit the amount of synthetic chemicals applied to crops and adopting techniques aimed to reduce nutrient loss.

Kevin Muno is among the converts. He and his business partners at the Santa Ysabel Ranch run a cattle operation called the Land of Milk and Honey. Located about 40 miles northeast of downtown San Diego, it is the southernmost of the ranches testing the efficacy of carbon farming methods in California.

According to Muno, his goal is to restore the ecology of the landscape through a series of practices that he calls regenerative agriculture. The aim is to improve soil quality and to promote vigorous plant growth. By demonstrating the ecological services that carbon farming can provide, he and his partners believe they can prosper and conserve resources. “Humanity can benefit,” says Muno. “People in the city like clean air and water in their reservoirs. If we manage the landscape correctly, we can have those things.”

At the ranch, cattle move around on small areas of land meant to mimic the herding instincts of wild herbivores. Chomping on grass, urinating and defecating as they go, the cows consume, digest or trample every edible plant in the segment. The plant life is then allowed to recover as the cattle are moved on.

If things go as expected, the grassland will spring back more thickly than before. The soil will hold more water, and provide more organic matter essential to plant growth. Healthy soil, in turn, becomes a carbon sink thanks to the improved plant vigor.

Based on advice from the Carbon Cycle Institute (CCI), Muno is also using compost to improve the soil. A quarter-inch of it was applied to half an acre of the ranch. Over several years, technicians will monitor the site for carbon uptake and then compare the results of a carbon farming study done in Northern California.

The experiment is based on research conducted by scientists at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Marin Carbon Project, a nonprofit organization. Over three years, they determined that a single application of a half-inch of compost to grassland led to an additional ton of carbon stored per hectare.

While measuring the potential for carbon sequestration on grasslands was the primary focus of the study, there were multiple benefits. The findings showed spreading compost also boosted plant growth by 40-70 percent. In addition, each hectare of land absorbed up to 6,868 gallons of water in the topsoil, allowing the grassland to remain lush and vibrant for extended periods.

Muno would like to duplicate these results on his ranch. “We want to recharge the water table by putting carbon into the soil to the point where we can make streams flow again,” he says. If he succeeds, the next step will be to scale up. San Diego County is home to more than 5,000 small farms and 208,564 acres of ranchland.

The statewide soil program is the first of its kind in the United States, and the goal is to store carbon while treating the soil beneath farmers’ and ranchers’ feet as part of a living system. Advocates for adding compost to farmland and grassland believe dirt, much like humans, requires good food to remain healthy and productive. Good dirt, in turn, produces abundant plants with a healthy appetite for carbon.

“In a way, it’s like a vitamin or a probiotic boost, so the plants perform at a higher level,” said Pelayo Alvarez, a spokesperson for the CCI. Adding nutrients to the soil feeds micro-organisms beneficial to plant growth, which in turn enhances plants’ ability to absorb carbon through photosynthesis.

In short, the judicious use of compost could be an effective way to grow more grass, and serve to slow the pace of climate change.

To achieve those two objectives, California’s state legislature created a $7.5million fund to establish a set of protocols providing clear direction to farmers and ranchers. These include low-till and no-till farming techniques, composting and planting fruit and nut trees, where it is appropriate.

KEEP READING ON NEWS DEEPLY 

Bison Returned From the Brink Just in Time for Climate Change

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Author: Deena Shanker | Published: July 31, 2017 

Ted Turner owns more than 100,000 acres of pristine land in southwest Montana, complete with lush grassland and forested hills rolling with Douglas firs. There are populations of wolves, black and grizzly bears, deer, elk and pronghorn antelope ranging freely, some crossing from nearby Yellowstone Park. But the real stars of the Flying D Ranch are his thousands of bison, the American beast once hunted to the edge of extinction.

Turner’s bison don’t need much human intervention to thrive. They breed naturally in the early summer, when the grass is at its most nutritious, and they birth their calves in the fields. The bison can withstand temperature fluctuations and snowfall. The animals are vaccinated for common diseases, but routine antibiotics and synthetic growth hormones aren’t used. When one of the animals dies—on the Flying D Ranch, about 2 percent to 3 percent of the herd perishes each year—the carcass is simply left for scavengers. 

The enormous, shaggy animals are making a comeback as a chic, healthy and environmentally friendly source of meat. But to those in the industry, the animals are just the final piece in a larger ecological puzzle. “The grass business is the business we’re in,” said Mark Kossler, vice president of ranch operations at Turner Enterprises Inc. Keep the grass growing, the philosophy goes, and the rest of the ecosystem will follow. In other words: If you grow the grass, your bison will thrive.

And the bison business is thriving. The meat is healthier than beef, with more protein and less fat than salmon, and it is also more lucrative for ranchers. Nearly 60 percent of bison marketers reported an increase in demand, and 67 percent said they were planning to expand their businesses, according to a survey in May by the National Bison Association, an industry group.

Perhaps what makes this growth most surprising is that it coincides with challenging prices for bison meat. A pound of ground beef retails for $4.99 per pound at the moment, according to USDA data. Ground bison currently sells for more than twice that price, at $10.99 per pound. The past three years have seen a 25 percent growth in sales in the retail and food service sectors, according to the trade group, bringing in about $350 million in 2016.

The bison industry is a bit uncomfortable with a price climb that has no end in sight. There is general concern that if it continues, consumers will eventually stop buying. Ranchers are still scared by a market crash in the early 2000s. Nobody wants the bison bubble to burst again. “We don’t want to price ourselves out of the market,” Kossler said.

