Tag Archive for: Food Security

Researchers Refute Claim That World Needs to Double Food Production

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Published: August 2017 

A team of researchers from major American land-grant universities recently published a study in BioScience challenging the familiar assertion that “to feed the world, we need to double food production by 2050.”

Reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2011, this refrain has been repeated by influencers from National Geographic to the United Nations, as well as leading public academics and some of the biggest corporate actors in agriculture, including Monsanto, Cargill, and Syngenta.

The year 2050 is only 33 planting seasons away, as the study’s lead author Mitch Hunter stresses. Achieving a 100-percent increase from current production—or doubling it—would mean growing output faster than humans ever have, year over year for those next three decades straight. Reaching that milestone through continued conventional intensification would have dramatically negative environmental and social impacts.

While a body of research from the early 2010s did predict a doubling of demand by 2050, Hunter’s study argues that the data now support a more moderate 26 to 68-percent increase. The new research indicates that “roughly historical rates” of production growth should be able to meet this lower demand.

The authors also underscore, however, that their projections demonstrate a need for a 26 to 68-percent increase not in production alone, but in secure access to a nutritious and diverse diet. Citing estimates that 30 to 50-percent of food produced today ends up wasted because of gaps in storage, transportation, and utilization, the study paints a cautiously optimistic picture.

Hunter clarified in an op-ed that the team is not disputing the methods used in the original projections they sought to double-check, most famously published by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the University of Minnesota. Instead, they updated the 2005 baseline data that the well-cited projections used. Global cereal production, for example, has already jumped by 24 percent since 2005, and oil crops 39 percent. The team replaced the now decade-old crop production data and used newer, higher estimates for global population growth.

Using old numbers is dangerous when discussing something as far-reaching as global agriculture, argues Hunter. “The dramatic call to double production by 2050 has led to a focus on agricultural intensification. This, in turn, fosters a produce-at-all-costs mentality, which may exacerbate existing environmental challenges by increasing the use of fertilizers, pesticides, irrigation, and tillage,” he wrote.

KEEP READING ON FOOD TANK 

Loss of Fertile Land Fuels ‘looming Crisis’ Across Africa

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Author: Jeffrey Gettleman | Published: July 29, 2017 

The two elders, wearing weather-beaten cowboy hats with the strings cinched under their chins, stood at the edge of an empty farm, covering their mouths in disbelief.

Their homes — neat wooden cabins — had been smashed open. All their cattle had been stolen. So had their chickens. House after house stood vacant, without another soul around. It was as if some huge force had barreled into the village and swept away all the life.

Sioyia Lesinko Lekisio, one of the elders, had no doubts who did this. Swarms of herders from another county had invaded, attacking any farm or cattle ranch in their path, big or small, stealing livestock, ransacking homes and shooting people with high-powered assault rifles.

“There’s nothing we can do about it,” he said. “They want our land.”

Kenya has a land problem. Africa itself has a land problem. The continent seems so vast and the land so open. The awesome sense of space is an inextricable part of the beauty here — the unadulterated vistas, the endless land. But in a way, that is an illusion. 

Population swells, climate change, soil degradation, erosion, poaching, global food prices and even the benefits of affluence are exerting incredible pressure on African land. They are fueling conflicts across the continent, from Nigeria in the west to Kenya in the east — including here in Laikipia, a wildlife haven and one of Kenya’s most beautiful areas.

 

Large groups of people are on the move, desperate for usable land. Data from NASA satellites reveals an overwhelming degradation of agricultural land throughout Africa, with one recent study showing that more than 40 million Africans are trying to survive off land whose agricultural potential is declining.

At the same time, high birthrates and lengthening life spans mean that by the end of this century, there could be as many as four billion people on the continent, about 10 times the population 40 years ago.

It is a two-headed problem, scientists and activists say, and it could be one of the gravest challenges Africa faces: The quality of farmland in many areas is getting worse, and the number of people squeezed onto that land is rising fast.

