Sustainable Agriculture // Current

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1 month ago

Tribal survival: the Dongria Kondh

Indian tribe the Dongria Kondh face destruction of their lands and extinction at the hands of British mining giant Vedanta Resources

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17 hours ago

Groundwater Science Turned Upside Down

Researchers have discovered that some of the most fundamental assumptions about how water moves through soil in a seasonally dry climate such as the Pacific Northwest are incorrect - and that a century of research based on those assumptions will have to be reconsidered.

A new study by scientists from Oregon State University and the Environmental Protection Agency showed - much to the surprise of the researchers - that soil clings tenaciously to the first precipitation after a dry summer, and holds it so tightly that it almost never mixes with other water.

The finding is so significant, researchers said, that they aren't even sure yet what it may mean. But it could affect our understanding of how pollutants move through soils, how nutrients get transported from soils to streams, how streams function and even how vegetation might respond to climate change.

The research was just published online in Nature Geoscience, a professional journal.

"Water in mountains such as the Cascade Range of Oregon and Washington basically exists in two separate worlds," said Jeff McDonnell, an OSU distinguished professor and holder of the Richardson Chair in Watershed Science in the OSU College of Forestry. "We used to believe that when new precipitation entered the soil, it mixed well with other water and eventually moved to streams. We just found out that isn't true."

"This could have enormous implications for our understanding of watershed function," he said. "It challenges about 100 years of conventional thinking."

What actually happens, the study showed, is that the small pores around plant roots fill with water that gets held there until it's eventually used up in plant transpiration back to the atmosphere. Then new water becomes available with the return of fall rains, replenishes these small localized reservoirs near the plants and repeats the process. But all the other water moving through larger pores is essentially separate and almost never intermingles with that used by plants during the dry summer.

The study found in one test, for instance, that after the first large rainstorm in October, only 4 percent of the precipitation entering the soil ended up in the stream - 96 percent was taken up and held tightly by soil around plants to recharge soil moisture.

A month later when soil moisture was fully recharged, 55 percent of precipitation went directly into streams. And as winter rains continue to pour moisture into the ground, almost all of the water that originally recharged the soil around plants remains held tightly in the soil - it never moves or mixes.

"This tells us that we have a less complete understanding of how water moves through soils, and is affected by them, than we thought we did," said Renee Brooks, a research plant physiologist with the EPA and courtesy faculty in the OSU Department of Forest Ecosystems and Society.

"Our mathematical models of ecosystem function are based on certain assumptions about biological processes," Brooks said. "This changes some of those assumptions. Among the implications is that we may have to reconsider how other things move through soils that we are interested in, such as nutrients or pollutants."Researchers have discovered that some of the most fundamental assumptions about how water moves through soil in a seasonally dry... more

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21 hours ago

How Perfect is the Park Slope Food Coop?

Having moved to Booklyn NY from Spain for a couple of months, I was eager to get to know the Park Slope Food Coop (PSFC), one of... more

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18 hours ago

New features on Sustainable Agriculture/Water Is Life Groups

A short video to update on what is going on in the Sustainable Agriculture and Water Is Life Groups. Our Member of the Month Club... more

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20 hours ago

Stella McCartney Rallying Behind Food, Inc.’s Message Of Conscious Consumerism

Despite being the daughter of a Beatle, she has earned her own place in the spotlight as a staunch advocate for animal rights and... more

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1 day ago

Branson warns that oil crunch is coming within five years

Sir Richard Branson and fellow leading businessmen will warn ministers this week that the world is running out of oil and faces an... more

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1 day ago

In the Mountains of the Moon, a trek to Africa's last glaciers

Even today, hiking into the Rwenzori range is like stepping into a lost world. Fewer than 2,000 people a year visit the place. For long stretches, you see no one. And there are surprises by the hour, from worms as long as your walking stick, to iridescent greenish-purple sunbirds and the elusive, brilliant-blue Rwenzori turaco.