Bison keeps flying off store shelves—and not just at farmer’s markets and Whole Foods Market Inc. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. and Costco Wholesale Corp. are also sellers, and many ranchers offer direct sales online. In 2016, General Mills Inc.acquired EPIC Provisions, whose Bison Bacon Cranberry Bar, made with 100 percent grass-fed bison, is its bestseller. To keep up, bison backers just announceda new commitment for bison herd restoration: One million bison in North America by 2027, more than doubling the current estimated 391,000.

For now, at least, nature is taking care of bison and the people who raise it, including those in the more than 60 Native American tribes across 19 states working with the NBA. But the bison industry, unlike some of its peers in meat production, is keenly aware that climate change is a looming threat to the health of the herds.

Most farmers and ranchers speak of climate change in hushed tones, if at all, probably because they’re considered part of the problem (PDF). At the July International Bison Conference in Big Sky, Montana, however, climate change was the central theme.

Conference attendees included babies, 6-year-olds, teenagers, millennials, mid-life career changers and grandparents. (“My grandkids call me ‘Buffalo,’” one attendee said.) Amongst the crowds, there seemed to be a consensus that the climate was changing and the bison industry would need to adapt.

In a giant conference room at the Big Sky Resort, about 600 ranchers assembled to listen to James Hurrell, the director at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, deliver the keynote presentation on the impacts—past, present and future—of a changing climate. An audible gasp was heard in response to a slide about the warmer temperatures expected by the end of the century, and someone in the audience let out a “whoa” in response to predictions of 100-degree-plus days to come.

In a different presentation, ecologist Joseph Craine presented research showing that the warming temperatures were reducing the protein in grass, leading to smaller bison. He urged the ranchers to pay close attention to (and share) what their animals are eating as they naturally seek out protein. “Everyone has a story on strange things their bison eat,” he said. That information could help everyone.

“Ag is risky and it’s getting riskier from a climate perspective,” Dannele Peck, director of the USDA’s Northern Plains Climate Hub told conference attendees. The agency is working to gather information from, and distribute information to, farmers and ranchers about short-term extreme weather events, as well as long-term climate-related changes. While the websites’ tools, such as climate projections and soil data, are not specifically built for bison, Peck urged the ranchers to use them. After the presentation, she said she was “really hopeful” that the USDA’s Agricultural Research Service will fare well in the final Trump administration budgets.

For many bison ranchers, the need for a symbiotic relationship with the environment is clear. “This organization is fundamentally different, a conservation organization that works very closely with sustainable farming organizations,” said Tom Barthel, the owner of Snake River Farm in Minnesota. He raises bison, cattle, hogs and, according to his business card, “damn fine horses.” Not only do his bison live well on his ranch, they die well, too. The bison are pasture harvested—slaughtered in the field without ever knowing what hit them. He sells his meat directly, and—because bison cooks a little differently than typical beef—includes cooking instructions with his invoices. “These are the cowboys’ cowboys,” he said of the people that become bison ranchers. They care not just about money, but about their land and animals as well.

KEEP READING ON THE GUARDIAN 

Food and Farming: Two Futures

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Author: Vandana Shiva | Published: July 12, 2017 

The slogan was that there would never again be scarcity of food because we can now make “bread from air”.

There are two distinct futures of food and farming. One leads to a dead end. A dead planet: poisons and chemical monocultures spreading; farmers committing suicide due to debt for seeds and chemicals; children dying due to lack of food; people dying because of chronic diseases spreading due to nutritionally empty, toxic commodities sold as food and climate havoc wiping out conditions for human life on Earth.

The second leads to the rejuvenation of the planet through rejuvenation of biodiversity, soil, water, rejuvenation of small farms diverse, healthy, fresh, ecological food for all.

The first path is industrial, and was paved by the poison cartel, which was born during the war to create chemicals that can kill people. After the wars they redeployed war chemicals as agrichemicals — pesticides and fertilisers — we were told we can’t have food without poisons.

Explosives that were made by burning fossil fuels at high temperature to fix atmospheric nitrogen were later used to make chemical fertilisers. The slogan was that there would never again be scarcity of food because we can now make “bread from air”.

There was the exaggerated claim that artificial fertilisers would increase food production and remove all ecological limits that land puts on the agriculture. Today the evidence is growing that artificial fertilisers have reduced soil fertility, reduced food production and contributed to desertification, water scarcity and climate change.

In the 1990s, we were told we would starve without genetically modified organisms (GMOs) brought to us by the same poison cartel. There was an exaggerated claim that GMOs would remove all limits of the environment, grow food in deserts and toxic dumps. Today we have only two GMO applications: herbicide resistance and Bt toxins in crops. The first was claimed to control weeds but has created superweeds. Bt crops were supposed to control pests but they have created new pests and superpests. Bt cotton has pushed thousands of farmers to suicide.

Now we are being told “big data” will feed us. Monsanto calls it “digital agriculture” based on “big data” and “artificial intelligence”. It has started to talk about “farming without farmers”. This is why the suicide epidemic of Indian farmers and farmers’ crisis has drawn no response from the government. Because they are blindly paving the next phase on the dead end highway.

Monsanto’s partnership with Atomwise allows making a guess which molecules will give Monsanto the next possible pesticide. This is not the intelligence for sustainable management of pests. Just the narrow bet on the next poison. It is turning life into a digital casino.

