How “Open Source” Seed Producers From the U.S. To India Are Changing Global Food Production

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Author: Rachel Cernansky | Published: December 12, 2016

Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space. For nearly 20 years, Morton’s work was limited only by his imagination and by how many different kinds of lettuce he could get his hands on. But in the early 2000s, he started noticing more and more lettuces were patented, meaning he would not be able to use them for breeding. The patents weren’t just for different types of lettuce, but specific traits such as resistance to a disease, a particular shade of red or green, or curliness of the leaf. Such patents have increased in the years since, and are encroaching on a growing range of crops, from corn to carrots — a trend that has plant breeders, environmentalists and food security experts concerned about the future of the food production.

A determined fellow dedicated to the millennia-old tradition of plant breeding, Morton still breeds lettuce — it just takes longer, because more restrictions make it harder for him to do his work.

“It’s just a rock in the river and I’m floating around it. That’s basically what we have to do, but it breaks the breeding tradition,” he says. “I think these lettuce patents are overreaching and if they [were to hold up in court], nobody can breed a new lettuce anymore because all the traits have been claimed.” He continues to work with what is available, breeding for traits he desires while being extra careful to avoid any material restricted by intellectual property rights. He has also joined a movement that is growing in the U.S. and around the world: “open source” breeding.

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Respected Environmentalist on the Side of the Livestock

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Author: Stephen Cadogan | January 5, 2017 

A respected environmentalist has hit back against the demonisation of beef.

In 2003, Allan Savory won the Banksia award for the person doing the most for the environment on a global scale.

In 2010, the Savory Institute’s sister organisation, the Africa Centre for Holistic Management, won the Buckminster Fuller Challenge for working to solve the world’s most pressing problems.

Now, the Savory Institute is one of 11 finalists in Sir Richard Branson’s Virgin Earth Challenge to award scalable and sustainable ways of removing greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

At the recent World Meat Congress in Uruguay, Allan Savory offered more than 700 meat industry leaders from 36 countries hope for their industry, which has been battered by public opinion.

“With livestock out of feedlots, and back on the land, properly managed,” he said, “we have the opportunity to regenerate deteriorating environments and to impact climate change significantly.”

It’s a welcome piece of encouraging news after so many scientists have targeted ruminant livestock as key contributors to global warming, due to their gaseous emissions.

Savory says agriculture has been a major cause of climate change not because of cattle but because the rise of modern, industrial agriculture destroyed soil life and rendered soils far less capable of storing carbon.

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Going Vegan Isn’t the Most Sustainable Option for Humanity

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Author: Allison Eck | Published: August 16, 2016 

If you’ve decided to go vegan because you think it’s better for the planet, that might be true—but only to an extent.

A group of researchers has published a study in the journal Elementa in which they describe various biophysical simulation models that compare 10 eating patterns: the vegan diet, two vegetarian diets (one that includes dairy, the other dairy and eggs), four omnivorous diets (with varying degrees of vegetarian influence), one low in fats and sugars, and one similar to modern American dietary patterns.

What they found was that the carrying capacity—the size of the population that can be supported indefinitely by the resources of an ecosystem—of the vegan diet is actually less substantial than two of the vegetarian diets and two out of the four omnivorous diets they studied.

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The Importance of Agroecology in Sustainable Agriculture, an Interview With Dr. Gliessman

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Published: December, 2016

Dr. Steve Gliessman is a Professor Emeritus of Agroecology in the Department of Environmental Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is on the Board of Directors at Community Agroecology Network, a small nonprofit that works to incorporate agroecology into small-farm communities in Central America, Mexico, and Mozambique. Dr. Gliessman is also the Editor-in-Chief of the international journal Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems.

Additionally, Dr. Gliessman is a member of the International Panel of Experts on Sustainable Food Systems and a farmer at Condor’s Hope Ranch, where his family produces dry-farmed, organically grown wine grapes and olives. Food Tank had the opportunity to speak to Dr. Gliessman about his work in agroecology and organic, sustainable farming.

Food Tank (FT): How did you become interested in agroecology, sustainable agriculture, and organic gardening?

Steve Gliessman (SG): I think my interest in agroecology began when I was a graduate student back in the late 1960s and early 1970s and was doing fieldwork in Costa Rica. It didn’t make sense to me that farmers had to abandon land after farming for a while and move to new land, cut down tropical forest, burn it, and plant new crops. It seemed to me that ecology (the science of how nature works) should be able to provide answers and options for making land productive in a more permanent fashion. I was pretty much unaware at the time of the social and economic factors involved, but the system did not seem to be very fair. After I finished my PhD, I decided to leave academia and moved to Costa Rica, where I became the manager of a small coffee and vegetable farm where we tried to farm using ecology and organic practices.

