Factory Farms Put Climate at Risk, Experts Say, Urging Health Officials to Speak Out

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Author: Georgina Gustin | Published: June 7, 2017 

Roughly 200 experts in disciplines from nutrition to animal welfare are calling on the World Health Organization to take a more serious look at the impact of industrial livestock production on human health and the climate.

In a letter sent Monday, the group—which includes former New York Times food writer Mark Bittman and environmentalist Bill McKibben—appealed to the WHO, asking that its next director-general work “to reduce the size and number of factory farms.” The WHO’s World Health Assembly got underway Monday, and the body will elect a new leader this week.

“As the global health community acknowledges the intertwined nature of planetary and human health, it must also confront the role that factory farming plays in climate change,” the letter says.

The group points to predictions that, without a reduction in meat consumption, agriculture—including livestock production and growing grain to feed livestock—is on track to gobble up half the world’s carbon budget if countries expect to meet the 2050 target of limiting global temperature rise to less than 2 degrees Celsius. The livestock industry’s contribution to greenhouse gases come from direct sources, including methane emitted from the animals belching and their manure, but also from indirect sources, including land conversion and deforestation linked to growing feed.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency says that agriculture, including livestock production, is responsible for 9 percent of overall greenhouse gas emissions. The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) gives a higher global number, estimating that livestock production accounts for about 14.5 percent of all human-caused emissions, or about 7.1 gigatons of carbon dioxide or its warming equivalent.

Sara Place, who works on sustainable beef production for the National Cattlemen’s Beef Association, said Monday that the letter’s points about the impact of the beef industry globally misrepresents the U.S. beef industry, the world’s largest producer.

“In the U.S., direct emissions from beef, in terms of methane emissions, was 1.9 percent of U.S. emissions,” Place said, citing 2014 numbers from the EPA. “Transportation is 25 percent of our emissions. Numbers that are accurate at the global level don’t necessarily apply to the U.S.”

While short on policy recommendations and details, the letter suggests that advocacy groups and academics are going to push the issue at a global level.

“The letter highlights the interconnectedness of health, climate and meat consumption. They’re overlapping issues,” said Sunjatha Bergen, a food and livestock specialist at the Natural Resources Defense Council. “This is an issue that the WHO should look at.”

Globally, meat consumption has increased over the past 40 years, particularly in developing countries as incomes have risen, according to the FAO. The letter points to data indicating that factory farms have served this increased demand, especially for poultry and swine—but it says this surge in production has come at a cost to health and the environment.

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Tilling Best Left to Mother Nature

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Published: May 8, 2017 

Whether talking to farmers in France, Ghana or southern Ohio, Rafiq Islam’s message is consistent: Tilling the land does more long-term damage than good.

As an Ohio State University soil scientist, Islam is among the disciples in the movement to convince farmers that plowing their fields before they plant or after they harvest harms the health of the soil and its ability to spur growth and resist erosion.

Soil plowed repeatedly can lose key ingredients that enrich it, including carbon, which can evaporate as carbon dioxide gas into the air.

Left undisturbed, soil can maintain that carbon, and the dry decaying stalks in an untilled field add to the organic materials in the dirt.

After crops such as soybeans or corn are picked, a farmer can plant a cover crop in a field instead of plowing it. The cover crop keeps the soil porous and contributes carbon to it, Islam said.

Land left bare is more susceptible to erosion and cannot absorb water from rain or snow as efficiently as when cover crops are planted on it.

Earlier this spring, Islam was part of a team of soil specialists who traveled to France to present four workshops on climate change, soil health, cover crops and no-till farming, sponsored by two farm organizations in France.

More workshops are planned for the summer in Ukraine and China, in the fall in Uzbekistan, and in the winter in Ghana.

In most parts of the world, the majority of farmers regularly plow. So it’s not easy to convince longtime conventional farmers or even younger farmers not to plow their land, said Islam, who is the soil, water and bioenergy program leader at Ohio State’s South Centers in Piketon.

“You try to open their eyes by showing them the actual field results and demonstrating the user-friendly field tests and tools,” Islam said. “It’s tough. Farmers are businessmen. Some don’t want to take risks.”

To many, tilling makes sense. Running a disk or plow through the land breaks up the soil and helps mix in fertilizer to ready the field for new seeds.

But, Islam and other proponents of no-till and cover crop farming said, plowing the land can kill some of the crucial beneficial microorganisms in the soil.

Even on fields crowded with the dry remains of last season’s crop, new seeds can be sown using drill attachments to planters. And the root system of cover crops helps break up the soil to make room for the roots of newly planted seeds.

KEEP READING ON LANCASTER FARMING

Despite Many Challenges, Grassfed Beef Could Go Mainstream

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Author: Lisa Held | Published: June 7, 2017 

The days of having to find and trek to a craft butcher shop and pay a steep premium for a grassfed steak may be numbered. This spring, leaders from all sectors of the grassfed beef industry gathered at the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in New York for the release of a groundbreaking report titled “Back to Grass: The Market Potential for U.S. Grassfed Beef.”