This is like playing poker on the deck of the Titanic while the ship is sinking.

In 2013, Monsanto acquired world’s largest climate data corporation, Climate Corporation, for $1 billion. In 2014, it acquired the world’s largest soil data corporation, Solum Inc. Climate Corporation does not bring to farmers the knowledge that the solution to climate change lies below our feet, in the soil. It sells “data”.

Solum Corporation does not work with farmers to understand the rich soil food web — the bacteria, the fungi, the earthworms. It sells data.

But data is not knowledge. It is just another commodity to make the farmer more dependent.

The farmer is being told s/he must outsource his/her mind to Monsanto. This is the next step in a dead end future that ignores the intelligence of seeds, plants, soil organisms, our gut bacteria, farmers and our grandmothers.

We can sow the seeds of another future. All over the world, small farmers and gardeners are already implementing this agriculture, preserving and developing their soils, their seeds, practising agroecology. They are feeding their communities with healthy and nutritious food while rejuvenating the planet. They are thus sowing the seeds of food democracy — a food system in the hands of farmers and consumers, devoid of corporate control, poisons, food miles and plastics; a food system that nourishes the planet and all humans.

Contrary to the myth that small farmers should be wiped out because they are unproductive and we should leave our food future in the hands of the poison cartel, surveillance drones and spyware, small farmers are providing 70 per cent of global food using 30 per cent of the resources that go into agriculture. Industrial agriculture is using 70 per cent of the resources to create 40 per cent of the greenhouse gas emissions, while providing only 30 per cent of our food. This commodity-based agriculture has caused 75 per cent of the destruction of soils, 75 per cent of the destruction of water resources, and pollution of our lakes, rivers and oceans, 93 per cent of crop diversity has been pushed to extinction through industrial agriculture.

KEEP READING ON SEED FREEDOM

How, and Why, Some Farmers Are Bringing Livestock Back to the Prairie

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Author: Amy Mayor | Date Published: August 1, 2017 

On a cloudy summer day, Iowa farmer Wendy Johnson lifts the corner of a mobile chicken tractor, a lightweight mesh-covered plastic frame that has corralled her month-old meat chickens for a few days, and frees several dozen birds to peck the surrounding area at will. Soon, she’ll sell these chickens to customers at local markets.

The demand for beef, pork and chicken raised on smaller farms closer to home is growing. Now, some Midwest farmers, like Johnson, are exploring how to graze livestock to meet those demands while still earning a profit.

Johnson runs Joia Food Farm on land she rents from her family, which has a conventional corn and soybean operation near Charles City, Iowa. She transitioned some fields to organic for corn and soybeans but also raises several types of livestock.

“Before we just let them out and day range, we make sure they know and understand that this is their home,” Johnson says, “so they go back into it.”

From now on, the chickens will be free to forage and peck during the day. The portable coop will keep them safe at night.

Most of the meat in grocery stores comes from huge farms and ranches that gain efficiency through economies of scale, and bring us cheap burgers, chops and wings. Those farms can be rough on the environment, generating massive amounts of animal waste and depleting the soil. Johnson’s approach relies on grazing different types of animals on the same land in a carefully controlled pattern, which ideally will enhance the land they roam. When used with several different animals, the technique is sometimes called multi-species grazing.

Johnson plans to rotate sheep through a series of small paddocks, followed by the meat chickens. The animals will eat what they please and fertilize with their waste. Laying hens and turkeys roam freely about her farm and yard. And she plans for pigs to eventually graze on organic crop fields where their natural rooting behavior should help improve soil health.

Farmers like Johnson are hoping creative approaches to providing meat, often at a premium, to customers who care more about farming methods than price will improve cropland and wildlife habitat while also helping them earn a profit.

“A multi-species open pasture system has a higher level of animal welfare,” says Will Harris of White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, Ga. “I believe it is more regenerative for the land and I think it benefits rural economies.”

Harris pasture-raises cattle, hogs, sheep, goats, rabbits and five types of poultry. It sounds chaotic, and Harris says it requires careful planning.

KEEP READING ON NPR

Fertilizers, a Boon to Agriculture, Pose Growing Threat to U.S. Waterways

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Author: Tatiana Schlossberg  | Published: July 27, 2017 

Nitrogen-based fertilizers, which came into wide use after World War II, helped prompt the agricultural revolution that has allowed the Earth to feed its seven billion people.

But that revolution came at a cost: Artificial fertilizers, often applied in amounts beyond what crops need to grow, are carried in runoff from farmland into streams, lakes and the ocean. New research suggests that climate change will substantially increase this form of pollution, leading to more damaging algae blooms and dead zones in American coastal waters.

A study published Thursday in Science concludes that eutrophication, excessive nutrient enrichment, is likely to increase in the continental United States as a result of the changes in precipitation patterns brought by climate change. Heavier rains caused by warmer temperatures will cause more agricultural runoff, sluicing more nutrients into rivers, lakes and oceans.

The authors found that future climate change-driven increases in rainfall in the United States could boost nitrogen runoff by as much as 20 percent by the end of the century.

“When we think about climate change, we are used to thinking about water quantity — drought, flooding, extreme rainfall and things along those lines,” said Anna Michalak, a professor of global ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science in Stanford, Calif., and one of the authors of the study. “Climate change is just as tightly linked to issues related to water quality, and it’s not enough for the water to just be there, it has to be sustainable.”

