Tag Archive for: Regenerative Agriculture

Consumers Paying for ‘Fair Treatment of Workers, Animals, and Land’

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Author: Brian Frederick | Published: February 2018

Jeff Moyer is the Executive Director of Rodale Institute, an independent research institute for organic farming. For decades, Moyer has helped develop new techniques and invent new tools to support organic methods.

The Rodale Institute was founded in 1947 in Kutztown, PA by J.I. Rodale. Inspired by the nitrogen fertilizer shortages during World War II, Rodale wanted to develop practical methods of rebuilding soil fertility. Today, the institute focuses particularly on compost, soil health, weed and pest management, livestock operations, organic certification, wastewater treatment, and climate change. It is home to the longest running comparative study of organic and chemical agriculture, started in 1981.

Moyer is well known for inventing and popularizing the No Till Roller Crimper, a device for weed management. He is a past chair of the National Organic Standards Board, a founding board member of Pennsylvania Certified Organic, the Chairman of the Board of Director of The Seed Farm, a member of the Green America Non-GMO Working Group, a Project Member of The Noble Foundation’s Soil Renaissance project, and a Board Member of PA Farm Link. Moyer has been with the Rodale Institute for over 40 years.

Food Tank had the opportunity to talk with Jeff Moyer about organic farming and the future of agriculture.

Food Tank (FT): What is the No Till Roller Crimper and how has it changed farming?

Jeff Moyer (JM): The No Till Roller Crimper is used to terminate and suppress weed growth rather than using toxic chemicals. By doing so, farmers are able to delay termination by several weeks, increasing biomass production, resulting in greater nitrogen fixation, and accumulating more soil organic matter. This practice has allowed for farmers to integrate cover crops in their production systems, save money, and improve soil structure.

Research to determine which cover crops to grow with cash crops and having precise timing is crucial to the No Till Roller Crimper system. The concept can work for farms all around the world, but the timing is different in distant countries.

Although the No Till Roller Crimper has changed both conventional farming and organic farming, this tool allows for a faster process for farmers who wish to transition from conventional to organic production. At Rodale Institute, we encourage the reduction of tillage to improve soil health, and the No Till Roller Crimper has aided in that process.

FT: What are the biggest challenges organic farming faces?

JM: One of the biggest challenges organic farming faces is brand equity and trust in the marketplace. The consumer wants to be able to trust the background procedures of the organic food industry and assure their target in the improvement of personal and environmental health, not just the marketing of their brand. Consumers are paying for fair treatment of workers, animals, and land, not just the seal of organically certified.

It is important that the values beyond the production of the produce outweigh the value of the food product itself, a focus on soil health and the environment, rather than a larger yield. The overall goal is to feed the world for thousands of years, not just the present time. Through organic agriculture, this can be made possible, while continuing to focus on environmental concerns.

It is necessary for a shift in policy decisions for this to become a universal standard. Integrating stricter policy can lead to further research into scientific data of organic farming and the benefits thereof. For example, a cow can be fed organically, and be considered organic certified, but the treatment of this animal can be so inhumane, a person would not support the organic label itself.

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Drought-Stricken Texans Turn to Cows to Save Their Farms

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Authors: Ginger Zee, David Miller, Kelly Harold, Olivia Smith, and Andrea Miller | Published: February 6, 2018

How does a cattle farmer from Texas withstand a drought? In the summer of 2011 as oppressive heat and drought hit Texas, grasses were dying and cows were running out of food to eat. To save their cattle, ranchers were forced to truck their cows to fields of healthy grass.

But as several farms were turning to dust, cattle rancher Jon Taggart of Grandview, Texas, continued run his business.

“I’m proud to say that we harvested cattle every week of the year through that entire drought,” he told ABC News.

How did Taggart stay open while other farmers were struggling?

“The reason was because we planted those deep-rooted native grasses that were designed by somebody a lot bigger than us to survive those droughts,” he said.