Produced by sustainability-minded investment firms Bonterra Partners and SLM Partners in collaboration with Stone Barns, the report is the first deep dive into consumer demand for grassfed beef and the economics of its production. And the news is good: according to “Back to Grass,” despite major obstacles, there is serious potential to grow grassfed systems to a size that could compete with the grain-fed feedlot system that currently produces the vast majority of U.S. beef.

While the production of meat under the feedlot system causes major environmental issues, including methane emissions, intensive resource use, and soil and water pollution, regenerative grassfed systems have been shown to restore soil health and sequester carbon, while prioritizing animal welfare and producing meat that’s better for human health.

But big questions remain: Can production challenges be met while maintaining the integrity of the regenerative approach and of the term grassfed? Can the industry effectively educate consumers on what labels really mean? And can grassfed proponents convince people that grassfed beef is not overwhelmingly lean and dry, as commonly believed, when produced properly?

Skyrocketing Demand Amidst Misinformation

In some ways, consumers are actually leading the charge, according to the report, as overall demand has shifted toward natural and organic foods produced with greater concern for health, animal welfare, and sustainability.

On a panel on consumer trends, Maple Hill Creamery owner Tim Joseph said research his company conducted showed that consumers often thought their organic meat came from cows grazing only on grass, and once they learned that organically raised cows can still eat a diet of corn and soy, they were often driven to buy grassfed instead. “The grassfed system lines up with the customers’ aspirational vision of what they thought was happening on farms,” Joseph said.

While consumption of beef in the U.S. fell 2.3 percent each year from 2006 to 2015 overall, retail sales of fresh grassfed beef nearly doubled each year between 2012 and 2016, rising from just $17 million in 2012 to $272 million in 2016. (Still, the overall labeled grassfed market—including fresh retail, packaged foods, and food service—only accounts for an estimated $1 billion, which is less than 1 percent of the overall $105 billion total US beef market.)

“I think we’re at a tipping point,” said Urvashi Rangan, a sustainable food systems consultant who’s been working with leaders in the industry to develop a consensus around grassfed labeling. Rangan compared the current status of grassfed to where organic was 20 years ago, when the market had not yet developed to begin to meet consumer demand for healthier foods.

And she pointed out that interest in grassfed beef has grown despite the widespread belief that it does not taste as good as conventional beef, plus confusion as to what grassfed really means and which labels can be trusted.

Since the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) doesn’t regulate the term in the same way that it verifies organic certification, many efforts to create a standardized definition and seal are coming from within the industry. (Unfortunately, there is already a lot of cheating, with “grassfed feedlot” systems feeding grass pellets to confined cattle or cattle’s grass diets being supplemented with various kinds of other feed.)

“Consumers are interested in purchasing sustainable meat, and they’re interested in the grassfed market, but they really don’t know how their meat has been produced,” said Stone Barns CEO Jill Isenbarger.

“It illuminated for me the need for a more consistent certification standard and simpler, clearer communication that’s truly transparent to consumers,” she added.

KEEP READING ON CIVIL EATS

Who Grew Our Clothes?

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Author: Rebecca Burgess | Published: April 24, 2016 

Unraveling the story behind the glamor and surface appeal of fast fashion is like Dorothy and her little dog toto pulling the curtain back on the man whose amplified voice is used to create the illusion of the Wizard of Oz. The fervor and pomp of fast fashion lies in contrast to the landscapes from which it comes. It is in this chasm between what it appears to be and what it is, where the real costs to our lives and health lay quietly and anonymously below the radar of our consumption.

When we ask ‘who made our clothes’ we come into contact with a suite of global supply chains that connect what we put on our skin each day to human-operated cut & sew facilities, finishers, knitters or weavers, yarn spinning, carding, washing, ginning, or fossil fuel extraction for resin chips (for synthetic fibers), and in the case of natural fibers—we end up back on the farm. When we begin to take note of the ‘who’ in all of these processes we unearth the story of their contribution and the reality of their task and the risks they endure. During this year’s Fashion Revolution Week and for the purposes of this write-up we start from the bottom up to ask ‘who grew our clothes, and how?’

For this exploration I am going to trace a few details related to the most ubiquitous natural fiber—cotton. The National Cotton Council states that in the United States the crop is grown in approximately 17 states and it covers 12 million acres of farmland. Three fourths of this cotton is used for our garments and 6.5 billion pounds of cottonseed enters the food system. We export our cotton to the tune of $7 billion and U.S. cotton accounts for 30% of the total world export market.