A mountaineering guide stands near the former terminus of the Speke Glacier, which once snaked down the side of Mount Speke for 1,600 feet.Also astonishing is the kaleidoscope of chlorophyll, the staircase of forest zones that clings to the range from the foothills at 5,400 feet to the treeline around 13,500 feet. On our second day, we entered a forest of giant heather so ensnarled in moss it was hard to see the sky. “No forest can be grimmer and stranger than this,” wrote Filippo de Filippi in his epic account of the first expedition to thoroughly explore the range and climb its major peaks, led by the Italian mountaineer and adventurer, Prince Luigi Amedeo of Savoy, Duke of the Abruzzi, in 1906.

As we climbed higher, the heather disappeared, replaced at 11,200 feet with something stranger: two species that looked like cactus, but weren’t — the torch-like giant lobelia and the giant groundsel, which reaches upward with woody branches topped by enormous cabbage-like leaves.

But the most astonishing sight of all is the snow you begin to glimpse hovering above the tropical landscape. When Abruzzi tramped through the range a century ago, ridges and mountains were shellacked with snow and glaciers. He discovered glaciers on six peaks and estimated their total size at 2.5 square miles.

“Members were full of excitement and satisfaction,” wrote de Filippi, describing the expedition’s initial ascent into the alpine zone. “The place was rough and wild. A cold and biting wind blew off the glacier and suggested surroundings very different from those usually associated with Equatorial Africa.”

Today, less than half a square mile remains. On three peaks, glaciers have disappeared altogether.

In the Andes and Himalaya, the melting of high-altitude glaciers is expected to trigger water shortages downstream in coming decades. But Uganda’s ice is much too small to have such an impact. Nonetheless,
Ice is disappearing so swiftly that much critical scientific information may already have been lost.Josephat and his fellow tribe members are worried. For them, melting glaciers are an economic threat.

“The snow and ice you are seeing are a tourist attraction,” said our cook, Donald Philly, over dinner one evening. “Clients come to see the snow and we get employment opportunities.” And when the snow is gone, he added, jobs will vanish. Standing nearby, Josephat said the Bakonjo would simply have to adapt — like the chameleons. “We are going to train our guides on rock climbing,” he said.

Precipitation patterns are also changing.

“Years ago, it would rain cats and dogs, from morning to evening, for seven days straight,” Josephat said. “Rivers were flooded. There would be a lot of fog, even down to the lower elevations. These days, that is not happening.”

Such changes, he believes, are contributing to a rise in mortality he has observed among the iconic giant lobelia. “The trees are withering at a rapid speed,” Josephat said. And as they die, he said, other plant and moss species are likely to suffer, too.

Ultimately, Josephat said, he fears climate change may set off a domino effect of forest decline that could one day diminish the range’s ability to soak up and store water, putting downstream villages at risk. The Bakonjo guides take the threat so seriously they have recently formed an organization to plant more trees around the base of the range, both to battle deforestation and increase carbon sequestration.Even today, hiking into the Rwenzori range is like stepping into a lost world. Fewer than 2,000 people a year visit the place. For... more

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1 day ago

The organic movement is a civic process, not a set of standards

There’s a politics to everything—even a buch of cows munching grass.

Consumers interested in understanding the current fight over what makes milk “organic” would do well to study the politics of the dairy industry a century ago.

In the 1930s, dairy farmers in the Northeast and Midwest spilled milk onto the streets to protest prices. Their political rhetoric blamed shady milk dealers and heartless bureaucrats for their plight but, as I describe in my book, Nature’s Perfect Food, there was another factor that increased the chaos of dairy pricing: pasture.

There were two kinds of dairy system at the time: larger, more intensive, dairies closer to cities that fed grain and hay in confinement operations and sold milk to fluid milk markets year round. Then, there were the smaller, “hill farms” that tended to pasture their cows. Known as “summer dairies” these pasture-based operations tended to sell milk mostly in the summer months, often to local small cheese plants.

