Authors: Anne Weir Schechinger & Craig Cox | Published on: October 5, 2016
The United Nations has forecast that world food production must double to feed 9 billion people by 2050. That assertion has become a relentless talking point in the growing debate over the environmental, health and social consequences of American agriculture.
America’s farmers, we are told, must double their production of meat products and grains to “feed the world.” Otherwise, people will go hungry.
Agribusinesses such as Monsanto sometimes cite the so-called “moral imperative” to feed a hungry world in order to defend the status-quo farm policy and deflect attention from the destruction that “modern” agriculture is inflicting on the environment and human health.
The real experts know better. Jose Graziano da Silva, director-general of the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization argues instead that the current conditions of “modern” agriculture are “no longer acceptable.”
The key to ending world hunger while protecting the environment is to help small farmers in the developing world increase their productivity and income, and to promote “agro-ecology” everywhere, including in the U.S.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Sunflower-1170-1170x770.png7701170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-10-19 05:00:012016-10-19 14:20:05Feeding the World
What was the first thing you did when you woke up this morning? Maybe you opened a window to breath in the fresh morning air?
Then what did you do? Hop into the shower; brush your teeth; turn on the coffee pot? I’ll bet the smell of coffee made you hungry, so maybe you cooked up breakfast. Scrambled eggs? Oatmeal, maybe? Or just some toast and butter?
Fresh air to breathe.
Fresh, clean water for bathing and drinking.
Fresh, healthy food to eat.
Those are three good reasons to care about regenerative agriculture – and the practice of Holistic Management. HMI’s mission is to teach farmers and ranchers how to manage land sustainably using the Holistic Management methodology in order to promote land health, productivity, and profitability. Holistic Management improves air quality by reducing pollutants, while increasing the amount of carbon sequestered; conserves water, while providing water catchment opportunities; and helps farmers and ranchers produce healthy foods, and raise healthy livestock without the use of unnecessary antibiotics, hormones, fertilizers, and other chemicals.
Holistic Management training can positively impact the number of small, sustainably managed farms and ranches; decreasing the need for industrial and factory farms.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/15489276582_7838ca4c01_k-1170x780.jpg7801170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-10-18 22:26:062016-10-18 22:29:32Why Should I Care About Regenerative Agriculture If I’m Not A Farmer Or A Rancher?
Diana Donlon is Center for Food Safety’s Food and Climate Campaign Director where she leads Soil Solutions, a program communicating the critical importance of rebuilding soil health for food security, fresh water availability, and climate stability.
In bone-dry California we are counting the days until October when the rainy season should begin.
When wells run dry in the Central Valley, fires rage in Big Sur and pine forests in the Sierra Nevada die off, you can’t help but wonder where all the water has gone. But what if we asked a slightly different question: where should the water be?
To answer this it helps to know that soil hydrologists classify fresh water as either blue or green. According to Henry Lin, Professor of Hydropedology / Soil Hydrology at Penn State University,
“Blue water refers to water collected in rivers, lakes, wetlands and groundwater. Blue water is available for withdrawal before it evaporates or meets the ocean. Green water refers to water absorbed by soil and plants and is then released back into the air. Green water is unavailable for withdrawal.”
Nevertheless, it may be surprising to learn that what ends up as blue water represents only approximately 38.8 percent of total precipitation, whereas what ends up as green water represents the remaining approximately 61.1 percent of precipitation.
Although green water clearly represents the lion’s share of precipitation, as Professor Lin states, “green water is an often overlooked resource.”
Why do we fail to see the green water—the water that is stored in soils and consumed by plants?
Film-maker Deborah Koons Garcia provides one hypothesis. Koons Garcia, who wrote and directed Symphony of the Soil, an homage to Earth’s living soil system, points out that most people are “soil blind.”
If we “saw soil,” she says we would recognize that when it is healthy, soil acts like a giant sponge that absorbs water during floods and provides it to plants in times of drought. We would also “see” the difference between soils that have structure and soils that don’t. In order for soil to store water effectively it must have organic matter, or carbon. This carbon gives soil the structure necessary to carry out its filtering and holding functions. When rain falls on soils that are carbon deficient, the water isn’t absorbed into the soil sponge.