CottonModuleLoading

Above: Cotton loading module in California, credit Gary Kramer, USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service – photogallery.nrcs.usda.gov

According the USDA, 94% of the cotton planted in the U.S. in 2015 was genetically engineered (GE). The vast majority of U.S. cotton is resistant to the use of key herbicides that contain glyphosate—these commercial herbicides are known as Round-up, PROMOX, and WeatherMAX.

These synthetic compounds are used widely to destroy other plant material in the field, while leaving the cotton present. According to the National Cotton Council, farmers spend $780 million per year on chemical inputs, and $170 million on farm labor. Chemicals now cost more than human labor.

In regard to that labor and the reality of the working conditions in the GE cotton fields—a recent study from the Center for Biological Diversity from 2015, Lost in the Mist, illuminated that over half of the glyphosate used in California is sprayed in the state’s eight most impoverished counties, where 53% of the population is Hispanic or Latino (compared to 38% of the state as a whole). The southern part of California’s central valley is the heart of California cotton production, which includes the same counties identified in the study—Kern, Fresno, Tulare, Madera, Lake, Imperial, Merced and Del Norte. Farmworkers and land-managers applied over 10,370,147 pounds of glyphosate in our state alone in 2013, and 65% of that was used in these counties.

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Above: Mapping glyphosate use in California alongside demographic data, in Lost in the Mist by Center for Biological Diversity

What are the costs of using this much glyphosate in our fiber and food system?

In a peer-reviewed study from the scientific journal Toxicology, it was shown that glyphosate disrupted human cells within 24 hours of exposure in sub-agricultural doses. DNA damage occurred with exposures as low as 5 ppm (parts per million), and endocrine disruption (effecting human hormone balance) occurred at as low as .5 ppm.

In another peer-reviewed report by the Annual Review of Physiology it was stated that new epidemiological studies have connected endocrine disruption to metabolic syndrome, obesity and type II diabetes. Residues of glyphosate on some feed are allowed at levels up to 400 ppm, and there are currently no laws regulating the concentration of glyphosate residues on our fibers. The skin’s ability to absorb environmental toxins is a more direct pathway to our blood supply than through that which we ingest (the digestive tract is designed to find and expel toxins more effectively than the dermis layers), however we often do not consider what we put on our body as detrimental to our health in the same way we consider the detrimental effects of the food supply.

Perhaps it is for that reason that the risks of growing and wearing Round-up Ready cotton remain a fairly unregulated and unstudied arena. However, toxicological reports agree that glyphosate—the main chemical used to sustain the genetically engineered cotton supply—must be considered carcinogenic, and exposures to this synthetic compound are occurring through multiple environmental pathways.

Having just spent time late last week at a strategy meeting on the True Cost of American Food, it is now becoming increasingly evident that the cost of the industrially produced food supply could very well be bankrupting us. We know that half of all Californians either have type II diabetes or are in a pre-diabetic condition, costing our state $27 billion in health care costs each year. Farther afield, on a global scale, obesity is costing us $2 trillion annually, equivalent to 20% of our global spending.

While I realize it is already a fairly herculean task to internalize the costs of our food system, I cannot forgo the opportunity to seek to persuade our food systems stakeholders to include the costs of our fiber system in their analysis. The same land that feeds us, is clothing us.

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Above: the landscape that provided the materials and labor for Grow Your Jeans; photo by Paige Green.

The farm workers exposed to glyphosate are being subjected to this not only for food production, but also for fiber production. Our general population is being exposed to the compound via unregulated and yet to be measured ways via the fiber system, and it is clear that exposures are occurring through our food supply in concentrations known to create health risks. With such a low exposure threshold for endocrine disruption, it is clear we have a health crisis on our hands.

And then there is the task of turning the tide of mainstream consciousness, which includes the vast majority of wearers and eaters. In light of Fashion Revolution Week, and in light of all of the effort our local community is putting forward to illuminate the severe realities of this global industry—flash mobs, symposia, social media campaigns—it is still hard to say what forces will turn the tides of this industry. Perhaps the reality that our clothing is exposing us to endocrine disruptors, which are linked to obesity, metabolic disease, infertility, cancer, and diabetes?

It’s not just that those who are growing our clothes face these risks, it is all of us. While I’d like to think farm worker justice and welfare would be enough for the mainstream culture to change its consumption habits, I think that perhaps proliferating a more widespread understanding that the beauty we seek to create from fashion is being directly undermined by how we are producing it. I can imagine there are few who would be pleased to know that their clothing is harming their health.

You may ask, what are the options? With over 94% of our cotton being genetically engineered and reliant on the use of glyphosate-rich herbicides, what can we do?

Starting in our home community, there is a lot we can do. In our Fibershed of Northern California, we live within 150 miles of two cotton projects that are offering stellar options for the fashion industry.

