Green (Living) Review: organic farming

Showing posts with label organic farming. Show all posts

New Aerial Photos Suggest Big Organic Farmers May Be Lying to Us

Photo credit: The Cornucopia Institute Consumers of organic eggs and milk like knowing that the cows and chickens on organic farms are treated decently. Many people count on the fact that these animals are required to get a certain amount of time in the great outdoors. They’re not supposed to be kept indoors round the clock in classic factory farm fashion.

Unfortunately, one watchdog group called the Cornucopia Institute says the biggest organic farms aren’t bothering to follow the rules. They’re getting too big to be able to even try. In fact, they’re turning into… factory farms.

The Wisconsin-based group, which researches and investigates agricultural and food issues, announced in December 2014:

[C]onsumers, who rightly assume that the animals producing their food are being treated respectfully, and consequently resulting in higher quality food, are being taken advantage of in the marketplace.

Why is this so? Take a gander at the aerial photographs the Cornucopia Institute took earlier in 2014 of 14 major organic diary and chicken farms. See large numbers of animals enjoying the sun and air? No? That’s a problem. Potentially, that’s a rather important violation of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) organic certification.

Yes, Organic Farming Can Feed the World

A recent gathering of researchers and smallholder farmers in Istanbul yields insights.

A few years ago, I was at a biotechnology trade meeting listening to a panel on GMOs. Throughout the two-hour session, the panelists all sang the praises of the technology—not too surprising at an industry event. (At the time, the GMOs under commercial planting were limited to seeds genetically engineered to produce an insecticide and/or resist a proprietary herbicide.)

What was unexpected was what came next: One of the speakers took the mic to say those opposed to GMOs should be tried for crimes against humanity. Seriously. Sure, the comment may have been a gross misuse of the term, but a similar sentiment runs throughout the messaging from the biotech industry that says we can’t feed the world if we don’t embrace the technology.

If my experience last month in Turkey is any indication, the notion that GMOs are the only way to feed a growing population is way out of step with both the leading thinkers on food and farming and the world’s smallholder farmers—who produce much of what the planet eats and 80 percent of the food in Asia and sub-Saharan Africa.

These farmers may not have money on their side, but I saw the power of strength in numbers at the Organic World Congress. Held this year in Istanbul, the conference brought together people from 81 countries to discuss the latest research from organic farm fields and to share private and public developments that promote organic agriculture.

Amish Farmers Study Plant Immunology, Avoid Using Pesticides Completely

Amish farmers are studying plant immunology in order to grow healthy organic produce free of harmful chemicals.

amishorganic102114 Amish farmers avoided the draft during WWII, even choosing to face jail time over going to war because they didn’t believe in combat, and now they are taking up a different fight altogether – peacefully – by studying plant immunology in order to grow healthy organic produce without pesticides, herbicides, and other harmful chemicals that biotech companies are lavishing on crops like cheap perfume on an uncouth lady.

Samuel Zook, an Amish farmer recently explained to a reporter:

“If you really stop and think about it, though, when we go out spraying our crops with pesticides, that’s really what we’re doing. It’s chemical warfare, bottom line.”

Zook should know what its like to try to grow without pesticides and still get rid of pests that would ravish his crops. He owns a 66-acre farm that was once riddled with fungus and other plant-killing insects that he could scarcely eradicate. The 39-year old farmer talked at length about trying to run a homestead that had been in his family for five generations, and how miserably he was failing. He became disillusioned with the Big Ag methods promoted as ‘agriculture’ when they are nothing more than war on the natural world. His frustration led him to the writings of an 18-year old Amish farmer from Ohio, named John Kempf.

This young upstart is the founder of Advancing Eco Agriculture, a consulting firm the farmer established in 2006 to promote science-intensive organic agriculture. That’s right – it wasn’t just going to be an inconclusive guessing game about what to grow and how to grow it – his achievements would make any pro-GMO agriculturalist or biotech scientists eat their genetically modified words.

The Solution Is the Soil: How Organic Farming Can Feed the World and Save the Planet

One man, backed by many, marches on Washington to tell lawmakers and the world that 'there is hope right beneath our feet.'

Just over a week ago, the executive director of the Rodale Institute, Mark 'Coach' Smallwood, set out from the group's research farm in eastern Pennsylvania on a 160-mile journey to Washington, DC with a walking stick, a brimmed hat, and a simple but profound message: We can not only stop climate change. We can reverse it.

When Smallwood makes his expected arrival in the nation's capital on October 16, he will deliver a Rodale white paper—titled Regenerative Organic Agriculture and Climate Change: A Down-to-Earth Solution to Global Warming (pdf)—to lawmakers alongside a broader message from a global coalition of organic farmers, scientists, and food justice advocates who argue that a global transformation in how the world grows its crops, manages its soil, and feeds its livestock is the key solution available to us that can best stop, even reverse, the growing and dangerous volumes of carbon and other greenhouse gases now pushing world's atmosphere and oceans beyond capacity.

Experts Agree: Organic Farming Is Revolutionary

It's time to get back to the roots of farming to save the planet.

"Organic" is just another word for "expensive." It's a joke bandied about in supermarkets, illustrating that people are widely unaware of the connection between the contents of their carts and its impact on the health of our bodies and the planet.