“It’s a looming crisis,” said Odenda Lumumba, head of the Kenya Land Alliance, a group that works on land reform. “We are basically reaching the end of the road.”

More than in any other region of the world, people in Africa live off the land. There are relatively few industrial or service jobs here. Seventy percent of Africa’s population makes a living through agriculture, higher than on any other continent, the World Bank says.

 

But as the population rises, with more siblings competing for their share of the family farm, the slices are getting thinner. In many parts of Africa, average farm size is just an acre or two, and after repeated divisions of the same property, some people are left trying to subsist on a sliver of a farm that is not much bigger than a tennis court.

A changing climate makes things even harder. Scientists say large stretches of Africa are drying up, and they predict more desertification, more drought and more hunger. In a bad year, maybe one country in Africa will be hit by famine. This year, famine is stalking three, pushing more than 10 million people in Somalia, Nigeria and South Sudan to the brink of starvation.

But much of Africa’s farmland is in danger for another, perhaps simpler, reason: overuse. Fast-growing populations mean that many African families can’t afford to let land sit fallow and replenish. They have to take every inch of their land and farm or graze it constantly. This steadily lowers the levels of organic matter in the soil, making it difficult to grow crops.

In many areas, the soil is so dried out and exhausted that there is little solace even when the prayed-for rains finally come. The ground is as hard as concrete and the rain just splashes off, like a hose spraying a driveway.

“There are going to be some serious food-security issues,” said Zachary Donnenfeld, a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies in South Africa. “More and more countries will be reliant on food imports. You’ll increasingly see the international community come into more rescue-type situations.”

The fact that several of Africa’s biggest economies have grown impressively in the past 10 years may seem like an answer, but analysts say the newfound affluence may actually compound these pressures.

As people gain wealth, they consume more — more energy, more water and usually more meat, all of which intensify the pressures on the environment. In Kenya, a piece of meat is one of the first things people treat themselves to when they get a little extra cash, and as the nation’s economy grows, so does the taste for beef. Cows have always been a traditional form of wealth; now they’re big business. In the past 15 years, the number of cows in Kenya has shot up by more than 60 percent to around 20 million, driving a scramble for grazing lands.

Some parts of Kenya are now so overgrazed by cows and goats that all the grass roots have been eaten, leaving large stretches of bare earth, as measured by NASA satellite imagery that tracks net levels of carbon dioxide absorption. Herders from bare-earth zones in Kenya are often the ones invading ranches.

Private investors are tramping in as well. Since the 1990-2005 period, global food prices have increased by 50 to 75 percent. Many foreign companies and local businesspeople have speculated that despite soil degradation, African farmland is destined to become more valuable. Small landholders across the continent are increasingly getting priced out or even evicted to make way for big commercial farms. This has led to conflict even in usually peaceful places, like Malawi, where a land-defense movement recently started to fight back against foreign-owned tea plantations.

KEEP READING ON THE NEW YORK TIMES 

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.

KEEP READING ON SEED FREEDOM

How the Food Industry Can Help Reverse Climate Change

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Author: Katy Askew | Published: July 25, 2017 

According to the latest data from the US’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOOA), average global temperatures in March were 1.05°C higher than when records began in 1880. Scientific consensus – which is reflected in the Paris Climate Accord – places the ‘point of no return’, when global warming reaches dangerous levels, at 2°C. 

The climate clock is ticking.

Estimates vary as to how long we have left to stabilise warming below this level. The Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC) calculates this time based on the premise that we can emit a maximum of 760 gigatons of CO2 into the atmosphere between now and 2100. At present, we are emitting 40 gigatons of CO2 each year. That’s 1,268 tons per second. At current rates, we have a little over 18 years before our carbon budget is spent, the MCC says. 

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) suggests if humans carry on with a “business as usual” approach, the Earth’s average temperature will rise by between 2.6°C and 4.8°C above pre-industrial levels by 2100.