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Above: Sally Fox in her organic cotton fields in the Capay Valley, photos by Paige Green

To the north is Sally Fox, the first biodynamic certified color-grown cotton farmer in the United States, and a longtime organic practitioner and breeder who rotates her cotton with winter wheat, and co-plants with black-eyed peas, sunflowers and milo. Her fine flock of merino sheep grazes down her cotton stubble at the end of the season, cycling nutrients quickly for her next year’s crop.

To the south of us is the Sustainable Cotton Project, a project focused on providing a non-genetically engineered Pima and Acala Cotton at scale. Farther afield outside of our intimate region there is the West Texas Organic Cooperative, another scaled project that plants 10-19,000 acres per year. For all of these projects drought has intensified the pressures of what is already a thin margin crop.

To support these projects we recommend connecting with the farmer or co-op you find connects most deeply to your values or a strategic geography that you are committed to, and finding out who has been purchasing from these land-bases and where you can source finished garments and fabric.

As Fashion Revolution Week encourages each of us to ask ‘Who Made My Clothes?’ and to understand the fashion industry conditions which led to the lives lost and injured in the collapse of the Rana Plaza Complex in Bangladesh, we need to continue to seek that same transparency throughout the fashion and fiber system. Whether for the health and human rights of workers at every part of the supply chain down to the soil, or for our own personal health, we need to consider ‘who grew our clothes, and how?’

RE-POSTED WITH PERMISSION FROM FIBERSHED. SEE THE ORIGINAL ARTICLE HERE.

Carbon Farming & Cutting Food Waste: Climate Solutions That Don’t Require Trump’s Buy-in

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Author: Twilight Greenaway | Published: June 5, 2017 

Donald Trump’s recent decision to withdraw the U.S. from the Paris Agreement on climate has many wringing their hands. But Paul Hawken doesn’t have time for despair. In fact, the veteran author and entrepreneur has spent the last several years working with a team of scientists and policy experts to map and quantify a set of climate solutions he says have the power to draw down the carbon in the atmosphere and radically alter our climate future. And he’s confident that many of these efforts will continue to take place with or without government buy-in.

Hawken’s new book, Drawdown, illuminates 100 of the most effective of these solutions and points to food and agriculture as hugely important when it comes to both sequestering current greenhouse gases and releasing fewer of them in the first place. From composting and clean cookstoves to managed grazing and multistrata agroforestry, Drawdown makes a compelling case for radically changing the way we eat, farm, and tend to the land. Civil Eats spoke to Hawken about the book, the surprising role food has come to play among climate optimists, and his advice on how to keep our eyes open while imagining the future of our planet.

Can you tell us about what you wanted to do with this book and how food plays a role in the picture it paints?

We mapped, measured, and modeled the most substantive solutions to reversing global warming. We didn’t have a horse in the race. We may have biases, I’m sure we do, but our process and methodology was to eliminate bias and just to look at [the solutions] from the point of peer-reviewed science in terms of the carbon impact.

There are only two things you can do really with respect to the atmosphere, which is to stop putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and then bring them back home. There’s nothing else. Some solutions—like land use solutions—do both.

We didn’t go into it knowing what would be the biggest sector. Or even what would be the top five or 10. We went in very open-ended and it turns out food is eight of the top 20 suggestions.

You ranked the solutions in terms of potential impact. Number three is reduced food waste and number four is the shift to “a plant-rich diet.” Why then, do you think food and ag are so rarely a part in the mainstream conversation about climate change?

My guess as to why food and land-use solutions have been marginalized and even ignored is because of the way solutions have been approached by climate scientists. Estimates vary, but at least 65 percent of the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are due to combustion of fossil fuels, so it is easy to come to the conclusion that replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy is the biggest solution.

One of the reasons reducing food waste ranks high is because most of the food that is discarded ends up in landfills where it is buried in an anaerobic environment causing methane emissions, which are 34 times more potent in their greenhouse warming potential compared to CO2. A plant-rich diet reduces the consumption of animal protein, and the production of meat—whether grass fed or in CAFOs—is also a very significant source of methane.

And finally, there is agriculture itself, another source of significant emissions as practiced by conventional and industrial agriculture. Tillage removes carbon, mineral fertilizers create another potent greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide, glyphosate sterilizes soil life creating emissions, monocultures expose the soil to sun and heat, an emission cause, etc.

When you change these three practices, and cultivate types of sustainable food production techniques, like system of rice intensification and agroforestry, it turns out that food has a greater potential to help reverse global warming than the energy sector. That’s also due to the fact that land use can sequester carbon, whereas renewable energy simply avoids carbon emissions.

However, your question stands. Why did we not look at this more closely sooner? That is a mystery at Project Drawdown. These data, math, and conclusions detailed in Drawdown could have been calculated and disseminated a long time ago. The science these calculations are based on has been known for a long time.

Food is seen as inherently personal. Do you think the urgency about the climate has the potential to get more people thinking about food on a systems level?