Taggart has been raising grass-fed and grass-finished beef since 1999 and owns three stores in Texas called Burgundy Pasture Beef.

While most beef that is sold in stores is finished on grain to fatten them up, Taggart and a small but growing number of farmers are feeding their cows grass exclusively for their whole lives.

That makes the grass as important to the farm as the cows themselves.

“We want an extremely diversified plant population: warm season grasses; cool season grasses; grasses that germinate early; grasses that germinate later.”

That diversity of grass has kept Taggart’s soil healthy even as Texas faces droughts. The grasses ability to hold on to water when it rains has helped keep his farm healthy.

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Connecting Through Food

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Author: Nigel McNay | Published: January 27, 2018

A greater profile for the wide-ranging benefits of regenerative agriculture is what a Stanley woman hopes will flow from her recognition in a national awards program.

Jade Miles has been announced as one of three finalists in the Victorian Rural Women’s Award.

The award is part of a wider program, with the Victorian winner to be named at Melbourne Museum on March 20 going on to the national award ceremony in Canberra in September.

Ms Miles said that to be nominated “really is incredible” and “actually a bit of a surprise”.

“More than anything it allows you to know that the work that you’re doing is understood and it reads with people,” she said.

“What it does is provide an opportunity where people are starting to actually listen to what your message is.

“Because mine is around regenerative agriculture and local food systems, it’s not one that usually gets a very loud voice.”

Ms Miles’ nomination outlined how she wanted to share her learnings from developing a community-owned regional food co-operative and to build a social enterprise-based model that could be rolled out in other regions.

She and her husband, Charlie Showers, and their three children live at Black Barn Farm, which they plan on becoming a regenerative and diverse orchard, nursery and learning space.

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Healthy Soil and Regenerative Farming as Major Food System Solutions

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Author: Sammy Blair | Published: February 2018

Lauren Tucker, Executive Director of Kiss the Ground, will be speaking at the Washington D.C. Food Tank Summit, “Cultivating the Next Generation of Young Food Leaders,” which will be held in partnership with George Washington University, World Resources Institute, the National Farmers Union, Future Farmers of America, and the National Young Farmers Coalition on February 28, 2018

Initially the manager of their local garden, Tucker is now the Executive Director of Kiss the Ground, a non-profit striving to combat climate change by cultivating healthy soil to sequester carbon in the atmosphere. Kiss the Ground focuses on public engagement through media and educational curriculum, and works to help farmers build healthy soil.

Growing up in rural West Virginia surrounded by conventional corn and soy fields, Tucker realized that despite being surrounded by an agrarian community,  people in the United States were disconnected from their land. She was inspired to help people and the planet and has spent her adult life learning about and sharing the connection between humans and the earth we live on.

Tucker graduated with a B.A. from the Honors program at American University in Psychology and International Studies, and then became a UC Master Gardener and earned her Permaculture Design Certificate. Tucker has extensive experience working with national and international non-profits, including Green Light New Orleans and Angel Flight West, and has worked as a chef and organizer for local farm dinners.

Food Tank spoke with Lauren about the importance of soil health, regenerative farming, and how consumer knowledge of our food system can help solve environmental and human health crises.

Food Tank (FT): What originally inspired you to get involved in your work?

Lauren Tucker (LT): I started studying nutrition and then realized that nutrition is so much more than the right mix of minerals, proteins, carbs and fats. I discovered that soil and how we grow food is the basis for nutrition. Along the way I met Ryland Engelhart and Finian Makepeace, Kiss the Ground co-founders, who were inspired by healthy soil and plants’ potential to draw carbon out of the atmosphere. Healthy soils and regenerative farming have become my full passion as they provide a solution to global warming human health.

FT: How are you helping to build a better food system?

LT: We create educational materials (films, book, social media, and middle school curriculum) on soil as a carbon sequestration solution. We also raise money for farmer training and work with businesses to invest in healthy soils in their supply chains. Everything we do is helping to achieve our mission: to inspire participation in the global movement to restore soils.

