Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Growing pains for farmers
Michael Booth, Denver Post
It’s a crazy time for farmers, torn among environmental interests, the demand for cheap food and a chance to earn more.
—
Ol’ Curt Sayles has a farm.
And ee-yi, ee-yi, yow, is it complicated.
With duck defenders here, and bread bakers there. An ethanol plant here, and a worldwide food shortage there. Here a hedge fund. There a carbon sequestration contract. Everywhere a bewildering federal aid package.
What Ol’ Farmer Sayles really has is a silo-busting headache, just when longtime Eastern Plains farmers like him have the rare chance to earn good money. It’s not enough to grow the world’s food – from an energy crisis to bread riots to global warming, the world wants to lay all its problems at the barn door.
“Our society and politics have created several paradoxes,” Sayles said. “We want cheap renewable energy and cheap food. We want a reduced dependence on foreign oil but don’t want to exploit our own resources. And yet we don’t want renewable energy to affect our food prices.”
Sayles gazes off into the bright sunshine and watches a hired hand fix a more prosaic problem, a giant blown tractor tire.
“It’s a unique time right now,” concludes Sayles, not really that old at age 51. “In the next 30 years, we’ll look back and say, that was a crazy year and a half.”
(17 May 2008)
World’s Poor Pay Price as Crop Research Is Cut
Keith Bradsher and Andrew martin, New York Times
The brown plant hopper, an insect no bigger than a gnat, is multiplying by the billions and chewing through rice paddies in East Asia, threatening the diets of many poor people.
The damage to rice crops, occurring at a time of scarcity and high prices, could have been prevented. Researchers at the International Rice Research Institute here say that they know how to create rice varieties resistant to the insects but that budget cuts have prevented them from doing so.
This is a stark example of the many problems that are coming to light in the world’s agricultural system. Experts say that during the food surpluses of recent decades, governments and development agencies lost focus on the importance of helping poor countries improve their agriculture.
The budgets of institutions that delivered the world from famine in the 1970s, including the rice institute, have stagnated or fallen, even as the problems they were trying to solve became harder.
(18 May 2008)
California farm product exporters face shipping squeeze
Jim Downing, Sacramento Bee
As the weak dollar makes the fruits of California farms ever more attractive to overseas buyers, big exporters like Sacramento’s Blue Diamond Growers are finding it tougher to get their products to far-off customers.
The high price of oil and shifts in the global balance of trade have made space on container ships hard to come by. Cargo rates are up sharply. Delays of several months have become routine.
“It’s really put a crunch on U.S. ag exporters,” said Tammy Rossi, Blue Diamond’s manager of logistics and operations, as a forklift driver parked the last of 22 tons of almonds in a shipping container at the company’s loading dock one morning last week.
(18 May 2008)
Fears over state’s food security
Carmel Egan, The Age
VICTORIA’S ability to feed itself is threatened by new farming practices and cheap imported fruit and vegetables, warns a major food report commissioned by the State Government.
Competition for water and increased fuel costs are driving farmers away from essential food production to high-value export-oriented crops such as wine, almonds and dairy.
The Secure and Sustainable Food Systems for Victoria report said food supply problems were so severe that consumers’ access to affordable, healthy diets was jeopardised.
… Lead author Kirsten Larsen warned that food prices would keep rising.
Ms Larsen said the community and government had underestimated how vulnerable local food production was to climate change, drought and soil degradation. Victorian and Australia were a decade behind other developed nations in tackling food security.
(18 May 2008)
Climate change threatens French truffle
Jessica Mead, Reuters
The black truffle, one of the most exclusive and expensive delicacies on the planet, is under threat from climate change.
A mysterious species of underground fungi with reported aphrodisiac and therapeutic properties, the aromatic truffles are also highly fragile and cannot withstand more than three weeks without water.
But prolonged drought in many of their prime growing regions in Europe and predictions about global warming suggest the future is about as black as the truffles themselves, to the despair of the growers.
(16 May 2008)
Confusing, arbitrary rules prevent local farmers from feeding us
Lara Bradley, The Sudbury Star (Ontario, Canada)
Dave Lewington’s neighbours in Lavigne joke that his birds are on vacation as the former camper, circled by an electric fence to keep out foxes, is shifted each week around his fields all summer long to give the birds fresh grass to eat – and also to fertilize the fields with their droppings.
Crack one of their monster eggs in a pan and you’ll notice the deep yellow of the yolk, darkened by the grass they eat. It’s a tastier egg, but you won’t find them in any local grocery stores. You can’t buy local eggs in stores because there’s no grader in the area to arrange eggs by size.
To get local eggs, people have to travel to the farm’s gate. In the down season, when there’s no produce to bring customers in, Lewington ends up feeding them to the pigs.
When you look around at where we’ve arrived in food production, the contradictions are everywhere.
Big and small, here’s a few:
North Americans obsessed with combatting obesity, eating themselves to death on a high-caloric, low-nutrition diets, while other parts of the world are rioting over food shortages;
Don Poulin has to truck a portion of his potatoes to Toronto to a central depot only to have them trucked back to Sudbury by the grocery stores;
There are some 2,150 beef cattle in the district, but it’s nearly impossible to find local beef; and
In the height of the Sudbury blueberry season, only the mushiest, blandest berries possible from California are in the grocery stores.
(17 May 2008)
