Why Supermarket Tomatoes Suck. Andrews McMeel Publishing Excerpted from the new book "Tomatoland: How Modern Industrial Agriculture Destroyed Our Most Alluring Fruit" In Vermont, where I live, as in much of the rest of the United States, a gardener can select pretty much any sunny patch of ground, dig a small hole, put in a tomato seedling, and come back two months later and harvest something. Not necessarily a bumper crop of plump, unblemished fruits, but something. When I met Monica Ozores-Hampton, a vegetable specialist with the University of Florida, I asked her what would happen if I applied the same laissez-faire horticultural practices to a tomato plant in Florida.
She shot me a sorrowful, slightly condescending look and replied, "Nothing. " "Nothing? " I asked. "There would be nothing left of the seedling," she said. From a purely botanical and horticultural perspective, you would have to be an idiot to attempt to commercially grow tomatoes in a place like Florida. Amid Texas Drought, High-Stakes Battle Over Water. Food Supply Under Strain on a Warming Planet. India - Sangham seed and p2p lending movement in India. Farmers are “misled” into believing the promise that the high-input, chemical-intensive, single-crop agriculture of the so-called “green revolution” is their salvation, he says.
So when it fails, they end up trapped in a debt spiral that too often leads to despair and suicide. “Those that say that the green revolution will save the world should come and see the hundreds of thousands who have committed suicide in India,” he warns. “The green revolution is a downhill slide into disaster.” Satheesh points out that as many as 100,000 of the farmer suicides have been in Punjab, which is the centre of industrialised agriculture in India. There the water has been contaminated by the pesticides which have been applied to crops, he says.
Most quotes are from PV Satheesh, director of the Deccan Development Society (DDS), which supports community farming in one of the poorest parts of rural India, in the Zaheerabad region of Andhra Pradesh. Excerpt: “It’s been a quiet revolution,” says Satheesh. How gas drilling contaminates your food - Sustainable food. There’s a stunning moment in the Academy Award-nominated documentary “Gasland,” where a man touches a match to his running faucet — to have it explode in a ball of fire. This is what hydraulic fracturing, a process of drilling for natural gas known as “fracking,” is doing to many drinking water supplies across the country. But the other side of fracking — what it might do to the food eaten by people living hundreds of miles from the nearest gas well — has received little attention. Unlike many in agriculture, cattle farmer Ken Jaffe has had a good decade. But lately he’s been nervous, worried fracking will destroy his business. Jaffe’s been good to his soil, and the land has been good to him.
By rotating his herd of cattle to different pastures on his Catskills farm every day, he has restored the once-eroded land and built a successful business with his grass-fed and -finished beef. “For sustainable agriculture, fracking is a disaster,” says Jaffe. Fracking is not a new technology. Climate shifts 'hit global wheat yields' 6 May 2011Last updated at 12:52 By Mark Kinver Science and environment reporter, BBC News Most regions show a link between temperature rises and declines in crop yields Shifts in the climate over the past three decades have been linked to a 5.5% decline in global wheat production, a study has suggested.
A team of US scientists assessed the impact of changes to rainfall and temperature on four major food crops: wheat, rice, corn and soybeans. Climate trends in some countries were big enough to wipe out gains from other factors, such as technology, they said. The findings have been published in the online edition of the journal Science. "We focused on those four crops because they make up the bulk of calories consumed today," said research leader David Lobell from Stanford University. "There are already clear changes going on in most agricultural regions in terms of weather, and they have effects on food production that are sizeable," he told the Science podcast. Food for thought. Food for Thought: The Farmer as Superstar. Why the slowdown in agricultural productivity growth? Views expressed here are (or were) mine when I wrote them and should not be attributed to my current or past employers, funding agencies, coauthors or colleagues.
Note that my views can change frequently and I'm likely to blog about things I'm uncertain about, because that's how I learn. I make no representations as to the accuracy, completeness, or general validity anything presented in this blog and will not be held liable for any errors, omissions, losses, injuries or damages arising from my postings. I do promise not to deliberately mislead. I do expect to make lots of unintentional typographical errors and hope with time and practice with these will diminish. I welcome comments scolding me for such errors but am not liable for any harm they may cause to anyone anywhere. All comments are unrestricted and are welcome and encouraged. I will not moderate comments unless, well, unless I have to, at which time I will change this disclaimer and explain the new comment policy.
