National Young Farmers Coalition 2016

National Young Farmers Coalition 2016

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Diane Brady: “The Only Way To Change The World Is Through Partnerships “

Diane Brady: “The Only Way To Change The World Is Through Partnerships “

Award-winning journalist, author, and media executive Diane Brady will be speaking at the inaugural New York City Food Tank Summit, “Focusing on Food Loss and Food Waste,” which will be held in partnership with Rethink Food Waste Through Economics and Data (ReFED) and with support from The Rockefeller Foundation and The Fink Family Foundation on September 13, 2017.

Brady works with entrepreneurs, business leaders, and organizations seeking to strengthen their thought leadership and impact with the audiences they want to reach. That includes working with a growing eco-system of writers, producers, and other creative talent to produce newsworthy mobile video, op-ed pieces, media sites, books, and events that explore the future of business. Brady is especially focused on creating opportunities to highlight global perspectives and new voices on critical issues.

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Award-winning journalist, author, and media executive Diane Brady will be speaking at Food Tank’s NYC Summit on September 13, 2017.

Brady became a journalist at 15 years old to meet her favorite band and has been asking questions ever since. She has interviewed many of the world’s leading business and political figures, independently and for employers like Bloomberg Businessweek, The Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, Maclean’s magazine in Toronto, and the U.N. Environment Programme in Nairobi. Her book, Fraternity, was named one of Amazon’s best books of 2012 and nominated for the NAACP Image Award. She is currently collaborating on another book.

Food Tank spoke with Brady about her vision to connect people and change the world through beneficial partnerships.

Food Tank (FT): What originally inspired you to get involved in your work?

Diane Brady (DB): Curiosity. I love to find out what motivates people, what’s happening, and then connect the dots to understand what’s around the corner.

FT: What makes you continue to want to be involved in this kind of work?

DB: Every day, I learn something new. I’ve also moved from connecting the dots to connecting people as I think the only way to change the world is through partnerships in which we each play to our strengths.

FT: Who inspired you as a kid?

DB: My mother inspired me. She left home at 17, became a flight nurse and midwife, married a man outside her religion, and only asked of her three daughters that they be curious, kind, and true to themselves.

FT: What do you see as the biggest opportunity to fix the food system?

DB: I’m inspired by the move to urban agriculture, energy-efficient protein sources like crickets, and attention to the conditions of workers and animals in the food chain. The biggest opportunity is to get people more involved in the process of creating food—from growing it to preparing it.

FT: Can you share a story about a food hero who inspired you?

DB: I don’t have one hero. I believe in ecosystems and partnerships to get things done. I’m inspired by the efforts of influencers like Jamie Kennedy and Michelle Obama to foster interest in good food at the school level. I’m intrigued by what Kimball Musk is doing on that front. I think nutrition activists like Kenya’s Ruth Oniang’o achieve similar gains against daunting odds. We also need corporate buy-in to move the needle, which is why I admire business leaders like Gary Hirshberg of Stonyfield Farms and Paul Polman of Unilever. They genuinely try to do the right thing at scale, which isn’t easy.

FT: What’s the most pressing issue in food and agriculture that you’d like to see solved?

DB: If I had to pick, I guess I’d say food waste. With new technologies, I hope we’ll get much better at enhancing production, distribution, and nutritional value along the food chain.

FT: What is one small change every person can make in their daily lives to make a big difference?

DB: Eat less meat.

The NYC Food Tank Summit is now Sold Out. Register HERE to watch the livestream on Facebook. A few tickets remain for the Summit Dinner at Blue Hill Restaurant with a special menu from Chef Dan Barber. Apply to attend HERE. If you live in New York City, join us on September 14 for our FREE outdoor dance workout led by Broadway performers called Garjana featuring many great speakers raising awareness about food waste issues. Register HERE. 

Goodbye, Small Farmer? Investors Could Soon Own Most of American Farmland

Goodbye, Small Farmer? Investors Could Soon Own Most of American Farmland

Today, 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. Here’s why that’s a problem.

Katy Keiffer posted Aug 08, 2017

This article was originally published by The New Food Economy. It has been edited for YES! Magazine. 

We’re used to thinking of escalating rents as an urban problem, something suffered mostly by the residents of booming cities. So when city people look out over a farm—whether they see corn stalks, or long rows of fruit bushes, or cattle herds roving across wild grasses—the price of real estate is probably the last thing that’s going to come to mind. But the soil under farmers’ feet has become much more valuable in the past decade.

It’s started to change the economics of American agriculture.

While urban commercial real estate has skyrocketed in places such as New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., powerful investors have also sought to turn a profit by investing in the most valuable rural real estate: farmland. It’s a trend that’s driving up costs up for the people who grow our food, and—slowly—it’s started to change the economics of American agriculture.

Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers.

Think of it this way: If you wanted to buy Iowa farmland in 1970, the average going price was $419 per acre, according to the Iowa State University Farmland Value Survey. By 2016, the price per acre was $7,183—a drop from the 2013 peak of $8,716, but still a colossal increase of 1,600 percent from 1970. For comparison, in the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose less than half as fast, from 2,633 to 21,476. Farmland, the Economist announced in 2014, had outperformed most asset classes for the previous 20 years, delivering average U.S. returns of 12 percent a year with low volatility.

That boom has resulted in more people and companies bidding on American farmland. And not just farmers. Financial investors, too. Institutional investors have long balanced their portfolios by putting part of their money in natural resources—goldmines and coalfields and forests. But farmland, which was largely held by small property owners and difficult for the financial industry to access, was largely off the table. That changed around 2007. After the stock market collapse, institutional investors were eager to find new places to park money that might prove more robust than the complex financial instruments that crumpled when the housing bubble burst. What they found was a market ready for change. The owners of farms were aging, and many were looking for a way to get cash out of the enterprises they’d built.

And so the real estate investment trusts, pension funds, and investment banks made their move. Today, the USDA estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. And with a median age for the American farmer of about 55, it is anticipated that in the next five years, some 92 million will change hands, with much of it passing to investors rather than traditional farmers.

What about the people—often tenant farmers—who actually work the land being acquired?

But what about the people—often tenant farmers—who actually work the land being acquired? During the same period that farmland prices started gaining steam, many crop prices have stagnated or fallen. After hitting a high above $8 a bushel in 2012, corn prices today have fallen back to less than $4 a bushel—about what they were 10 years ago, in 2007, when farmland prices first started to soar.

Growing low-cost food, feed, and fuel (corn-based ethanol) on ever-more-expensive land is a tenuous predicament, and it raises a host of questions. Is this a sustainable situation? What happens to small farmers? And are we looking at a bubble that will burst?

How farmland got expensive

Three big factors have contributed to the rapid increase in the prices paid for farmland—which is usually defined to include grazing land and forests—according to Wendong Zhang, an assistant professor of economics at Iowa State University. (Zhang tracks farmland prices, especially Iowa farmland prices, which are among the best documented in the country.)

First, interest rates, since the financial crash of 2007–2008, have been at historic lows, which tends to drive up asset prices. The ethanol market has shown “phenomenal growth,” Zhang says, linked to increasing interest in sustainable fuels. Indeed, if you graph ethanol production over the past 20 years, it shows exactly the same explosive growth as land prices. And as exports to China and elsewhere have increased, farm income has risen. “Farm income is the variable to track” in analyzing land prices, Zhang explains.

Well-heeled investors are snapping up farmland, driving prices up.

But there’s an added factor: well-heeled investors are snapping up farmland, driving prices up. Here’s how the Economist explained it: “Institutional investors such as pension funds see farmland as fertile ground to plough, either doing their own deals or farming them out to specialist funds. Some act as landlords by buying land and leasing it out. Others buy plots of low-value land, such as pastures, and upgrade them to higher-yielding orchards.”

And, says Craig Dobbins, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, “Farmland and other real estate investments are good investments to balance the risk of investments in stocks and bonds. These buyers are sensitive to the expected rate of return that will be received from the purchase of such an investment. If farmland values rise to levels that it does not appear the investment will provide the threshold rate of return, they will not purchase. The location preferences of these buyers are much more flexible than an individual farmer.”

Institutional investors can and do buy land in every region and of every type: cropland in the Corn Belt, rangeland in cattle country, or fruits and nuts in California. Among the big players are TIAA-Cref, BlackDirt, Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, American Farmland Company, AgIS Capital, and Gladstone Land Corporation. Other institutional investors, as well, show a cross section of financial interests in the relatively stable investment that land represents over time. According to RD Schrader, a real estate broker of farmland based in Colorado, “The number of investors is growing, and because of that, it occurs more often and makes the marketplace more fluid. With the downturn in values now, the institutional investors help keep the land values more stable.”