PARK RAPIDS, MINN. – The mating dance of the hex mayflies drew John Sorenson to the Straight River at sunset.
As the bugs floated like snowflakes in the fading summer light, he pulled on his waders and waited patiently for the distinct sound of trout breaking the dark water to feed.
“It’s a treasure,” he said, stepping to the edge of the grassy bank and casting his line, as he has for years.
But the Straight River is becoming warmer and more polluted as farm irrigation rigs multiply along its banks. Now Sorenson fears that the fish huddling in the cooler deep spots are a stark sign that northern Minnesota’s only naturally producing trout stream is in trouble.
“In 10 years the Straight River could be a big muddy stream good only for carp,” he said.
And the peril is flowing downstream — into the Mississippi River and across a watershed that covers almost half of Minnesota, signaling a new and rising threat to one of the state’s great natural wonders. Like many others across Minnesota, the great river is heading toward an ecological precipice.
In the last five years, the Upper Mississippi watershed has lost about 400 square miles of forests, marshes and grasslands — natural features that cleanse and refresh its water — to agriculture and urban development. That’s an area bigger than Voyageurs National Park and represents the second fastest rate of land conversion in the country, according to one national study.
That breathtaking transformation is now endangering the cleanest stretch of America’s greatest river with farm chemicals, depleted groundwater and urban runoff. At this rate, conservationists warn, the Upper Mississippi — a recreational jewel and the source of drinking water for millions of Minnesotans — could become just another polluted river.
Here, around Park Rapids, potato fields are replacing forests, and drinking wells show rising levels of nitrate contamination from fertilizers.
Along the western edge of the vast watershed, soaring demand for irrigation is depleting sensitive aquifers and rivers that feed the Mississippi
And where the Upper Mississippi curves like a giant question mark through the center of Minnesota, many of its tributaries are showing signs of stress — phosphorus that breeds algae, sediment that makes the water cloudy, even bacteria in stretches farther downstream.
“What we do to our land, we do to our water,” said John Linc Stine, commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Yet because most land use decisions are in the hands of private property owners and local governments, Minnesota has limited power to protect the river. “We can see it coming and still not be able to do something about it,” Stine said.
The battles over land use along the great sweep of brown river go beyond drinking water, to deeply held values that give the headwaters state part of its identity, said Bonnie Keeler, an environmental scientist at the University of Minnesota.
“Like clear lakes, stewardship, a sense of place and pride, and the identity of Minnesotans around clean water,” she said.
Quite beyond their sheer beauty, forested lands in the watershed also provide immense economic value in purifying drinking water for millions of people, an issue that has drawn the attention of federal regulators. This past summer, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency launched a special project to predict how changing land use around the Upper Mississippi affects water quality, part of a larger effort to understand the threats facing major drinking water systems across the country.
Keeler, who directs the Natural Capital Project at the university and studies the social value of such things as clean water and forests, said it’s hard to find the right balance between protecting the Upper Mississippi and preserving economic engines such as agriculture and tourism. But, she added, the debate has thrust a new kind of environmental thinking to the forefront: Clean water, natural landscapes and wilderness have an economic value that deserves a place in the broader equation that defines a healthy economy.
In short, Keeler said, “What would a map of an ideal watershed look like?”
Author: Colin Todhunter | Published on: August 29, 2016
Food is becoming unhealthy and poisoned with chemicals, while diets are becoming less diverse. There is a loss of plant and insect diversity, which threatens food security, soils are being degraded, water tables polluted and depleted and smallholder farmers, so vital to global food production, are being squeezed off their land and out of farming.
Over the last 60 years or so, Washington’s plan has been to restructure indigenous agriculture across the world. And this plan has involved subjugating nations by getting them to rely more on U.S. imports and grow less of their own food. Agriculture and food production and distribution have become globalized and tied to an international system of trade based on export-oriented mono-cropping, commodity production for the international market, indebtedness to international financial institutions (IMF/World Bank) and the need for nations to boost foreign exchange (U.S. dollar) reserves to repay debt.
This has resulted in food surplus and food deficit areas, of which the latter have become dependent on agricultural imports and strings-attached aid. Food deficits in the global South mirror food surpluses in the West.