"I would say that [organic farming is] a 100-percent solution to the health problem, to the unemployment problem, the poverty problem, the biodiversity problem, and the water problem," says Vandana Shiva, PhD, founder of The Research Foundation for Science, Technology, and Natural Resource Policy. She was one of several speakers to discuss regenerative organic agriculture at an expert panel event hosted by the Rodale Institute, the Carbon Underground, and Organic Consumers Association.

But the benefits go way beyond these comparably "small" issues because organic farming is also the solution to our carbon problem. According to the Rodale Institute, the answer to the looming climate catastrophe is right under our feet: soil. The researchers found that, through regenerative organic agriculture, the soil will be able to sequester carbon in a way that not just limits, but also reverses, the threatening levels of atmospheric CO2.

Kristine Nichols, PhD, chief scientist at the Rodale Institute, explained that if we shift to a regenerative organic model of agriculture, 40 percent of the total annual carbon emissions will be taken out of the atmosphere and stored in the soil. (That's an estimated reduction of 21 gigatons of CO2 every year, or equal to about 4.25 billon cars off of the road). Additionally, the Rodale Institute found that this organic model would apply to pasture and rangelands, too, sequestering another 71 percent of annual carbon emissions.

"This is tipping that needle past 100 percent that we're going to be able to sequester more carbon in the soil than the emissions that we have on an annual basis," she says. The positive conclusion? She and other experts say this will reverse climate change.

Turn Here Sweet Corn – Book Review

Review by Michael Smith (Veshengro)

Turn Here Sweet Corn: Organic Farming Works
by Atina Diffley
Published by University of Minnesota Press, August 2013
344 pages 1 b&w photo, 5 b&w plates, 29 color plates, 6 x 9
$18.95 paperback
ISBN 978-0-8166-7772-6

When the hail starts to fall, Atina Diffley doesn’t compare it to golf balls. She’s a farmer. It’s “as big as a B-size potato.” As her bombarded land turns white, she and her husband Martin huddle under a blanket and reminisce: the one-hundred-mile-per-hour winds; the eleven-inch rainfall (“that broccoli turned out gorgeous”); the hail disaster of 1977. The romance of farming washed away a long time ago, but the love? Never. In telling her story of working the land, coaxing good food from the fertile soil, Atina Diffley reminds us of an ultimate truth: we live in relationships—with the earth, plants and animals, families and communities.

A memoir of making these essential relationships work in the face of challenges as natural as weather and as unnatural as corporate politics, her book is a firsthand history of getting in at the “ground level” of organic farming. One of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest, the Diffleys’ Gardens of Eagan helped to usher in a new kind of green revolution in the heart of America’s farmland, supplying their roadside stand and a growing number of local food co-ops. This is a story of a world transformed—and reclaimed—one square acre at a time.

And yet, after surviving punishing storms and the devastating loss of fifth-generation Diffley family land to suburban development, the Diffleys faced the ultimate challenge: the threat of eminent domain for a crude oil pipeline proposed by one of the largest privately owned companies in the world, notorious polluters Koch Industries. As Atina Diffley tells her David-versus-Goliath tale, she gives readers everything from expert instruction in organic farming to an entrepreneur’s manual on how to grow a business to a legal thriller about battling corporate arrogance to a love story about a single mother falling for a good, big-hearted man.

Atina Diffley's book “Turn Here Sweet Corn” is a masterclass in organic gardening and farming without being preachy, a lesson in entrepreneurship, a love story and a legal thriller, all rolled into a memoir that is as easy to read as a good novel.

Reading the chapter “Endangered Species” I just wanted to scream at the developers as well as the people who regarded the vegetables growing in the fields as “just laying there being wasted”. The latter pointing to the fact that so many folks today do not know where the vegetables that they buy in the supermarkets come from and that, unless they are grown in a hydroponic way, they grow in soil, what they would regard as as “dirt”.

The developers, when they take over the Diffley land, you also want to scream at. We cannot eat houses and infrastructure and we need farms just like the Gardens of Eagan and others close to the cities. But seems to be something that escapes them and that all too many today do not understand and that includes many in our governments.

When reviewing books I tend to use Post-It notes for annotations which I leave sticking like flags out of the pages of the book. When a book has many such flags, as this one has, it means one of two things; it is either extremely good and those flags indicate references or bad and the flags remind me as to where the bad points are and that I will comment on these.

In the case of “Turn Here Sweet Corn” it is the former and not the latter. This book is a handbook for organic gardening and farming without being one.

The book is an absolute page turner that I found very hard to put down. And the reader will also learn something new about organic gardening and farming on almost each and every page. It is easy to read and teaches the whys and wherefores, and even the how-tos to some degree, of organic farming and gardening without being a boring manual.

Atina Diffley is an organic vegetable farmer who now educates consumers, farmers, and policymakers about organic farming through the consulting business Organic Farming Works LLC, owned by her and her husband, Martin. From 1973 through 2007, the Diffleys owned and operated Gardens of Eagan, one of the first certified organic produce farms in the Midwest.

Rating: Six out of five. I know that that is actually not possible but I am going to do it anyway.