That sounds great if you want to sell land, as many American farmers approaching retirement age do. But from the viewpoint of sustainability, consolidating farmland in the hands of financially oriented landlords has many disadvantages.

Chief among them: The investment entities that own the land can control what’s grown on it and how. A quick look at farmland investment company websites makes it clear that they are very particular about assessing the fertility, the access to water and distribution, and other criteria of the land they are buying. And they favor conventional agriculture—the kind that uses the agro-chemicals, mono-cropping, and extensive tilling that continue to degrade American farmland.

For financial investors, commodity crops are king.

For financial investors, commodity crops are king, and they're unlikely to change their minds anytime soon. As Don Buckloh of the American Farmland Trust put it, “When it comes to crop diversification, it is nearly impossible to shift a commodity operation to something less monolithic. For example, the infrastructure for dealing with products other than corn or soy in Iowa, simply doesn’t exist. So farmers are stuck with having to grow the same crops ad infinitum. It’s a scary proposition because should the ethanol program be dissolved, what will corn farmers do with all that extra corn? Already the prices are so low that farm incomes are projected to be half what they were six or seven years ago. We have no plan B for this type of eventuality.”

Could investment companies become a force for a more ecological approach to agriculture? In theory, yes. BlackDirt Capital, a Connecticut-based firm that specializes in property in the northeastern part of the country, claims to be wholly based on agroecological principles. But that approach is rare and likely to remain so.

Who’s bidding on the land

In practice, our best hope of true stewardship of the land will come from enlightened, committed owner-farmers. But the trend toward treating farmland as a financial investment, and the high prices that have come with it, make it harder and harder for new young farmers to enter the field. Lindsey Schute, Director of the National Young Farmers Coalition points out, “Access to secure, affordable land is the biggest challenge young farmers and ranchers face in this country. With two-thirds of our nation’s farmland set to change hands in the next few decades, we cannot afford to see the price of farmland driven up beyond what a working farmer can compete with.”

In these examples, ownership of the land becomes corporate, but it remains in U.S. hands. In another variant of land investing that’s become increasingly significant over the past few years, ownership—and control over the land and the food it produces—goes overseas.

Ownership of the land becomes corporate, but it remains in U.S. hands.

We’re all familiar with the concept—though going the other way, with multinational corporations from the United States, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, Egypt, China, or some other developed nation buying from sellers in developing nations. Investment in farmland is a key strategy for governments anxious to stabilize their food supply and their food prices. By buying land in other countries and farming it, foreign buyers are able to support their domestic food supply and other markets that depend on agriculture without having to compete for essential products on the global market. Foreign investors will buy several hundred thousand acres, say in Africa, to produce palm oil, rubber, or a biofuel. The deals are typically accompanied by promises of jobs, infrastructure, resource development, or just a jolt for the national economy, but all too often, those promises come to nothing. The local population reaps no benefit, they lose their farming rights, access to water, even their homes. Quite often, civil unrest will ensue. Ethiopia at this very moment provides a prime example of this phenomenon.

The new target for farmland investment: The United States. The most recent figures from USDA, dating from 2011, show that roughly 25 million acres, about 2 percent of our national total of 930 million acres, are in foreign hands. And the pace of investment seems to be picking up. In the period since USDA’s 2011 report, foreign investors have gone on shopping sprees in the heartland and beyond. Saudi Arabia and the UAE alone have acquired more than 15,000 acres in Arizona and Southern California to grow fodder for dairy cattle. Italian buyers are reported to have purchased 102,000 acres in Missouri, and New Zealand about 18,000.

The most memorable deal—though most coverage treated it as a corporate acquisition rather than a resource grab—was the 2013 acquisition of America’s largest producer of pork, the Smithfield Company, by a Chinese company called Shuanghui—which subsequently changed its name to the WH Group. The company is an independent entity, but it has received substantial funding from the Chinese government. The government of China now controls more than 400 American farms consisting of about 100,000 acres of farmland, with at least 50,000 in Missouri alone, plus CAFOs (concentrated animal feeding operations), 33 processing plants, the distribution system—and one out of every four American hogs.

Smithfield is a “vertically integrated” company, meaning that it owns everything right down to the feed supply and all the way up the food chain to the many brands of processed and packaged foods distributed throughout the United States and the world. However, one could make the argument that the most important assets within this $4.72 billion sale are the farmland and the water.

One thing that is clear is the lack of a universal national policy governing water rights and water use.

One thing that is clear is the lack of a universal national policy governing water rights and water use. In states that are water insecure in the Southwest, dizzying and arcane regulations are barely equal now to the challenges of current domestic use, much less answering the needs of foreign agriculture. It seems the barest common sense that there should be some federal entity protecting citizens’ rights to water against anonymous industrial agribusiness. As yet that has not happened. And while California and the Southwest would seem the most obvious areas that will face serious water challenges in the future, we have already seen similar drought conditions playing out in other states, such as Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma. Eventually we may find that dry states must be supplied in some measure by wet states. Logic would dictate that laws regarding water use and access should be firmly in place before selling off resources to another nation.

States such as Iowa have banned the sale of farmland to foreign buyers and others have laws that limit the number of acres that can legally be sold, but it can be quite tricky to tell who is doing the buying. Foreign buyers can hide their identity by creating an American corporation, or buying through a U.S. majority-owned subsidiary.

So just how much of our farmland are we willing to sell? And who decides? Most proposed deals must go through the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). Established under the Ford Administration in 1975, it has broad powers to accept or deny requests for foreign acquisitions of American companies and land. After September 11, other criteria were included under the jurisdiction of the CFIUS, including food, water, and agriculture. The committee is made up of representatives from 16 government agencies, and chaired by the Secretary of the Treasury. It includes members from the Department of Defense, Homeland Security, the State Department, and the Departments of Commerce, Energy, and Justice, as well as the offices of the U.S. Trade Representative and Science and Technology Policy. Its reviews and deliberations are closed to the public, and decisions are handed down with virtually no transparency.

The risks of ever-expensive land

The dangers of high land prices are obvious—especially for younger farmers who are trying to get established and farmers who want to steer away from Big Ag approaches. The dangers of ownership by large corporations and foreign buyers are equally clear. But another danger to high, rapidly rising land prices is one that brings to mind the great real estate bust of 2007: a bubble. Bubbles can be devastating, leaving small land owners underwater on their mortgages and depriving them of the crucial collateral they need to get loans on operating expenses.

Could the current rise in farm prices be a bubble? Certainly if you read some headlines in Midwestern newspapers, you might get the impression not only that there’s a bubble but that it is in the process of bursting. Though farmland prices are still high, they peaked somewhere around 2013 and have fallen for three years in a row—the first time that’s happened.

“I don’t think it’s a bubble,” Zhang says. “In a bubble, you’ll see dissociation between prices and the value of the underlying assets. This time, when crop prices went down—with corn dropping from six or seven dollars a bushel in 2013 to about half that price today—the land prices dropped with them. And farmers still have some money.”

It’s going to require the progressive wing of farming to rethink its economics.

Don’t get too optimistic—or too pessimistic—just yet, though. Interest rates are creeping up. Farm income, the key factor in determining land prices, has been falling for the past three years from record highs, and USDA is predicting a fourth year of decline. On the other hand, operating costs seem to be going down. And prices in Iowa seem to have ticked up slightly, though that may be just because farmers are holding on to their property, waiting for better prices to return; farmland for sale is in short supply in Iowa. (These insights come courtesy of Professor Zhang. For much, much more, visit the invaluable Iowa Land Portal.)

Zhang himself takes a temperate view: “Despite the deteriorating agricultural financial conditions and continued decline in farm income, the current farm downturn is more likely a liquidity and working capital problem, as opposed to a solvency and balance sheet problem for the entire agricultural sector,” he writes. “Rather than an abrupt farm crisis, we are likely to [see] a gradual, drawn-out downward adjustment to the historical normal return levels for the agricultural economy. The U.S. farmland market [is] likely headed towards stabilization and potentially slightly more modest downward adjustments before bouncing back in the near future.”

If it pans out that way, Zhang’s prediction is probably good news for the economy. Is it good news for a sustainable approach to agriculture rooted in small, independent farms, enlightened farming practices, and short supply chains? That’s less obvious. At the very least, it’s going to require the progressive wing of farming to rethink its economics and its go-to-market strategies and possibly make big changes.

But that is a story for another day.

USDA and SCORE Launch Innovative Mentorship Effort to Support New Farmers and Ranchers

USDA and SCORE Launch Innovative Mentorship Effort to Support New Farmers and Ranchers

August 8, 2017 | USDA

News Release – DES MOINES, Iowa – U.S. Agriculture Secretary Sonny Perdue today signed a Memorandum of Understanding with officials from SCORE, the nation’s largest volunteer network of expert business mentors, to support new and beginning farmers. Today’s agreement provides new help resources for beginning ranchers, veterans, women, socially disadvantaged Americans and others, providing new tools to help them both grow and thrive in agri-business.

