Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Comments received online and by email, in response to Emily Franklin’s recent article Milk: The sustainability issue raised three questions about the use of soya in dairy farming, to which the SFT did not have ready answers. Richard Young has been investigating, and he’s come up with some unexpected facts.
While several conventional conservation practices applied to corn-soybean fields can reduce nutrient loss, converting annual crop acreage to perennial biomass crops would be far more effective.
Recently I had a chance to chat with Diego Footer from Creative Destruction, formally known as Permaculture Voices, on a podcast series featuring “honest, hard conversations about farming, business, and life with those trying to make a living doing something that they love and dealing with life in the process.”
About 20 percent of crops in the Czech Republic (and up to 30 percent in Germany) never make it to our plates – all because of norms that determine size, shape and color of fruits and vegetables. “But since food doesn’t always grow uniformly, it has to be sorted,” says Strejcová. And this sorting often happens right on the fields during harvest time.
Parthiban is not the only one to recognize the high value of pollinators in improving the crop production, which in turn improves the quality of life, nutrition and well-being of the Indian people.
Pretty Prairie, home to 650 people on the southern Kansas plains, is a one-well town. And that well is giving the town fits. The 30-meter-deep (100-foot) borehole draws water from a slice of the Equus Beds aquifer that has shown increasing levels of nitrate, a chemical that can be deadly for infants.
It doesn’t really matter what we decide to call it – mob grazing, rotational grazing or paddock grazing – they all essentially mean very similar things.
What I mostly want to do on this site over the next few months is resume exploring the alternative world of my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex. But there’s a case for taking a step back, putting that exercise into a wider context, and laying out something of a programme for the year – especially in the light of some comments I’ve recently received. So that’s what I’m going to do here.
Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space.
While it is clear that global trade play a major role as a driver of destruction of biodiversity there is no way “consumers” in the US or other developed economies can be expected to take responsibility for the effect on biodiversity of their consumption.
The most recent turn in the UK dairy crisis is the rejection of milk by young people, replaced by alternatives such as soya or almond milk. David Dobbin, the chief executive of United Dairy Farmers has described this as a “demographic time bomb”.
Over the past few years, we’ve tracked the success of Farmland LP, a family of funds created to increase the economic yield of farmland through sustainable farming practices.
