Food & agriculture – Sept 17

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Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Food Banks Finding Aid in Bounty of Backyard
Patricia Leigh Brown, New York Times
BERKELEY, Calif. — Natasha Boissier did not expect an epiphany while pushing her baby’s stroller exhaustedly around the neighborhood. But eyeing her neighbors’ yards, Ms. Boissier began noticing the abundance of fruit trees — and how much of their succulent bounty wound up on the ground.

“There was all this fruit going to waste,” she said of the apples, pears and plums in her midst. “It seemed like such a natural way to deal with hunger.”

Thus was born North Berkeley Harvest, part of a small but expanding movement of backyard urban gleaners — they might be called fruit philanthropists — who voluntarily harvest surplus fruit and then donate it to food banks, centers for the elderly and other nonprofit organizations.

In an era in which fruit canning, drying and preserving are for many no longer everyday skills, harvesters like Ms. Boissier, a 40-year-old social worker, are bringing a new spin to the concept of U-Pick-’Em. A renewed emphasis on locally grown organic foods, along with higher food prices and increased demand at food banks, has inspired a new generation of community harvesters to search for solutions in their backyards.
(13 September 2008)

Don’t put all your eggs in one food basket: experts
Joydeep Gupta, New Kerala (India)
In an era of climate change leading to more unpredictable rainfall, the way to food security is to diversify what one grows on the field, say international experts.
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“Increasing temperatures, declining and more unpredictable rainfall, more frequent extreme weather and higher severity of pest and disease are among the more drastic changes that impact food production,” said Johannes Kotschi of Agrecol, an agricultural research institute in Germany.

“These are the global trends. While we have to worry about this, we also have to remember the global trends mask tremendous regional differences, with the poorest being most at risk both by global climate variations and global commodity price fluctuations,” he said in an e-mail interview.

“Warming in the Indian Ocean and an increasingly ‘el Niño-like’ climate could reduce main-season rainfall across most of Africa, East and South Asia, and Central and South America,” added Janet Cotter and Reyes Tirado, researchers who have been studying the subject and members of the international NGO Greenpeace.

With India at the forefront of countries already bearing the ill effects of climate change, Cotter said in the Greenpeace report: “The biggest problem for food security will be the predicted increase in extreme weather, which will damage crops at particular developmental stages and make the timing of farming more difficult, reducing farmers’ incentives to cultivate.”
(15 September 2008)

Scientist says ag costs continuing to rise
UPI
A U.S. agricultural economist is forecasting a continuation of rising costs for such farm commodities as fertilizer, seed genetics, energy and land costs.

… “We’re seeing fertilizer prices skyrocket, primarily because worldwide market prices for crops are high, which increases the demand for fertilizers,” he said.
(15 September 2008)

Future of Food director Garcia on ‘making soil sexy’
Tom Philpott, Gristmill
Slow Food Nation interview: Deborah Koons Garcia
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Filmmaker Deborah Koons Garcia burst onto the sustainable-food scene with her 2004 documentary the Future of Food, a biting, well-researched indictment of Monsanto and genetically modified food. I caught up with her at Slow Food Nation to discuss her current project, a documentary about a topic dear to my heart: soil.
(16 September 2008)
The title of the coming documentary on soil is “In Good Heart.”

In Good Heart website
Garcia interview (Sonoma News)
Garcia interview (Whole Life Times)