“Shepherding one generation to the next is our responsibility. We want to help new farmers, veterans, and people transitioning from other industries to agriculture,” said Secretary Perdue. “They need land, equipment, and access to capital, but they also need advice and guidance. That’s what SCORE is all about.”

SCORE matches business professionals and entrepreneurs with new business owners to mentor them through the process of starting-up and maintaining a new business. USDA and its partners across rural America are working with SCORE to support new farming and ranching operations, and identify and recruit mentors with a wealth of agricultural experience.

Secretary Perdue announced the new partnership in Des Moines during the Iowa Agriculture Summit. Perdue was joined by Steve Records, Vice-President of Field Operations for SCORE in signing a Memorandum of Understanding that will guide USDA and SCORE as they partner in the mentorship effort, which will soon expand to other states.

“SCORE’s mission to help people start and grow vibrant small businesses is boosted by this new partnership with USDA. America’s farmers, ranchers and agri-businesses will benefit from the business knowledge and expertise SCORE can offer,” said Records. “The partnership allows both SCORE and USDA to serve more people while providing America’s farmers added support to lead to more sound business operations, create profitable farms with sustainable growth and create new jobs. We are excited at the opportunity to extend SCORE’s impact to our farmers and the agriculture industry.”

SCORE mentors will partner with USDA and a wide array of groups already hard at work serving new and beginning farmers and ranchers, such as the FFA, 4-H, cooperative extension and land grant universities, nonprofits, legal aid groups, banks, technical and farm advisors. These partnerships will expand and integrate outreach and technical assistance between current and retired farmers and agri-business experts and new farmers.

This joint initiative leverages SCORE’s 10,000 existing volunteer mentors and USDA’s expertise and presence in agricultural communities to bring no-cost business mentoring to rural and agricultural entrepreneurs. This initiative will also be another tool to empower the work of many community-based organizations, cooperative extension and land grant universities working with beginning farmers in their communities. SCORE mentorship will also be available to current farmers and ranchers. Anyone interested in being a mentor can get more information and sign up on the USDA New Farmers’ website at https://newfarmers.usda.gov/mentorship.

Soil Testing: The Need for Total Testing

Soil Testing: The Need for Total Testing

July 28, 2017 in Eco-Farming, Farm Management, Soil Fertility, Soil Life, Soils, Uncategorized, Weeds

What many farmers probably don’t know about soil testing is that most soil tests only tell us what is soluble in the soil. They do not tell us what is actually there in the soil, no matter what fertilizer salesmen might like to imply. To find out what is actually there requires a total acid digest similar to what is used for plant tissue analysis. Mining labs run these total acid di­gests on ore samples which are crushed, ground and extracted with concentrated nitric and hydrochloric acid solutions, but a mining assay does not determine total carbon, nitrogen and sulfur as a plant tissue analysis would. These ele­ments need a separate procedure essen­tial for evaluating soil humic reserves.

Total soil testing is key to understanding your soils’ needs.

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Most soil tests measure total carbon, which then is multiplied by 1.72 to calcu­late soil organic matter. This assumes that most of the carbon in the soil is humus of one form or another. While this may or may not be true, determining the car­bon to nitrogen, nitrogen to sulfur, and nitrogen to phosphorus ratios is a good guide for evaluating organic matter, and this requires testing total nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus as well as carbon.

While carbon in almost any form is a benefit to the soil, it helps enormously if it is accompanied by the right ratios of ni­trogen, sulfur and phosphorus. Though these ratios are not set in stone, a target for carbon to nitrogen is 10:1, for nitro­gen to sulfur is 5.5:1 and for nitrogen to phosphorus is 4:1. This works out to an ideal carbon to sulfur ratio of 55:1, and a carbon to phosphorus ratio of 40:1. Because soil biology is very adjustable these targets are not exact, but achieving them in soil total tests is a good indica­tion of humus reserves that will supply the required amounts of amino acids, sulfates and phosphates whenever the soil food web draws on them.

Humus as Vague Science

Humus formation and utilization is a fuzzy subject that has long been poorly understood. Humification may result from long-term geological processes as with the formation of peat, brown coal and leonardite. But humification can also result from humus-forming activ­ity by mycorrhizal fungi, actinomycetes or any microbial species that can add to or withdraw, somewhat like bees stor­ing honey in the hive from the soil’s storehouse of humic acids. The pre­cise carbon structures of humic acids are enormously difficult to characterize, which means carbon structures end up classified as humic acids whenever they are too large to pass through bacterial cell walls. This pretty much limits humic acids to consumption by fungi, actino­mycetes or protozoa. This vague but use­ful rule draws the dividing line between humic and fulvic acids at somewhere around 2,000 atomic weight units — above is humic acid, and below is fulvic.

It is not much easier to determine the precise structures of fulvic acids. Though fulvic acids can also be extract­ed from peat, brown coal or leonardite, generally fulvic acids are low molecular weight residues from the breakdown of plant and animal wastes. However, much of the carbon chemistry that plants give off around their roots as root exudates could be classified as fulvic acids based on molecular weight. This low molecu­lar weight fulvic chemistry is very ver­satile and may be taken up by plants, consumed by soil bacteria, or used by humus building microorganisms to as­semble stable, high molecular weight humic acids.

Many of these humus-forming mi­crobes form symbiotic relationships with crop roots and capitalize on the fact that virtually all plants that are growing well also give off some of their sap as an energy-rich bonanza of root exudates. When photosynthesis is abundant these microbes convert surplus root exudates into humic acids and store them in the soil as clay/humus complexes. Then when there is rain or photosynthetic conditions are not ideal they tap into these stores, much like bees do in the hive. This evens out plant and soil food ­web interactions and keeps things going on a fairly even keel.

Where we really see the benefits of this plant/microbe/humus interaction is where we see root exudate overlap, which will be dealt with later. The important bit here is the organisms that consume humic acids also store them as clay/humus complexes. This is a good reason to use 10 percent soil in making compost to ensure adequate soil surfaces for humus complexes to form. The large molecular weight carbon compounds in the resulting clay/humus complexes will incorporate amino acids, sulfates and phosphates along with silicates and vari­ous cations. Only a small portion of these materials show up on soluble soil tests even though they are available to the mycorrhi­zae, actinomycetes and/or protozoa.

Charcoal & Fossil Humates

Carbon is the basis of life, and in al­most any form carbon benefits the soil by attracting life. Biochar is a very ben­eficial carbon source. But just because something is a carbon source does not mean it has sufficient other elements as­sociated with it. The process of making biochar pretty much guarantees that most of the nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus are driven off; and since these elements are anions, the char that results — while bio-active — will have a high pH because it will still contain most of its original cal­cium, magnesium, potassium and silicon.

Fossil humates, such as are mined or extracted from brown coal or leonardite, also tend to be deficient in nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus. Even composts, which tend to be better balanced, may be deficient in certain elements. Chars, fos­sil humates and composts will increase soil life, but will that soil life scavenge the soil for such things as nitrogen, sulfur and phosphorus and tie them up so they aren’t soluble? We only need small amounts to be soluble on a steady basis.

If we want to achieve the best results we should test and adjust our ratios of carbon to nitrogen, nitrogen to sulfur and nitrogen to phosphorus, not only in our soils but also in the chars, humates or composts we apply — and this requires total testing. The significance of these ratios is huge in developing a long-range plan for thriving, robust growth, efficient pho­tosynthesis and biological nitrogen fixation without resort to nitrogen fertilizers.

Just suppose the ratio of C to N in the soil reserve is 15:1 or even 20:1 and there’s not enough amino acid nitrogen in the soil’s humus reserve. In cloudy weather when photosynthesis is reduced, root exudation and nitrogen fixation are low and the microbial symbiosis with crop roots mines the humus flywheel — then it comes up short in amino acids.

Or suppose the N:S or N:P ratios don’t deliver enough S or P. Will there be enough free in the soil or will the plant come up short? Deficiencies may also include silicon or boron, or any macro- or micronutrients that might be stored in the soil’s clay/ humus complexes. What can the soil’s humus flywheel deliver? Total tests are our best clue.

Keep in mind that we do not want more than a steady trickle of soluble nutrients. For the most part we want our nutrients to be insoluble but available. We should also keep in mind Liebig’s law of the minimum. The great 19th century chemist, Justus von Liebig, pointed out that plants can only grow to the extent of their most deficient element, and it won’t matter how much other stuff they have. This implies that whenever there is a shortage of something in the soil’s humus flywheel, the plant may have to slow down and limp along.