Hill farm costs were low, and so were the prices cheese plants paid for their milk, compared to higher priced fluid market milk. However, when times got tough, some of this pasture-produced cheaper milk would make its way into city fluid milk markets, thereby lowering the price paid to higher-cost confinement dairy farmers. In 1937, Congress passed legislation that allowed for the creation of milk market orders, boundary-setting rules that helped separate out confinement and pasture based operations and the prices they received.

Eventually, pasture-based summer dairy systems died out in all but the most remote areas of the Midwest. Making cheese and other dairy products increasingly became the strategy dairy companies used to manage the supplies they couldn’t sell as fluid milk.
The rise in consumer demand for organic milk brought pasture-production back into the game. Along with the re-appearance of pasture-dairying has come the tricky politics of pasture as well. After more than two years of wrangling, the USDA’s National Organic Program is about to release its final Livestock Access to Pasture Rule. What the final rule will look like is uncertain, but the proposed rule, printed in the Federal Register in October of 2008, mandates that cows producing certified organic milk have a specific percentage of pasture-grazed grass as part of their diet. Two years of negotiations have brought most actors into agreement as to minimum national pasture requirements. But two parties: Straus Family Creamery and Aurora Dairies, continue to fight.
http://www.grist.org/article/2010-02-08-organic-dairy-dispute-strauss-cornucopia/There’s a politics to everything—even a buch of cows munching grass. Consumers interested in understanding the... more

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1 day ago

Ten Things You Should Know About Organic Farming

If all the farms in the United States went organic, we could rest easy about climate change. Here are 10 quick facts about organic... more

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1 day ago

Why to Always Eat Organic Kale

An ongoing Organic Nation series that seeks to explain the benefits of certain organic foods and products over their conventional... more

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1 day ago

Bayer must pay $1.5 m to AK ,MS, rice farmers for GMO contamination

A federal court jury has ordered the German conglomerate Bayer CropScience to pay $1.5 million to farmers in Arkansas and... more

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2 days ago

Was 2009 the year the world turned against GM?

Despite promising the world in 2009, biotech corporations have increasingly raised the hackles of scientists and citizens worldwide
2009 was a year in which the biotech industry, Gates and their US Administration allies did everything in their power to drive the world down the GM road, but it was also a year marked by remarkable global resistance.

It was a year too in which the truth emerged more clearly than ever about not just the severe limitations and risks of GM crops, but the viability of the many positive alternatives to GMOs alternatives from which the profit-driven GM-fixation diverts much needed attention and resources.

The scene had been set in 2008 with the IAASTD report, produced by 400 scientific experts and signed up to by some 60 governments. That made it clear that after more than 10 years of commercialisation, GM crops had done nothing to help with the eradication of hunger or poverty, or the reversal of the environmental degradation caused by agriculture.

The IAASTD instead championed as the way forward: agro-ecological farming; and research conducted by the UN Environment Programme also suggested organic, small-scale farming could deliver increased yields without the accompanying environmental and social damage of industrial farming. The UNEP's analysis of 114 projects in 24 African countries found that yields had more than doubled where organic, or near-organic practices had been used. In 2009 the contribution of such sustainable approaches to cooling the planet was also widely acknowledged while news of Monsanto's attempts to dress up environmentally destructive GM monocultures as climate friendly earned it a worst lobbying award.

Mainstream criticism

But what was most remarkable in 2009 was the way in which criticism of the biotech industry went mainstream. Alarmingly for the industry, some of the hardest hitting criticism it faced was to be found in editorials and investigative articles that appeared in the likes of Scientific American, the New York Times, the Associated Press and, most astonishingly of all perhaps, the staunchly pro-GM journal Nature Biotechnology.

