Tag Archive for: Resilient Food Systems

Soil Farmers: How A Renewed Focus On The Land Is Building More Resilient Farms

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Author: Brian Kaufenberg | Published: June 26, 2018

Peter Allen wants to bury a fence.

Tucked within the rolling landscape of the driftless region, on a farm outside of Viola, Wisconsin, a barbed wire fence runs along the spine of a ridge separating a strip of pasture from the valley below. The noticeable three-foot drop between the fence and the field is the result of years of soil washing away while the field was being used as conventional cropland.

“When we got here, this soil was in really bad shape; it hardly grew anything and there was no topsoil left, it was all just sand subsoil,” Peter Allen recalls in a January 2018 episode of the television show “Outdoor Wisconsin.” “So we immediately brought the animals in, […] planted about 30 different species of native prairie grasses and flowers and then a bunch of trees in rows, and then we ran chickens here behind them. And now, just two years later, this is some of the best forage we have on the farm, right where we ran the chickens through.”

As Allen’s animals—cattle, hogs, sheep, and chickens—graze the forage, they return nutrients and organic matter to the land, slowly rebuilding what’s been lost—adding between a quarter of an inch to an inch of soil per year, he says, and slowly restoring the savannah ecosystem once native to the area, a mix of trees and prairie. The livestock are key to this process, providing the cornerstone to a farming system that now yields perennial fruits and nuts, annual crops like corn, and pastured beef, pork, and chicken.

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Seeds: Farming Forever

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Author: Kerry Hoffschneider | Published: June 19, 2018

It has been 100 years since Jacob and Alma Gonnerman purchased their farm in York County, Neb. on August 2, 1918. Raymond and Evelyn Gonnerman bought the same farm on February 4, 1947. Since 2004, Raymond’s grandson Scott and his wife Barb have been owners and stewards of the Gonnerman homestead.

Recently, more than 40 farmers and ranchers from across the Midwest – Iowa, Indiana to Kansas, traveled to this century farm to learn about the regenerative practices Scott and Barb have implemented to ensure their land carries on for the next 100 years and more. They also journeyed there to listen to two presenters – Christine Jones, PhD, who is an internationally-renowned soil ecologist from Australia and founder of Amazing Carbon, www.amazingcarbon.com and Jay Fuhrer – a Soil Health Specialist from Bismarck, N.D. who represented the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) Menoken Farm, a demonstration farm implementing cover crops and other regenerative practices located outside Menoken, N.D. – www.menokenfarm.com.

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Ever Wonder How Rainfall Affects Your Peanut Butter Sandwich Habit?

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Climate change will impact agriculture and food supplies. That’s why this digital classroom is teaching food literacy.

Author: Angela Fichter | Published: June 5, 2018

Almost 800 million people are currently facing chronic hunger, and we waste one-third of all the food we produce. Americans are eating nearly a quarter more than they did in 1970, but we’re not just eating more than we used to—we’re eating way more than we need to. While our consumption is up, we’re misinformed and less connected to what we’re putting in our mouths.

Many people don’t know where their food comes from—where their vegetables or the grains in their bread are grown, or the farming methods used to harvest them, or how they arrive in the store from which they were purchased. According to a 2017 survey by the Innovation Center of U.S. Dairy, 7 percent of American adults believe chocolate milk comes from brown cows. This reflects a broad social trend—we generally don’t learn about farm-to-fork food systems in school. But the Center for Ecoliteracy is trying to change that.

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How We Can Make Beef Less Terrible for the Environment

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Author: Eric Toensmeier | Published: May 30, 2018

When I began investigating how to capture carbon dioxide to fight climate change a decade ago, I had no way of knowing which tool would have the greatest potential. Years later, in 2015, when the environmentalist and entrepreneur Paul Hawken hired me to work for Project Drawdown to help model the impacts of 23 land-based climate change solutions, many on our team were surprised when a relatively unknown solution called “silvopasture” emerged as the most powerful agricultural production practice — the ninth most powerful method overall.

Silvopasture systems combine trees, livestock (ruminants like cattle, sheep and goats) and grazing. Ranchers and pastoralists plant trees or manage the land for spontaneous tree growth. The trees provide shade, timber and food for livestock. In most silvopasture systems, the carbon captured in soil and trees more than makes up for the greenhouse gases (methane and nitrous oxide) that ruminants emit through belches and flatulence. One study of intensive silvopasture in Colombia found that emissions from livestock were equal to a quarter to half of the carbon sequestered in soil and biomass.