I tend to think of food as more cultural than personal. In the U.S., subsidies have allowed people the ability to eat large quantities of expensive foods, like milk and meat. In most countries, the true cost of these items limits the stroke and heart-disease outcomes we have in the U.S. I believe people move toward healthier food because of their own needs and understandings, not because of the climate impact.

What we see in our research is that regenerative practices (in many areas besides food) are increasing because they work better, are less expensive, create greater productivity, can be locally sourced, create meaningful jobs, enhance human health, engender community, and much more. In other words, making choices that are better for your body, the soil, workers, your children, and your community are almost invariably practices that reverse global warming.

Let’s talk about the term “regenerative.” I’ve heard from several folks in the organic community who worry that another label will confuse consumers. Why did you choose to highlight regenerative agriculture vs. organic? 

KEEP READING ON CIVIL EATS 

Grass Fed Beef: The Right Type of Beef That Will Bolster Your Health

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Author: Dr. Joseph Mercola 

Purchasing meat typically involves an initial check of its price, but not everyone is inquisitive when it comes to its nutritional content and freshness. Fortunately, the movement towards grass fed beef is continuously gaining momentum, because more and more people are realizing about the benefits this type of beef offers to human health and the environment.

Continue reading to learn what grass fed beef is, how it stacks up against typical beef and where you can find the best sources of high-quality meats in your area.

Why You Should Consider Grass Fed Beef

Grass fed beef comes from cows that are allowed to graze on pasture and consume their natural diet of grass. This situation is different from cows raised in concentrated animal feeding operations (CAFOs), which are fed a processed diet containing grains and even growth-promoting drugs.1

Organic grass fed beef production requires more effort and attention to detail, as ranchers have to follow strict guidelines that’ll ensure the meat’s freshness and quality.

Because grass fed cows are grown in more humane conditions, the meat’s quality is superior to conventional beef. The meat also tends to be loaded with more nutrients, without the risks attributed to harmful pathogens that are found in conventional beef (more on this later).

Positive long-term effects of grass fed beef production on the environment must be emphasized too. A study published in the journal Nature Plants sought to discover the benefits of organic versus conventional farming under four key sustainability metrics: productivity, environmental impact, economic viability and social well-being.

Researchers analyzed data that emerged in the past 40 years, and the results highlighted these positive effects connected to organic farms:2,3

  • More profitable and can earn farmers anywhere from 22 to 35 percent more compared to their conventional counterparts
  • More environmentally friendly
  • Able to produce equally or more nutritious foods with fewer or no pesticide residues
  • Can provide unique benefits to the ecosystem
  • Can deliver social benefits

Health Benefits of Grass Fed Beef

Beef in general already contains certain nutrients that are good for your body. However, grass fed beef goes above and beyond because it is simply more nutritious, possessing these important components:4

Lower amounts of total fat Higher levels of beta-carotene Higher in vitamins B1 (thiamin), B2 (riboflavin) and E
Higher amounts of minerals like calcium, magnesium and potassium, alongside other minerals like iron, zinc, sodium and phosphorus Higher portions of total omega-3 fatty acids Higher amounts of conjugated linoleic acid (CLA or cis-9 trans-11), a potential cancer fighter
Higher amounts of vaccenic acid that can be transformed into CLA A healthier ratio of omega-6 to omega-3 fatty acids

‘Meat’ Your Match: Grass Fed Beef Versus Grain Fed Beef

Grass fed beef’s benefits do not end with its high nutritional content. If you’re still not convinced why beef from grass fed cows is better, take note of these key points:

•Humane growing methods: Grass fed cows consume their natural diet of grass, since they have been allowed to graze on grasslands during their lifetime. A grass-rich diet consequently boosts the cow’s health and the quality of meat.

Meanwhile, cows in profit-hungry CAFOs are fattened for slaughter by being fed artificial diets that contained grains, corn, soy,5 growth-promoting drugs and antibiotics. Eventually, this diet altered the bacterial balance and composition in the animal’s gut, resulting in meat that’s tainted with potentially health-damaging bacteria.

•Greater fatty acid composition: As mentioned earlier, grass fed beef contains higher ratios of healthy fats like vaccenic acid, conjugated linoleic acid and omega-3 fatty acids, compared to grain fed cows.

•Fewer amounts of bacteria: Overcrowding of cows in CAFOs is a very common situation that may lead to increased bacterial contamination. Samples of CAFO-grown beef revealed traces of antibiotic-resistant bacteria that may have contributed to the increasing number of antibiotic-resistant disease cases being reported.

Consumer Reports examined 300 samples of conventionally raised and sustainably produced (including grass fed) ground beef to see if there were traces of five types of disease-causing bacteria: Clostridium perfringens, Salmonella, Enterococcus, Staphylococcus aureus and E.coli (including O157 and six other toxin-producing strains).

