Tag Archive for: Agroecology

Plant Diversity Enhances Productivity and Soil Carbon Storage

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Author: Shiping Chen, et. al. | Published: April 16, 2018

Significance

Soil carbon sequestration plays an important role in mitigating anthropogenic increases in atmospheric CO2 concentrations. Recent studies have shown that biodiversity increases soil organic carbon (SOC) storage in experimental grasslands. However, the effects of species diversity on SOC storage in natural ecosystems have rarely been studied, and the potential mechanisms are yet to be understood. The results presented here show that favorable climate conditions, particularly high precipitation, tend to increase both species richness and belowground biomass, which had a consistent positive effect on SOC storage in forests, shrublands, and grasslands. Nitrogen deposition and soil pH generally have a direct negative effect on SOC storage. Ecosystem management that maintains high levels of plant diversity can enhance SOC storage and other ecosystem services that depend on plant diversity.

Abstract

Despite evidence from experimental grasslands that plant diversity increases biomass production and soil organic carbon (SOC) storage, it remains unclear whether this is true in natural ecosystems, especially under climatic variations and human disturbances. Based on field observations from 6,098 forest, shrubland, and grassland sites across China and predictions from an integrative model combining multiple theories, we systematically examined the direct effects of climate, soils, and human impacts on SOC storage versus the indirect effects mediated by species richness (SR), aboveground net primary productivity (ANPP), and belowground biomass (BB). We found that favorable climates (high temperature and precipitation) had a consistent negative effect on SOC storage in forests and shrublands, but not in grasslands. Climate favorability, particularly high precipitation, was associated with both higher SR and higher BB, which had consistent positive effects on SOC storage, thus offsetting the direct negative effect of favorable climate on SOC. The indirect effects of climate on SOC storage depended on the relationships of SR with ANPP and BB, which were consistently positive in all biome types. In addition, human disturbance and soil pH had both direct and indirect effects on SOC storage, with the indirect effects mediated by changes in SR, ANPP, and BB. High soil pH had a consistently negative effect on SOC storage. Our findings have important implications for improving global carbon cycling models and ecosystem management: Maintaining high levels of diversity can enhance soil carbon sequestration and help sustain the benefits of plant diversity and productivity.

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Climate Resilience – A Course for Farmers

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While farmers already know just how much we are connected (and vulnerable) to the variability inherent in working with nature, farming connects to Climate Change in profound ways. On the one hand, industrial farming is one of the main contributors to Climate Change. On the other, agroecological farming can actually mitigate and reduce the risks, vulnerability and impacts of a changing climate.
With this contradiction in mind, it is clear that to confront Climate Change rather than just react to it, we need to nurture strong farmer networks, adapt the way we farm to reduce impacts on the environment, and make our farms and farmers more climate resilient.

MESA is proud to offer an online course to help you build the tools to do just that.

Climate Resilience – A Course for Farmers

In this interatctive online course, you will learn and share knowledge with climate resilient agriculture experts, experienced farmers, and MESA’s network of agroecology educators. You will build relationships to a peer group to share expertise and strengthen community-based farmer-to-farmer networks. You’ll learn to create and apply strategies to improve environmental conditions on your farm while helping build resilience and productivity within your management practices, all oriented to confronting Climate Change in your context. After May 30-July 30, you’ll have a break followed by an in-person farmer-farmer field day to wrap up the course.

By taking this course you will: 
  • Understand how your farm or ranch connects with climate change, agroecology, and global agriculture
  • Create a Climate Resilience Action Plan for your farm or ranch
  • Develop new relationships to share best practices and strategies
  • Connect regionally with farmers and ranchers during a Farmer-to-Farmer Field Day and through live, interactive online meetings
  • Increase your farm or ranch’s ability to adapt to the impacts of Climate Change and reduce both the production, social and financial risks of climate variability
  • Gain familiarity with the regional tools, policies and resources available to support you as a farmer in the face of climate change
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Economic Impact of Organic Agriculture Hotspots in the United States

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Authors: I. Julia Marasteanu, and Edward C. Jaenicke | Published: February 2018

In this paper, we assess whether or not organic agriculture has a positive impact on local economies. We first identify organic agriculture hotspots (clusters of counties with positively correlated high numbers of organic operations) using spatial statistics. Then, we estimate a treatment effects model that classifies a county’s membership in an organic hotspot as an endogenous treatment variable. By modeling what a hotspot county’s economic indicators would have been had the county not been part of a hotspot, this model captures the effect of being in a hotspot on a county’s economic indicators. We perform the same analysis for general agricultural farm hotspots to confirm that the benefits associated with organic production hotspots are, in fact, due to the organic component. Our results show that organic hotspot membership leads to a lower county-level poverty rate and a higher median household income. A similar result is not found when investigating the impact of general agriculture hotspots.