For some climate scientists, however, this estimate could be optimistic. A 2016 paper published in Scientific Advances, under lead author Tobias Friedrich of the of the University of Hawaii, argues temperature rises due to greenhouse gas emissions are “strongly dependent on the climate background state”, with “significantly larger values attained during warm phases”. 

In other words, the hotter it gets, the quicker the temperature is likely to rise. According to this paradigm, at current emission levels, the average global temperature could rise by between 4.78°C and 7.36°C by 2100. 

The food industry is particularly vulnerable to climate change. As the World Food Programme and Met Office food insecurity map shows, areas in Africa, the Middle East and Asia are already vulnerable to food insecurity and global warming brought about by rising emissions that are set to deepen the problems faced in these regions. 

“Changes in climatic conditions have already affected the production of some staple crops, and future climate change threatens to exacerbate this. Higher temperatures will have an impact on yields while changes in rainfall could affect both crop quality and quantity,” the WFP warns. 

The integrated global nature of the food industry supply chain – which is reliant on crops such as cocoa and coffee, as well as coconut and palm oil, that are internationally sourced – mean large-scale food manufacturers in Europe and North America, where the WFP says food insecurity is negligible, are far from immune to the negative consequences of global warming.

The food industry and Scope 3 emissions

The food industry is also one of the largest carbon emitters. For instance, if both direct and indirect emissions are taken into account, over 30% of the European Union’s greenhouse gas emissions come from the food and drink sector, environmental campaign group Friends of the Earth notes. 

Andrew Nobrega, the North American investment director at France-based PUR Projet, which looks to help companies regenerate and protect ecosystems, that the food sector is already taking action to address emissions, from investments in renewables to carbon offsetting. 

Speaking during a Climate Collaborative event in May, Nobrega notes: “Many organisations attempt to both value and address Scope 1 and Scope 2 emissions within their supply chain.” These emissions include those directly from production, such as efforts to lower energy use, and indirect emissions such as transportation. “There is an opportunity to look a little bit further and look at Scope 3 emissions,” Nobrega says. 

Scope 3 emissions include those produced by raw material processing and production and, Nobrega says, these account for 40-50% of a product’s total emissions. 

PUR Projet specialises in providing supply chain management for corporations that reflect “positive carbon actions and the need to cut deforestation in commodity sourcing” and it operates projects in Latin America and other tropical forested regions.  

To address Scope 3 emissions directly, investment can be targeted at the farm level to promote ecosystems and biodiversity, stabilise yields, reduce costs for the farmers and provide alternative income opportunities and help to adapt to climate change and reduce pressure on their systems, Nobrega suggests. Ecosystem restoration can be achieved through agroforestry practices, such as insetting trees, rotating crop cycles and utilising non-chemical fertilisation methods. 

“We are taking a unit of climate mitigation and we are seeking to address climate smart agriculture and the regeneration of forests in some cases but also decreasing deforestation in the first place,” Nobrega explains. 

“Agroforestry itself is a carbon sequestration measure… and by the provision of sustainable timber and mitigating loss of yields you actually reduce the need for these farmers to go further into existing forested lands to degrade either for more agricultural land, illegal timber harvesting or something of that nature. So you are both engaging climate action on the parcel level and reducing the need for degradation outside of the parcel.”

Preventing deforestation has been flagged as a priority by global chocolate giants, companies reliant on cocoa. Earlier this year, companies including Nestle, Mondelez International, Hershey, Ferrero and Mars announced plans to work together to “end deforestation and forest degradation in the global cocoa supply chain”.  

The joint initiative, which also has the backing of NGOs and other stakeholders, will move to “develop and present a joint public-private framework of action to address deforestation” at the COP 23 UN climate change talks in Bonn in November. It will initially focus on Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana, the world’s leading producers of cocoa, where the farming of the commodity is a driving force behind rapid rates of deforestation.