Building N, S & P

Truly amino acids are of first importance for protein de­velopment, but as long as nitrogen fixation supplies a steady stream of amino acids from the microbial symbiosis around crop roots there is no other element closer to hand in greater abundance than nitrogen.

A more urgent deficiency to remedy is sulfur. Sulfur works at surfaces and boundaries making things accessible. As such it is the catalyst for most of plant and soil chemistry. For example, sulfur is what peels the sticky, miserly magnesium loose from its bonding sites in the soil. Without sufficient sulfur the plant may not take up enough magnesium even if it is abundant in the soil. This deprives the plant of sufficient chlorophyll to make efficient use of sunshine, and then there is a shortage of sugary root exudates to feed nitrogen fixation — which requires 10 units of sugar to produce one amino acid. Considering how common magnesium deficiency is in plants growing on magnesium-rich soils, we shouldn’t ignore sulfur deficiencies in the soil reserves. Many soils are abundant with magnesium, but without the 55:1 carbon to sulfur ratio needed for optimum growth, plants can easily be magnesium deficient, poor in photosynthesis — and when they don’t make enough sugar they won’t have good nitrogen fixation.

One can amend sulfur in the soil in various ways. With chars or raw humates, both of which are deficient in nitrogen and sulfur, small amounts of ammonium sulfate (30 to 80 pounds per acre depending on the case) can be helpful. But keep in mind this is a soluble chemical and only so much can be absorbed by the soil’s carbon complexes and the microbial life they support.

Potassium sulfate might also be of use, but total soil testing often indicates an abundance of total potassium and more in soluble form interferes with magne­sium uptake, which usually is counter­productive. Gypsum (calcium sulfate) is most commonly used for corrections, though only about 50 ppm of sulfur (0.4 to 0.6 tons per acre) can be absorbed by the soil in one application.

The problem here is sulfate tends to leach if there’s too much. That might be good if all it carried with it was magnesium as most soils are high in magnesium. But, what if the sulfate carries copper, zinc, manganese or even potassium along with it? Can we afford such losses?

If we try to keep soluble sulfur topped up at 50 ppm (Morgan test) by using gyp­sum mixed with compost or raw humates, gypsum will probably work beautifully and not acidify the soil. It may take a few years to build sulfur levels into the soil totals, but patience is a virtue. However, when the soil pH is already 7.0 or above, elemental sulfur becomes the input of choice. Elemental sulfur pulls oxygen out of the atmosphere as it oxidizes to sulfate and this lowers pH — which for alkaline soils is desirable. Again, try to keep the soluble sulfur level around 50 ppm and gradually build this element into the soil reserves as humic reactions or interactions progress.

Visual Signs

Sometimes we can see a field that had water standing in a streak, puddle or blanket for a day or two, which leached some of the sulfur and left a meander­ing, light-color streak or area where the water was. Often such events are repeat­ed, which can make the area of leaching stand out rather clearly. This is sulfur deficiency, which leads to magnesium deficiency in plant growth on what is probably a high mag soil — which would explain not draining fast enough in the first place. Usually on such soils the calcium leaches leaving the magnesium behind. Fixing such problems takes care­ful applications to the deficient area rather than just making a simple recom­mendation for an entire field. It may be possible to remedy such a deficiency by eye by following the lighter colored area with one or more sulfur applications — most likely gypsum — along with compost, fossil humates or biochar.

Phosphorus may also be deficient, though sometimes total phosphate is surprisingly high without sufficient phosphorus availability. If a total test shows the N:P ratio is too high, add enough rock phosphate to compensate for the deficiency and apply this with compost, raw humates or char inputs. As with sulfur, calculate the amounts once the inputs are spread and don’t go overboard. Adding too much can be like having a soup with too much salt in it.

Keep in mind it is not rare for total tests to show 10 to 100 times as much total P as shows up on soluble tests. Al­though sulfur deficiency limits phos­phorus availability, the key deficiency that often must be remedied to make phosphorus available from soil totals is copper. Phosphorus is useless without copper. Though 2 ppm soluble copper is generally considered adequate, 5 ppm gives more margin and 10 is not harm­ful unless the soil is extremely light with poor humus reserves.

Zinc deficiency can also keep phos­phorus tied up, and a 10:1 phosphorus to zinc ratio is a desirable target in total tests. Total tests of rock phosphates gen­erally show the desired amount of zinc. Usually trace mineral deficiencies such as copper and zinc show up most clearly in winter where these elements work 1/100th less efficiently at 30 or 40°F as they do at 70 or 80°F. The signs of these deficiencies are quite obvious in winter, and if the deficiencies are remedied, growth in cool periods of spring or au­tumn will be much better.

Silicon & Boron

Even though silicon is secondary in importance to sulfur, silicon accounts for all transport in plants. It is the basis of capillary action. As a co-factor, boron works with silicon to provide sap pres­sure and often is found in appropriate amounts in siliceous rock formations. Boron has an affinity for silicon in the capillary linings where borate molecules take the place of silicate molecules. How­ever, boron forms three electron bonds where silicon forms four. Boron’s in­ability to form the fourth bond creates a hunger in the surrounding silicate mol­ecules, which causes them to draw water and electrolytes from the roots through the capillary system to the transpiration sites in the canopy. Without sufficient boron, plants with high boron require­ments like legumes, crucifers, vines, etc., will have too little sap pressure to feed their canopy. Then they may wilt at mid-day or not have enough root exudation at night. Where plants have high brix in the early morning, boron is deficient.

Lest we forget, however, the key role of sulfur is in the soil biology around plant roots where sulfates and sulfur-containing amino acids interact with the surfaces of soil particles, most of which are siliceous. Actinomycetes and mycor­rhizal fungi in particular need sulfur to peel silicon and boron away from the surfaces of clay and sand particles in the soil. This is a gradual process because it only works at surfaces. It is the nitrogen to sulfur ratio in soil total tests that lets us know whether the soil food web can do an adequate job of silicon and boron ac­cess — and this makes a huge difference with how well alfalfa, tomatoes, grapes, wheat or other crops can transport things.

Most importantly, since photosyn­thesis is hugely dependent upon the ef­ficiency of transport, silicon and boron are essential for efficient photosynthesis. Energy has to travel in chemical form from the chloroplasts, which capture sunlight, to where sugars are made. Also any newly made sugars have to get out of the way of the next sugars being made, and so forth. Anything that slows down transport slows down photosynthesis and will ultimately slow down the nitro­gen fixation that chlorophyll formation depends on.

Sugars & Nitrogen Fixation

Usually sugar is the most limiting factor in nitrogen fixation. This shows up in root exudate overlap. Where garlic, ginger, corn, beans, bananas, etc., double their root density in the soil and have root exudate overlap between plants, they grow more vigorously.

Ever notice where corn is planted too thickly so that five or six seeds sprout in just a few inches? Always the corn sprouts in the middle grow fastest. Later if the corn isn’t thinned there may be competition for nutrients and moisture; but if nutrient and moisture competition was all that was going on the middle corn seedlings wouldn’t be the most robust.

Native Americans used to plant corn — without fertilizer — as a soil-build­ing crop by planting their seeds in tri­angle shaped groups or hills to maximize root exudation, nitrogen fixation, and amino acid uptake. They grew big, tall, long-season corns that built carbon into their soils. In some cases they bundled the stover for winter fuel, which they burned, sprinkling the ashes back on their fields. They did this for hundreds and even thousands of years without recourse to nitrogen fertilizers. In terms of efficiency, agriculture took some giant steps backward in the 20th century.

If we had corn planters that perfectly singulated seed and we could plant with double drills that alternated seeds from left and right drills with 10-inch spacing in each drill and 5 inches in between drills, the seeds would come up in a zig­zag pattern that maximizes root exudate overlap in high population corn plant­ings. This would minimize the need for nitrogen fertilizers.

Soil Testing: An Eye-Opener

As an agricultural consultant in far northern Queensland, Australia, I grew $2,000-$3,000 of culinary ginger in my garden as well as an aloe vera nursery without nitrogen fertilizers. Both were high-silicon crops. At nearby Mt. Garnet we had a diatomaceous earth mine that sold diatomaceous earth (DE) at $300/ton — somewhat pricey, but an excellent silicon fertilizer. When I sprinkled this DE on my ginger it grew beautifully and was twice as robust wherever I spilled a liberal amount. The same was true for my aloe vera. What was clear was that nitrogen fixation and amino acid uptake by both ginger and aloe was far more abundant with high-silicon availability. On a nearby banana farm using the same diatomaceous earth at a rate of 1 ton per hectare (2.5 acres) there were 1.28 more new leaves per month, a sure sign of quality nitrogen availability and robust growth. This meant silicon was a huge influence in nitrogen fixation.