And in different ways they were all making the same fundamental point - the GM industry has been allowed to gain an unprecedented stranglehold over the use of seeds. An editorial in Scientific American, for instance, complained that 'it is impossible to verify that genetically modified crops perform as advertised. That is because agritech companies have given themselves veto power over the work of independent researchers'.

The editorial went on to note that, 'food safety and environmental protection depend on making plant products available to regular scientific scrutiny', and Scientific American called on the industry to 'immediately remove the restriction on research from their end-user agreements. Going forward, the EPA should also require, as a condition of approving the sale of new seeds, that independent researchers have unfettered access to all products currently on the market'.

continuedDespite promising the world in 2009, biotech corporations have increasingly raised the hackles of scientists and citizens... more

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3 days ago

Cancer and pesticides: the legal floodgates have opened

After long battles, three farmers in France have won legal claims that their cases of cancer and Parkinson's disease were caused by working with pesticides. Now they want to help others fight similar cases
Paul François says he is lucky to be alive. In April 2004, he went to clean out what he thought was the empty tank in his agricultural spraying machine. When he opened the cap, noxious fumes of some remaining pesticides escaped. He was not wearing a mask and therefore breathed in a lungful. Immediately admitted to hospital, he fell into a coma.

Since then his illness continues to affect his kidneys and nervous system and he has again fallen into comas on several occasions. Today, he is working on his case against Monsanto, the company that produced Lasso, the culprit pesticide that was taken off the market in 2007.

The victims

Paul told his story at the first meeting of a network of 'pesticide victims' in a small hotel near his farm in Poitiers. The 40 participants had gathered to work out how they could help each other, and what could be done to protect the health of others.

One of the difficulties in putting together a strong legal case - against either a pesticide company or the French authorities - is finding clear evidence from scientific studies and asking doctors to make the link between exposure to pesticides and a medical condition. François told the meeting that medical professionals had often turned him away:
'They tell me: "Go home, you are depressed because you are ill",' he said.

Agricultural worker, Gilbert Vende in Bourges was luckier - at least from the perspective of finding a more helpful medical professional. In 2001, after being drenched with gouache used to protect seeds in autumn, he suffered serious breathing problems. A year later, he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease. His doctor gave him a letter linking his condition to exposure to 'pesticides, insecticides, fungicides et gouache'. But even with this document, it took extraordinary diligence to win his case in October 2005 when he became the first person in France to have Parkinson's recognised as an occupational disease. He is now embarked on helping others.

Gathering evidence

Two other agriculturalists in France have won recognition for the link between pesticides and their leukaemia. Even before Vende won his case, Dominque Marchal, a cereal farmer in the Vosges became the first person in France to win recognition that his leukaemia was work-related. When he first became ill, his wife suspected that his daily pesticide spraying on their 100,000 hectare farm might be the cause. But when they talked to the medical authorities about this idea, they were treated with such 'scorn' that it made Madame Marchal determined to fight.

She employed a lawyer to help her gather the scientific evidence and herself set about gathering invoices and receipts to list which pesticides her husband had been using in previous years. Then, from their own pesticide stocks and with the help of neighbouring farms, she was able to gather samples of each of the potential cancer-causing substances. Her lawyer helped her find a laboratory willing to analyse the contents, and when the results came back they showed that 40 per cent contained benzene, a substance not marked on any of the contents labels but that is known to increase the risk of leukaemia.

Since the Marchals' success, other farmers and agricultural workers with cancers such as myeloma and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma are trying to gain recognition and compensation for their conditions. A second person in France had his Parkinson's disease recognised as an occupational disease in October 2009.After long battles, three farmers in France have won legal claims that their cases of cancer and Parkinson's disease were... more

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3 years ago

Food For Thought

In 2005 Time magazine named Peter Singer one of the world's 100 most influential people. The New Yorker claims: "Peter... more

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4 days ago

GMOs contaminate the world- and no one here cares

Ever felt that the approval of GM crops and foods by GM 'regulators' across the world has lacked transparency, due... more

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4 days ago

USDA stance on GM alfalfa threatens “fabric of organic industry”

Agency said to be protecting Monsanto while ignoring concerns of the fastest growing segments of American agriculture.

