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Waste not, want not (Video)
Guardian
British consumers dump 6.7 million tonnes of food a year. Top chefs offer their advice on creating great meals while cutting back on waste
(29 January 2008)
Price freezes squeeze Chinese farmers
Asia Pulse/Xinhua via Asia Times
While most Chinese consumers, particularly in urban areas, are relieved at the government’s decision to freeze prices on key household commodities, some of the country’s farmers argue their interests might be ignored.
The Chinese government moved this month to restrict price hikes of daily necessities, such as grain, edible oil, meat, milk, eggs and liquefied petroleum gas, in an effort to bring rising inflation under control.
…Xu Shaohua, a rice farmer from the Dongting Lake area, a key grain production base in central Hunan province, hopes that additional measures will be taken to satisfy people who live in the countryside.
“Prices of pesticides and chemical fertilizers have continued to soar, but the price of rice has not undergone big hikes in recent years,” Xu said. “Rice in 2007 only fetched 80 yuan (US$11)or so per 50 kilograms on the market. I don’t have much left after labor costs are deducted. It is simply unrealistic to rely on plowing the fields and becoming prosperous.”
… The rich-poor gap is growing between cities and villages in a country with 900 million farmers, or three quarters of its total population.
(29 January 2008)
Eco-Farm: California dreaming
Notes on California’s big sustainable-farming conference.
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
Note: This is another in a series of posts from Eco-Farm, the annual conference held by the Ecological Farming Association of California. At Eco-Farm, some 1,400-1,500 organic farmers, Big Organic marketers, and sundry sustainable-ag enthusiasts pack into a rustic, beautiful seaside conference hall an hour-and-a-half south of San Francisco to talk farming amid the dunes.
Eco-Farm is a bit like summer camp for sustainable-ag nerds. You wind up outdoors a lot, wandering from activity to activity, often pelted by rain. I loved it. No brain-sucking hotel conference hall, no day upon day of artificial light and processed air. Break-out sessions took place in scattered arts-and-crafts bungalows, linked by trails through the rolling dunes. The low roar in the background was not some infernal highway; rather, waves lashing up against a rocky shore.
What sort of people thronged this sea-side paradise? About what you’d expect. The gently aging front line of that first great wave of back-to-the-land farming zeal of the early ’70s: Dudes with tremendous gray beards, some with matching beret-capped dreadlocks; sensibly shod ladies swathed in earth tones.
Young folks mixed among these wizened survivors, and lots of them: the new wave of microfarmers and food-justice and green activists, some of them as hippied-out as their elders, some with a more urban-hipster aesthetic, and others still sporting what I call call “farm metro”: Carhardt trousers and Blundstone boots.
Judging from Eco-Farm’s sponsor list, I assume there must of have been some corporate types lurking among us, but I didn’t encounter many personally.
For me, a new-wave east coast farmer (and former Texan), California — particularly its northern half — has long represented a kind of sustainable-ag mecca: the land of (raw, pastured) milk and honey.
Here are some of my impressions from Eco-Farm.
- Small-scale sustainable agriculture has become a site of activism. I’ve attended several annual conferences of the Carolina Farm Stewardship Association — North and South Carolina’s version of Eco-Farm — and have been impressed by the upswing in political energy around farming. But at Eco-Farm that energy seemed ratcheted up a notch. Some sessions had the buzz of an anti-war rally — young folks and elders plotting an assault on industrial food. And nametags revealed the presence of a veritable gaggle of sustainable-ag and food-justice NGOs. Speakers talked often of “the movement,” and that rubric seemed fitting.
- And yet, sustainable-ag remains a passion limited largely to white, middle-class folks. Eco-Farm displayed a broad diversity of ages and sartorial styles. Ethnically, though, a kind of monoculture flourished. That fact was seldom mentioned; and only with a dose of self-flagellation. What was missing, though, was analysis. Why are so few non-whites drawn to small-scale farming? I never heard the question come up. Like the national food-justice movement, the California contingent has failed to open a broad and sustained conversation on food, class, and race. Indeed, the whole question was essentially relegated to a single informative session on urban farming. I think the vexations of food and class will have to be fully aired and addressed for the sustainable-food movement to move beyond niche status. But the lack of discussion at Eco-Farm doesn’t mean there isn’t plenty of powerful activism around food in low-income, minority-dominated areas in California. In the next days, I plan to visit and post about San Francisco’s Alemany Farm and Oakland’s People’s Grocery.