I then moved from Costa Rica to Mexico, where I took a position as an ecologist at a small school of tropical agriculture in Cárdenas, Tabasco. The college was located in the middle of a gigantic Green Revolution project, and the students being trained at the school were supposed to be able to solve any problems the project might encounter. Large-scale monocultures, high chemical inputs, hybrid seed, etc. were the norm. But surrounding the project were the small farms of traditional Mayan farmers, and once I set foot inside those farms and started talking to the farmers, with my ecological focus, an amazing intercultural conversion took place as I observed how productive, appropriate, and sustainable these traditional farms were—and we called it agroecología. For me, agroecology actually was born as a form of resistance to the Green Revolution and a way of defending small farmer knowledge and tradition. When I moved back to California in 1980 after almost 10 years, I brought agroecology with me to the University of California at Santa Cruz. The Environmental Studies Program and the organic farm on the campus made it an ideal place to start the UCSC Agroecology Program.

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Berkeley Lab Awarded $4.6m for Transformational Agriculture Technologies

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Author: Julie Chao | Published: January 3, 2017 

As advanced as agriculture has become, there remains a pressing need for nondestructive ways to ”see” into the soil. Now the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E) has awarded $4.6 million to Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) for two innovative projects to address this gap, giving farmers important information to increase crop yields while also promoting the storage of carbon in soil.

One project aims to use electrical current to image the root system, which will accelerate the breeding of crops with roots that are tailored to specific conditions (such as drought). The other project will develop a new imaging technique based on neutron scattering to measure the distribution of carbon and other elements in the soil.

“Both technologies could be transformational for agriculture ⎯ for quantifying belowground plant traits and where carbon and other elements are distributed⎯and will enable the next generation of predictive models for agriculture and climate,” said Eoin Brodie, deputy director of Berkeley Lab’s Climate & Ecosystem Sciences Division and a microbiologist who is contributing to both projects. “They’re windows into the soil, something that we urgently need.”

Berkeley Lab received these competitive awards from ARPA-E’s Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration (ROOTS) program, which seeks to develop crops that take carbon out of the atmosphere and store it in soil — enabling a 50 percent increase in carbon deposition depth and accumulation while also reducing nitrous oxide emissions by 50 percent and increasing water productivity by 25 percent.

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Regenerative Agriculture Redefined

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Author: Ethan Roland | Published: January 3, 2017

The term Regenerative Agriculture is cropping up all over the place. The annals of the internet are growing almost daily with articles, blog posts, tags, and tweets about farmers, corporations, and foundations shifting their attention toward the new hot thing: Regenerative Agriculture.

It is wonderful to see such a broad-scale conversation happening about agriculture, ecosystem health, and soil carbon. Unfortunately, in all the buzz, some of the definitions of Regenerative Agriculture that have emerged do not live up to its full potential. Many focus solely on soil carbon, ignoring biodiversity, water cycles, and human wellbeing. And while soil fertility and carbon sequestration are hugely important to our planet’s capacity to grow food, they are the tip of the iceberg as far as what Regenerative Agriculture can mean and do for us.

After months of consultation with hundreds of farmers, ranchers, designers, and companies around the world, Terra Genesis International has developed a new and holistic definition of Regenerative Agriculture:

Regenerative Agriculture is a system of farming principles and practices that increases biodiversity, enriches soils, improves water cycles, and enhances ecosystem services.

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Why Drought-resistant Farming Could Be a Feminist Act in Lesotho

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Author: Ryan Lenora Brown | Published: January 3, 2017

Maleloko Fokotsale’s garden isn’t very photogenic. From a distance, it looks like little more than a jumble of rocks and dirt piled high beside her neat fields in the rolling hills outside Lesotho’s capital.

And it wasn’t easy to build – there were stones to be hauled and trenches dug, dirt and leaves and fertilizer to be layered delicately like sections of a parfait.

However, this “keyhole” garden – so named for its unusual shape, like the body of an open-mouthed pac man – has a crucial advantage over the fields that surround it. It uses far less water to produce a given quantity of vegetables, helping subsistence farmers here to weather one of the worst droughts of the past century, which is now barreling toward its third year across southern and eastern Africa.

But for farmers like Ms. Fokotsale – also the chief of this small village – building a drought resistant garden gave her another, less obvious benefit, too.

Time.

Like most women here, hours of Fokotsale’s days are peeled away collecting her family’s water – wheelbarrows full of it – from nearby streams and wells. So for her, making farming more resistant to drought isn’t only a way to grow more in a parched season – it eases her domestic burdens. And that’s an effect that’s likely to continue long after this drought passes.