KEEP READING ON MERCOLA.COM

Sowing the Seeds of Earth Democracy in Trump Times : The Planetary Crisis, Responsibilities and Rights

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5th of June is World Environment Day – a day to remember that we are part of the Earth, and that we all have a duty to care. That two centuries of fossil fuel driven development is pushing humanity to the brink. And we need to change course.

This environment day is dominated by President Trump walking out of the Paris agreement. A “concrete-ist” afraid of the “winds of change”. What does Trump’s cowardice imply for international obligations to protect the earth, for a future based on ecological justice, for sowing the seeds of Earth Democracy?

Environmental laws at the national level were created in the 1970’s to protect the Earth from harm, and because we are part of the Earth, to protect people from harm.

In 1992, at the Earth Summit, the International community adopted two major ecological principles – the precautionary principle and the polluter pays principle, and signed two legally binding agreements – The UN Convention on the Conservation of Biodiversity,(CBD) and UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC).

Both treaties were shaped by the emerging ecological sciences and the deepening ecology movement. One was a scientific response to the ecological impact of pollution of the atmosphere due to use of fossil fuels.The second was a scientific response to the genetic pollution caused by GMOs and the erosion of biodiversity due to the spread of industrial, chemical monocultures. Three years after Rio, the UN Leipzig Conference on Plant Genetic Resources assessed that 75 % biodiversity had disappeared because of the Green Revolution and Industrial farming.

Interdisciplinary science and democratic movements created the momentum for International Environmental law. Science and Democracy continue to be the forces challenging the mindless threat to the Earth because of corporate greed.

In the case of Climate Change the key issue is reduction of emissions and strategies for adaptation. In the case of Biodiversity Conservation the key issues are Biosafety and promotion of practices that conserve Biodiversity.

Both treaties connect in agriculture, our daily bread. How we grow our food has a major impact on the health of the planet and the health of people.

Industrial agriculture is based on fossil fuels and the chemicals it uses are derived from fossil fuels. As I have mentioned in my book “Soil not Oil” 50% of the atmospheric pollution linked to excess carbon dioxide, nitrogen oxide, methane comes from and industrial, globalised food system. The same fossil fuel intensive, poison intensive industrial agriculture is also destroying the biodiversity of our seeds and crops, soil biodiversity, killing pollinators, destroying water resources. It is also responsible for 75% of the disease epidemic related to bad food produced by oil.

The alternative, a biodiversity intensive, ecology intensive, localised food system, rejuvenates the health of the planet, and our health. Through biodiversity of plants fixing atmospheric carbon and nitrogen, excess gases are removed from the atmosphere where they cause pollution and climate instability, and are put in the soil where they rejuvenate fertility and produce more and healthier food.

The same food and agriculture systems that conserve and rejuvenate biodiversity also mitigate climate change. They contribute to health and to increased livelihoods in regenerative living economies.

People and communities everywhere are giving up poisons and adopting agroecology. They are shifting from an agriculture destroying the health of the planet and our health to a regenerating healing agriculture. They are obeying the laws of Gaia and waking up to the Rights of Mother Earth, simultaneously enhancing human well being. They are not waiting for governments to trump each other just to see who gets what share of a divided planet. Some governments are also waking up to both their obligations, and with it the possibilities of creating post fossil fuel economies through regenerative agriculture and renewable energies.

The most basic contest today is between the laws of the Earth and the lawlessness and irresponsibility of greed combined with ignorance. By backing out of the Paris agreement on Climate, President Trump has acted against the planet and our common humanity. He has supported irresponsibility, greed and lawlessness. Surprise? No.

He is of course not the first US President to have tried to undermine the UN treaties. Senior President Bush in the lead up to Rio said “Our Lifestyles are not negotiable”. To protect the GMO industry and the poison cartel, he refused to sign the Biosafety protocol to the CBD to regulate GMOs. President Obama continued to put pressure on India to undo its patent laws (which do not allow patents on seeds) – to assist Monsanto establish seed monopolies – to serve the empire. That is when I wrote the open letter to Obama and Modi to uphold our laws.

President Obama flew into Copenhagen and undid the legally binding UNFCC, replacing it with voluntary commitments. That is why President Morales took the initiative to initiate the Draft of the Universal Declaration on the Rights of Mother Earth, a process I was involved in.

So there are two processes at work today – one is going beyond fossil fuel industrialism, beyond anthropocentrism, to create Earth Democracy based on the Rights of all beings.

The second process is the intensification of the processes of destruction based on greed, and destructive power of a small minority of powerful “league” of men.

The highest laws that govern our lives, and allow us to live, are laws of the Earth, of Gaia, of ecology.

As members of the Earth Community, our rights to her seeds and biodiversity, her soil and land, her water and air, are derived from our responsibility to protect and rejuvenate her resources.

And the rights of each being, including every human being are defined by the rights of other beings.

