The Fashion Industry Goes Green with Sustainable Agriculture

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IZMIR, TURKEY — While efforts have focused on reducing waste, brands and designers are increasingly endorsing projects in regenerative agriculture to help reduce the emissions produced in the manufacture of classic textiles, such as cotton and wool.

In between rows of sprouting cotton crops, the dried-out stems of wheat and sugar beet carpet a stretch of farmland near Turkey’s Aegean coast, helping to lock in soil nutrients and moisture — even in the scorching heat.

In nearby fields, where cotton is being grown without the protective blanket, the plants wilt and wither under the sun. “Healthier soil means healthier cotton,” said Basak Erdem, the farm manager of cotton fields owned and run by cotton
manufacturer SOKTAS, which is based in the Soke municipality of Aydin province.

Four years since SOKTAS first converted one hectare (2.47 acres) of land for regenerative farming — using nature-based methods to restore the land and improve its carbon storage capacity — the soil absorbs more than 18 tonnes of carbon per hectare a year.

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Regenerative Agriculture Slated to Restore Ecosystems As Pressure Mounts in F&B Sectors

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The food agriculture sector faces mounting pressure to reduce its contributions to climate change. While agriculture accounts for around 34% of global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, mainly from farming, deforestation and transportation activities in supply chains, the F&B sector recognizes the imperative to act on climate change, sparking interest in regenerative agriculture’s potential to restore ecosystems and sequester carbon.

Concurrently, 60% of consumers globally now rate sustainability as an essential purchase factor, driving demand for sustainably sourced products ever higher, according to FoodChain ID, a company that has been providing integrated food safety, quality and sustainability services to the global agrifoods industry since 1996.

Food Ingredients First speaks to FoodChain ID ahead of the company’s webinar on regenerative agriculture, which will be broadcast on November 8, 2023.

Dr. Ruud Overbeek, senior vice president of corporate development and strategic relationships at FoodChain ID, says agriculture is under pressure to demonstrate and improve its sustainable credentials.

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A Week on a Regenerative Dairy Farm

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In November 2019, I found myself on the other side of the planet, at Yandoit Farm, in the middle of the Australian countryside. I was part of a cohort of around twenty eclectics who had come to learn the concepts and applications of permaculture (and the joys of spring camping) over a two-week period. From these fourteen intense days of training, I came away with a head full of inspiration, ideas and projects to transpose onto the plot of land awaiting my arrival in Quebec a few months later. In spite of my enthusiasm, there was still an uneasy feeling in the back of my mind: how could I, as a proud descendant of five generations of farmers, combine permaculture and its principles with modern dairy and livestock farming?

Life has more than one twist and turn, and now, almost exactly four years later, I find myself in New York State attending a course in regenerative dairy production offered by Soil Health Academy.

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A Bold Return to Giving a Damn

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Why did you write the book?

“As I approached 40 years of age my view of how I should treat my land, my herd, and my community radically evolved… in ways that I would never have expected. My perception of what is good land stewardship. and what is good animal welfare, and what is good community service turned upside down. Good land management came to mean giving up utilizing harmful industrial reductionist science tools like pesticides and chemical fertilizers. Good animal welfare came to mean moving from merely not treating animals with cruelty to allowing them to express their instinctive behavior.

Good community development came to mean evolving my hometown [Bluffton, Georgia] from a literal ghost town into a delightful little village. I realized that what I had done was good, and important, and highly replicable. I understood that if I could tell my story to other farmers and ranchers, they too could find the courage to step outside the horribly damaging commodity agricultural production system.I wanted to share my 30-plus-year journey with others who might decide to make the same choice.”

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Mexico’s Corn Defenders Honored with Environmental Prize

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When I arrived in Mexico City nine years ago to research the effort by citizen groups to stop multinational seed companies from planting genetically modified corn in Mexico, the groups had just won an injunction to suspend planting permits. Monsanto and the other companies, supported by the Mexican government at the time, appealed and the farmer, consumer and environmental groups were awaiting a judicial ruling.

I asked their lead lawyer, Rene Sánchez Galindo, how he thought they could hope to overcome the massive economic and legal power of the companies and government. He said with a smile, “The judge surely eats tacos. Everyone here eats tacos. They know maize is different.”

