Tag Archive for: Biodiversity

Family Farmers: Feeding the World, Caring for the Earth

Family farming preserves traditional food products, while contributing to a balanced diet and safeguarding the world’s agro-biodiversity and the sustainable use of natural resources. Family farmers are the custodians of a finely adapted understanding of local ecologies and land capabilities. Through local knowledge, they sustain productivity on often marginal lands, through complex and innovative land management techniques. As a result of the intimate knowledge they have of their land and their ability to sustainably manage diverse landscapes, family farmers are able to improve many ecosystem services.

Photo credit: Flickr / CIAT

Family farming represents an opportunity to boost local economies, especially when combined with specific policies aimed at the social protection and well-being of communities.

Family farmers have strong economic links to the rural sector; they contribute strongly to employment, especially in developing countries where agriculture still employs the majority of the labour force. In addition, the incremental income generated by family farming is spent on housing, education, clothing etc. in the local non-farm economy.

Download the Report from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations

Beyond the Beginning: The Zero Till Evolution

Introduction: A Biological System Evolves

The risk-takers of past decades who were among the first to park plows and cultivators – believing they could plant crops into untilled stubble and still harvest good yields – may have never dreamed they’d launch a farming revolution. Yet their cumulative efforts worldwide have done just that.

“Increasing numbers of farmers are converting to no-till, making it a global phenomenon,” says Jon Hanson, newly retired research director of the USDA Agricultural Research Service Northern Great Plains Research Laboratory at Mandan, North Dakota. “In South America farmers are adopting no-till in a big way, and worldwide 95 million hectares [235 million acres] are in no-till. No-till is helping to conserve soil around the globe.”

The modern no-till movement on large-scale farms became possible with the invention of herbicides, such as 2, 4-D and paraquat in the 1940-50’s, permitting weed control without tillage. The absence of tillage results in a residue mulch covering the soil surface and requiring seeding practices or equipment designed to sow directly into mulch-covered soil.

The no-till system retains more than 90 percent of crop residue on the soil surface. By contrast, the moldboard plow retains less than 10 percent of residue; the chisel plow and disk retain between 25 and 75 percent of residue; while ridge-planting and strip-till planting systems retain 40 to 60 percent of residue.

Download the Report from the Manitoba-North Dakota Zero Tillage Farmers Association

The Littlest Farmhands

Author: Jop de Vrieze

Abstract

Scientists have recently discovered thousands of microbial species living in, on, and around plant roots that help plants survive and thrive—for instance by facilitating the uptake of nutrients and water, warding off pests and diseases, and enabling plants to cope with drought, flooding, toxins, or extreme temperatures. Scientists are trying to harness these symbionts for use in agriculture. Several microbial products are already in use on the farm, and major agrochemical companies are investing heavily in research to develop others. To what extent microbial products can eventually increase yields or reduce the use of pesticides and chemical fertilizers is still unclear, however.

Keep Reading in Science

Climate Change, Healthy Soils, and Holistic Grazing… A Restoration Story

Author: Savory Institute

Summary

Regenerating the health and productivity of our soils is critical for ensuring the Earth’s climate remains conducive to not only human life but other species as well. Moreover, we need to take direct action so that we have enough water and food to sustain a growing population of people. Livestock, properly managed, have a critical role to play in achieving these goals.

Reducing fossil fuel emissions is essential for curtailing the acidification of our oceans and for reversing the rapidly increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But it is just as critical that we greatly reduce the CO2 emissions tied to modern agricultural practices. In addition, there are still many billions of tons of CO2 in the atmosphere that need to be drawn down to Earth and safely stored if we are to maintain a livable climate for life on Earth.

The most obvious place to store this “legacy load” of CO2 is in our soils, where soil organisms convert it into organic matter, or soil organic carbon. The world’s soils, however, are unable to store the vast amounts of carbon they once did; scientists estimate our soils have lost up to 80 to 537 billion tons of carbon and that land misuse accounts for 30% of the carbon emissions entering the atmosphere.

Efforts to limit emissions from fossil fuel Combustion alone are incapable of stabilizing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

Here we will shed light on the process of atmospheric carbon capture and storage that has developed in the natural world over millions of years, has minimal possibility for unintended consequences, and has myriad benefits for the health of lands worldwide as well as all dependent on them.

The quantity of carbon stored in soils is directly related to the diversity and health of soil life. Bacteria, fungi and other soil life convert carbon that plants have extracted from the atmosphere through photosynthesis into organic matter. When soils are healthy, soil life is healthy and more carbon is converted and stored.