One of the most common problems is too much soluble nitrogen at any given time. A little nitrogen on a steady basis is good, but it is easy to go overboard. Nitrogen availability is a double-edged sword because too much soluble N leads to the nitrification of amino acids, which strips silicon and boron from the soil while shutting down nitrogen fixation. The result is insufficient transport in following crops. We have to be observant and intelligent in our management of soil nitrogen, as ignorance is hardly bliss.

Grasses usually are the best silicon accumulators, which makes maintain­ing them in our soil cover along with legumes a good idea. Bare soil is always a dead loss and a sure way to ensure sili­con and boron leaching — which easily results from too much cultivation, and this welcomes weeds. Weeds love soluble nutrients, which is one of the reasons we don’t want soluble nutrients. What we want is insoluble but available nutrients, and we want to get all our nitrogen from the air where it is abundant.

My target on pastures is to keep sol­uble silicon levels above 80 ppm with totals above 1,000 ppm — not so hard without nitrogen fertilizer abuse. For tomatoes I like 100 ppm soluble silicon which is more difficult; and for cher­ries — a really silicon-sensitive crop — I aim for 120 ppm. This really takes good management though it pays off hand­somely. Hopefully American soil labo­ratories will take total soil testing on board like my Australian lab, Environmental Analysis Laboratories (EAL).

Though growers can send samples to EAL, I’d prefer a quicker, more respon­sive domestic approach. So far Texas Plant and Soil Lab in Edinburg, Texas, and Midwest Laboratories in Omaha, Nebraska, have indicated interest. I’m not sure how they do with the Mehlich III analysis, my preference, but I’d like to think they can perform adequate total soil testing including totals for C, N and S.

By Hugh Lovel. This article was published in the April 2013 issue of Acres U.S.A.magazine.

BIG Envisions Multi-Purpose Biomass Power Plant in Sweden

BIG Envisions Multi-Purpose Biomass Power Plant in Sweden

As you find yourself filled with curiosity, peering through the windows of a geodesic dome, its aesthetic value goes unchallenged. However, its level of functionality in relation to indoor agriculture remains questionable. Amidst the uncertainty on the validity of such structures, Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) envisioned their scheme for a “biomass cogeneration plant” within a geodesic dome for the city of Uppsala, Sweden. During the colder months, the power plant will employ technologies with the potential to generate energy by converting biomass waste into heat, electricity, and biofuels through combustion or other conversion methods. It will serve to entertain in the summertime.

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The transparency of the enclosure is an inviting aspect of the power plant that is typically nonexistent in this kind of facility - it communicates a rare level of public education and community engagement for this typology. Although still in the idea phase, it’s an exciting vision of how future energy production might look. 

The city of Uppsala invited BIG to design a biomass cogeneration plant that would offset its peak energy loads throughout the fall, winter and spring as part of an international competition (ultimately won by Liljewall Arkitekter). Home to Scandinavia’s oldest university and landmark Uppsala cathedral, the plant proposal’s biggest challenge was to respect the city’s historic skyline.

Considering the project’s proposed seasonal use, BIG envisioned a dual-use power plant that transcends the public perception; in the summer months, the “crystalline” proposal was designed to transform into a venue for festivals during the peak of tourism.

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“By harnessing the economies of scale associated with greenhouse structures it is possible to provide a 100% transparent enclosure to provide the future massive silhouette on Uppsala’s skyline with an unprecedented lightness while allowing the citizens to enjoy educational glimpses of what happens within. Rather than the conventional, alienating hermetic envelope of traditional power plants, the crystalline volume serves as an invitation for exploration and education. The next generation of creative energy.”

“BIG’s design proposal fuses two conventional industrial archetypes into an unconventional hybrid: the plant and the greenhouse. Both have been developed to provide a rational and efficient form of enclosure to massive industrial facilities: for manufacturing and agriculture respectively,” stated the practice in a press release.

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Urban Gleaning Grows Up

Urban Gleaning Grows Up

From branch-sensing technology and drones to supporting refugees, the urban gleaning movement is ripe with innovation.

BY JORDAN FIGUEIREDO  |  Food Waste, Nutrition, Urban Agriculture  |  07.12.17

America’s 42 million home and community gardeners grow an estimated 11 billion pounds more food than they can use. Meanwhile, 87 percent of Americans are not eating enough fruits and vegetables.

The good news is the movement of people who harvest that excess home-grown food, known as urban gleaning, has matured over the past decade or so from a weekend hobby for locavores to a growing sector of the food economy. In recent years, dozens of private and public groups around the U.S. have gotten organized around getting this extra food onto people’s tables.

At the recent Gleaning Symposium, hosted by the Green Urban Lunchbox in April in Salt Lake City, today’s urban gleaning renaissance was on full display. More than 10 organizations from places as far flung as Atlanta, Philadelphia, and Tucson spent two days sharing information, strategy, and stories about building the urban gleaning movement around the U.S.

Among the participants were volunteer computer scientists from Boulder, Colorado, who have created an online map that’s logged 1.2 million of the world’s edible (and gleanable) plants; a couple of guys from Atlanta who turned their old-fashioned southern music jamboree cider fest into a gleaning organization; and a Salt Lake City organization that transformed a 35-foot school bus into an educational greenhouse and gleaning organization. It was clear from these innovations and more that gleaning organizations have come a long way in recent years.

Taking Care of Trees, People, and More

We’ve long known that eaters benefit from urban gleaning, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that tree-owners do, too. “Before we can finish our pitch, [fruit tree owners] are already like, ‘just take it, take [the fruit] away,’” said Craig Durkin, co-founder and board member of Atlanta’s Concrete Jungle. “They are tired of the rotting fruit and flies that often arrive when a tree produces way more than they can handle.”

There is a similar story being told in Utah. “A lot of homes in Salt Lake City sit on quarter-acre lots and the city was built around this idea that you would grow your own food,” said Shawn Peterson, founder and executive director of the Green Urban Lunchbox.

Peterson finds that many Salt Lake City homeowners can’t pay for the services to maintain their trees. So, in addition to gleaning, his organization also offers pruning, pest control, and fertilization services for fruit trees after the harvest season is over. The group has serviced and gleaned fruit from 2,500 trees over the last few years, but Peterson estimates there are 47,000 more out there.

Some urban gleaning organizations, like Tucson’s Iskashitaa, go beyond fruit trees and provide other services to the community. Iskashitaa, named after the Ubuntu word for working cooperatively, helps the area’s refugee population from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. In addition to connecting refugees through gleaning, Iskashitaa teaches English literacy and offers other community resources. As Iskashitaa founder and executive director Barbara Eiswerth explained, their participants may be isolated in other arenas, “but food is the common denominator—it brings us together, it empowers them.”

Stepping Up Gleaning Technology

Technology is increasingly connecting urban gleaning organizations to their communities in diverse ways. For example, Salesforce supports nonprofits in tracking volunteer statistics, pounds gleaned, donor contact information, and more, free of charge, making it much easier to run an organized gleaning operation than ever before.

Concrete Jungle’s Durkin partnered with Georgia Tech University to create tree-tracking software called FoodParent, which they offer for free to the community. The FoodParent maps also keep track of the seasons in which trees in the 500-square mile Atlanta area are ripe and ready to glean.

Durkin has also tested tree-surveying drones, “branch bending” sensors that can tell when trees are heavy with ripe fruit, and a branch-affixed device that photographs the trees (and fruit) and tweets out the pictures.

While technology can play a great role in advancing urban gleaning, several users did share some warnings at this spring’s Symposium. For instance, while open-source mapping has worked well for Falling Fruit, the worldwide, online, open-source map of our edible urban landscapes, it did not provide the same result for the Philly Orchards Project: When a selfish forager decided he wanted all Philly’s fruit to himself, he deleted their entire map! Ethan Welty, co-founder of Falling Fruit, also cautioned against using Google Maps for everything, as the technology makes it “so easy to move data that there are a lot of messed-up maps out there.”

Re-Connecting to Real Food

In a world over-saturated with processed food, the Jamie Oliver quote, “Real food doesn’t haveingredients, real food is ingredients,” hits the right mark. For this reason, empowering under-resourced (and unaware) folks to pick their own food—rather than requiring a team of volunteer gleaners—is a big part of the equation. Because much of that soon-to-be-wasted fruit grows in others’ yards, questions about how to glean without trespassing are regular aspect of the movement.

“More than 50 percent of the population is living in urban areas—how can they play a role in how we feed ourselves?” Welty said. “[With gleaning] people can stay connected to where their food comes from.”

Robyn Mello, orchard director of the Philly Orchards Project, echoed that sentiment. “People just haven’t been told they can harvest these trees that are everywhere,” she said. With 1,100 trees planted over the last 10 years in 57 community public spaces, Philly Orchards bridges that gap, re-connecting the community to food growing all around them.

