Food & Water

Getting to 350 with a $2 pocket knife

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Farmer Managed Natural Regeneration is a cheap and rapid method of re-vegetating deserts and restoring climate balance to below 350 ppm. Vast areas of cleared agricultural land in arid lands retain an “underground forest” of living stumps and roots. By simply changing agricultural practices, this underground forest can re-sprout, at little cost, very rapidly and with great beneficial impact. In other words, in many instances the costly, time consuming and inefficient methods of raising seedlings, planting them out and protecting them is not even necessary for successful reforestation.

Should cheap phosphorus be first on an elemental ‘Red List’?

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Phosphorus is already out of reach for poor farmers in many countries, and, as history’s economic lessons have shown, the costs of any monopolized resource can skyrocket. Dr. Elser is also concerned about the institutional vacuum regarding governance: “Who will establish regulations and incentive structures with regard to phosphorus use and waste given its impacts on food security?”

“Humans control the global phosphorus cycle, more than carbon, more than nitrogen,” says Elser. “Looking at how we’re doing with P, I’d have to say: this is no way to run a biogeochemical cycle.”

When will we admit that our corn ethanol policy is immoral?

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Having just returned from a trip to Eastern Nebraska, I feel as if I participated in a movie set for “The Road” or its equivalent. It’s all about ethanol in this region of the country and it’s not a pretty sight. Because of our unbridled and unquenchable thirst for liquid fuels, this policy is creating a vast environmental ruin not so different from that of the tar sands areas of Canada. In recent years, this land which was a prairie a short one-hundred-and-fifty years ago has become a region that produces primarily only two industrial agricultural crops, corn and soybeans.

Pope Mary and the new wave of food hubs

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He and the people in his church are part of the new “food hub” wave, although he didn’t call it that. He just wants to encourage the people in his church to start asserting their food independence. But instead of going the usual route of venturing forth and trying to teach the people how to grow food, Mike decided to ask the parishioners themselves how to go about it.

The importance of domestic animal diversity

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For century upon century domestic animals have been bred with specialized traits suited to particular tasks or to live and prosper in specific climates or regions. Arguably these domesticated breeds are of significance equal to their brethren who live in the wild and just like their wild counterparts, many of the breeds are in danger of extinction. Indeed some breeds have already been lost.

Chemical low

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The Bou Craa mine in occupied Western Sahara is one of the world’s largest sources of phosphorus, a vital component of the fertilisers on which much of the world’s agriculture, and global food production and food security, depends. For some time there has been concern about our reliance on a finite supply of phosphorus, and the implications of this for agricultural productivity, food prices and nutrition, particularly in developing countries. The term “peak phosphorus” has joined the term “peak oil” in the lexicon of 21st century scarcity. An article in this week’s Nature journal (Elser and Bennett, 2011) addresses the phosphorus problem …