Keep Reading on Revitalization News

Farmers’ Use of Cover Crops Could Benefit the Pheasant Population

Author: Michael Pearce

Jeff Prendergast said life is pretty easy for a grown Kansas pheasant. With so many crop fields, food is seldom a problem. Even with reductions in Conservation Reserve Program fields there’s normally enough cover to protect a lot of the birds from predators and the elements. With nearly 8 million acres of wheat there’s no shortage of potential nesting cover. Still …

“Our main limiting factor is brood-rearing cover,” said Prendergast, Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism pheasant biologist. “Wheat fields have been the nesting cover, and when they grew into weeds they were our brood-rearing cover. Then (when farmers began spraying harvested fields with herbicides) those fields became essentially deserts without any vegetation and insects for the chicks.”

But Prendergast sees the growing practice of planting freshly harvested fields to non-harvested plants as a positive for pheasant numbers in the future.

Kelly Griffeth, a farmer in Mitchell and Jewell counties, is a believer in such cover crops.

“We’re using cover crops about everywhere we farm,” Griffeth said. “It’s making us money by improving our soil, and we have tons of wildlife, too.”

Keep Reading on Madison.com

The Healing Power of Regenerative Organic Agriculture

September 20, 2015 marked 25 years since my father, Robert Rodale, was killed in a car accident in Russia. If on that fateful day someone would have asked him what his legacy was to be, I know for a fact he would have answered: “Regenerative organic agriculture.”

To him, organic alone was not enough. He believed we needed a commitment to making things better. But more importantly, he understood that nature inherently makes things better when left to do her work. Nature heals itself, just as our bodies inherently attempt to heal themselves when wounded. We needed, he thought, to get nature on our team to make organic agriculture reach its true power.

A lot of people thought he was crazy. But some thought he was onto something.

After he died, the idea of regenerative agriculture seemed forgotten as the organic movement grew. But lately, there has been a resurgence of support behind the idea of regeneration. Thanks to the work of Tom Newmark, with the Carbon Underground, people are gathering around the tribal fire of regenerative organic agriculture in a way that my father would have only dreamed about. There’s even a growing movement toward regenerative capitalism, an idea proposed by the Capital Institute‘s John Fullerton.

Keep Reading on Maria’s Farm Country Kitchen

 

Reversing Desertification Shows Living Soil is Key Factor in Environmental Health

Author: Pamela

This beautiful TED Talk by Allan Savory, biologist and ecologist, highlights the importance of rebuilding native soil, particularly in areas where desertification already has begun. The irony of the story is that holistic land management and animal husbandry provide the strategic cornerstone to rejuvenating the grasslands of the world.

The lesson for those in G3 is: Protect and nurture your O.W.L. (Oxygen, Water, and Life), because Living Soil is the KEY FACTOR in environmental health in general and specifically for the health of your landscape and the health of your waterways.

Recently our Managing Member, Pamela Berstler, spoke in a meeting of Water Conservation Managers noting the paramount importance of educating about soil health in water conservation and pollution prevention.  Pamela argued that building a healthy, biologically active Soil Sponge was the MOST IMPORTANT ACTIVITY in healthy landscape building and that this truth applied to all manner of land use from agriculture to urban/suburban residential and commercial, parklands, and even “natural” watershed areas that we would consider wildlands. Pamela also reasoned that all soil is degraded (especially biologically speaking) and that intervention, remediation, and ACTION was required to rebuild our soils, particularly as it applies to garden-building, even when using plants that are considered native or have become perfectly adapted to the climate and place over thousands of years.

Map of Global Soil Degradation

There was push-back from the audience.  One attendee proposed that plant selection and placement was the most important factor for education and that selecting and planting native plants in native soil was THE simple and compelling solution for restoring watersheds and producing healthy, low resource gardens (including water conserving, of course). The reasoning was that native plants don’t need soils with organic matter in them, and so long as the microclimate conditions supported the plant selection, no soil amendment was necessary.

Keep Reading on Green Gardens Group

Women and Biodiversity Feed the World, Not Corporations and GMOs

The two great ecological challenges of our times are biodiversity erosion and climate change. And both are interconnected, in their causes and their solutions.

Industrial agiculture is the biggest contributor to biodiversity erosion as well as to climate change. According to the United Nations, 93% of all plant variety has disappeared over the last 80 years.

Monocultures based on chemical inputs do not merely destroy plant biodiversity, they have destroyed soil biodiversity, which leads to the emergence of pathogens, new diseases, and more chemical use.

Our study of soils in the Bt cotton regions of Vidharba showed a dramatic decline in beneficial soil organisms. In many regions with intensive use of pesticides and GMOs, bees and butterflies are disappearing. There are no pollinators on Bt cotton plants, whereas the population of pollinators in Navdanya’s biodiversity conservation farm in Doon Valley is six times more than in the neighbouring forest. The UNEP has calculated the contribution of pollinators to be $200 billion annually. Industrial agriculture also kills aquatic and marine life by creating dead zones due to fertilizer run off. Pesticides are also killing or damaging aquatic life.

Keep Reading on Common Dreams