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Seed behemoth Monsanto stumbles into antitrust trouble
Tom Philpott, grist
Even as it bombards the airwaves and magazine ad pages to tout its commitment to “sustainable agriculture,” GMO seed giant Monsanto has been having a rough go on the PR front of late.
First came a report (PDF) from the Organic Center showing that the company’s core Round Up Ready products have sparked a veritable monsoon of herbicide use. According to the report, since the introduction of “herbicide tolerant” corn, soy, and cotton in 1996, farmers have sprayed 382.6 million more pounds of herbicides than they otherwise would have—the overwhelming bulk of it Monsanto’s “Roundup” brand glyphosate.
And the gusher is only growing larger. As farmers have come to increasingly rely on Roundup applications, glyphosate-resistant superweeds are spreading—inspiring farmers to both spray more Roundup and add other toxic chemicals to create herbicide cocktails. “Herbicide use on [herbicide-tolerant] crops rose a remarkable 31.4% from 2007 to 2008,” the report states.
Now that’s sustainable agriculture!…
(16 Dec 2009)
Weather no obstacle for Pittsburg garden
Nikki Patrick, Morning Sun
The wind chill may be approaching zero, but the vegetables in Jon Sherman’s garden are warm and thriving.
Sherman, a retired social worker, is in his third year of four-seasons organic gardening at his rural Pittsburg home and is producing a variety of lettuces, carrots, beets, Swiss chard, kale, spinach, cabbage and broccoli.
“The colder and worse the weather gets, the better it is for this,” he said.
He grows his winter garden in cold frames, which function as miniature greenhouses.
“The origin of cold frames goes back to 18th century Europe,” Sherman said. “They gardened in extreme cold.”
He builds his own frames, using wood that has not been chemically treated.
“You do not want chemicals leaching into the soil,” he said. “I scrounge for materials as much as I can. I’ve been to auctions and bought old waterbed frames, which I sand down to get rid of the varnish.”
On top of the frame is a clear cover called a light.
“You can make those out of windows, and we replaced our patio doors and used the glass for lights,” Sherman said…
(10 Dec 2009)
How a Hoop House Can Extend the Growing Season (radio broadcast transcript)
Jerilyn Watson and Bob Doughty, Voice of America
Farmers and gardeners have long used greenhouses to extend the growing season in cold weather. Now, hoop houses are gaining popularity. Hoop houses are sometimes called a temporary greenhouse or passive solar greenhouse.
A hoop house is basically a metal frame covered with plastic or other all-weather material. A common design looks like a high tunnel. Unlike a greenhouse, which uses a heating system, a hoop house is heated by the warmth of the sun.
Now, the United States Department of Agriculture has announced a program to help farmers who want to build hoop houses.
The department, through its Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service, has been supporting a project in Michigan. That state has a short growing season…
(21 Dec 2009)
related: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=14jE1T2Vd_Q&feature=youtube_gdata And also check out Kalpa’s commentary on her Agricultural Economic news roundup from the 18th. -KS
Copenhagen: peasant farmers can save the planet
Ed Hamer, the ecologist
Small-scale peasant farmers from the global South are not just among the first to suffer the impacts of climate change: they also offer the most realistic solution to the climate crisis.
This was the message delivered to delegates and minister at the COP15 negotiations by the international peasant movement La Via Campesina today.
Speaking at the UNFCCC conference center, Henry Saragih, La Via Campesina’s international coordinator, urged heads of state to recognise the role peasant agriculture can play in mitigating climate change while at the same time addressing food security.
‘More than 150 peasant farmers have come to Copenhagen to claim that a radical change in the food system can reduce current global emissions from between 50-75 per-cent,’ he said. ‘We are not begging for carbon credits or other trade based solutions; we advocate a diverse food system that supports local markets and ultimately promotes food sovereignty.’
According to the La Via Campesina: ‘Global warming has been taking place for decades but it has been only recently, once transnational corporations have been able to set up huge money-making schemes, that we hear about possible solutions designed and controlled by big companies and backed up by governments.’…
(15 Dec 2009)
Getting at the roots of unsustainable U.S. ag policy
Paula Crossfield, Civil Eats
Around one third of global greenhouse gas emissions come from the way we produce, process, distribute and consume the food we eat according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Meanwhile, farmers the world over will be the most affected by climate change, as higher carbon in the atmosphere and higher temperatures increase erratic weather patterns, pests, and disease occurrence, while decreasing water availability, disrupting relationships with pollinators and lowering yield and the efficacy of herbicides like glyphosate (aka Roundup) — all detailed in a revealing new report from the USDA called The Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems [pdf].
We should all give the USDA credit for keeping the ties between agriculture, food and climate change at the forefront of the discussion. Even in Copenhagen, where agriculture is getting less attention than it arguably should be considering its impact and potential for mitigating climate change, U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack spoke about the need for research, and seeing agriculture as an opportunity for climate change mitigation. He even said to the delegates in Copenhagen, “We need to develop cropping and livestock systems that are resilient to climate change.” While I agree on the surface with these statements, taking a deeper look reveals potentially problematic ideas for just how to do this.
Outlined in Vilsack’s prepared remarks are a few clues for how the U.S. is looking at adapting agriculture in the face of climate change. I find it valuable to do a little point-by-point debunking here, so we can look at the facts again, laid out so clearly in the USDA report above, and come up with real solutions. And since the U.S. is responsible for the most greenhouse gases, and we were the first to adopt intensive agriculture practices, we have an opportunity to lead the world to a more sustainable future.