As the ancient Isha Upanishad states, all beings have the rights to the earth’s resources, and any person taking more than their share is nothing but a thief. A league of extraordinary thieves.

KEEP READING ON SEED FREEDOM

Adding Animals Adds Profit, Organic Matter for North Dakota Farm

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Author: Laurie Bedord | Date Published: May 31, 2017 

The quality of food Paul Brown raises hinges on the quality of the soil on which it is grown.

“When my parents purchased the farm from my grandfather in 1991, the soil’s organic matter ranged from 1.7% to 1.9%,” he says. “Four years of crop failure and nearly going broke got my dad thinking outside the box. He began growing multispecies crops, expanding crop rotation, and eventually growing cover crops to diversify and build the soil’s resiliency.”

From a very young age, cattle were part of life on the farm for Brown. “We always had about 250 pairs grazing the land, and we marketed directly to consumers,” he says.

It wasn’t until he returned to the farm in 2010, after graduating from North Dakota State University, that the idea for diversifying this part of the business also took shape.

“These soils developed over thousands of years with grazing animals rotating throughout the landscape,” says the 29-year-old. “The longer we can keep land and livestock integrated, the healthier our soils will be. If we can mimic the template nature laid out for us, we will continue to build the resilience back into the ecosystem that was damaged.”

HENS AND MORE

His first year back, Brown invested in 100 laying hens, which follow cattle on pasture. A mobile chicken coop serves as a place for the birds to lay eggs, roost, and take refuge at night.

“I started with hens because they are relatively low cost,” he says. “Since I had never raised hens before, I wouldn’t have gone broke if it was a complete debacle.”

Grazing is supplemented with grain by-products. “We do some grain cleaning and sell cover crop seed. Those screenings are fed to the hens. We are turning a waste product into eggs we can sell. Once you start to build enterprises that are feeding off each other, that is where a lot of profitability comes in,” Brown says.

Looking to find a market for his eggs, he connected with a local CSA (community supported agriculture) group.

“I was exposed to 125 potential customers,” he says. “Most of them ended up buying from me and still do. It was a great product to introduce to customers because they are willing to pay $5 for a dozen eggs.”

Today, his flock has grown to over 1,000 laying hens. Once customers realized how good the eggs were, demand grew for other offerings.

“In 2013, I added hair sheep. I started with 20 ewe lambs and a ram,” he says. “I am up to 150 ewes now. A year later, I added six sows and a boar and have 25 Berkshire and Tamworth sows farrowing out today. Pigs are raised on pasture and fed non-GMO grains grown on the ranch.”

Integrating a variety of animals has flourished into a successful business. It has also paid dividends in bolstering organic matter, which is close to 7% today.

“Knowing what I know now, I think I can reach 12% by the time I retire,” Brown says.

KEEP READING ON SUCCESSFUL FARMING

California Today: To Fight Climate Change, Heal the Ground

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Author: Mike McPhate | Published: May 30, 2017 

The climate change fight has focused largely on cutting emissions.

But California is now considering another solution: dirt.

Whereas an overabundance of carbon in the air has been disrupting our climate, plants are hungry for the stuff.

The Central Valley’s farmlands essentially operate as a vast lung, breathing in carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and converting it into plant tissues. That results in less of the heat-trapping gas in the atmosphere.

But the healthier the soil, the more carbon is stored in plants.

Enter California’s Healthy Soils Initiative, a statewide program rolling out this summer that is the first of its kind in the country.

“I think there’s a growing recognition that the soil beneath our feet has huge potential to sequester carbon,” said Karen Ross, secretary of the state’s Department of Food and Agriculture.

More than a quarter of California’s landmass is used for agriculture. Over generations, farming practices like monocropping and tillage have reduced the amount of organic matter in the soil, affecting plant growth. Some of that organic matter, which contains carbon, needs to be put back.

KEEP READING ON THE NEW YORK TIMES 

Saving America’s Broken Prairie

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Author: David J. Unger  | Published: April 26, 2017 

Out near wear the continent divides, up on a ridge carved by ice over millennia, among blazing star, blue aster, purple prairie clover, harebell, and smooth brome — grasses all yet untouched by the plow — Neil Shook balls up some purple pasqueflower, shoves it into his nostril, and snorts.

He loves to do this.

“Mash it up really good,” Shook says as he hands me a piece of flower. “Really good.” And I, too, shove pasqueflower up my nose and snort.

“Did you get it?” Shook asks. I do. It’s a burn that is supposed to be just the thing for clearing a stuffy sinus, and while I’m not yet a convert, I get Shook’s larger point, too: This plain land is home to strange and wild life.

Shook is the manager at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge, a 4,385-acre expanse of federally protected grasslands and wetlands in east-central North Dakota. Each year, tens of thousands of pelicans, cormorants, gulls, herons, and others come here to nest, and I’ve come to learn more about a place Shook calls “heaven.”