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Corporations Need Nature’s Regenerative Service

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Author: Frank Hajek | Published: February 2, 2018

We heard the chainsaws first, like the buzz of a bee on amphetamines, interspersed with the crash of falling giants, then the toiling drone of bulldozers. We were approaching the edge of the Salvación-Boca Manu-Colorado road. Our Matsigenka guide, Feliciano, from Pankotsi Lodge in the nearby village of Shipetiari, led us expertly through the forest. Suddenly, we emerged onto the road clearing, precisely at the spot where a Caterpillar was digging up the roots of a recently felled tree.

The foreman at the road front was at first jovial and friendly, but when he noticed we were taking pictures, he began a speech about tourism and conservation not creating enough local jobs. He went on to say that the local district council had recently secured a large cacao project, which the road would support. I asked where he was from.

He replied he was from the Andean highlands of Puno, but that he had lived for 20 years in Madre de Dios and that he was a selvatico, a jungle man. We spoke for over an hour, and he showed us another Caterpillar that had broken down as a result of the grueling work. He was a nice guy. But in my mind the fact remained: He was helping to build a road, with illegal loggers hot on his tracks, already extracting precious woods from Manu National Park’s border, one of Peru’s last great wilderness areas.

So I decided to ask him directly: Did he not feel bad about all the forest they were felling?

His answer was also direct: “No. El bosque no me da trabajo.” No. The forest doesn’t give me a job.

And that is the problem: Many people do not perceive the value of wilderness areas, even though we receive life-sustaining services from them every day. These services include natural cycles that we take for granted such as climate regulation, water purification and maintaining biodiversity.

These services are, in theory, worth trillions of dollars to the world economy (PDF). But you cannot eat theory, and so we are losing millions of hectares of forests, countless animal and plant species, and many unique ecosystems every year, especially in the emerging economies of the developing world. The need for new tools and systems to make this loss and its value tangible to people long has been acknowledged, but successful models of how to do this are still thin on the ground.

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Baby Steps – Profile in Soil Health

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Moving Beyond Sustainability into a Regenerative System

Ezra Lakey started Lakey Farms in 1945 with a focus on small grain production.  Half the acres were in small grains and the other half were summer fallow, with the occasional plow down nitrogen pea crop.  The farm progressed and grew through the years as did the family.  Ezra’s five children all helped on the farm, but Dwight and his younger brother Jerry were the two who were most involved.  Dwight’s eldest son, David, returned after college to the farm to help the operation grow to nearly 9,000 acres at one point.  With the passing of Ezra in 2009 and the retirement of Jerry, additional help was needed.  At that time, Dwight’s youngest son, Dan, was 2 years out of college where he had obtained a bachelor’s degree in Business Management and was living in Twin Falls working in outside sales.  With the pending birth of his first child, the desire to raise his children on the farm was growing.  When presented with the opportunity to return to the farm, Dan and his wife, Marie, made the decision to return to the small East Idaho town.

A Legacy of Conservation

Soil conservation is nothing new to the Lakey’s.  In the early 1980s, they transitioned away from moldboard plowing into chisel plowing to reduce erosion.  They also incorporated water and sediment basins and contour farming for the same reason.  Then in the late 1990s ,they moved away from fallowing so many dryland acres and moved to annual cropping. Dwight served on the Caribou Soil Conservation District from 1989 to 1998.  Through the years, they have tried to implement the best conservation techniques of the time.

When Dan came back to the farm in 2009, changes were in the works.  The Lakey’s were seeing the negative effects of using Anhydrous Ammonia (NH3) fertilizer and starting to transition away from it.  Dwight was looking at incorporating mustard into their limited crop rotation.  Then a JD-1895 no-till drill was purchased. Dan was tasked with figuring out how to operate it and run it.  By 2013, mustard was in the rotation and giving the ground a much needed break from cereal grains, but they still were seeing some concerns on other cropland.   “At that time, I thought that what we needed was a different tillage tool or something to dump out of a jug that we could use to cure the problem,” Dan recalls.