Excess nitrogen from the fertilizers can cause eutrophication in the ocean, which can lead to harmful algae blooms or hypoxia — reduced levels of oxygen that create conditions in which organisms can’t survive.

The study’s authors looked at three emissions scenarios — high, stable and falling — in both the near and far future in more than 2,100 “subbasins” or watersheds in the continental United States.

KEEP READING ON THE NEW YORK TIMES 

How the Food Industry Can Help Reverse Climate Change

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Author: Katy Askew | Published: July 25, 2017 

According to the latest data from the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA), average global temperatures in March were 1.05°C higher than when records began in 1880. Scientific consensus – which is reflected in the Paris Climate Accord – places the ‘point of no return’, when global warming reaches dangerous levels, at 2°C. 

The climate clock is ticking.

Estimates vary as to how long we have left to stabilise warming below this level. The Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) calculates this time based on the premise that we can emit a maximum of 760 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere between now and 2100. At present, we are emitting 40 gigatons of CO2 each year. That’s 1,268 tons per second. At current rates, we have a little over 18 years before our carbon budget is spent, the MCC says. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests if humans carry on with a “business as usual” approach, the Earth’s average temperature will rise by between 2.6°C and 4.8°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

For some climate scientists, however, this estimate could be optimistic. A 2016 paper published in Scientific Advances, under lead author Tobias Friedrich of the of the University of Hawaii, argues temperature rises due to greenhouse gas emissions are “strongly dependent on the climate background state”, with “significantly larger values attained during warm phases”. 

In other words, the hotter it gets, the quicker the temperature is likely to rise. According to this paradigm, at current emission levels, the average global temperature could rise by between 4.78°C and 7.36°C by 2100. 

The food industry is particularly vulnerable to climate change. As the World Food Programme and Met Office food insecurity map shows, areas in Africa, the Middle East and Asia are already vulnerable to food insecurity and global warming brought about by rising emissions that are set to deepen the problems faced in these regions. 

“Changes in climatic conditions have already affected the production of some staple crops, and future climate change threatens to exacerbate this. Higher temperatures will have an impact on yields while changes in rainfall could affect both crop quality and quantity,” the WFP warns. 

The integrated global nature of the food industry supply chain – which is reliant on crops such as cocoa and coffee, as well as coconut and palm oil, that are internationally sourced – mean large-scale food manufacturers in Europe and North America, where the WFP says food insecurity is negligible, are far from immune to the negative consequences of global warming.

The food industry and Scope 3 emissions

The food industry is also one of the largest carbon emitters. For instance, if both direct and indirect emissions are taken into account, over 30% of the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the food and drink sector, environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth notes. 

Andrew Nobrega, the North American investment director at France-based PUR Projet, which looks to help companies regenerate and protect ecosystems, that the food sector is already taking action to address emissions, from investments in renewables to carbon offsetting. 

Speaking during a Climate Collaborative event in May, Nobrega notes: “Many organisations attempt to both value and address Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions within their supply chain.” These emissions include those directly from production, such as efforts to lower energy use, and indirect emissions such as transportation. “There is an opportunity to look a little bit further and look at Scope 3 emissions,” Nobrega says. 

Scope 3 emissions include those produced by raw material processing and production and, Nobrega says, these account for 40-50% of a product’s total emissions. 

PUR Projet specialises in providing supply chain management for corporations that reflect “positive carbon actions and the need to cut deforestation in commodity sourcing” and it operates projects in Latin America and other tropical forested regions.  

To address Scope 3 emissions directly, investment can be targeted at the farm level to promote ecosystems and biodiversity, stabilise yields, reduce costs for the farmers and provide alternative income opportunities and help to adapt to climate change and reduce pressure on their systems, Nobrega suggests. Ecosystem restoration can be achieved through agroforestry practices, such as insetting trees, rotating crop cycles and utilising non-chemical fertilisation methods. 

“We are taking a unit of climate mitigation and we are seeking to address climate smart agriculture and the regeneration of forests in some cases but also decreasing deforestation in the first place,” Nobrega explains. 

“Agroforestry itself is a carbon sequestration measure… and by the provision of sustainable timber and mitigating loss of yields you actually reduce the need for these farmers to go further into existing forested lands to degrade either for more agricultural land, illegal timber harvesting or something of that nature. So you are both engaging climate action on the parcel level and reducing the need for degradation outside of the parcel.”

Preventing deforestation has been flagged as a priority by global chocolate giants, companies reliant on cocoa. Earlier this year, companies including Nestle, Mondelez International, Hershey, Ferrero and Mars announced plans to work together to “end deforestation and forest degradation in the global cocoa supply chain”.  

The joint initiative, which also has the backing of NGOs and other stakeholders, will move to “develop and present a joint public-private framework of action to address deforestation” at the COP 23 UN climate change talks in Bonn in November. It will initially focus on Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the world’s leading producers of cocoa, where the farming of the commodity is a driving force behind rapid rates of deforestation.

Regenerative agriculture

While addressing deforestation helps to cut Scope 3 emissions for some products, climate smart agriculture can also help to take carbon from the atmosphere and put it back in the ground through photosynthesis. 

For this to work, you have to start with healthy soil, Tim LaSalle of California State University and Chico State, told an event focused on climate change running alongside the Natural Products Expo West food industry trade show in California earlier this year. 