“My vision is that somewhere in the future we are no longer necessary—and we get people harvesting all these trees on their own,” Mello said.

Photos courtesy of Concrete Jungle.

The Origins of Hydroponic Farming

The Origins of Hydroponic Farming

In this hydroponic system in Spain, lettuces are grown in plastic troughs without any soil, substrate or other material around their roots. The nutrient solution is recirculated to eliminate drainage loss and seepage of nutrients into the soil, and to reduce the cost of fertiliser. Photo: Prof Gert Venter

AGRICULTURAL NEWS - Hydroponics is not a new concept. It preceded the earliest tillage practices on farms, and plants have been grown in lakes and oceans from time immemorial.

The origins of today’s hydroponics can be dated back to the 15th century, when Leonardo da Vinci, born in 1452, deduced the following:

“To develop, plants need mineral elements that they absorb from the soil by means of water. Without water, the plants do not survive, even if the soil has the mineral elements they need.

Water is as if it were the soul of plants, as minerals are as if they were the soul of soil. If we could transmit to the soul of plants [the water], the strength of the soul of soil [the minerals], perhaps we would not need it [the soil] to make plants survive and multiply.

I believe that, in a future that does not belong to me, that [this] will be possible. So, it is advisable to add fertiliser and irrigate periodically the lands for us to get a healthy and productive plantation.”

The Early Years

Hydroponics, as we know it, developed slowly since the Middle Ages until water culture became a favourite research technique during the 17th century, after the posthumous publication of a book on the subject by the scientist and philosopher, Francis Bacon.

In 1699, researchers found that plants grew better in water that was less pure than in distilled water.

By 1842, a list of nine elements believed to be essential for plant growth had been compiled, and this resulted in the development of soilless cultivation techniques. Solution culture then quickly became a standard research and teaching technology and is still widely used today.

In the 19th century, scientists showed renewed interest in the nutrient requirements of plants. Complete nutrient solutions were developed over time, but it was only in the 1920s that Prof WF Gericke of the University of California in the US began to focus on commercial plant production using dissolved nutrient solutions instead of soil.

He coined the name ‘hydroponics’ by combining two Greek words, hydros (water) and ponos (work).

At the time, greenhouse growers replaced their greenhouse soil at frequent intervals, or maintained it by adding large quantities of commercial fertilisers.

To solve this difficulty, researchers replaced natural soil systems with either aerated nutrient solutions or artificial soil, called substrates, consisting of chemically inert aggregates, moistened with nutrient solutions.

The Later Years

Between 1925 and 1935, extensive development took place in modifying plant physiologists’ methods for large-scale crop production, but hydroponics was not widely accepted due to the high cost of constructing concrete growing beds.

During the Second World War, the US army started using hydroponics to produce food for troops stationed on islands in the South Atlantic and the Pacific, due to the prohibitive cost of transportation.

After the war, interest in hydroponics boomed when gravel culture hydroponics was used to grow tomatoes, cucumbers and other vegetables. However, these systems had shortcomings and many were eventually abandoned.

Harvest Dinner

Harvest Dinner

THE EVENT

The Indiana State Fair Foundation Speech by Jordyn Leininger

Join us for a unique evening at the Indiana State Fair benefiting the Indiana State Fair Foundation!

Traditional harvest dinners bring together family and friends for celebration and fellowship at the end of a long planting season. They are the culmination of months of hard work, commitment and stewardship. They are the very essence of what it means to be a farmer in Indiana.

The Indiana State Fair is our state’s largest celebration of agriculture, so what better way to celebrate than with a Harvest Dinner to honor Indiana’s farmers.

This year’s event will take place on Wednesday, August 16, in the Indiana Farmers Coliseum.

HARVEST AWARD

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Purdue University President Mitch Daniels Accepting the 2016 Harvest Award

The Harvest Award is given annually at the Harvest Dinner to an individual, organization or company that has made a significant contribution to the growth of our great Indiana State Fair with a focus on agriculture, youth and education.

Past Harvest Award Recipients:
DOW AgroSciences – 2015
Purdue University – 2016

FUNDRAISING

All proceeds from this event will benefit the Celebration of Champions which awards the hard working 4-H youth who rise to the top of their peers at the Indiana State Fair.

Click Here to learn about sponsorship opportunities and to reserve your table today!

Farms On the Fringe: New Takes On America’s Farming Tradition

Farms On the Fringe: New Takes On America’s Farming Tradition

These six farmers have found innovative ways to grow plants in today’s climate, whether in corn country or coal country, with fish tanks or smartphones.

August 01, 2017 Tracie McMillan

How do you feed a hotter, drier, more inequitable world? A new generation of American farmers are coming up with answers that rarely resemble the cornstalks and cattle pens of mainstream agriculture.

Today’s American farmers are less white. They’re also increasingly experimental. Even as our biggest farms get bigger, small producers are innovating in countless ways as they grapple with the serious questions that face our food system. Some prioritize making high-quality food affordable to folks on minimum wage and accessible in places where fresh produce is scarce; others are learning how to farm with far less water on drought-prone fields. They may be discovering hidden super fruits, reinvigorating coal country, or bringing urban farming to the mountains. Here are six who will change your mind about what it means to farm.

Fish Farming on Dry Land

Ouroboros Farms
Half Moon Bay, California

Chard grown in Ouroboros’s aquaponics system reveals its colorful roots.

Courtesy of Ouroboros Farm

When the recent six-year drought hit California, most farmers were screaming for water. Here’s one who wasn’t: Ken Armstrong, owner of Ouroboros Farms in the Bay Area. And that is more than a little strange—because for Armstrong, water is actually a growing medium. He specializes in aquaponics, a system of raising fish and vegetables in tandem.

Armstrong founded the farm in 2012 after watching a YouTube video about Will Allen, a MacArthur Grant–winning urban farmer in Milwaukee. Inspired, he gathered some potential partners and attended a four-day workshop in Florida, then went home and got to work. Today, Ouroboros’s greenhouses sit on a sliver of land, just one-third of an acre. Nutrient-rich water from the farm’s 9,000 gallons of fish tanks circulates out through neighboring “raft beds,” which hold floating frames with sprouting greens whose roots are suspended in water, and through “medium beds,” which use clay pebbles to filter and disperse water for the vegetables. The roots take up the nitrogen from the fish, and clean water circulates back into the tanks.

Aquaponic farmers Jessica Patton and Ken Armstrong at Ouroboros’s farm stand

Courtesy of Ouroboros Farm

The system, says Armstrong, produces mature lettuce more quickly than soil planting and uses less water, too. The monthly output of 12,500 heads of lettuce requires about 8,000 gallons of water—a little less than two-thirds a gallon per head, as opposed to 12 gallons on traditional California farms. And output is constant, allowing his fraction of an acre to match the annual production of five acres of soil.

Armstrong says he launched Ouroboros to prove that the method could work commercially. He sells greens and other vegetables to local restaurants, and an on-site farm stand offers direct sales, with salad mix going for $4 to $5 for an 8-ounce bag. He also hosts training programs and farm tours and consults with new growers looking to run commercial aquaponics operations.

“Being able to bring high-quality, nutritious food closer to urban areas is going to be one of the agricultural paradigm shifts for the future,” he says. “I think more and more it’s going to be popping up.”

Mountainside Urban Farming

Tassinong Farms
Crested Butte, Colorado

Tassinong Farm utilizes a hydroponic system housed in repurposed shipping containers to grow vegetables year-round in the harsh Colorado climate.

Courtesy Tassinong Farms

Local food in Crested Butte, Colorado, has long been a summer-only affair. For residents, there has been little choice in the matter: tucked into the Rocky Mountains at 8,900 feet, Crested Butte doesn't exactly offer optimal growing conditions. Its night temperatures drop below freezing nine months of the year. But Kate Haverkampf saw a way around this obstacle. She launched Tassinong Farm, a year-round hydroponic facility housed in repurposed shipping containers, in December 2015. “It was such a difficult task to get fresh local food year-round,” says the former tech consultant. When her husband, who works in logistics, ran across a story about farming in containers, she was sold: “I just decided to make that my job.”

Inside four containers, which Haverkampf bought from a supplier aptly known as Freight Farms, LED lights illuminate shelves of plants rooted in a growing medium made from recycled plastic bottles. With a smartphone-enabled tracking system, Haverkampf can monitor her crops closely. If the nutrient mix gets out of balance in the irrigation water, she can swipe and tap to fix it, even from across the country. Because there is no soil, there is no need for herbicides to control weeds. There’s little need for pesticides, either, in this tightly controlled indoor growing space. Haverkampf’s biggest cost is electricity—the lights run 18 hours a day—so this year she’s exploring her options for solar.

