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Full fields, empty tanks
Phyllis Jacobs Griekspoor, Wichita Eagle
Diesel shortage could hinder wheat harvest
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Forget about high fuel prices. As harvest nears in western Kansas, the bigger concern is fuel supply. “I’m telling our producers to get their tanks full,” said Pat Peterson, general manager of the United Plains Ag cooperative in Sharon Springs. “Supply is more important than price.”
A shortage of diesel fuel supplies is the result of a combination of weather and maintenance problems at refineries and terminals in the region that have caused slowdowns in production and problems with delivery.
(10 June 2007)
Ag and emissions: Time growers got on path of sustainability
Mary Haffner, Venture County Star
Last year, a federal judge ruled that five California air basins violated the Clean Air Act when they failed to reduce smog-forming volatile organic compound “VOC” emissions from agricultural pesticides. In Ventura County, instead of attempting to comply with federal air pollution requirements over the last 10 years, more land was dedicated to conventional growing that relies on high concentrations of VOC-producing fumigants and heavy spraying schedules. The law was flagrantly disregarded. ..
Communities and environmental groups, strengthened in number and educated about the trade-offs between high yields and high air and water pollution, will continue to ensure that these mandates are enforced. ..
How much longer will a more enlightened society be willing to put up with conventional farming when there is another way to grow food that respects natural resources, works with nature instead of against it, and leaves communities with cleaner air, cleaner water and healthier ecosystems? Sustainable farming is far superior to conventional methods when you consider all of the environmental and public health harms and benefits of each. ..
Mary Haffner, of Ventura, is a lawyer, board member of Community and Children’s Advocates Against Pesticide Poisoning, and a Ventura Unified School District trustee.
(10 June 2007)
World Day Against Child Labour Focuses On Agriculture
Akanimo Sampson, Scoop
This year’s World Day Against Child Labour on June 12 is to focus on the elimination of child labour in agriculture, which accounts for a staggering percentage of the world’s working children and is one of the most dangerous forms of work for children and adults like.
The International Labour Organisation’s (ILO) International Programme on the Elimination of Child Labour (IPEC) estimates that over 100 million boys and girls aged 5-14 work as child labourers on farms and plantations the world over, where they are often exposed to hazards and risks that run the gamut from the mixing, handling and applying of toxic pesticides to using dangerous cutting tools, to working in extreme temperatures and operating powerful farm vehicles and heavy machinery. ..
(9 June 2007)
Gardeners, beware of the plastic beast
Beth Botts, Chicago Tribune
For just about every plant we buy, a pot, a bag, a bottle gets sent to the landfill
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In the garage, shed or basement of nearly every gardener, you will find stacks of plastic pots. Then there are mulch bags, pesticide and fertilizer bottles, flat trays from six-packs of annuals. We think of our gardening as greening the world, but it generates an awful lot of plastic garbage.
Gardeners may not realize how much. Nursery pots, flats and cell packs alone use up to 320 million pounds of plastic a year, according to a 2004 estimate from the Penn State University College of Agricultural Sciences in University Park, Pa.
Where does it all go? We may reuse some pots or crumple some cell packs in the bottom of containers to save potting mix. But in the end, most of the plastic from our gardens goes to landfills or hazardous waste incinerators. “A very small percentage of agricultural and gardening plastics are recycled,” says Lois Levitan of the Environmental Risk Assessment Program at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.
Ultimately, it’s up to gardeners to reduce those piles of plastic by buying less, encouraging the horticulture industry to find better methods of packaging and pressing for more recycling.
(10 June 2007)
Rooftop farming taking root
Sinead Carew, Reuters
New York is better known for tall buildings and crowded streets than farms but a group of environmentalists say Gotham’s rooftops could be used to grow enough vegetables to feed the entire city and reduce dependence on far-away farms.
New York Sun Works has opened an environmentally friendly Science Barge to prove its point. Moored on the Hudson River, it grows and harvests lettuce, cucumbers and tomatoes in a greenhouse using rain and energy from solar panels and wind turbines and biofuels.
The nonprofit group says that if similar outfits, with hydroponic systems using water and no soil, were installed on the city’s 14,000 acres (5,665 hectares) of unshaded rooftop, it could feed as many as 20 million people in New York City and the surrounding metropolitan area year round.
“If we planted those rooftops with hydroponic greenhouses … we could grow comfortably more than enough fresh vegetables for the entire population of New York City,” said Ted Caplow, head of the group behind the project.
Cities such as Havana, Hanoi and Singapore produce much of their food, but New York ships in almost all its food. ..
(8 Jun 2007)