- Sustainable ag has become a vocation not unlike that of art. The hours are long, the pay sucks, and failures are commonplace. But the work also offers ample opportunity for creativity and vision, and triumphs are exhilarating. That description applies to the life of a musician; it also works for someone setting out to make a living from the land. (One difference: Musicians can at least dream of big bucks; farmers, not so much.) The insight is probably banal, but here goes: Since its first stirrings back in the days of Rodale in the 1950s, the alternative-farming life has always drawn people with lots of creative energy, which often bubbles into letters, music, painting, and other art forms. Eco-Farm offered plenty of confirmation for that observation — particularly the talent show. A young farmhand delivered an offbeat, weirdly affecting spoken-word bit about lonesome talks over beer with his scarecrow ladyfriend; an elder took a virtuoso turn on a pair of bongos; there was a soaring aria, and a sing-along farm song straight from 19th century New England. Two young fellows delivered a fabulously silly cabaret act; and the audience endured at least one earnest earth dance. My favorite bit was when two young urban farmers, pictured above, gave a spirited, and yes, talented, version of Beck’s “Satan gave me a taco.”
(28 January 2008)
A load of hot air?
Simon Fairlie, The Guardian
Green and vegan claims that meat is a climate crime are based on a UN statistic that could lead to more industrialised farming
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Are cows and sheep replacing aviation as the world’s No 1 climate culprit? In a recent leaflet for animal welfare group Compassion in World Farming, under the headline “Factory farming is inhumane, unacceptable and unsustainable”, Sir Jonathon Porritt, chair of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, wrote: “The livestock sector is responsible for producing a shocking 18% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. That’s more than the entire transport sector, including aviation.”
But where does this figure, which is now used by governments, pressure groups and many others, come from? Search the web and you will find scores of vegan and vegetarian websites all broadcasting the same message: meat is no longer just murder – it is also climate crime.
These campaigners and websites all derive their 18% figure from a single source: a report published in November 2006 by the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), called Livestock’s Long Shadow. The irony is that the agenda promoted in this report is diametrically opposed to that of most greens and vegans. Its authors’ mission is not to phase out or reduce meat-eating; indeed, they anticipate that world meat consumption will have doubled from 229m tonnes in 2001 to 465m tonnes by 2050. Nor do they want to see an end to factory farming. Instead, they say that “intensification and perhaps industrialisation of farming is the inevitable long-term outcome”, which can “only be achieved at the cost of pushing numerous small- and middle-scale producers out of business”.
Intensification of farming is necessary, the FAO argues, because “by far the largest share of emissions come from more extensive systems, where poor livestock holders often extract marginal livelihoods from dwindling resources”. Seventy per cent of the emissions they identify are attributable to extensive livestock, and only 30% to intensive livestock.
This approach comes as no surprise to long-term observers of the FAO.
(30 January 2008)
Agriculture Is Changing the Chemistry of the Mississippi River
Press office, Yale University
Midwestern farming has introduced the equivalent of five Connecticut Rivers into the Mississippi River over the past 50 years and is adding more carbon dioxide annually into its waters, according to a study published in Nature by researchers at Yale and Louisiana State universities.
“It’s like the discovery of a new large river being piped out of the corn belt,” said Pete Raymond, lead author of the study and associate professor of ecosystem ecology at the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies. “Agricultural practices have significantly changed the hydrology and chemistry of the Mississippi River.”
The researchers tracked changes in the levels of water and bicarbonate, which forms when carbon dioxide in soil water dissolves rock minerals. Bicarbonate plays an important, long-term role in absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas. Oceans then absorb the excess carbon dioxide and become more acidic in the process. “Ocean acidification makes it more difficult for organisms to form hard shells in coral reefs,” said R. Eugene Turner, a co-author of the study and a professor at the Coastal Ecology Institute at Louisiana State University.
The researchers concluded that farming practices, such as liming, changes in tile drainage and crop type and rotation, are responsible for the majority of the increase in water and carbon dioxide in the Mississippi River, which is North America’s largest river.
(29 January 2008)