A draft environmental impact study (EIS) on genetically modified Roundup Ready alfalfa released by the US Department of Agriculture ignores the threat of GMO contamination on organic and non-GMO farming and says organic consumers don’t care about GMO contamination.

Dismisses significance of GMO contamination
USDA’s Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) released its draft EIS on December 14, 2009, and the Center for Food Safety (CFS) says the document dismisses the significance of widespread contamination of organic and non-GMO alfalfa. A CFS statement says, “It is evident that the USDA has not taken the concerns of non-GMO alfalfa farmers or organic dairy farmers into consideration whatsoever.”

CFS analysis of key findings of the EIS is listed below:

The EIS dismisses the significant adverse economic effects that GMO contamination will have on organic and non-GMO conventional alfalfa seed or hay growers, and organic and conventional dairy producers that rely upon organic and non-GMO alfalfa hay for forage.

The EIS’s economic analysis admits that Roundup Ready GM alfalfa will hurt the organic industry and small farmers but it fails to analyze or suggest any possible protections for organic.The EIS says there is no evidence that organic consumers care about GE contamination.

The last point is especially ludicrous, says George Kimbrell, CFS staff attorney. “When the initial National Organic Program rule was published, the USDA received 275,000 public comments from people demanding that genetic engineering be excluded from organic food. This is evidence that people do care about GE contamination.”

“Business as usual”
In 2006, CFS sued the USDA for its illegal approval of Monsanto Company’s GM Roundup Ready alfalfa because the agency failed to conduct the National Environmental Policy Act-mandated EIS before deregulating the crop. In February 2007, the US District Court for the Northern District of California sided with CFS and banned GM alfalfa. The court ordered USDA to go back and do what it should have done in the first place—evaluate the environmental and economic impacts of GM alfalfa on the environment, farmers, and the public.

APHIS’s draft EIS gives a green light to allow unlimited, nation-wide commercial planting of GM alfalfa. The draft EIS states that GM alfalfa, which is resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup herbicide, is “unlikely to pose plant pest risks and will not result in significant impacts to the human environment.” However, CFS says, “USDA plans to move ahead despite increasing evidence that GM alfalfa will threaten the rights of farmers and consumers, as well as damage the environment.”

“USDA’s announcement is simply business as usual, once again catering to Monsanto’s corporate interests at the expense of farmers and consumers,” stated Andrew Kimbrell, executive director of the Center for Food Safety.

Alfalfa is grown on over 21 million acres, and is worth $8 billion per year (not including the value of final products, such as dairy), making it the country’s third most valuable and fourth most widely grown crop. Alfalfa is primarily used in feed for dairy cows and beef cattle, and also contributes to pork, lamb, sheep, and honey production. Consumers also eat alfalfa sprouts.Agency said to be protecting Monsanto while ignoring concerns of the fastest growing segments of American agriculture. A draft... more

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5 days ago

Non-GMO seed bank sprouts in California

Baker Creek Heirloom Seed Company’s Seed Bank revives a past tradition and promotes non-GMO production Driving through... more

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5 days ago

VICTORY! U.S.D.A. Plans to Drop Program to Trace Livestock

Faced with stiff resistance from ranchers and farmers, the Obama administration has decided to scrap a national program intended to help authorities quickly identify and track livestock in the event of an animal disease outbreak.

In abandoning the program, called the National Animal Identification System, officials said they would start over in trying to devise a livestock tracing program that could win widespread support from the industry.

The agriculture secretary, Tom Vilsack, will announce the changes on Friday, according to officials at the Agriculture Department, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the decision had not yet been made public.

The officials said that it would be left to the states to devise many aspects of a new system, including requirements for identifying livestock.