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An Apple Shows Just How Broken Our Food System Is

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Author: Otto Scharmer | Published: May 27, 2018

Buying and eating apples seems a pretty healthy thing to do. But a new study has found that every 1 kilo (2.2 pounds) of conventionally grown apples creates health effects costing 21 cents due to the effects of pesticides and fungicides, resulting in sick leave and eventually shorter life expectancies.

The study, from the Dutch organization Soil & More Impacts, to be published at the end of May, highlights a key problem: The price you pay for apples in the store doesn’t cover the hidden costs of producing them. Instead, these are paid for by society — through the ever-increasing costs of health care and health insurance.

The apple example is not an outlier; it’s indicative of the bigger picture. Agriculture is the world’s largest industry, with 1 billion people engaged in farming worldwide. Pasture and cropland use about 50 percent of the earth’s habitable land. Agriculture also is one of the worst-polluting industries on the planet — even though it could be one of the most powerful forces for good.

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The Lush Spring Prize Celebrates Social and Environmental Regeneration

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The £200,00 prize fund redefines what environmental and social responsibility should look like.

Author: Katherine Martinko | Published: April 26, 2018

‘Sustainable’ is an appealing yet complicated word. Since its definition is not officially regulated, any business or organization can describe its product or service as sustainable without being held accountable. This has resulted in a great deal of greenwashing, making things out to be more eco-friendly than they are.

At the same time, however, there are many wonderful organizations that model sustainability at its finest, working to develop systems that meet present-day needs without compromising the abilities of future generations to support themselves. This is good, except that it fails to address the problem of damage already done. For instance, a sustainable food production system could operate on degraded land, but that doesn’t mean the land will ever be improved or brought back to a biologically diverse state.

Enter the concept of regeneration, which some experts are hoping will replace sustainability as the buzzword of the future. Regeneration is sustainability taken a step further. Regenerative systems strive not only to do no harm, but also to improve their social, environmental, and economic contexts. In other words, they leave behind a better world.

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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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Kernza and the Promise of Perennial Agriculture

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Author: Monica Watrous | Published: March 16, 2018

ANAHEIM, CALIF. — At The Perennial restaurant in San Francisco, customers may order a crisp waffle, fresh-baked bread or a sourdough crumble made with Kernza, a perennial grain with deep roots that holds great promise for a sustainable food supply.

Kernza is an intermediate wheatgrass developed by The Land Institute, a non-profit organization in Salina, Kas., and is shown to have a positive impact on soil health, carbon sequestration and water retention.

“It’s a gamechanger,” said Rachel Stroer, chief operating officer of The Land Institute, during a presentation at Natural Products Expo West in Anaheim. “After four decades of rigorous research and 20 years of intensive plant breeding, the first perennial grain has hit the U.S. market.”

Domesticated from a wild relative of annual wheat, the sweet, nutty grain soon may be found in cereals and snacks from General Mills, Inc., Minneapolis, which recently announced a collaboration with The Land Institute to commercialize Kernza. Patagonia Provisions, Ventura, Calif., sources the grain for its Long Root Ale, a craft beer brewed in Portland, Ore. Birchwood Cafe in Minneapolis serves pancakes and grain salads made with the grain.

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Rodale Institute to Launch Much-Anticipated Regenerative Organic Label

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Author: Emily Monaco | Published: March 7, 2018

The Rodale Institute plans to unveil its new Regenerative Organic Certification (ROC) at this week’s Natural Products Expo West trade show in Anaheim, California. ROC was developed by the Regenerative Organic Alliance, a coalition of organizations and businesses led by the Rodale Institute and spearheaded by brands like Patagonia and Dr. Bronner’s.

The USDA organic standard is the “bedrock” of the new certification, notes a recent press release. Only USDA farms and ranches that have already achieved the organic certification will be eligible for ROC, which boasts higher-bar standards for soil health, ecological management, animal welfare, and fairness for farmers and workers.

“I don’t think it’s going to replace organic, that’s not our goal, but rather to build on it,” says Jeff Moyer, Executive Director of the Rodale Institute.

The Alliance recognizes standards such as Global Animal Partnership, Animal Welfare Approved, Certified Humane, Fair for Life, Fairtrade International, Agricultural Justice Project, and multiple others, and many of the policies covered by these certification programs have been incorporated into the ROC standard.

“By already having some these certifications, farmers, and ranchers will be on their way to achieve ROC certification,” explains an Alliance rep.

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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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