KEEP READING ON JUST-FOOD

Dirty Dairy: Why Consumers Need to Force Ben and Jerry’s to Go Organic

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Author: Ronnie Cummins | Published: July 25, 2017 

The Vermont brand has been built on a bucolic image of cows grazing on endless pastures . . . Ben & Jerry’s ice cream and other Vermont companies have used this idyllic imagery to sell their products. Gone are the days, however, when most of Vermont’s cows were grazing in spectacularly scenic landscapes. Now a majority of Vermont’s cows are locked up in . . . ‘confined animal feeding operations’ or CAFOs . . . grazing on concrete with a diet rich in GMO corn and pesticides. – “Vermont’s GMO Addiction: Pesticides, Polluted Water and Climate Destruction,” Regeneration Vermont

The most important thing we can do today as conscious consumers, farmers and food workers is to regenerate public health, the environment and climate stability. We can do this most readily by moving away from industrial, GMO and factory-farm food toward an organic, pasture-based, soil-regenerative, humane, carbon-sequestering and climate-friendly agriculture system.

What’s standing in the way of this life-or-death transformation? Rampant greenwashing. The proliferation of $90 billion worth of fraudulently labeled or advertised “natural” and “socially responsible” food products in the U.S. confuses even the most well-intentioned of consumers and lures them away from purchasing genuine organic or grass-fed products.

Perhaps no company personifies greenwashing more than Vermont-based Ben & Jerry’s.  Ben & Jerry’s history—a start-up launched by two affable hippies, from a renovated gas station in Burlington, Vt., —is legendary. Despite selling out to Unilever in April 2000, the brand’s handlers have preserved its quirky, homespun image, and masterfully convinced consumers that Ben & Jerry’s has never strayed from its mission: “to make the world a better place.”

As the New York Times reports, the Organic Consumers Association (OCA) recently sent samples of Ben and Jerry’s top-selling ice cream brands to an independent testing lab for analysis. Ten out of 11 samples tested positive for Roundup (glyphosate and AMPA) herbicide contamination

So much for making the world a better place.

Compare the Ben & Jerry’s test results with the results of our testing of organic brands, brands that use organic milk from farms that are actually making the world a better place. Three out of four nationally distributed organic ice cream brands tested negative for Roundup contamination (only Whole Foods “365” brand was contaminated).

A history of stalling on organic

Twenty-four years ago, anti-GMO food activists, including the Pure Food Campaign (OCA’s predecessor), successfully pressured Ben & Jerry’s and a number of other leading dairies to prohibit the use of America’s first genetically engineered food product, Monsanto’s recombinant Bovine Growth Hormone (rBGH). Now marketed by drug giant Elanco (Eli Lilly), rBGH is linked to increased risk of human breast and colon cancer, a greater use of antibiotics in animal feed, and damage to cow’s health.

Several groups, including the OCA, subsequently asked Ben & Jerry’s to move beyond just prohibiting their dairy cows from being injected with rBGH. We asked them to go 100 percent organic, which would have required the company to ban its dairy suppliers from feeding their cows GMO corn and grain, and to use only organic ingredients in its flavors. But even before Ben & Jerry’s was bought out by Unilever, company founder Ben Cohen told Vermont Food activist Michael Colby “that Ben & Jerry’s was not going to transition to organic because it wouldn’t allow them to ‘maximize profits.’ “ 

Since 1994, Ben & Jerry’s, the $1.5-billion-per-year flagship brand of the second-largest multinational food corporation in the world, Unilever (annual sales $60 billion), has cashed in big time on its “rBGH-free” policy, advertising its brand, over and over again, as “all natural,” “GMO-free,” “fair trade,” “climate-just,” and “socially responsible.”

Despite repeated calls from consumer groups to stop advertising its ice-cream as “natural” or “all natural,” given that it is derived from cows raised almost exclusively on GMO corn forage (grown with Roundup Ready, neonic-, and BT-spliced seeds), laced with non-organic ingredients, sprayed heavily with Roundup and other pesticides, Ben & Jerry’s continues to greenwash and lie. The company recently (June 18, 2017) described its mission as:

To make, distribute and sell the finest quality and euphoric concoctions with a continued commitment to incorporating wholesome, ingredients and promoting business practices that respect the Earth and the Environment.

After more than a decade of dodging consumer, farmer, animal welfare, environmental and farmworker pleas to stop greenwashing and to equitably source its milk from cows grazing on organic pasture, Ben & Jerry’s continues to stall. Instead, Ben & Jerry’s sources its milk from St. Alban’s, a 400-farmer dairy co-op that is increasingly dominated by large factory farm-type dairy operations. To feed their cows, farmers routinely spray tons of pesticides, including Roundup, atrazine and metolachlor, on fields of GMO corn grown from neonic-coated and BT toxin seeds. They also apply tons of soil-killing, climate-disrupting nitrogen fertilizers that pollute Vermont’s streams, rivers and lakes.

Petitions and protests calling for Ben & Jerry’s to stop its suppliers from exploiting farmworkers, confining dairy cows and driving small dairy farmers into bankruptcy, have produced nothing more than vague promises of “respecting the Earth” and supporting rural economic justice.

Enough is enough. Vermont and national public interest organizations have lost our patience. It’s time for Unilever and Ben & Jerry’s to move beyond greenwashing to decisive action. It’s time for Ben & Jerry’s to announce it will immediately begin transitioning to 100-percent organic. Otherwise conscious consumers have no choice but to launch a national and, if necessary, international protest campaign and boycott.