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International Study Indicates Ways to Mitigate the Effects of Climate Change on Agriculture

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International study indicates ways to mitigate the effects of climate change on agriculture

Author: Cristina Pinto, University of Coimbra | Published: March 14, 2018

Extreme weather events are going to be more frequent and longer lasting, and farmers will have to adapt, finding new forms of agricultural and agroforestry management

Extreme weather events “are going to be more frequent and longer lasting, and farmers will have to adapt, finding new forms of agricultural and agroforestry management in order to make this sector more resilient to climate change,” says scientist José Paulo Sousa, from the Center for Functional Ecology of the Faculty of Science and Technology of the University of Coimbra (FCTUC), coordinator of a team of Portuguese researchers participating in the international study ECOSERVE, which is evaluating the effects of climate change on soil biological processes.

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This Revolution Will Be Farmed

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With roots in the Occupy Movement, the Experimental Farm Network seeks participatory plant breeding on a massive scale.

Author: Lela Nargi | Published: March 7, 2018

A long-bearded, bespectacled Nathan Kleinman is standing inside a hoophouse in Southern New Jersey he proudly announces he got for free from a local farmer. Excitedly, he holds up plastic baggies containing his latest accessions of seeds. “These are Chinquapin chestnuts—they’re sweet and small,” he says, pouring what look like dark brown cap-less acorns into his palm. Back into their bag they go so he can show off the rest of his prizes: “Korean stone pines—they’re really rare. Bittenfelder apples, which are good to use for rootstock. Oh, these are cool; they’re from monkey puzzle trees, which are native to Chile.”

The tree seeds are all part of Kleinman’s ever-growing collection of perennials—plants that grow for more than two years and, critical for Kleinman’s purposes, have the ability to combat the effects of climate change. Later today, he will mix these and others with soil, vermiculite, and water, then set them in his fridge to germinate.

Outside, it’s a brutally windy winter’s day, with nothing in the frost-crusted fields beyond the hoophouse except a sprinkling of miraculously still-green sedum and moss, and the barren, woody stalks of a beheaded sorghum crop. But Kleinman is already thinking of spring and the potential it affords for a new season of agricultural activism.

Kleinman is co-founder of the Experimental Farm Network (EFN), a five-year-old nonprofit that aims to start what he calls a farming revolution. On the one hand, EFN is an open-source seed company, with about 80 hardy varietals of tomatoes, beans, squash, and peppers currently for sale on its website. More broadly, it’s a sustainable farming community with a mission to identify and breed carbon-sequestering perennials, relying for labor on a volunteer army of experienced and newbie agriculturists across the country.

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What’s the Future of Farming? It Can Only Be Agroecology, Says Farms of the Future

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Author: Niamh Michail | Published: August 1, 2017

Think of agriculture of the future and you may conjure up images of hydroponic lettuces grown in underground, urban bunkers or massive-scale precision farming using satellites and drones. But for campaign group Farms of the Future, the future is, and can only be, agroecology.

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Agroecology to the Rescue: 7 Ways Ecologists are Working Toward Healthier Food Systems

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Author: Marcia DeLonge | Published: August 2, 2017

A lot has been written about agroecology, and a new special issue of the journal Agroecology and Sustainable Food Systems takes it to the next level.

The new issue, entitled Agroecology: building an ecological knowledge-base for food system sustainability, expands the conversation by outlining recent progress in ecology relevant for tackling food system challenges ranging from disappearing diversity to water woes to climate catastrophes. Together, the eight included articles demonstrate a range of emerging science-based opportunities that can help farmers and ranchers achieve the triple bottom line: social, environmental, and financial sustainability.  Here are just the highlights of what some farm-focused ecologists have been up to:

  1. Making sense out of complexity: Agroecosystems are complex, and as Vandermeer and Perfecto (2017) explain, “the fundamental rules of natural systems should be used as guidelines for planning and management of agricultural systems.” Fortunately, ecologists have developed some great tools (tools in topics like Turing patterns, chaotic dynamics, and more) that are up to the otherwise daunting task, and agroecologists are busy beginning to put them to work.
  2. Linking biodiversity to farming benefits: Decisions about how land is used at a regional scale can affect farming conditions at a surprisingly smaller scale, influencing even the pollinators and insect pests that are too small to spot unless you’re actually strolling through a field. As Liere et al. (2017) describe, understanding the connections between biodiversity at these different scales is essential to sustaining healthy, multi-functional agricultural systems. Agroecologists have just scratched the surface of investigating these “cascading” effects, and the subject is ripe for more discoveries.
  3. Keeping nutrients where we need them: It’s hard work keeping enough nutrients in some places (such as soils and plants) and reducing them in others (like in lakes and the atmosphere), but getting this right is a key to growing enough food while protecting the environment. Agroecologists tackle these problems with a bird’s eye view, measuring and evaluating everything from study plots to farm fields to watersheds. As Tully & Ryals (2017)note, this approach is critical to finding ways to optimize solutions (such as agroforestry, cover cropping, and organic amendments, just to name a few).
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Can Big Money Fix a Broken Food System?