Wheat Genetics and Yield. Available via e-mail and online, Food Security and Ag-Biotech (FS-AgBiotech) News is a free daily news service covering the most important global developments related to agriculture and food security, with a strong emphasis on issues related to the controversy over agricultural biotechnology. FS-AgBiotech News provides succinct summaries of the most pertinent news stories, op-eds, journal articles, and reports on biotechnology, biosafety, agricultural research and development, intellectual property rights, technology transfer, liability and redress, genetic resources, trade, and economic development.
FS-AgBiotech News draws information from a diverse range of sources including peer-reviewed journals, international news wires, and a variety of publications form industry, government, and NGOs. FS-AgBiotech News is an example of the tools and strategies developed by Meridian Institute to help people solve problems and make informed decisions. Food for thought: How energy is squandered in food industry. By Shelly K. Schwartz, CNBC.com Posted 05/01/2011 2:00 PM | For a nation fixated on the responsible use of resources, we're surprisingly wasteful with energy when it comes to putting food on the table. By Troy Maben, AP file By Troy Maben, AP file From the diesel fuel tractors that harvest our crops, to the refrigerated trucks that transport products cross-country, to the labor-saving technology found in the home such as toasters and self-cleaning ovens, the U.S. food system is about as energy inefficient as it gets.
A fall 2010 report by the Department of Agriculture's Economic Research Service, ERS, called "Fuel for Food: Energy Use in the U.S. Between 1997 and 2002, in fact, over 80 percent of the increase in annual U.S. energy consumption was food related. "This is what they call a fossil fuel party," says Kamyar Enshayan, director of the Center for Energy & Environmental Education at the University of Northern Iowa. And then, of course, there's the impact on our climate. Why So High. Why Just About Everything You Hear About California's Water Crisis Is Wrong, Wrong, Wrong | Water. January 7, 2010 | Like this article? Join our email list: Stay up to date with the latest headlines via email. We've been lied to for years now about the severity of California's water shortage. One of the big boosters promoting the drought scare is Gov. Such a huge cutback is alarming for a state in which most of the population lives hundreds of miles away from water sources and is dependent on a gargantuan aqueduct system for basic survival.
Has the drought really been that bad? When left, right, print, broadcast and mainstream media outlets agree, it has to be true, right? Ninety-four percent of average? The power of simple fact-checking aside, why would California officials exaggerate -- if not outright lie -- about the drought? Groundwater Availability Detailed in California’s Central Valley (7/8/2009 3:43:58 PM) New hydrologic model provides insights into water supplies. A new, three-dimensional water-modeling tool provides a detailed picture of how water flows below ground and how it relates to surface-water in rivers and canals in California’s Central Valley. The Central Valley Hydrologic Model, developed by scientists at the U.S. Geological Survey, is available for use by water managers and other agencies. The model was designed to help resource agencies assess, understand and address the many issues affecting the joint use of surface- and groundwater supplies – known as “conjunctive use” – in the Central Valley.
“This new model not only details the current scarcity of groundwater, but also provides a scientific tool to help water managers remedy the situation in the future,” said Secretary of the Interior Ken Salazar. “Science can be invaluable in helping to provide solutions.” To develop the model, scientists examined more than 8,500 drillers’ logs, some dating back to the early 1900’s. Shortage and rising water prices. A little bird sent this interesting article [pdf] on water shortages, price increases and water markets in Australia and the US. I liked these figures in particular:
Groundwater depletion rate accelerating worldwide. In recent decades, the rate at which humans worldwide are pumping dry the vast underground stores of water that billions depend on has more than doubled, say scientists who have conducted an unusual, global assessment of groundwater use. These fast-shrinking subterranean reservoirs are essential to daily life and agriculture in many regions, while also sustaining streams, wetlands, and ecosystems and resisting land subsidence and salt water intrusion into fresh water supplies.
Today, people are drawing so much water from below that they are adding enough of it to the oceans (mainly by evaporation, then precipitation) to account for about 25 percent of the annual sea level rise across the planet, the researchers find. Soaring global groundwater depletion bodes a potential disaster for an increasingly globalized agricultural system, says Marc Bierkens of Utrecht University in Utrecht, the Netherlands, and leader of the new study. Digital Rowing Home. The Great Paradigm Shift In Commodity Prices. This is the second in a series of articles on Jeremy Grantham's Time to Wake Up: Days of Abundant Resources and Falling Prices Are Over Forever.