Regenerative agriculture

While addressing deforestation helps to cut Scope 3 emissions for some products, climate smart agriculture can also help to take carbon from the atmosphere and put it back in the ground through photosynthesis. 

For this to work, you have to start with healthy soil, Tim LaSalle of California State University and Chico State, told an event focused on climate change running alongside the Natural Products Expo West food industry trade show in California earlier this year. 

KEEP READING ON JUST-FOOD

As the Great Plains Disappear, a Path to Better Farming

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Author: Peter Carrels | Published: June 29, 2017 

Gabe Brown’s 5,200-acre farm and ranch in central North Dakota practically straddles the 100th meridian, the line that historically divided Eastern lands that were farmed from the drier Western lands that were grazed by livestock.

That geographic boundary, of course, has always been somewhat blurry. But in recent years, row-crop agriculture on an industrial scale has pushed the dry line westward. Modern sod-busting has gobbled up vast expanses of native grasslands, markedly enlarging the nation’s corn and soybean acres.

Critics watched this happen but weren’t able to quantify the ecological alteration. Now, an analysis issued by the World Wildlife Fund, Plowprint Report, confirms just how extensively the American Great Plains has been transformed. The Great Plains region, the short and mixed-grass portion of the North American prairie, includes lands from the Canadian border east of the Rocky Mountains, between Great Falls, Montana, and Fargo, North Dakota, and stretching south to Texas — some 800 million acres in total.

Destruction of the Eastern portion of the continent’s prairie region — the tallgrass part — was caused by conversion to corn and soybean fields and is nearly complete. Less than 1 percent of the original tallgrass prairie ecosystem survives. The Plowprint study reveals that since 2009, more than 53 million acres of prairie on the Great Plains has been plowed and converted to corn, soybeans and wheat.  That figure — an area that equals the size of Kansas — represents about 13 percent of the estimated 419 million acres of Great Plains grasslands that had survived in its native condition.

Fortunately, stewardship models show how farming can be less damaging and more sustainable. For example, Brown changed the way he managed his land after suffering four years —1995 to 1998 — of hail and drought. Nearly broke and lacking access to capital to buy seeds and chemicals, Brown re-examined his approach to farming. Finding that his soils had dramatically deteriorated through conventional farming practices, he started avoiding tillage and now relies on cover crops, perennial grasses and a diversity of income streams. When many of his neighbors plowed pastures to plant corn, Brown did the opposite, reducing row crops from 2,000 acres to 800 acres and re-vegetating 1,200 acres back into prairie. His operation also emphasized grazing and grasses instead of growing annual grains.

“It’s not easy to admit that I farmed the wrong way for many years,” Brown said. “But we’ve completely weaned ourselves from government programs, stopped using synthetic fertilizers, minimized herbicide use, and in the process enriched and even built our soils.”

Keeping roots in the ground became his mantra, and that meant growing cover crops and indigenous grasses. He began measuring moisture retention and monitored microbes in the dirt. Soon he had a name for his soil stewardship: Re-generative agriculture.

On land still planted to row crops, Brown saw his yields rise, outpacing his county’s averages by 20 percent. He began selling grass-finished livestock and nutrient-dense eggs, honey and other produce directly to consumers. He grazed cattle, sheep and hogs on dozens of carefully rotated pastures. The operation included 1,000 pastured laying hens.

“We can feed the world better food by maintaining healthy soils,” declared Brown. “The destruction of perennial grasses to grow subsidized crops like corn and soybeans is a travesty.”

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California Farmers Climate Pledge

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As California farmers and ranchers, our livelihoods as well as the ability to feed America entirely depends on the climate. Working close to Nature, we are the first to notice shifts in weather. On our land and in our harvests, we bear the brunt of floods, drought and rising temperatures.

We are soil stewards who belong to a community beyond our own fields; we don’t plant for seasons but for generations. It’s with this legacy in mind that we pledge our support for the science, commitment and goals outlined in the Paris Climate Agreement.

