Food & agriculture – May 12

Click on the headline (link) for the full text.

Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage

Peak phosphorus: the sequel to peak oil ? (audio)
Dana Cordell, University of Technology Sydney conference via ForaRadio (Australia)
Phosphorus isn’t quite at the top of the list of fashionable causes, but perhaps it should be. Dana Cordell warns of a looming problem, we’ve become addicted to it and, like oil, it’s believed it will run out.

Phosphorus has been used extensively for over 100 years as a fertiliser in modern industrial agriculture. The widespread use has lifted crop yields and helped feed the world’s growing population, but what happens when production reaches a peak?

Highlights from UTS Speaks Eating the Earth: how should we eat to ensure a sustainable future?

Dana Cordell is PhD scholar, UTS Co-founder, the Global Phosphorus Research Initiative
(6 May 2009)
Other talks at the UTS conference:
Linking food, diet and sustainability Highlights from the UTS Speaks public lecture series: Eating the Earth: How should we eat to ensure a sustainable future? Professor Stuart White provides an overview of the issues

More on the conference

Finding my Herb Garden
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
When we came here, we knew we wanted to grow our own food, and we had sneaking intuitions that we might want to grow other things. Gradually, I’ve been both excited and delighted to discover precisely how much we can and do grow – but figuring this out has required that we overcome the prejudices we were raised with, the first being “things area always and only just one thing.” That is, when I began planting, I thought “these are my herbs, these are my vegetables, this is to eat, this to season it, this for beauty.” Each thing was divided into its place. It has taken me a while to overcome that habit, and herbalism has been one of the primary instruments of doing so – they were a living reminder that plants are almost never only one thing, even to we simple minded humans.

… So I’d always grown a lot of herbs. But until four or five years ago, I didn’t think much about herbs as medicinals – or rather, I did – I used them, and purchased them, but I didn’t grow most of them. I’m embarassed to think how long it took me to notice that instead of buying red clover blossoms for tea, I could just pick them out of my pasture, or that the red raspberry leaf tea that I was taking in late pregnancy could have been made from the scores of red raspberry leaves growing under my spruce trees. I was somehow intimidated by the whole project of figuring out when to harvest, when things were medicinally active, and how best to use them.

But as I looked into the uses of the herbs, I found that I was growing a surprising number of medicinal herbs already, simply out of fascination with the plants.
(8 May 2009)

Wisconsin Fourth-Graders Boycott School Lunch
Gordon Jenkins, Slow Food USA
Patricia Mulvey reports on the blog F is for French Fry that last Friday, a group of fourth-graders at Nuestro Mundo Elementary School in Madison, WI had planned to protest the unhealthy food served in their cafeteria by staying behind in class during recess and enjoying a home-cooked meal with fresh fruits and vegetables. Their “Real Food Picnic” – you might call it an Eat-In– was canceled, however, when the school district’s assistant superintendent alerted parents and administrators and asked them to discourage the event, citing concerns about food allergies, lack of supervision and the presence of news media.

The students are members of a group called “Boycott School Lunch (BCSL)” that they founded last fall after conducting some “gross experiments” like measuring how much grease they could squeeze out of a hamburger. This year, they’ve been learning about Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement in history class. When teacher Joshua Forehand showed them a film about the Children’s Crusade that took place in Birmingham, AL in 1963, the students were inspired to organize a peaceful protest in support of improving school lunch.

Fourth-grader Sierra Mueller-Owens told The Capital Times that “We had planned really good meals [for the protest], and I was hoping a lot of people would enjoy it.” She also hoped that the school district’s food service would feel the impact of fewer school lunches sold that day. Instead of a organizing a protest potluck, BCSL is now planning a letter-writing and petition campaign. Parents have requested a meeting with district administrators to discuss supporting the students’ efforts and improving the school lunch program in order to provide healthier food.

According to the Cap Times, student boycotts of school lunch have been cropping up all over the country lately.
(29 April 2009)

Hungry For Land
Maywa Montenegro, SeedMagazine.com
Growing food in foreign lands has a long history. But the 21st century version of outsourced agriculture presages something fundamentally new.

In response to the global food crisis, wealthy countries mostly in the Middle East and North Africa, but also China, India, and South Korea, among others are buying or attempting to buy farmland in the developing world. In the eastern and financial presses, these sorts of stories have been coming at a steady drip for more than a year. But somehow, with the exception of a few brief reports most casting it as a “win-win” scenario the phenomenon has fallen beneath the radar of mainstream western press. That is now likely to change as the trend gathers momentum and the international community begins to respond. On April 6, at a specially convened Manhattan forum, UN food security expert Olivier de Schutter called for a “code of conduct” to regulate the purchase of international farmland. “States, all too often, are led to make such deals because they are attracted to immediate rewards, but they should also look at the long-term consequences,” he said. On Wednesday of this week, Joachim von Braun, Director General of the International Food Policy Research Institute, will deliver a press conference in Washington, DC, on the controversial issues surrounding this development.