Changing Views

The farm was looking at additional tillage implements such as disk rippers and high speed vertical tillage tools to deal with compaction and residue.  At one point, he thought possibly more fallowing and returning to the plow might be the answer.  Then, Dan began attending soil classes in 2014.

“I started to realize that what I was seeing and treating on the cropland were merely symptoms, and they weren’t addressing the real problem,” he said.

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Turning Appalachia’s Mountaintop Coal Mines Into Farms

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In the post-coal economy, community organizations are creating jobs and restoring the ravaged land.

Author: Catherine V. Moore | Published: January 12, 2018

On a surface-mine-turned-farm in Mingo County, West Virginia, former coal miner Wilburn Jude plunks down three objects on the bed of his work truck: a piece of coal, a sponge, and a peach. He’s been tasked with bringing in items that represent his life’s past, present, and future. “This is my heritage right here,” he says, picking up the coal. Since the time of his Irish immigrant great-grandfathers, all the males in his family have been miners.

“Right now I’m a sponge,” he says, pointing to the next object, “learning up here on this job, in school, everywhere, and doing the best I can to change everything around me.”

Then he holds up the peach. “And then my future. I’m going to be a piece of fruit. I’m going to be able to put out good things to help other people.”

Jude works for Refresh Appalachia, a social enterprise that partners with Reclaim Appalachia to convert post-mine lands into productive and profitable agriculture and forestry enterprises that could be scaled up to put significant numbers of people in layoff-riddled Appalachia back to work. When Refresh Appalachia launched in 2015, West Virginia had the lowest workforce participation rate in the nation.

When he’s not doing paid farm work on this reclaimed mine site, Jude is attending community college and receiving life skills training from Refresh. “I’m living the dream. The ground’s a little bit harder than what I anticipated,” he says of the rocky soil beneath his feet, “but we’ll figure it out.”

On this wide, flat expanse of former mountaintop, the August sun is scorching even through the clouds. In the distance, heavy equipment grinds away on a still-active surface mine site—the type of site where some of the Refresh crew members used to work, blowing up what they’re now trying to put back together.

Crew leaders drive out to an undulating ridge where we can see a 5-acre spread of autumn olive—a tough invasive shrub once heavily seeded on former mine sites as part of coal companies’ reclamation plans. It’s summer 2016, and the crew for this particular Reclaim Appalachia site is awaiting the arrival next week of a forestry mulcher that will remove and chew up the shrubs into wood chips. By the next spring, the clearing will have been replanted by this Refresh crew with over 2,000 berry, pawpaw, and hazelnut seedlings. During my visit, everyone’s clearly excited for the mulcher to arrive.

“It’s almost like a continuous miner head,” explains Nathan Hall, “but instead of mining coal, it’s mulching autumn olives.” Hall is from Eastern Kentucky and worked for a short time as a miner before attending the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies; now he heads up Reclaim Appalachia, which focuses on repurposing mine land.

A few small agriculture projects are on other former surface mines in the area, but Refresh and Reclaim are the only outfits attempting anything of this scale while also operating a job-training project. One crew member, former miner Chris Farley, says he’s stoked to be a part of “the first bunch” to attempt to farm these rugged lands.

“It’s a long-term science project,” says Ben Gilmer, Refresh’s president.

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Will 'Climate Smart Agriculture' Serve the Public Interest – Or the Drive for Growing Profits for Private Corporations?

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Authors: Peter Newell, Jennifer Clapp, and Zoe W. Brent | Published: January 19, 2018

The race is on to deliver models of agricultural development that are viable and sustainable in a world of accelerated climate change.

The urgency derives from the fact that the food and agriculture sector is both a major contributor to climate change and especially vulnerable to its worst impacts.

Most studies estimate that between 20-35 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gases are associated with the food and agriculture sector, while some have it as high as 50 percent.