Vermont activists demand major changes from Ben and Jerry’s

Regeneration Vermont, a broad-based coalition of consumers and farmers, has repeatedly asked Ben & Jerry’s and Unilever to sign a six-point pledge to go 100-percent organic over a three-year transition period. Here’s what the groups want Ben & Jerry’s to pledge:

1. A transition away from GMO crops and toxic pesticides/fertilizers and toward regenerative organic agricultural methods.
2. Fair wages for farmers, including premiums based on regeneration benchmarks and assistance in the transition toward regenerative methods.
3. Economic justice for farm workers, fair and livable wages, decent housing and social and cultural dignity.
4. Adoption of climate remediation techniques, beginning with an emphasis on healthy soils and cover-cropping for carbon sequestration and erosion control.
5. Humane treatment of farm animals, a phase-out of confinement dairies and a transition back to grassland grazing and grass-based feed for ruminants.
6. Cleaning up and protecting our watersheds, streams, rivers, ponds, lakes, and groundwater.

A trail of toxins

Recent reports published by Regeneration Vermont reveal that Ben & Jerry’s suppliers, and Vermont and U.S. (non-organic) dairy farmers in general, have gone backward, rather than forward over the past 15 years in terms of environmental sustainability, food safety, nutrition, greenhouse gas pollution, water pollution, animal welfare, farmworker justice, and preservation of family farms.

Chemical fertilizer use has also almost doubled in Vermont since GMOs began to dominate the market 15 years ago. 

So much for Monsanto’s claims that GMO crops would reduce the use of toxic pesticides and water- polluting and climate-destabilizing nitrogen fertilizers. Not to mention Ben & Jerry’s claim that it is “non-GMO” and “environmentally responsible.”

Among Regeneration Vermont’s finding are the following:

• An astounding 97 percent of Vermont’s field corn, the major component of a non-organic dairy cow’s diet, is now GMO (Roundup Ready, Bt-spliced, neonic seeds). This is the highest percentage of any state in the U.S.

• Herbicide use has increased over 100 percent-per-acre in Vermont since Monsanto’s GMO corn came on the market, with recent heavy use of atrazine, metholachlor, simazine, pendimethlin, glyphosate (Roundup), acetochlor, dicamba, and alachlor.

As Regeneration Vermont states in its report:

Regulators have determined that five of these eight most used herbicides [in Vermont] are possible or probable human carcinogens, the remaining three are suspected carcinogens. Seven of the eight are possible or probable endocrine disruptors (the other one is a suspected to be an endocrine disruptor). All eight have been determined by regulators and academics to cause birth or developmental defects and contaminate drinking water and public waters with dangerous chemicals that have long-term persistence. Atrazine, simazine, acetachlor, and alachlor have lost their registration in the EU, and are effectively banned.

The threat of #DirtyDairy and factory farms

Millions of health-minded Americans, especially parents of young children, now understand that cheap, non-organic, genetically engineered, industrial and factory farm food is hazardous. Not only does chemical- and energy-intensive factory farming destroy the environment, destabilize the climate, impoverish rural communities, exploit farm workers, inflict unnecessary cruelty on farm animals, and contaminate the water supply, but the end product itself is inevitably contaminated and inferior in nutritional terms, in this case in comparison to 100% grass-fed and organic milk and dairy.

America’s green-minded consumers understand that industrial agriculture poses a terminal threat to the environment and climate stability. A highly conscious and passionate segment of the population is beginning to understand that converting to non-chemical, non-genetically engineered, energy-efficient, carbon-sequestering organic/regenerative farming practices, and drastically reducing food miles by re-localizing the food chain, are essential preconditions for stabilizing our out-of-control climate and preparing our families and communities for future energy and resource shortages.

A critical mass of the global grassroots—consumers, farmers, activists—now realize that unless we act quickly, global warming and climate chaos will soon severely disrupt industrial agriculture and long-distance food transportation, leading to massive crop failures, food shortages, famine, war, and pestilence. Even more alarming, accelerating levels of greenhouse gases will soon push global warming to a tipping point that will melt the polar icecaps and possibly unleash a cataclysmic discharge of climate-destabilizing methane, now sequestered in the fragile arctic tundra.

Thanks to this growing consumer awareness—and four decades of hard work—the organic community has built up a $50-billion “certified organic” and $5-billion 100% grass-fed food and products sector that prohibits the use of genetic engineering and pesticides. The rapidly expanding organic products sector now constitutes more than 5 percent of total retail grocery sales (and 15 percent of fruits and vegetables), with an annual growth rate of 10-15 percent.  Even taking into account a sluggish economy, the organic market, if we eliminate greenwashing and labeling fraud, could conceivably reach a “tipping point” of 20 percent of grocery sales in 2020.

The myth of “natural” remains a threat

As impressive as this $55 billion Organic and Grass-fed Alternative is, it remains overshadowed by an additional $90 billion in annual spending by consumers on products, such as B&J’s, fraudulently marketed as “natural,” “gmo-free,” “free range,” or “sustainable.”

Consumer surveys indicate that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that “natural” products are “almost organic,” yet at the same time, much cheaper; the majority believes that “all natural” actually means that it is better than organics. Ben & Jerry’s is not the only brand greenwashing its products and impeding the growth of organic, 100% grass-fed and regenerative foods. But it is certainly among the most shameless.