Kate Haverkampf, owner of Tassinong Farms

Courtesy of Tassinong Farms

Perhaps most important for an arid place like Colorado, water usage is minimal. Agriculture accounts for 80 percent of water usage in the United States, and a typical pound of lettuce requires 34 gallons of water. At Tassinong, says Haverkampf, each container uses about 15 gallons a day—roughly equivalent to a quick shower―or 105 gallons weekly. At peak, this turns into about 60 pounds of greens a week—less than 2 gallons per pound.

Today the shipping containers churn out greens ranging from lacinato kale and purple spinach to romaine lettuces and lemony sorrel. They end up in salads and atop burgers at five local restaurants and are sold at a local food co-op. Haverkampf also takes individual online orders, and later this summer she’s opening a farm stand.

“I’m trying to prevent all of these miles and miles of driven produce,” Haverkampf says. With the new shop, “I like to think that people will come more often and know they can get their greens when they need them.”

Superfruit in the Heartland

Sawmill Hollow
Missouri Valley, Iowa

Andrew Pittz of Sawmill Holllow Farm carries aronia berry seedlings.

Nati Harnik/AP

If you think about the typical Iowa farm, you might picture rows of corn and soy; the state leads the nation in both. But Andrew Pittz, a sixth-generation Iowa farmer, is not typical. At his family’s Sawmill Hollow Farm, the fields are covered with certified organic aronia berries.

The project began in the 1990s, when Pittz’s mom and dad decided to branch out from the corn and soy both their parents had grown and began cultivating a berry farm. When Andrew graduated from Texas A&M with an agricultural degree and a passion for organic farming, he returned to the family homestead on the rolling hills of the Missouri Valley with a vision: he wanted to be part of “a rural renaissance, and create more farmers,” he says. To do that, he knew, he’d need to grow crops that both yield income and preserve land.

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Aronia berry bush

Flickr

The key to specializing in aronia, says Pittz, has been figuring out how to market the berries, which are highly astringent and bitter when fresh. The farm sells aronia jelly and syrup, aronia salsa, and even a spiced meat marinade, sold online and during on-site events like an annual Aronia Berry Festival. The berries also have one of the highest antioxidant ratings of any fruit, according to the Journal of Agriculture and Food Chemistry, making them desirable to consumers enthusiastic about so-called superfoods (a designation, it must be noted, met with less enthusiasm by health experts).

But above all, says Pittz says, he’s chosen to stick with aronia because it makes sense for the environment. The plant is native to Iowa and grows readily on his farm without irrigation. Between the bushes, a carpet of native grasses fixes nitrogen in the soil and boosts yield, limiting the need for chemicals. It’s a winning combination for the local turf, which is made of fertile but highly erodible soil called loess. Pittz points out that farmers planting annual grain crops like corn inadvertently increase erosion each time they pull out plants, turn over fields, and replant. Aronia berries, on the other hand, are perennials, so both the roots and the soil around them stay put.

And that, says Pittz, sums up his favorite trait of the aronia berry: “It is meant to grow here.”

Planting Justice

Soul Fire Farm
Grafton, New York

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Leah Penniman, co-director of Soul Fire Farm

Capers Rumph (circa 2014)

Rocky hillsides don’t get much play in agricultural daydreams. But when Leah Penniman and Jonah Vitale-Wolff laid their eyes on the thin, rock-strewn soil of Grafton, just outside Albany, New York, they decided to go all in. They applied soil remediation methods they had learned on urban farms and began contouring the hillside, removing rocks, planting crop rows, and even building a house. Five years later, in 2011, they opened shop at Soul Fire Farm, a CSA-only family farm focusing on environmental justice and supporting Albany’s low-income communities of color. They look beyond Albany, too, and run an agricultural training workshop, the Black and Latinx Farmers Immersion, which draws aspiring farmers of color from around the country.

Soul Fire’s CSA offers its 100 customers weekly one-bushel boxes selected from the farm’s 70 crops, which include beets, cucumbers, squash, corn, tomatoes, and peppers, among other veggies. All are grown without synthetic chemicals, and the farmers rely on compost to boost productivity, says Penniman. At the heart of the program is a careful sliding fee scale that can drop as low as zero for struggling families, and a doorstep delivery service to make sure everyone has easy access.

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Participants in Black Latinx Farmers Immersion harvest cilantro at Soul Fire Farm.

Capers Rumph (circa 2014)

That focus on accessibility comes in part from personal experience. When Leah and Jonah’s two children were very small, the family lived in a neighborhood where getting high-quality, fresh food meant walking to a farm CSA a couple of miles away. It was, says Leah, “really unfair as an expectation [of what was necessary] to feed families well.” So when the time came to start their own CSA, Penniman and Vitale-Wolff made access a priority.

Many of the couple’s customers share that concern. Francine Godgart, a married mother of two who works at the local hospital, chooses to pay extra every week to keep the costs down for low-income members. “It’s very expensive to eat organically,” she says. “I think it’s important for people who don’t have those resources to be able to be included.”

Re-energizing Coal Country

Fiber Flame/Pumpkin Vine Creek Farm
Paint Lick, Kentucky

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A customer chooses Kentucky-grown kenaf.

Jdeg Video & Photo

The hilltops of Kentucky have seen some tough times. More than 500 mountaintop removal sites dot the state’s Appalachian landscape, bringing with them a host of environmental problems: increased dust and toxins, contaminated water, and buried streams. And now that coal is on its way out, questions arise: How do you deal with all that degraded land? And is there a way for residents to make a living off it?

One entrepreneurial farmer, Robin Richmond Mason, has an answer: kenaf, a relative of hemp, okra, and cotton. Native to Africa, the plant has long been used for its fibers and is already cultivated in several states. Moreover, Mason says, it’s unlikely to spread, kudzu-like, since a shorter growing season means that it is harvested, or dies, before it goes to seed.

Working with researchers at a local commercial lab, Mason discovered kenaf is a potent source of fuel, burning longer and hotter than conventional firewood—a bonus in rural areas, where wood heat is common. (In 23 Kentucky counties, more than 10 percent of homes rely on wood heat, according to statistics from the state’s Energy and Environment Cabinet.) One log of firewood tops out at 4,800 BTUs and burns for two or three hours, but a log made of compressed kenaf silage, Mason says, can provide 7,500 BTUs and will burn for four hours. The firewood alternative also helps ease the pressure on standing forests wrought by the harmful biomass industry.

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Robin Richmond Mason of Fiber Flame/Pumpkin Vine Creek Farm

Jdeg Video & Photo

Mason wants the mountaintop removal sites “to be restored to Eden” and sees kenaf as an initial way to boost plant life there. “Let’s work toward the very best possible remediation plan. But unless there is economic motivation, I don’t see those developing.”

Last year’s initial run—farmed on an ex-miner’s land and hauled out by a trucker who worked for years with coal—was so successful that this year Mason has expanded to four growing sites across Kentucky. The biggest is at a former tobacco farm in the central part of the state that has dedicated 100 acres to kenaf. Judging by the yield from prior test plantings, Mason expects about five tons per acre. All of it will feed into Mason’s line of Fiber Flame products, including a sextet of logs sold with matches and instructions. She calls it a Pit Kit, and it’s currently being sold in local Whole Foods stores.

Old Farm, New Tricks

Santa Cruz Farm and Greenhouses
Española, New Mexico

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Don Bustos, organic farmer and owner of Santa Cruz Farm and Greenhouses

Gabriella Marks

There aren’t many farmers in the United States who can lay claim to their land the way Don Bustos can. His family’s been farming a patch of New Mexico for three centuries, and today he and his nephew still use the ancient community system of water ditches, called acequias, to feed their crops. And just as his parents did before him, much of what Bustos grows is sold within a 25-mile radius of his farm. But those traditions are only a foundation for this most modern of family farmers.

When Bustos left a construction career to return to the farm in the 1980s, the easy choice was to grow the staples that his parents had grown: crops like corn, potatoes, chilies, and squash. Instead he decided to try something different and set his sights on high-value organic crops, aimed at farmer’s markets and public schools. He began transforming his humble inheritance—three and a half acres across the road from a desolate stretch of federal public land—into something not just environmentally, but also financially, sustainable.

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Santa Cruz Farm and Greenhouses, New Mexico

Gabriella Marks

Today Bustos grows nearly six dozen varieties of fruits and vegetables year-round using a series of low-tech greenhouse structures, known as hoop houses, and a solar water heater. In any given month, it might be arugula or strawberries, salad mix or green chilies. Going solar, he says, made a huge difference in his livelihood. Not only did his energy costs plummet, from $750 a month to 7 cents a day, but the hoop houses “let us create income 12 months a year instead of trying to risk everything for 3 or 4 months.”