It all started just 20 months ago, when some of the world’s largest grain exporters notably Russia, Argentina, and Vietnam dramatically curbed exports in an effort to bring down domestic food prices. The resultant supply crunch sent prices soaring and set off the alarm bells in nations whose major food pipelines had suddenly been stanched. Some initially sought out long-term bilateral trade agreements: The Philippines, for instance, negotiated a three-year deal with Vietnam for 1.5 million tons of rice per year. Such agreements, however, are often tenuous and difficult to broker for more than a handful of years. Sensing their vulnerability, government leaders from Libya to Japan began deciding that importing food and crops would no longer suffice; it is safer, cheaper, better to own the land. And so, throughout 2008, with the world’s attention fixed on elections and Olympics and economic implosion, high-level officials quietly crossed the globe in a diplomatic hunt for arable country.
(27 April 2009)

A Doomer’s Spring
Zachary Nowak, Preparing For The Peak (blog)
An admitted doomer wanders through the multicolored desert that is suburban America, looking for signs of food self-sufficiency.
—
There’s nothing like Spring to make a doomer like me gloomy. My job in these months is to repair above-ground swimming pools, an activity which keeps me driving around the suburbs of Rochester, New York. If peakoptimists are hoping for a transition to a greener, more self-sufficient future, they better hope next year is better.

There is a fervent hope for a powering down and a greening up of the dreary Nowhereland of American suburbia. Jeff Vail, in one of his carefully-written essays, looked at the “the potential of suburbia to produce some degree of self-sufficiency in food, water, and energy.” Vail admits immediately that total self-sufficiency is unlikely, but that some measure is possible. He goes on to calculate just how much food (calories and nutrition) could come out of the one quarter acre lot that is our Everyperson’s personal fief. The answer is surprising: a decent amount, if the suburban baronet planted a mix of annuals (tomatoes, potatoes), perennials (rhubarb, asparagus), and some fruit and nut bushes.

I was eager to see if Americans had heeded Vail’s advice, or if they had simply been nudged towards the idea by the current economic crisis. I didn’t expect to see front yards tilled up yet (that’ll be a few more years in the coming, in my opinion) but I figured that back by the aluminum beast I was repairing I would see significantly more gardens, or even the odd raspberry bush, newly planted. “Who knows,” I thought, “maybe I’m not giving Joe the Whatever enough credit, maybe he’ll have read up on currant bushes or pawpaw trees or perennial onions.” I even had a moment, just before pool season started, when I thought I might have to hang up my doomer spurs and become an optimist.

That would have been a happy surprise.

What I’ve seen in the past eight days, though, have confirmed what I thought before. Compared to last year’s peak preparedness (as far as home food production), Americans… have made no progress at all. Suburban back yards (and front yards, and side yards) are a multicolored desert of ornamentals, mostly that most ornamental and useless of all, grass. That quarter acre is our perfect opportunity to have our garden at our doorstep (no huffing over to small plots next to the railroad tracks, like Europeans), and we are blowing it.

There are oaks, Scotch pines, Copper Beech, forsythia bushes, iris, peonies (lots of peonies), daffodils that are starting to wither, neglected rosebushes, and grass. Lots of grass, too. Nothing you could eat, except at the one house in Penfield where there were a few cattails growing in the drainage ditch at the property line, though I assume the Baron and Baroness had no idea that the rhizomes, shoots, and (later) flower cones and pollen are edible.

It was an almost deliberate attempt to avoid any food-producing plants. If you have to have a tree, why not throw in an apple? They flower nicely. Skip the forsythia and put in a Blueberry bush. Instead of peonies why not plant Giant Solomon’s Seal? Till up that bald spot in the grass and put in a few members of the deadly nightshade family (e.g. potatoes, tomatoes, peppers).

Antonio Gramsci once recommended, “Skepticism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” So I’ve mostly given up on exhorting the unwilling to get ready (my occasional, pissing-into-the-wind or preaching-to-the-choir post being hte exception). I myself have been germinating, along with my helpful greenthumb friend Andy McClain, a wide variety of perennials. We hope to plant out Sea Kale, Egyptian Nodding Onions, Chinese Artichokes, and Goji Berry bushes this summer. We’re even going to guerilla-plant watercress from a nearby drainage ditch into a slow-moving stream around the block.

Andy’s philosophy, like Gramisci’s, has always been skepticism: “You’re either right, or you’re pleasantly surprised.” That’s my advice for this Spring and Summer. As Peak Oil turns into the Long Emergency, I recommend you get a copy of Perennial Vegetables and start to hunker down. Ignore your neighbor’s obliviousness to the importance of a few zero-kilometer calories, and till up that bald spot in the lawn.

And don’t forget that you layer currant bushes!
(9 May 2009)
Great oaks from little acorns grow.

-BA