In fact, all these “natural,” “all-natural” and “sustainable” products are neither backed up by rules and regulations, nor a third-party certifier. Most “natural” or conventional products—whether produce, dairy or canned or frozen goods—are produced on large industrial farms or in processing plants that are highly polluting, chemical-intensive and energy-intensive.  

Perhaps fraudulently labeled “natural” foods such as Ben & Jerry’s wouldn’t matter so much if we were living in normal times, with a relatively healthy population, environment and climate. Conventional products sold as “natural” or “nearly organic” would be just one more example of chicanery or unethical business practices.

But we are not living in normal times.

Demanding that fake natural brands and producers, such as Ben & Jerry’s, make the transition to organic is a matter of life or death. We’re tired of pleading and politely asking Ben & Jerry’s, Unilever and other greenwashers to please change their ways. It’s time to step up the pressure. Please join the growing boycott of Ben & Jerry’s ice-cream by signing this petition and by volunteering to join a local campaign team in your local community.

Ronnie Cummins is international director of the Organic Consumers Association.

What’s on the Table at Amazon’s Secret Meeting With Cattle Ranchers?

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Author: Joe Fassler | Published: July 25, 2017 

Another day, another sign of Amazon’s ambitious plans to shake up the American food system. Reuters reports that on Wednesday, representatives from the e-commerce giant will meet with a small, influential group of ranchers who specialize in organic and grass-fed beef.

It’s a revealing move, and a tantalizing clue about the kind of company Amazon intends to be—if and when its in-progress acquisition of Whole Foods goes through. Amazon likely won’t piggyback off the grocer’s existing infrastructure, not that anyone expected that—it’s not CEO Jeff Bezos’s style to leave well enough alone. But setting up meetings at the producer level can only mean one thing: The company intends to forge new supply chains, finding novel ways to get food from farm to table.

What exactly does Amazon have in mind? That’s hard to say. The process around the meeting has been so secretive that even the ranchers attending the meeting—12 people, according to Reuters—have little idea what’s on the agenda. That’s according to Don Davis, a Texan rancher who sits on the American Grassfed Association’s board of directors.

“I don’t think anybody knows,” he said, when I reached him at home this afternoon. “So far as I know right now, I don’t believe anybody knows the purpose of the meeting, or what’s actually going to be discussed.”

In fact, he initially seemed quite surprised I’d heard about it.

“It was supposed to be a secret meeting—I was told not to discuss it with anybody,” he laughed. “Cat’s out of the bag, huh?”

Davis initially wouldn’t say where the meeting is held, though later he mentioned that a friend of his—who is attending—just got off the plane in Georgia. Our best guess, then, is that it’s taking place at White Oak Pastures in Bluffton, GA, one of the nation’s most celebrated producers of certified grass-fed beef. In March, Reuters reports, Amazon reps paid a visit to White Oak to meet with owner William Harris III—a big figure in the grass-fed movement, and something of a celebrity to people who care about such things. (The New York Times’s Kim Severson, for what it’s worth, has called him the Justin Bieber of the organic movement in the American south.) Harris seems to be a go-between of sorts between Amazon and the grass-fed community generally.

We’ll follow up to find out what we can about what’s on the meeting agenda. But we know enough now to make a few educated guesses.

A quick refresher: In the United States, the vast majority of cattle are raised on grass but sent to feedlots to be “finished”—fattened on corn, and then slaughtered (usually in massive facilities owned by the four big multinational meat packers, who control more than 80 percent of the industry and can process thousands of animals a day). But an ever-larger number of Americans—thanks, in part, to Michael Pollan’s now-famous 2002 profile chronicling the journey of a single feedlot steer, later featured in The Omnivore’s Dilemma—have shown interest in side-stepping the conventional system. Whether they’re animal welfare advocates, environmentalists, or libertarian trustbusters, a significant proportion of Americans want to eat beef from animals who spent their entire lives on grass.

Demand for grass-fed beef is surging. What was once a $5 million niche trade in the late 1990s—think farm stands and farmers’ markets—grew into an estimated $4 billion industry by 2016, according to a landmark 2017 study from the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in collaboration with the investment consulting firms Armonia LLC, Bonterra Partners, and SLM Partners. The same study pointed out that, based on Nielsen data, sales of labeled fresh grass-fed beef doubled each year between 2012 and 2016, growing from $17 million in sales to $272 million. That’s a breathtaking pace compared to the overall beef market, which the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates will plod along at 2.3 percent growth in 2018.

Considering all this, getting into grass-fed beef is a very smart move for Amazon. Not just because the feel-good imagery of happy cattle on grass could go along way towards tempering the company’s hard-nosed corporate image. And not just because it’s trying to bulk up its AmazonFresh service with offerings beyond bulk ramen and Chef Boyardee. Amazon’s move toward grass-fed is straight out of the standard tech industry playbook: identify an industry struggling with bottlenecked demand, and use transfomative tech to get people more of what they want.

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Agroecological Approaches to Enhance Resilience Among Small Farmers

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Authors: Clara Inés Nicholls and Miguel Altieri | Published: June 26, 2017 

Many studies reveal that small farmers who follow agroecological practices cope with, and even prepare for, climate change. Through managing on-farm biodiversity and soil cover and by enhancing soil organic matter, agroecological farmers minimise crop failure under extreme climatic events. 