Industrial model

And as drought and extreme weather events associated with climate change increase, the livelihoods of a huge proportion of the world’s population – over 2.5 billion people – who make their living from the sector are on the line.

Against this background the idea of ‘climate smart agriculture’ increasingly features in high level policy discussions.

Climate smart agriculture (CSA) describes interventions that generate ‘triple wins’: that make agriculture more resilient to the effects of climate change, in ways that reduce poverty and increase yields, while at the same time reducing the substantial emissions created by the agricultural sector.

These goals are widely accepted, but there are vastly different models on offer for how to achieve them, each vying to come out on top. The stakes are enormous, as the model that dominates will shape the future of agriculture for years to come.

One view, already dominant in policy circles, seeks to apply ‘fixes’ to the existing industrial model of agriculture to make it more sustainable.

Questionable sustainabilty

This model employs a suite of modern technologies and practices including genetic engineering, biofuels, biochar, and increased use of fertilisers that will deliver a ‘sustainable intensification’ of production.

This approach is underpinned by Malthusian assumptions about growing populations and dwindling fertile land, asserting that ‘we’ need to extract more with less to sustainably ‘feed the world’.

The main champions of this dominant approach are the World Bank, UN bodies such as Food and Agriculture Organisation and the International Fund for Agriculture and Development (IFAD) and large agribusiness corporations.

They find it attractive because it requires only slight changes to business as usual, while providing new opportunities for profit.

CSA projects provide a convenient cover for attempts to introduce controversial technologies into new markets or gain access to growing markets for their products, with questionable sustainabilty impacts.

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Video: Soil Organic Carbon: Keystone to Sustainability in a Changing World

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Published: January 6, 2018

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Changing Paradigms in Food and Farming — Part 1

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Author: Jack Lazor | Published: January 14, 2018

Our world is in a bit of an uproar these days. Never before have we seen so many challenges come to the fore simultaneously. Here in Vermont, we are very fortunate to live in a rather civil society, especially when we consider the toxic political environment that we see on the national level. We still have plenty to worry about right here in our own state, however. Hardly a day goes by without some mention of water quality and environmental pollution in the news. This past August we saw some of the worst-ever blue green algae blooms in lakes Champlain, Carmi and Memphremagog. Fingers were pointed, and the usual blame game transpired. In the last month, the Department of Agriculture has come under fire for lax enforcement of water quality regulations. Some legislators want to know why farmers are exempt from Act 250 jurisdiction. The question of who and how we will pay for Lake Champlain cleanup looms large.

The state’s dairy farmers, both organic and conventional are in the poorhouse. Vermont’s iconic dairy industry has been in an economic pinch for some time. The prices farmers are paid for the milk they produce are well below the costs of production. Until recently, organic dairy production has been an economic lifeline for many producers, but for the first time ever, organic prices have dropped as much as $6 per hundredweight in the last few months. Quotas have been imposed on organic milk production, further lessening farmers’ income potential. Stress levels on dairy farms continue to increase as farmers find they cannot pay their bills.

Meanwhile, retail outlets that sell dairy products are in a war for market share. Something as nurturing as food becomes a “sale item” like a television set or some other consumer good. Food prices are lower than ever while the cost of production back on the farm continues to rise. Why is it that cheap food is standard fare here in America? This madness all began in the years following World War II. After the lean years of the 1930s and food rationing during the war, Americans were ready to eat. At the same time, chemicals like nitrates and phosphates that had been used in the making of munitions were repurposed as agricultural fertilizers and pesticides. By 1950, a new industrial agricultural revolution was in full swing. Crop yields climbed, farms consolidated, and meat consumption increased. Tractors completely replaced horses for motive power. As agriculture became more mechanized, people began to leave their farms and rural communities for more opportunities in urban and suburban areas. If one is looking for the beginning of the long decline in rural America, look no farther than the 1950s. The green revolution was underway.

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