Whether through IMF-World Bank structural adjustment programs, as occurred in Africa, trade agreements like NAFTA and its impact on Mexico or, more generally, deregulated global trade rules, the outcome has been similar: the devastation of traditional, indigenous agriculture.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/10/Soil-1170-1170x770.png7701170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-10-01 05:00:372016-09-29 16:25:10Resistance Is Fertile: It’s Time to Prioritize Agroecology
Author: Bill Mollison | Published on: January 28, 2016
In 1981, Bill Mollison, the co-founder of permaculture, won the Right Livelihood Award. This is his acceptance speech. It explains his motivations, how he began the global permaculture movement from nothing and his determination to find solutions amid ecological collapse.
I grew up in a small village in Tasmania. I was born in 1928, but my village might have existed in the 11th century. We didn’t have any cars; everything that we needed we made. We made our own boots, our own metal works, we caught fish, grew food, made bread. I didn’t know anybody who lived there who had one job, or anything that you could define as a job. Everybody had several jobs.
As a child I lived in a sort of a dream and I didn’t really awake until I was about 28. I spent most of my working life in the bush or on the sea. I fished, I hunted for my living. It wasn’t until the 1950s that large parts of the system in which I lived were disappearing. First, fish stocks became extinct. Then I noticed the seaweed around the shorelines had gone. Large patches of forest began to die. I hadn’t realised until those things were gone that I’d become very fond of them, that I was in love with my country. This is about the last place I want to be; I would like to be sitting in the bush watching wallabies. However, if I don’t stand here there will be no bush and no wallabies to watch. The Japanese have come to take away most of our forest. They are using it for newsprint. I notice that you are putting it in your waste‑paper basket. That’s what has happened to the life systems I grew up in.
It’s always a mark of danger to me when large biological systems start to collapse, when we lose whole stocks of fish, as we’ve lost whole stocks of herring, and many stocks of sardines, when we lose huge areas of the sea bottom which were productive in scallops and oysters. When we enquire why this happens, it comes back to one thing: the use of energy sources not derived from the biological system.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/2196171642_ba28bfbab1_o-1170x785.jpg7851170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-09-27 12:35:482016-09-27 12:35:48Bill Mollison: The Birth of a Global Movement
Author: Valley Grower | Published on: September 15, 2016
Sacramento, California – California’s Climate Future and Soils: California’s Healthy Soils Initiative is a collaboration of state agencies and departments, led by the California Department of Food and Agriculture, to promote the development of healthy soils on California’s farm and ranch lands. Innovative farm and ranch management practices contribute to building adequate soil organic matter that can increase carbon sequestration and reduce overall greenhouse gas emissions.
The Healthy Soils Initiative is a key part of California’s strategy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by increasing carbon sequestration in and on natural and working lands. Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr.’s Executive Order B-30-15 (April 2015), codified by SB 32 in September 2016, established a new interim statewide greenhouse gas emission reduction target at 40 percent below 1990 levels by 2030. The Executive Order points to carbon sequestration in California’s forests and farmlands as one way to help meet that goal. The Brown administration also recognized the importance of soil health in the Governor’s 2015-16 proposed budget by highlighting that “as the leading agricultural state in the nation, it is important for California’s soils to be sustainable and resilient to climate change.”
In building soil health, California can also make use of wasted resources bound for the landfill. Currently, some 12 million tons of compostable or mulchable organic waste is sent to California landfills annually, where it generates methane and other public health threats that must be managed or mitigated. The Healthy Soils Initiative presents an opportunity to return those organic materials back to the soil, where they can serve as a resource for California’s critical agricultural economy.
Author: Kyle Midura| Published on: August 31, 2016
HINESBURG, Vt. -Dairies across the Northeast face nightmarish market forces with high feed costs and revenue spoiled by low milk prices. But in Hinesburg, Matt Baldwin is preparing to fulfill his dream of opening a dairy farm.
“I’m going into this with my eyes wide-open,” he said.
He’s banking his farm and family’s future on strong demand for organic milk.
“This is the only way we see that we can financially justify doing it,” Baldwin said.