We vow to continually improve our own on-farm practices to conserve energy and sequester carbon, but we also believe in the dire importance of a collective, worldwide commitment by all nations—including our own—to meet the 1.5 degrees Celsius target stated in the Paris Climate Agreement, all while building a cleaner, 21st century economy.

As members of the agricultural community, we are concerned by our president’s decision to pull America out of this agreement. We disagree with the current administration that this international accord will harm our economy without mitigating the climate crisis.

We ask that our leaders return America to its role as a collaborative, global leader in combating Climate Change. And in the meantime, we support state-based initiatives as well as citizen-funded programs—unbeholden to federal policy shifts—that recognize not only the dire consequences that inaction will have on our farms, ranches and food supply, but also the regenerative role that we farmers and ranchers can play in reversing these dangerous trends and restoring a healthy carbon cycle.

America depends on farmers. And farmers depend on the climate. Now is the time to act.

SIGN THE PLEDGE AND LEARN MORE ON THE FARMERS GUILD

 

Saving America’s Broken Prairie

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Author: David J. Unger  | Published: April 26, 2017 

Out near wear the continent divides, up on a ridge carved by ice over millennia, among blazing star, blue aster, purple prairie clover, harebell, and smooth brome — grasses all yet untouched by the plow — Neil Shook balls up some purple pasqueflower, shoves it into his nostril, and snorts.

He loves to do this.

“Mash it up really good,” Shook says as he hands me a piece of flower. “Really good.” And I, too, shove pasqueflower up my nose and snort.

“Did you get it?” Shook asks. I do. It’s a burn that is supposed to be just the thing for clearing a stuffy sinus, and while I’m not yet a convert, I get Shook’s larger point, too: This plain land is home to strange and wild life.

Shook is the manager at Chase Lake National Wildlife Refuge, a 4,385-acre expanse of federally protected grasslands and wetlands in east-central North Dakota. Each year, tens of thousands of pelicans, cormorants, gulls, herons, and others come here to nest, and I’ve come to learn more about a place Shook calls “heaven.”

On this stretch of grass, he bounces from plant species to grass species with a boyish exuberance that defies his years of work toward conserving America’s grassy core — a battle that has been, by almost every measure, a losing one.

This is as good an entry point as any into the complex, highly altered and highly threatened ecosystem that stretches some 1.4 million square miles down central Canada and through the U.S. heartland down to Mexico. Shove pasqueflower up your nose. Touch the grass as it waves in the wind. Hear the insects’ blanket drone. There is no etymological connection between “prairie” and “prayer,” but at times it seems there ought to be.

“Every plant out here has a purpose, and every animal or insect that’s found here has purpose,” Shook says. “There’s a relationship between those plants and animals, and we don’t understand what that relationship is — or we may not understand the importance of it — but it’s there for a reason. And when it’s gone, who knows what we lost?”

I went to North Dakota to see what I thought was the region’s defining story: The shale oil boom and bust that has reshaped the heartland’s economy and upended energy geopolitics just about everywhere. But it turns out that oil is just one part of a great transformation now underway in North America’s Great Plains and Central Lowlands, the likes of which has not been seen since the Dust Bowl. A biome that can be, in some spots, every bit as diverse and complex as a rainforest sits in the country’s backyard, and it’s coming undone.

This is flyover country. It’s easy to view North Dakota’s unending flatness as boring, empty, untamed. There’s a long tradition of seeing the prairie — this vast stretch of fertile, grass-dominated land — as negative space with no purpose other than to be transformed into something with purpose.

The famed naturalist Aldo Leopold saw it differently. “Prairie was, in fact, a community of wild animals and plants so organized,” he wrote, “as to build, through the centuries, the rich soil which now feeds us.”