New federal rules will be developed but the officials said they would apply only to animals being moved in interstate commerce, such as cattle raised in one state being transported to a slaughterhouse in another state.

It could take two years or more to create new federal rules, the officials said, and it was not clear how far the government would go to restrict the movement of livestock between states if the animals did not meet basic traceability standards.

The system was created by the Bush administration in 2004 after the discovery in late 2003 of a cow infected with mad cow disease.

Participation of ranchers and farmers in the identification system was voluntary, but the goal was to give every animal, or in the case of pigs and poultry, groups of animals, a unique identification number that would be entered in a database. The movements of animals would be tracked, and if there was a disease outbreak or a sick animal was found, officials could quickly locate other animals that had been exposed.

But the system quickly drew the ire of many farmers and ranchers, particularly cattle producers. Some objected to the cost of identification equipment and the extra work in having to report their animals' movements. Others said they believed the voluntary system would become mandatory, that it was intrusive and that the federal government would use it to pry into their lives and finances.Faced with stiff resistance from ranchers and farmers, the Obama administration has decided to scrap a national program intended... more

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5 days ago

"Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism"

FROM THE BOOK From Chapter 1, The Missing Link: It is an odd phenomenon, the way we react to the idea of eating dogs and other... more

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6 days ago

Monsanto's Roundup: Poison blowing in the wind

In addition to the considerable questions about the safety of GMOs and their effects on mammals, what about other potential side effects to crop producers of GMO crops and their use?

Dust is a common factor that all of us in crop production must deal with. Whether it comes from a country road or a combine harvesting a crop, dust is present in many places in rural America.

A crop farmer in northwest Iowa had some keen observations in regards to dust and decided to do some testing. This gentleman, who we will call John, noticed a significant amount of dust in the hog building where he custom feeds hogs. John gathered a sample of the dust from inside the hog building and placed it in a zip lock bag and identified it as hog dust.

John noticed an unusually large amount of dust around the combine when harvest was in progress in his brother’s Liberty Link corn field. Liberty is an herbicide with the active ingredient of glufosinate which is a nonselective herbicide similar to Roundup, Roundup contains glyphosate as the active ingredient. John collected a sample of the dust from the combine in the Liberty Link corn field and placed it in a zip lock bag and labeled it.

John also noticed a large amount of dust around the combine during harvest in his father’s Roundup Ready corn field so he collected a dust sample from the combine and placed it in a zip lock bag and labeled it. John then sent all of these dust samples to Midwest Labs and had a mold count and identification test conducted on the samples.

The results are as follows:

Hog dust Liberty Link Corn Dust Roundup Ready corn dust
Total mold count 14,000 cfu/g 7,200,000 cfu/g 15,600,000 cfu/g
Aspergillus sp. (other) 10,000 cfu/g 7,000,000 cfu/g 15,600,000 cfu/g
Penicillium sp 3,000 cfu/g 200,000 cfu/g --

When John received the results from Midwest Labs there was a note for him to call the lab. When John called the lab, they were interested in where these samples had been taken from. The concern was due to the health hazards that these molds could pose to people working in the environment where this dust was located. The lab strongly advised that anyone working in the area of this dust should a wear protective breathing apparatus.

After receiving this information from John, I called Dr. Elaine Ingham to discuss this discovery and then sent her the test results. After reviewing the test results, Dr. Ingham told me that if the Aspergillus spores get inside a person’s lungs, there is no antibiotic that is effective to stop the mold from spreading through the lungs. Few cases of Aspergillus lung infections resulting in death have been recorded, but possibly only because pneumonia, asthma or viral infections are assumed to be the cause of death when respiratory failure occurs. A fungus growing in the lungs has not been considered as a cause of death by most physicians. Nor does death always occur, as the Aspergillus niger mold growing in the lungs might just cause a persistent cough and respiratory discomfort.In addition to the considerable questions about the safety of GMOs and their effects on mammals, what about other potential side... more

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