Food

Innovation of the Week: Researchers find farmers applying rice innovations to their wheat crops

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The System of Rice Intensification SRI) is an innovative method of increasing the productivity of irrigated rice with very simple adjustments to traditional techniques. It involves transplanting younger seedlings into the field with wider spacing in a square pattern, irrigating to keep the roots moist and aerated instead of flooding fields, and increasing organic matter in the soil with compost and manure.

Preserving food to reduce waste

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The Global North and South both waste similar portions of the food they produce, but there is a significant difference between them – the majority of the wastage in the global south comes from lack of ability to preserve food – no refrigeration, no easy way to preserve it on a large scale, and limited market access or long times from harvest to market…In the Global North, the picture is different. We do lose food at harvest, but the majority of all food loss is household and market – supermarkets throwing out lightly dinged cans and crates of produce, households buying food and burying it in the back of their refrigerators – this is the picture of food waste in the Global North.

When The Gumboots Come Marching In

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Why we farm kids of the middle 20th century in Ohio also called them gumboots I do not know. We wore them regularly and so, human beings being what they are, gumboots became a symbol of our country culture and we were ridiculed for wearing them by town brats. Even as a young man who often went to town wearing gumboots, I was teased, usually in good humor, but the barb was always there. The city slickers didn’t realize that gumboots were very fashionable with the British aristocracy in the early nineteen hundreds.

Review: A User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

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User’s Guide to the Crisis of Civilization shows how our major crises share the same root causes and thus can be solved only by taking into account their complex interactions. Ahmed acknowledges that in this age of specialization it’s understandable for issues like climate change and oil depletion to be studied and discussed separately—indeed, he observes that this mode of inquiry into the causes of specific phenomena has enabled many of our greatest scientific advances. But it’s also, he argues, beginning to seem like an increasingly antiquated method, preventing experts from seeing the whole picture and the public from receiving consistent information.

Biochar: A boon for soils and the climate?

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Can farmers increase production while reducing greenhouse gas emissions, simply by mixing charcoal in with their soil? That what Albert Bates argues in The Biochar Solution: Carbon farming and climate change. Other guests include Julie Major, Faculty Lecturer at McGill University and an independent consultant who has worked with biochar for seven years, and Vermonter Jock Gill, who is experimenting with biochar at Shelburne Farms and promoting heating buildings while producing biochar for soils.

The gentle approach to animals saves time and money

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With a very small number of animals on a homestead, the whole tenor of livestock management differs from that of the commercial farm. You get to know your few animals well as individuals, and you become almost friends with them. Chore time becomes pleasurable. If you have hostile animals, you can get rid of them and buy others. And, if after a while you cannot find gentle animals, nature is telling you something.

Book review: Edible Front Yard

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Ivette Soler’s new book The Edible Front Yard: The Mow-less, Grow-more Plan for a Beautiful, Bountiful Garden is lush with pictures and full of design advice, color combinations, attractive edibles, and hardscaping ideas. Ivette (a.k.a. The Germinatrix), a garden designer and writer, insists on beauty and style in her front-yard edible landscapes and gardens. She advises “Beauty matters…your front yard is a greeting to the world.”

New briefing: Food safety for whom? Corporate wealth versus people’s health

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The steady stream of scandals, outbreaks of disease and regulatory crack-downs that is part and parcel of the industrial food system has made food safety a major global issue. Our growing reliance on corporate food and farming concentrates and amplifies risk in new and unprecedented ways, at scales never seen before, making intervention more necessary than ever to ensure that food does not make people sick. But behind all of the talk and action lies another agenda.

Climate, food and and the connectivity paradox

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At the most basic level, climate changes that cause world surface temperatures to rise are rooted in increased fossil emissions in the atmosphere. Total fossil fuel emissions are a function of key variables, most notably population, per-capita gross domestic product (GDP) and the carbon intensity of an individual unit of GDP. Understanding these forces and their relationships with each other is critical to measuring the extent of climate change and how we may seek to deal with it.

Managing manure to save mankind

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Long-time Ohio farmer Gene Logsdon says human and animal waste, including that from pets, is our greatest and most misunderstood natural resource. He points out that we spend billions to throw it away, and billions more to manufacture synthetic fertilizers.
(Radio interview and book excerpt)