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2017: Agriculture Begins to Tackle Its Role in Climate Change

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Author:Georgina Gustin | Published: January 4, 2017

By allowing countries to decide how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the landmark Paris climate agreement opened the door to new solutions. And over the past year, many countries, particularly in the developing world, decided that an especially effective way to reach those targets is through their farms.

Nearly 80 percent of the countries said they would use agricultural practices to curb climate change, and more than 90 percent said they would use those practices in addition to changes in forestry and land use linked to farming.

“2016 has been a very good year for agriculture and climate,” said Martin Frick, director of climate, energy and tenure at the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations. “It’s become possible to finally discuss the elephant in the room.”

When climate negotiators gathered in Marrakech in November to begin mapping out the process for reaching the Paris goals, groups hosted at least 80 agriculture-focused sessions.

“Agriculture has really lagged,” said Craig Hanson, director of the food, forests and water program at the World Resources Institute. “Considering it contributes 13 percent of greenhouse gas emissions, and 24 percent of net emissions with land-use change, it’s surprising it’s taken so long…But it’s finally happening,” he said.

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What the World Can Learn From SmartSOIL, a Research Project in the European Union

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Author: Joey DeMarco | Published: January 2017

The SmartSOIL (Sustainable farm management aimed at reducing threats to SOILs under climate change) project developed options to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) in Europe. It used meta-analyses of data from long-term experiments to model the impact of different farming practices on SOC. Unfortunately, studies have shown that individual farmers are often interested in short-term financial gains from increasing productivity and less concerned about the long-term sustainability of agricultural practices. Efforts to increase SOC is known as soil carbon sequestration.

A Sustainability article published in 2015 made the issue clear, “Soil degradation is not a theoretical problem; it is actively diminishing production capacity and compromising livelihoods at this very moment.” According to the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD), one-third of the world’s 1.5 billion hectares of arable land is moderately or severely degraded, having lost either part of its structure or fertility. Soil resources are being over-exploited, degraded and irreversibly lost. Poor management practices, urbanization, industrial and mining activities, and land-use changes are causing this degradation. Further, the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) states that converting natural ecosystems to agricultural plots has released roughly 66 billion tons of SOC from the ground since 1850.

SmartSOIL’s aim has been to reverse the current degradation trend of European soils. Agricultural practices that diminish SOC threaten soil functions and the surrounding ecosystem. Soil carbon sequestration has received increasing attention due to its ability to intake atmospheric carbon. The soil is an important part of the climate change conversation. The International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports that concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by nearly 40 percent since the start of the industrial era. A SmartSOIL deliverable states that on average, the calculated SOC balance on arable lands annually is negative 100 kg of carbon/hectare—a trend that needs to be reversed.

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For Carbon Sequestration, ARPA-E Banks $35 Million on the Crops of the Future

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Author: Tina Casey | Published: December 19, 2017 

The Energy Department is out with another $35 million in funding for its aptly named ROOTS carbon sequestration program, aimed at developing and deploying new crops that can solve at least two big problems at once. The crops of the future will be able to sequester carbon at a greater depth, increasing accumulation by about 50%. The new crops will also help restore soil quality, enabling farmers to sustain higher yields while — hopefully — reducing reliance on fertilizers.

ROOTS (Rhizosphere Observations Optimizing Terrestrial Sequestration) comes under the Energy Department’s cutting edge funding agency, ARPA-E. That adds a high tech twist to the act of plugging plants into the soil.

Reducing The Agriculture Soil Carbon Debt

The issue of soil “carbon debt” in the US agriculture industry hasn’t crossed the CleanTechnica radar yet, so here’s a brief explainer from the Energy Department outlining the scope of the problem:

While advances in technology have resulted in a ten-fold increase in crop productivity over the past hundred years, soil quality has declined, incurring a soil carbon debt equivalent to 65 parts per million (ppm) of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)…

Ouch!

The decline in soil quality creates a ripple effect that hampers the ability of the US agriculture industry to grow (so to speak lols) in a low carbon economy:

…The soil carbon debt also increases the need for costly nitrogen fertilizer, which has become the primary source of nitrous oxide (N2O) emissions, a greenhouse gas. The soil carbon debt also impacts crop water use, increasing susceptibility to drought stress, which threatens future productivity.

One particularly cost-effective solution, according to ARPA-E scientists (are you listening Rick Perry?) is to focus new crops on root systems that leverage the “photosynthetic bridge” linking plants, microbes and soil with atmospheric carbon.

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