In other words, all that pasqueflower, ragwort, indigo, and milkweed — all those bison, prairie dogs, pronghorns, daphnia, water boatmen, and eared grebes — have lived and died across the millennia, cycling nutrients from sun to leaves to soil to flesh and back into soil again. The soil that remains is packed with deep energy we turn into food for ourselves and the animals that feed us. Increasingly, this old, flat land provides fossil fuels, wind, and corn that we turn into modern energy and use in our homes and cars.

The prairie’s commodification has served as a tremendous boon to civilization, but not without costs. The grasslands of central North America have declined by approximately 79 percent in area since Europeans began arriving in large numbers in the early 1800s, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. In some places — particularly in the wetter, and more fertile, eastern tallgrass prairies — grassland cover has declined 99.9 percent since 1830.

It turns out that oil is just one part of a great transformation now underway in North America’s Great Plains and Central Lowlands.

“Every plant out here has a purpose, and every animal or insect that’s found here has purpose,” Shook says.

New pressures threaten to wipe out what’s left. Budgets for federal conservation programs are being cut. President Trump’s budget proposal would reduce Interior Department spending by 12 percent. Biofuel mandates, farm subsidies, and crop insurance give farmers incentive to put more land into production. Genetically modified seeds give them the technology to grow crops where they previously could not. An emergent middle class in China and across the developing world increases demand for the kinds of row crops that can feed nations. Oil production has creeped in from the west, spurred on by the fracking revolution, though low oil prices have tempered its advance. Wind power takes up space, too.

Throw climate change into the mix and it’s no wonder scientists call the American prairie one of the most threatened ecosystems on the planet.

“I’m always amazed that I can get on an airplane, pick up the [in-flight] magazine and have someone tell me about the crisis in the rainforest,” says John Devney, vice president for U.S. policy at Delta Waterfowl, a habitat conservation group focused on hunting. “Nobody tells this story,” he adds, gesturing to the grasslands behind him at a ranch outside Wing, North Dakota. “This is way more proximate to a hell of a lot of more people in the United States of America. What happens here in land use has implications — not just if you’re a duck hunter and you want to shoot a gadwall in Louisiana that’s produced in Sheridan County, North Dakota. It has implications [for] what’s happening in the Gulf of Mexico. It has consequences [for] what’s happening in Sioux Falls — with water quality, carbon sequestration values, [and] incredible biodiversity richness.”

The tension here is between maintaining the capacity to feed billions of people and maintaining the land that makes it possible. Soil is considered a finite resource, and can be revived only if given the time and space. Conservation science and holistic land management practices can help, but they compete with economics and policies that encourage liberal use of the plow.

When Neil Shook arrived at Chase Lake in 2010, he started seeing plumes of smoke on the horizon. Commodity prices were rising rapidly, and landowners rushed to convert as many acres as possible into agriculturally productive land. First they burned the grass, then they plowed the land and planted it with corn, soybean, or other crops. By 2013, it looked like “the apocalypse,” he recalls. “It was just like somebody dropped a nuke,” Shook says. “Just ‘boom.’”

It’s called “breaking” prairie when farmers turn grassland into cropland. And once broken, the prairie is hard to fix.

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6 Reasons Local Food Systems Will Replace Our Industrial Model

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Author: John Ikerd  | Published: May 25, 2017 

A local, community-based food system certainly is not a new idea. It’s simply an idea that is being reassessed in response to growing public concerns about the current global food system. When I was growing up in south Missouri in the 1940s and early 1950s, our family’s food system was essentially local. I would guess close to 90 percent of our food either came from our farm or was produced and processed within less than 50 miles of our home. There were local canneries, meat packers, and flour mills to supply grocery stores and restaurants with locally grown food products. Over the years, the local canneries, meat packers and flour mills were consolidated into the giant agribusiness operations that dominate today’s global food system. Supermarkets and fast-food chains replaced the mom-and-pop grocery stores and restaurants.