No-Till. Here is a classic case of agribusiness co-opting a perfectly good solution and making it bad (and then whispering it into the USDA’s ear)…
…Carbon Markets. Sure it sounds good to offer cash benefits to farmers who use more sustainable farming practices…
…Genetically Modified Organisms (GMOs). If Monsanto had its way, our government would be paying farmers to grow GMOs…
…Ethanol. Vilsack and President Obama talk about ethanol as if it had the potential to quench our thirst for oil…
(16 Dec 2009)
The report can be accessed here: The Effects of Climate Change on U.S. Ecosystems
Copenhagen could lead to increase in intensive farming
Ed Hamer, the ecologist
All sectors must play their part in a global emissions deal, but could including agriculture in the mix lead to an intensification of farming and money for GM crops?
On Saturday 12 December, Copenhagen University hosted a meeting of the biggest names on the global agriculture scene; the Food Agriculture Organisation of the UN, the International Fund for Agricultural Development and the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research, who all came together to discuss one thing: what does Copenhagen mean for agriculture?
Despite coming up with little in the way of concrete demands to present to the conference centre delegates, the meeting did highlight what could potentially be the make-or-break deal that seals Copenhagen’s place in history: a decision on whether agriculture – or more specifically soil carbon sequestration – will be eligible for carbon trading under the Clean Development Mechanism (CDM) funding scheme.
Soil for sale
For a sector which the IPCC says is responsible for fully one-third of combined global greenhouse gas emissions, and as an industry charged with achieving cuts in the region of 800 megatonnes of carbon per year while at the same time doubling productivity to feed 9bn people by 2050, agriculture has played a surprisingly low-key role in negotiations so far.
This partly because the science is controversial. Ever since the 1992 Rio Earth Summit the potential of mitigation through agricultural services has been dogged by the lack of scientific consensus on mitigation figures. In 2007, however the IPCC recognised that the world’s soils have the potential to sequester an estimated 6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent each year, opening the doors for agriculture’s carbon-trading proponents to flood in.
And flood they have. Within the past two years, the UNFCCC has been lobbied by successive international organisations, governments and private companies – from the United Nations Convention to Combat Desertification to Monsanto and the House of Saud – falling over themselves in anticipation of what trade in soil carbon credits could ultimately mean for their bottom lines…
(14 Dec 2009)
The Econexus report referred to in the article can be accessed here
Meet the Milk
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
If you were to come to visit right now, you wouldn’t see The Milk Truck until you started to get out of your car. But the moment you opened your door, the little vacuum cleaners would stick their heads in, just to make sure there’s no food on the floor. You see, at my house, there’s always food on the floor. My children drip crumbs and leave apple cores, and the litte vacuum cleaners feel it is there job to clean up.
But let’s back up. The little vacuum cleaners are Tekiah (Tekky) and Arava. They are small goats, born this autumn – each one weighs about as much as a Corgi dog, or a 9 month old human, and they would like to be your friends. Especially if you have food. Or, if you aren’t going to feed them, they’d like you to pet their heads, or hold them, or let them play king of the mountain on your car. You don’t mind little goat footprints on your car, do you?
Why do we do it? Well, part of it is that we really like goats. I have a lot of animals – and except perhaps for the cats, the goats are my favorite of the lot. Goats are like dogs, except less cooperative. They love you, but don’t fawn upon you. They are warm and sweet and make a ton of milk for what you feed them. My goats, being Nigerian Dwarves are the size of a largish dog, and two of them in milk produce about a quart and a half to two quarts a day (depending on time of year). Two full sized goats might produce as much as 1 1/2 to 2 gallons a day, but this is more milk than my family needs, plus I can pick a goat up and carry her if she’s in my way.
Right now, my goats are producing less milk, because I’m not a commercial producer who has to maximize production – that’s as it should be for me. It is cold, the goats are using more of their calories to keep cozy, and they have switched form mostly green feed to more hay. While we up their grain intake a little to compensate, we’re also reducing our expectations. In the longer term, my hope is to get everyone on the same breeding schedule (at this point we have them on spring and fall, because we couldn’t get the goats bred last winter), and allow our milk production to largely dry up in the winter, and be truly seasonal.
We produce our own because milk is a particularly difficult issue to do sustainably. If you are lucky enough to live by a dairy that produces a lot of its milk on grass, that’s awesome, but most of us don’t. And unlike meat, much of which can be produced on either human food scraps or on grass and pasture, most dairy requires grain – grain that could feed human beings…
(17 Dec 2009)
Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success
Jon Hurdle, New York Times via City Farmer
mid the tightly packed row houses of North Philadelphia, a pioneering urban farm is providing fresh local food for a community that often lacks it, and making money in the process.
Greensgrow, a one-acre plot of raised beds and greenhouses on the site of a former steel-galvanizing factory, is turning a profit by selling its own vegetables and herbs as well as a range of produce from local growers, and by running a nursery selling plants and seedlings.
The farm earned about $10,000 on revenue of $450,000 in 2007, and hopes to make a profit of 5 percent on $650,000 in revenue in this, its 10th year, so it can open another operation elsewhere in Philadelphia.
In season, it sells its own hydroponically grown vegetables, as well as peaches from New Jersey, tomatoes from Lancaster County, and breads, meats and cheeses from small local growers within a couple of hours of Philadelphia…
(20 May 2008)
related: Project for a Revolution in Philadelphia. And an update: the Farm is still going strong! -KS