Global agricultural production is already being affected by changes in rainfall and temperature thus compromising food security. Official statistics predict that small scale farmers in developing countries will be especially vulnerable to climate change because of their geographic exposure, low incomes, reliance on agriculture and limited capacity to seek alternative livelihoods.

Although it is true that extreme climatic events can severely impact small farmers, available data is just a gross approximation at understanding the heterogeneity of small scale agriculture, ignoring the myriad of strategies that thousands of small farmers have used, and still use, to deal with climatic variability.

Observations of agricultural performance after extreme climatic events reveal that resilience to climate disasters is closely linked to the level of on-farm biodiversity. Diversified farms with soils rich in organic matter reduce vulnerability and make farms more resilient in the long-term. Based on this evidence, various experts have suggested that reviving traditional management systems, combined with the use of agroecological principles, represents a robust path to enhancing the resilience of modern agricultural production.

A summary of social and ecological
factors that determine the degree of
resilience to climatic, and other, shocks.
Diverse farming systems

A study conducted in Central American hillsides after Hurricane Mitch showed that farmers using diversification practices (such as cover crops, intercropping and agroforestry) suffered less damage than their conventional monoculture neighbours. A survey of more than 1800 neighbouring ‘sustainable’ and ‘conventional’ farms in Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, found that the ‘sustainable’ plots had between 20 to 40% more topsoil, greater soil moisture and less erosion, and also experienced lower economic losses than their conventional neighbours. Similarly in Chiapas, coffee systems exhibiting high levels of diversity of vegetation suffered less damage from farmers to produce various annual crops simultaneously and minimise risk. Data from 94 experiments on intercropping of sorghum and pigeon pea showed that for a particular ‘disaster’ level quoted, sole pigeon pea crop would fail one year in five, sole sorghum crop would fail one year in eight, but intercropping would fail only one year in 36. Thus intercropping exhibits greater yield stability and less productivity decline during drought than monocultures.

At the El Hatico farm, in Cauca, Colombia, a five story intensive silvo-pastoral system composed of a layer of grasses, Leucaena shrubs, medium-sized trees and a canopy of large trees has, over the past 18 years, increased its stocking rates to 4.3 dairy cows per hectare and its milk production by 130%, as well as completely eliminating the use of chemical fertilizers. 2009 was the driest year in El Hatico’s 40-year record, and the farmers saw a reduction of 25% in pasture biomass, yet the production of fodder remained constant throughout the year, neutralising the negative effects of drought on the whole system. Although the farm had to adjust its stocking rates, the farm’s milk production for 2009 was the highest on record, with a surprising 10% increase compared to the previous four years. Meanwhile, farmers in other parts of the country reported severe animal weight loss and high mortality rates due to starvation and thirst.

Enhancing soil organic matter 

Adding large quantities of organic materials to the soil on a regular basis is a key strategy used by many agoecological farmers, and is especially relevant under dryland conditions. Increasing soil organic matter (SOM) enhances resilience by improving the soil’s water retention capacity, enhancing tolerance to drought, improving infiltration, and reducing the loss of soil particles through erosion after intense rains. In long-term trials measuring the relative water holding capacity of soils, diversified farming systems have shown a clear advantage over conventional farming systems. Studies show that as soil organic matter content increases from 0.5 to 3%, available water capacity can double.

At the same time, organically-rich soils usually contain symbiotic mycorrhizal fungi, such as vesicular arbuscular mycorrhizal (VAM) fungi, which are a key component of the soil microbiota, influencing plant growth and soil productivity. Of particular significance is the fact that plants colonised by VAM fungi usually exhibit significantly higher biomass and yields compared to non-mycorrhizal plants, under water stress conditions. Mechanisms that may explain VAM-induced drought tolerance, and increased water use efficiency involve both increased dehydration avoidance and dehydration tolerance.

Managing soil cover

Protecting the soil from erosion is also a fundamental strategy for enhancing resilience. Cover crop mulching, green manures and stubble mulching protects the soil surface with residues and inhibits drying of the soil. Mulching can also reduce wind speed by up to 99%, thereby significantly reducing losses due to evaporation. In addition, cover crop and weed residues can improve water penetration and decrease water runoff losses by two to six times.

Throughout Central America, many NGOs have promoted the use of grain legumes as green manures, an inexpensive source of organic fertilizer and a way of building up organic matter. Hundreds of farmers along the northern coast of Honduras are using velvet bean (Mucuna pruriens) with excellent results, including corn yields of about 3 tonne/ha, more than double the national average. These beans produce nearly 30 tonne/ha of biomass per year, adding about 90 to 100 kg of nitrogen per hectare per year to the soil. The system diminishes drought stress, because the mulch layer left by Mucuna helps conserve water in the soil, making nutrients readily available in periods of major crop uptake.

Today, well over 125,000 farmers are using green manures and cover crops in Santa Catarina, Brazil. Hillside family farmers modified the conventional no-till system by leaving plant residues on the soil surface. They noticed a reduction in soil erosion levels, and also experienced lower fluctuations in soil moisture and temperature. These novel systems rely on mixtures for summer and winter cover cropping which leave a thick residue on which crops like corn, beans, wheat, onions or tomatoes are directly sown or planted, suffering very little weed interference during the growing season. During the 2008-2009 season, when there was a severe drought, conventional maize producers experienced an average yield loss of 50%, reaching productivity levels of 4.5 tonne/ha. However the producers who had switched to no-till agroecological practices experienced a loss of only 20%, confirming the greater resilience of these systems.

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