Today, I doubt there are many communities in the United States who get more than 10 percent of their foods from local sources, as official estimates put local foods at well less than 5 percent of total food sales. Estimates of the average distance that food travels from production to consumption within the United States range from 1200 to 1700 miles. More than 15 percent of the food sold in the United States is imported, with more than 50 percent of fruits and 20 percent of vegetables coming from other countries. More than 30 percent of U.S. farm income is derived from agricultural exports to other countries. The local food system of my childhood has been transformed into the global food system of today. Most of these changes took place during a 40-year period, between the late 1950s and the late 1990s.

Today, we are in the midst of another transformation.

The local food movement is the leading edge of a change that ultimately will transform the American food system from industrial/global to sustainable/local. Organic foods had been the leading edge of the movement, growing at a rate of 20 percent-plus per year from the early 1990s until the economic recession of 2008. Growth in organics sales have since stabilized at around 10 percent per year. The organic food market reached $43.3 billion in sales in 2015—more than 5 percent of the total U.S. food market. Today, organic fruits and vegetables claim more than 10 percent of their markets. As organic foods moved into mainstream food markets, many consumers turned to local farmers to ensure the integrity of their foods. The modern local food movement was born.

How we got here

To understand the local food movement, it’s important to understand the birth of the modern organic movement. The organic movement has its roots in the natural food movement of the early 1960s, which was a rejection of the industrialization of American agriculture. Following World War II, the mechanical and chemical technologies developed to support industrial warfare were adapted to support industrial agriculture. The “back to the earth” people decided to create their own food system. They produced their own food, bought food from each other, and formed the first cooperative food buying clubs and natural food stores.

Concerns about the health and environmental risks associated with the synthetic fertilizers and pesticides were not the only reasons they chose to grow foods organically. They were also creating and nurturing a sense of connectedness and commitment to taking care of each other and caring for the earth. The philosophy of organic farming was deeply embedded in their communities. To these food and farming pioneers, organic was as much a way of life as a way to produce food.

Organic farming and food production remained on the fringes of American society until the environmental movement expanded into mainstream society and science began to confirm the environmental and public health risks associated with a chemically-dependent, industrial agriculture. As organic foods grew in popularity, organics eventually moved into mainstream supermarkets. Except for restrictions on use of synthetic agrochemicals and food additives, organic foods then began to seem more and more like conventional industrial foods.

Consumers who were concerned about the ecological and societal consequences of industrial agriculture then began looking to local farmers to ensure the ecological and social integrity of their foods. Between 1994 and 2015, farmers markets increased in number from 1,755 to nearly 8,476. In the 2012 USDA Census of Agriculture, there were 12,000 CSAs (community supported agriculture) and an estimated 50,000 farmers selling direct to consumers by all means. Many farmers who use organic production practices don’t bother with organic certification. Their customers know and trust them to produce “good food.”

A more recent development in the local food movement has been the multiple-farm networks of local farmers. The networks may be food alliances, cooperative, collaboratives or food hubs. Grown Locally, Idaho’s Bounty, Viroqua Food Coop, Good Natured Family Farms and the Oklahoma Food Cooperative are examples of food networks of which I am personally aware. These alliances range in size from a couple dozen to a couple hundred farmers. The National Good Food Network lists more than 300 “food hubs”—although I cannot vouch for their success or authenticity.

Why local food is part of a larger movement that could actually “change everything”

The local food movement is so decentralized and dispersed that it is impossible to accurately estimate the size or importance of the movement. The USDA estimated the value of local food sales by farmers at $9 billion in 2015. This figure does not reflect the “retail value” of food sold by farmers to local restaurants or retailers. Virtually everywhere I go, I discover new local foods initiatives.

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With Climate Chaos, Who Will Feed Us?

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Published 2014

The Industrial Food Chain uses 70% of the world’s agricultural resources to produce just 30% of our global food supply. Conversely, the Peasant Food Web provides 70% of the global food supply while using only 30% of agricultural resources.