His fields are certified or heading that way, and he’s transitioning his newly purchased cows off antibiotics and onto a strict diet. Baldwin will hedge his bet by selling other organic crops as well.
“It’s an exciting transition that we’re really excited about and readily looking forward to doing,” he said.
“Organic is more stable because they’re able to balance supply and demand,” said Roger Allbee, Vermont’s former agriculture secretary.
Allbee recently penned an opinion piece arguing that if Vermont dairy has a future, it’s in organic milk production. He says Vermont’s farmers simply can’t compete with the sheer volume of milk produced in massive farms out West and globalization is not helping, either. But organic demand is growing, and Allbee says that is Vermont’s opportunity to maintain its traditional brand, and for dairies to rise back to the top.
“Dairy is a big part of what Vermont’s all about, certainly for its economy and certainly for tourism,” Allbee said.
Author: Dr. David Suzuki | Published on: August 30, 2016
Urban agriculture won’t resolve all food production and distribution problems, but it could take pressure off rural land while providing other advantages.
Humans are fast becoming city dwellers. According to the United Nations, “The urban population of the world has grown rapidly from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2014.”
Sixty-six percent of us will likely live in urban environments by 2050. The number of mega-cities (more than 10 million inhabitants) is also skyrocketing, from 10 in 1990 to 28 in 2014—home to more than 453 million people—and is expected to grow to 41 by 2030.
Along with concerns about climate change and the distances much of our food travels from farm to plate, that’s spurred a renewed interest in producing food where people live. Urban agriculture won’t resolve all food production and distribution problems, but it could help take pressure off rural land while providing other advantages. From balcony, backyard, rooftop, indoor and community gardens to city beehives and chicken coops to larger urban farms and farmers markets, growing and distributing local food in or near cities is a healthy way to help the environment.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/Urban-Garden-1170x770.png7701170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-09-13 05:00:242016-09-13 14:53:23How Urban Farming Is Revolutionizing Our Cities and Food System
Author: Leilani Clark | Published on: August 29, 2016
The next time someone points to the need for more farmers’ markets as a way to help move local food from a trend to a substantive cultural shift, you might consider telling them about the power of institutional purchasing. It may sound less interesting and, on the surface, it certainly is. (Who doesn’t love buying purple carrots to the sound of a didgeridoo?) But bear with us.
You see, public and private institutions spend billions of dollars each year on food.Schools, universities, hospitals, prisons, corporate cafeterias, and senior care facilities share one thing in common—they prepare, cook, and serve thousands of meals every day. Now, a rising national movement wants to persuade these institutions to source a higher percentage of food from regional producers—with an emphasis on farms, fishermen, and and ranches that follow ecologically sound, socially just, and humane practices. It’s called institutional food procurement, and, while it might not have quite as much romance as some other elements of today’s Good Food Movement, some say this follow-the-money strategy could hold the key to transforming the American food system.
A shift in institutional food buying has the potential for major impacts on not only the local economy, but on food access, according to Amanda Oborne, Vice President of Food and Farms at Ecotrust, an Oregon-based nonprofit that works to advance farm-to-institution initiatives in the Pacific Northwest.
“We put the focus on the buyers with multi-million dollar food procurement budgets because even if they just redirect a couple of percentage points of their budget into the region, that’s going to drive change all the way through the [local] supply chain,” says Oborne. In one example, chefs at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon can order whole hogs from local producers thanks to an innovative partnerships with a meat distribution company.
For Ecotrust, and other farm-to-institution groups across the nation, the goals are two-fold. First, they aim to sway large institutions with huge food budgets to leverage their purchasing power in support of small and mid-sized regional farmers, ranchers, and fisherman as a way to boost the local economies. And to pivot away from consolidated global distributors like Sysco. A second, and just as important goal, is to open up access to healthy, local, and sustainable food for the populations generally served by public institutions.
https://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/farmer-tractor-pushcart-row-crops-1170x780-1170x780.jpg7801170Regeneration Internationalhttps://regenerationinternational.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/10/RI-Logo-New.pngRegeneration International2016-09-12 05:00:142016-09-12 19:03:27Why Farm-to-Institution Sourcing is the Sleeping Giant of Local Food