He was right. The next day the judge upheld the precautionary injunction. And he is still right: Ten years after the Demanda Colectiva, a collective of 53 people from 22 organizations, filed their class-action suit to stop GM corn, the precautionary injunction remains in effect despite some 130 company appeals.

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Watch the New Documentary “Common Ground”

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Soil4Climate, Big Picture Ranch and Area 23a present a hopeful and uplifting story of the pioneers of the Regenerative Movement who are known for producing tremendous quantities of nutritionally dense food and working to balance the climate – all while bringing our entire ecosystem back to life. The film investigates the power of regenerative farming systems from large to small-scale farming as the key to unlocking more (and healthier) food to feed America and the world beyond.

 

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We Must Still Define Regenerative Agriculture

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Imagine a sandwich that actually made you – and the world – healthier by virtue of making it. This dream is held by hard-nosed ranchers, coastal vegans, corporate types, and hippy homesteaders alike. The term they often use to describe the dream is “regenerative agriculture.” Leo DiCaprio even has a venture capital fund that evokes the term. Surely we can’t all want the same thing for once, right?

Nobody knows because there isn’t a clear or agreed definition of what regenerative agriculture means, putting it at risk of being yet another term greenwashed into meaninglessness, like “humane” or “free-range”, 1984-style. Regenerative agriculture has been used to describe a plethora of agriculture practices: Cover-cropping, no-till biodynamic farming, organic permaculture, sustainable agroforestry, the three sisters, but, most frequently, livestock grazing. These forms of farming aim to restore the terribly depleted soil, which harbors microorganisms and fungi that naturally sequester carbon and nitrogen, fight pests, and reduce erosion and pollution.

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Cover Crops and No-till Aren’t Just Good for Soil — They Also Make Farmers More Money, Study Says

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Farmers can save money by using practices that improve soil, according to a study from the Soil Health Institute.

The study surveyed 30 farms across the United States that are using no-till agriculture, which minimizes soil disturbance, and cover crops, where plants are used primarily to keep soil in place between growing seasons.

Across 29 of those farms, these practices increased net farm income by an average of $65 per acre annually. The study also found that these practices cost farmers on average $14 per acre less to grow corn and $7 per acre less to grow soybeans.

“This is a way that is not only more profitable, but these practices can really help them build that resilience to those more extreme weather events,” said Wayne Honeycutt, president and CEO of the Soil Health Institute.

A 2021 study by the same institute that focused on 100 farms across the Midwest also found that these practices saved money and increased net income.

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The New Colonialist Food Economy

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This past summer, the global trade regime finalized details for a revolution in African agriculture. Under a pending draft protocol on intellectual property rights, the trade bodies sponsoring the African Continental Free Trade Area seek to lock all 54 African nations into a proprietary and punitive model of food cultivation, one that aims to supplant farmer traditions and practices that have endured on the continent for millennia.

A primary target is the farmers’ recognized human right to save, share, and cultivate seeds and crops according to personal and community needs. By allowing corporate property rights to supersede local seed management, the protocol is the latest front in a global battle over the future of food. Based on draft laws written more than three decades ago in Geneva by Western seed companies, the new generation of agricultural reforms seeks to institute legal and financial penalties throughout the African Union for farmers who fail to adopt foreign-engineered seeds protected by patents, including genetically modified versions of native seeds.

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Regenerative Agriculture Is the New Farming Buzzword, but Few Can Agree on What It Means

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Earlier this year, NSW wine and olive oil producer Sam Statham recieved a phone call from a committed vegan.

The caller was seeking an assurance that animals weren’t used to graze the olive grove and vineyard. But the Stathams regularly agist sheep for exactly that purpose, and as a natural source of fertiliser.

“I had a sudden realisation that some people, not only do they not understand where their food comes from, they also might not understand what an ecosystem is or how nature actually works,” says Statham, who runs the family farm Rosnay Organic near Canowindra in the state’s central west.

It’s the main reason Statham now offers farm tours at Rosnay, which is certified to Australia’s national organic standard. He tries to provide clarity to visitors around the meaning of terms such as organic and regenerative, which are increasingly used to promote supermarket products.

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