The Peasant Food Web encourages diversity through breeding millions of varieties of thousands of crops, nurturing thousands of livestock breeds and aquatic species, while the Industrial Food Chain has narrowed this vast cornucopia down to a dozen crops, a handful of livestock species and collapsing fish stocks.

The Industrial Food Chain wastes two-thirds of its food production, devastates ecosystems, causes over $4 trillion in damages, and either under-nourishes or over-feeds 3.4 billion people. The Peasant Food Web is environmentally and nutritionally constructive.

1. Who feeds us today?

The Industrial Chain: Provides 30% of all food consumed (crops, fish, etc.) but uses about 70-80% of world’s arable land to grow 30-40% of crop-derived food; 1 accounts for >80% of fossil fuels 2 and 70% of water 3 used in agriculture; causes 44-57% of emitted GHGs annually 4; deforests 13 million ha 5 and destroys 75 billion tons of topsoil 6 each year; controls almost all of the 15% of food that is traded internationally 7 (i.e., 15% of all the food produced in the world) and dominates the $7 trillion commercial grocery market,8 while leaving almost 3.4 billion either undernourished or overweight.9 6

The Peasant Web:

Provides >70% of total food eaten by people:10 15-20% via urban agriculture; 11 10-15% from hunting and gathering; 12 5-10% from fishing; 13 and 35-50% from farms (harvests 60-70% of food crops from 20-30% of arable land); 14 accounts for <20% of fossil fuel 15 and 30% of water used in agriculture; 16 nurtures and sustainably uses diversity and dominates the 85% of the world’s food grown and consumed within national borders; 17 is the major (often sole) provider of the food that reaches the 2 billion hungry and undernourished.18

The Industrial Chain:

Provides 30% of all food consumed (crops, fish, etc.) but uses about 70-80% of world’s arable land to grow 30-40% of crop-derived food; 1 accounts for >80% of fossil fuels 2 and 70% of water 3 used in agriculture; causes 44-57% of emitted GHGs annually 4; deforests 13 million ha 5 and destroys 75 billion tons of topsoil 6 each year; controls almost all of the 15% of food that is traded internationally 7 (i.e., 15% of all the food produced in the world) and dominates the $7 trillion commercial grocery market,8 while leaving almost 3.4 billion either undernourished or overweight.9 6 The Peasant Web: Provides >70% of total food eaten by people:10 15-20% via urban agriculture; 11 10-15% from hunting and gathering; 12 5-10% from fishing; 13 and 35-50% from farms (harvests 60-70% of food crops from 20-30% of arable land); 14 accounts for <20% of fossil fuel 15 and 30% of water used in agriculture; 16 nurtures and sustainably uses diversity and dominates the 85% of the world’s food grown and consumed within national borders; 17 is the major (often sole) provider of the food that reaches the 2 billion hungry and undernourished.18

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A Narrow Focus on Boosting Farm Production Can Result in Land Degradation, Deforestation and Pollution

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Author: Sophie Hares | Published: May 3, 2017 

Efforts to fight rural poverty need to take better account of the environment and local culture to avoid exacerbating the problems they are meant to solve, researchers said.

Agricultural development programmes should consider more than just economic growth when trying to move people out of the poverty trap, and consider the links between social and ecological systems, said a paper published on Wednesday in the journal Science Advances.

“If you’re ignoring nature and culture, even the economic equations show there would be adverse consequences,” said co-author Jamila Haider from the Stockholm Resilience Centre.

Traditional seed types and agricultural practices risk being lost, alongside cultural links to crops, through development projects to introduce higher-yielding and more marketable crops.

In some cases, a rise in production has resulted in worse land degradation, including deforestation and pollution, and left communities more exposed to shocks, said the researchers.

They also noted cases where new seed types failed because local customs and environmental conditions were neglected.

The report said “resilience thinking” could shed light on why many aid projects – including those that pay for seeds, fertilizers, and machinery – fail to help people out of poverty.

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