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Financial services firms are increasingly directing investor dollars into regenerative agriculture and other systemic food projects.

Author: Lisa Held | Published: Civil Eats

Massive venture capital investments in food make for a steady stream of splashy, dramatic headlines.

Juicero raises $120 million; reporters discover you can “juice” their product without the help of the $400 machine. Hampton Creek raises $220 million; board members bolt after a series of scandals. Blue Apron raises $200 million; its IPO performs terribly.

But behind this high-profile obsession with the Next Big Thing, a number of impact investors are also raising capital for other types of food and agriculture projects that they believe have the potential to fix a broken food system.

A growing number of investment companies in this realm are now using capital to help ranchers switch to 100 percent grass-fed beef production, connect small farms to communities with little access to fresh food, and transition farmland used to grow commodity corn and soy to organic, regenerative systems.

“There’s total momentum right now around people rethinking about how their money is being put to work,” says Kate Danaher, the senior manager of social enterprise lending and integrated capital at RSF Social Finance. “Impact investing as a whole is growing very quickly, and my guess is that if you polled everyone interested, the most popular sector is sustainable food and ag.”

In fact, according to the Global Impact Investing Network’s most recent survey, 63 percent of impact investors said they were putting their dollars into food and agriculture, and impact investment in the sector has grown at an annual rate of 32.5 percent since 2013.

Those in the space say capital is what sustainable agriculture needs in order to scale up. But critics warn that the money comes with risks, when the priority is ROI and corporate ownership of farmland becomes the norm. “Agriculture is a whole culture of how to work with the earth,” says Anuradha Mittal, executive director of the Oakland Institute, which looks critically at land and agriculture investments around the globe. “When it’s driven by profit, it can be very dangerous.”

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Teaching Agroecology in the Himalayan Foothills

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Published: July, 2017

Neha Raj seeks sleep on the night train from Delhi to Dehradun. It’s not the soundest slumber, but she’s grown accustomed to the sway of the rails. Neha teaches at Navdanya’s organic farm in the foothills of the Himalayas. Her teaching props are the hundreds of varieties of rice, wheat, millets, lentils, vegetables, oilseeds, and spices grown at the farm. Since the green revolution—when private seed companies entered Indian agriculture—India’s agrobiodiversity has shrunk dramatically. Neha teaches farmers how to preserve it.

Navandya encourages a mix of ancestral and modern farming techniques through the practice of agroecology. At the heart of their work is the observation that the green revolution has destroyed traditional knowledge that previously guided Indian farming communities. Now, most are poorer; their land and innards poisoned. Unable to pay off credit for expensive chemical pesticides and fertilizers, more than 300,000 Indian farmers have committed suicide, often drinking the very toxins they apply to their crops. Neha’s teaching is based on simple science and economics—farmers don’t need to bury themselves in debt to tend their crops. Healthy soils and climate-adapted, local seeds can generate adequate yields and well-fed children. Navdanya’s method isn’t anti-modern, but it is based on ancestral wisdom.

Neha took me to visit a farmer who had participated in Navdanya’s training program. I asked his advice for U.S. farmers, also deep in debt to agrochemical companies, planting row upon row of purchased, genetically modified corn seeds. “Cow dung,” he counseled. “Lots of cow dung.”

As we spoke, his wife poured pails of water on their cow—revered provider of milk and soil nutrients—and scrubbed vigorously. We walked past a composting pile of dung and straw that had yet to be plowed into his fields. Rather than buy seeds, he saves them from the previous year’s harvest. He’d planted a little bit of everything, spreading risk and diet among an astonishing variety of grains, tubers, and vegetables. There was always something to put on a plate.

Neha’s colleague, Drona Chetri, felt with his fingertips for a hidden key on top of a beam. The padlock to Navdanya’s central seed bank—smaller seed repositories are spread across the country—sprang open. Each week, Bija Devi and Sheila Devi, the Navdanya Seed Keepers, brandish smoking branches in the dirt-floored storehouse to dissuade insects and reduce moisture. To minimize contamination, he had me take off my shoes. In socks, I examined the labels of hundreds of glass jars, clay pots, and seed-laden stalks drying above on a twine line. Handwritten entries in a notebook described the conditions in which the seeds thrive and fail. In a live experiment, seeds are planted and returned each year—the circulation keeps them adapting to evolving ecosystems, essential in today’s quickly changing climatic conditions. It was a far cry from one-size-fits-all seeds cooked up in a Monsanto lab.

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Food and Farming: Two Futures

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Author: Vandana Shiva | Published: July 12, 2017 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Tag Archive for: Agroecology

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