On this stretch of grass, he bounces from plant species to grass species with a boyish exuberance that defies his years of work toward conserving America’s grassy core — a battle that has been, by almost every measure, a losing one.

This is as good an entry point as any into the complex, highly altered and highly threatened ecosystem that stretches some 1.4 million square miles down central Canada and through the U.S. heartland down to Mexico. Shove pasqueflower up your nose. Touch the grass as it waves in the wind. Hear the insects’ blanket drone. There is no etymological connection between “prairie” and “prayer,” but at times it seems there ought to be.

“Every plant out here has a purpose, and every animal or insect that’s found here has purpose,” Shook says. “There’s a relationship between those plants and animals, and we don’t understand what that relationship is — or we may not understand the importance of it — but it’s there for a reason. And when it’s gone, who knows what we lost?”

I went to North Dakota to see what I thought was the region’s defining story: The shale oil boom and bust that has reshaped the heartland’s economy and upended energy geopolitics just about everywhere. But it turns out that oil is just one part of a great transformation now underway in North America’s Great Plains and Central Lowlands, the likes of which has not been seen since the Dust Bowl. A biome that can be, in some spots, every bit as diverse and complex as a rainforest sits in the country’s backyard, and it’s coming undone.

This is flyover country. It’s easy to view North Dakota’s unending flatness as boring, empty, untamed. There’s a long tradition of seeing the prairie — this vast stretch of fertile, grass-dominated land — as negative space with no purpose other than to be transformed into something with purpose.

The famed naturalist Aldo Leopold saw it differently. “Prairie was, in fact, a community of wild animals and plants so organized,” he wrote, “as to build, through the centuries, the rich soil which now feeds us.”

In other words, all that pasqueflower, ragwort, indigo, and milkweed — all those bison, prairie dogs, pronghorns, daphnia, water boatmen, and eared grebes — have lived and died across the millennia, cycling nutrients from sun to leaves to soil to flesh and back into soil again. The soil that remains is packed with deep energy we turn into food for ourselves and the animals that feed us. Increasingly, this old, flat land provides fossil fuels, wind, and corn that we turn into modern energy and use in our homes and cars.

The prairie’s commodification has served as a tremendous boon to civilization, but not without costs. The grasslands of central North America have declined by approximately 79 percent in area since Europeans began arriving in large numbers in the early 1800s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In some places — particularly in the wetter, and more fertile, eastern tallgrass prairies — grassland cover has declined 99.9 percent since 1830.

It turns out that oil is just one part of a great transformation now underway in North America’s Great Plains and Central Lowlands.

“Every plant out here has a purpose, and every animal or insect that’s found here has purpose,” Shook says.

New pressures threaten to wipe out what’s left. Budgets for federal conservation programs are being cut. President Trump’s budget proposal would reduce Interior Department spending by 12 percent. Biofuel mandates, farm subsidies, and crop insurance give farmers incentive to put more land into production. Genetically modified seeds give them the technology to grow crops where they previously could not. An emergent middle class in China and across the developing world increases demand for the kinds of row crops that can feed nations. Oil production has creeped in from the west, spurred on by the fracking revolution, though low oil prices have tempered its advance. Wind power takes up space, too.

Throw climate change into the mix and it’s no wonder scientists call the American prairie one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.

“I’m always amazed that I can get on an airplane, pick up the [in-flight] magazine and have someone tell me about the crisis in the rainforest,” says John Devney, vice president for U.S. policy at Delta Waterfowl, a habitat conservation group focused on hunting. “Nobody tells this story,” he adds, gesturing to the grasslands behind him at a ranch outside Wing, North Dakota. “This is way more proximate to a hell of a lot of more people in the United States of America. What happens here in land use has implications — not just if you’re a duck hunter and you want to shoot a gadwall in Louisiana that’s produced in Sheridan County, North Dakota. It has implications [for] what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico. It has consequences [for] what’s happening in Sioux Falls — with water quality, carbon sequestration values, [and] incredible biodiversity richness.”

The tension here is between maintaining the capacity to feed billions of people and maintaining the land that makes it possible. Soil is considered a finite resource, and can be revived only if given the time and space. Conservation science and holistic land management practices can help, but they compete with economics and policies that encourage liberal use of the plow.

When Neil Shook arrived at Chase Lake in 2010, he started seeing plumes of smoke on the horizon. Commodity prices were rising rapidly, and landowners rushed to convert as many acres as possible into agriculturally productive land. First they burned the grass, then they plowed the land and planted it with corn, soybean, or other crops. By 2013, it looked like “the apocalypse,” he recalls. “It was just like somebody dropped a nuke,” Shook says. “Just ‘boom.’”

It’s called “breaking” prairie when farmers turn grassland into cropland. And once broken, the prairie is hard to fix.

KEEP READING ON UNDARK