Yesterday's The Problem With Humans was the first. Grantham's thesis is straightforward. Accelerated demand from developing countries, especially China, has caused an unprecedented shift in the price structure of resources: after 100 hundred years or more of price declines, they are now rising, and in the last 8 years have undone, remarkably, the effects of the last 100-year decline! Statistically, also, the level of price rises makes it extremely unlikely that the old trend is still in place.If I am right, we are now entering a period in which, like it or not, we must finally follow President Carter’s advice to develop a thoughtful energy policy and give up our carefree and careless ways with resources.
The quicker we do this, the lower the cost will be. Yes, our luck has run out. Yes, indeed, that's a lot of pigs. Bonus Video. Reading Ian Morris on the Wheat Lands and the Rice Lands - Brad DeLong's Grasping Reality with Both Hands. Suresh Naidu of Columbia told me to move Ian Morris's Why the West Rules--for Now to the top of The Pile--that it is a much, much better book than its title might suggest, and that Ian Morris knows lots of things that I do not. So I did, and I read it Saturday during downtime while watching a Berkeley Robotics Competition. Suresh is correct: it is a very good book. And it is not about "why the west rules for now. " it is, instead, Ian Morris's ecological materialist interpretation of global history, very well written, well argued, and well documented.
I learned a lot from it. The key features of Morris's theory are: Common human biology.Common human sociology.Agrarian foundationsWheat vs. riceHard ceilingsThe five horsemen of the apocalypseEye of the needleAtlantic tradeCoal and factor prices The first way that geography is important is that it shapes the agrarian foundations on which post hunter gatherer human societies are built. Over time technology and organization develop. Book Chat on 'The Big Thirst': The Future of Water. Charles Fishman, a longtime writer for Fast Company magazine, is the author of “The Big Thirst,” a new book on water. He previously wrote “The Wal-Mart Effect,” which was an Economist “book of the year” in 2006 and a finalist in The Financial Times’s awards for best business book. Our conversation follows. Simon & Schuster Q. Mr. We just assume when we turn on the tap, the water will be there, and that the water system buried in the ground is doing fine.
Both assumptions are out of date. We are going to have to move from an era of unconscious water abundance to an era of smart water — using water smartly (why do we water the azaleas, or flush our toilets, with purified drinking water?) Lidia GjorjievskaCharles Fishman, author of “The Big Thirst.” Q. Mr. Free water — water so cheap you never think about cost when making water use decisions — is a silent disaster. Free water leads to constant waste and misallocation. Q. Mr. I visited a very poor neighborhood in Delhi named Rangpuri Pahadi. Socialagriculture : Message: PROJECTS PLANNING DUE DATE. Hi everybody. I feel that it is time to make the announcement that if nothing solid occurs (which means there is budget, space, and work for me to do) by the time I get back from Rainbow (~july 25), I am headed west to Taiwan.
It would be far preferable to know in advance that the above conditions of 'solidity' had been achieved BEFORE I leave for Rainbow (~june 10) so I could do some crew recruiting there if necessary. Of course, I will know at any point if conditions (above and below) have been met. PEOPLE! Paying my dues volunteering under harsh conditions at my expense has won me credit... to continue to volunteer under harsh conditions at my expense.
Yes, I can create comprehensive, referenced, balanced research reports. So I am afraid you will have to accelerate your plans if you want to have me included in them. People email routinely asking for answers to complex questions that would require days of research to begin to develop an effective evaluation. Thanks, Connected Farm by Farm Works. Why top predators matter: an in-depth look at new research. Swine CAFOs and Novel H1N1 Flu: Separating Facts from Fears. Are wheat varieties losing disease resistance? Swine flu on the automated pig farm - How the World Works. Flu Season: Factory Farming Could Cause a Pandemic | Health and Wellness. China's famed Pearl River under denim threat.
Statewide Groundwater Regulation? Rising Tomato Prices Attracts Vegetable Thieves. Adapting to the Freshwater Crisis: In-Depth Reports. Water in California: Stuck in the Delta. Declining Crop Yields. Professional Paper 1766: Groundwater Availability of the Central Valley Aquifer, California. Study: Bat disease may increase farm pesticide use. Groundwater marketing (everywhere) and regulation (in CA) Ug99 Fungus and its Spores Bring Starvation. 80% of tropical agricultural expansion between 1980-2000 came at expense of forests. Foodshed Alliance - About Us. What is a Foodshed? Tony Juniper: Why the Rainforests Could Cost us the Earth. ...and the trees are all kept equal, by hatchet, axe and saw. The Cost of Climbing the Protein Ladder. Blog Archive » Farmer Power: The Continuing Confrontation between Subsistence Farmers and Development Bureaucrats.