His market savvy has helped earn Bustos wide acclaim, including a 2015 James Beard Foundation Leadership Award. He’s also been recognized for his passionate activism on behalf of small and sustainable farmers who fall outside the conventional image of American growers. Bustos has advocated for female farmers and farmers of color in both Washington, D.C., and New Mexico; created a farmer training program that also connects small growers with public school cafeterias; and supported the state’s acequia system, which dates from the 1600s.

That history, says Bustos, is part of what makes New Mexico, where nearly one-third of farmers are Hispanic, special. “We’re not inventing anything new,” he says, with regard to his growing practices and local base of customers. “That’s all been done by our ancestors."

onEarth provides reporting and analysis about environmental science, policy, and culture. All opinions expressed are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policies or positions of NRDC. Learn more or follow us on Facebook and Twitter.

Lumigrow LED Growers Guide for Vine Crops

Lumigrow LED Growers Guide for Vine Crops

Download The Guide 

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LumiGrow, Inc., the leader in smart horticultural lighting, empowers growers and scientists with the ability to improve plant growth, boost crop yields, and achieve cost-saving operational efficiencies. LumiGrow offers a range of proven grow light solutions for use in greenhouses, controlled environment agriculture and research chambers.  LumiGrow solutions are eligible for energy-efficiency subsidies from utilities across North America.

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Biomimetic Architecture

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Daniel Christian Wahl  Glocal educator, activist and consultant, generalized in whole systems design and transformative innovation for regenenerative cultures  |  Jul 23, 2017

Biomimetic Architecture

Through its infinite complexity, nature is an instructive and inspirational influence that can expand the aesthetic horizons of the building arts and confirm the inalienable right of humanity to try to salvage a place on this planet before it’s too late. The mission now in architecture, as in all human endeavour, is to recover those fragile threads of connectedness with nature that have been lost for most of this century. The key to a truly sustainable art of architecture for the new millennium will depend on the creation of bridges that unite conservation technology with an earth-centric philosophy and the capacity of designers to transform these integrated forces into a new visual language.

— James Wines (2000: 237)

There are countless examples of architects taking inspiration from biology. The Uluru- Kata Tjuta Cultural Centre in Australia, designed by Gregory Burgess Architects, mimics the interwoven bodies of two battling snakes. Foster & Partner’s Swiss Re Headquarters in London, known as the ‘Gherkin’, is a 40-storey tower inspired by marine organisms called ‘glass sponges’. These suck in water at the bottom and expel it at the top to filter nutrients; the building’s ventilation system mimics this flow.

Many other internationally recognized architects often rely on zoomorphic inspiration for the designs, processes and concepts that shape their buildings. Other internationally recognized architects who frequently rely on zoomorphic inspiration for the designs, processes and concepts that shape their buildings are Santiago Calatrava, Michael Sorkin, Frank Gehry, Renzo Piano, and Nicholas Grimshaw (Martin, 2004; Aldersey-Williams, 2003).

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One of the domes of the Eden Project (designed by Michael Pawlyn) — Source

While many of them are inspired by natural and biological forms, Michael Pawlyn’s approach to biomimicry in architecture is to focus on what he can learn from biological processes to make buildings more efficient by modelling nature’s closed-loop, renewable energy, no-waste systems in the design of buildings (2011).

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Michael Pawlyn

In helping to design the indoor environments for the Rainforest and Mediterranean biome exhibitions at the famous Eden Project, Pawlyn learned a lot about how water and energy cycle through natural ecosystems and how processes and functions in ecosystems are integrated and interlocking to create synergies. His design for the ‘Sahara Forest Project’ (Figure 16) makes use of such biomimicry thinking.

The bold proposal aims not only to generate large amounts of renewable energy based on concentrated solar power and to desalinate large amounts of seawater. It integrates these functions through the use of seawater-cooled greenhouses for the horticultural cultivation of food and biomass, creating a long-term strategy to reverse desertification and regenerate productive ecosystems where the Sahara Desert borders the sea.

The project is on its way to implementation. A pilot test and demonstration centre has been built in Qatar in collaboration with two giant fertilizer companies, the Norwegian Yara ASA and its Qatari joint-venture partner Qafco. It would be good to keep in mind that in the long term the fertilizers used in such a facility will also have to be produced from renewable sources and with renewable energy. Nevertheless, this experiment at scale will give us many opportunities to learn. It will teach us how to ask the right questions in an attempt to re-green the world’s deserts.

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Figure 16: Reproduced with the permission of the Sahara Forest Project Foundation

Growing vegetables and biomass in the desert with external fertilizer inputs, but also using renewable energy and innovative desalination and horticulture approaches, can be considered a Horizon 2 stepping-stone technology, offering us important opportunities to innovate even more closed-loop systems that are based, as much as possible, on organic fertilizers and on-site nutrient cycling.

Conventionally, human-made systems tend to be fossil-fuel dependent, linear and wasteful, mono-functional and engineered towards maximising one goal. Here the aim is to pursue a different paradigm — that is demonstrated by mature ecosystems which run on current solar income, operate as zero waste systems, are complex and interdependent, and have evolved toward an optimised overall system. The Pilot Project will demonstrate concentrated solar power, seawater-cooled greenhouses, evaporator hedges creating conditions for restorative agriculture, halophyte cultivation and algae production in an interdependent cluster that achieves significant increases in productivity for all elements of the system.

— Michael Pawlyn (2014)

Human beings, as expressions of life-generating-conditions-conducive-to-life, are capable of creating designs that are both restorative and regenerative. We can go beyond simply not doing any harm and start to regenerate health, resilience and thriving communities everywhere. This is the promise of biologically and ecologically inspired design and architecture.

The Eastgate Centre is a multi-storey office building in the Zimbabwean capital Harare. It uses a passive cooling system inspired by the way termites (Macrotermes michaelseni) cool their mounds. Mick Pearce and engineers at Arup designed the building to use only a tenth of the energy normally needed to cool a building of this size in the hot African climate (Biomimicry 3.8, 2014b). The Swedish architect Anders Nyquist of EcoCycleDesign applied a similar termite ventilation to the Laggarberg School in Timrå, Sweden.

Andres Nyquist on Termite Ventilation applied to an eco-retrofit of an old school

The visionary architect and writer Jason McLennan, a Buckminster Fuller prize winner and Ashoka Fellow, created the Living Building Challenge in 2006 as a new kind of building certification system that goes beyond international or national standards like LEED or BREAM and sets a standard for regenerative architecture based on biologically inspired and ecologically informed design. There are currently 192 projects on four continents spanning a range of building types. The ‘Living Building Challenge 3.0’ challenges us to ask some fundamental questions about architecture and design:

What if every single act of design and construction made the world a better place?

What if every intervention resulted in greater biodiversity; increased soil health; additional outlets for beauty and personal expression; a deeper understanding of climate, culture and place; a realignment of our food and transportations systems; and a more profound sense of what it means to be a citizen of a planet where resources and opportunities are provided fairly and equitably?

— International Living Future Institute (2014: 7)

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Jason McLennan

McLennan’s vision is to take what has already been learned through previous versions of the Living Building Challenge and incorporate these insights and new questions within the framework of the Living Future Challenge. McLennan regards the Living Future Challenge as “an opportunity to rethink and redesign all our systems and provide a vision for a truly regenerative society” (Living Future Institute Australia, 2014). He is a driving force in the transition towards a regenerative culture who has inspired architects around the world to take up his challenge to create buildings conducive to life.

[This is an excerpt of a subchapter from Designing Regenerative Cultures, published by Triarchy Press, 2016.]

BCFN Releases Report Exploring Environmental, Food, and Migration Sustainability

BCFN Releases Report Exploring Environmental, Food, and Migration Sustainability

Jamaica Farm Drought

The Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition Foundation (BCFN) has released its second Food Sustainability Report titled “Environmental, Food and Migration Sustainability: Three Challenges To Overcome Together.” The report is a joint effort between BCFN and the Milan Center for Food Law and Policy, aimed at raising awareness about crucial issues surrounding food and sustainability.

The report emphasizes the connection between climate change and extreme poverty, with a section dedicated to the link between climate change and migration. “Environmental, food and migration sustainability are different facets of a single problem whose solution requires an integrated, informed approach ‘from governments, businesses, citizens and scientists,'” the authors conclude.

The report also highlights the Food Sustainability Index, a tool developed by BCFN in collaboration with the Economist Intelligence Unitthat ranks 25 of the world’s largest economies by the sustainability of their food systems. The index indicates “sustainable agriculture is an effective weapon for fighting climate change,” although the report acknowledged the difficulty in implementing fully sustainable food systems.

BCFN and the Milan Center released its first report in January 2017 titled, “Climate Change and Famine: Issues at the Heart of International Awareness,” which focused on climate change, food security, and food safety.

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Zoya Teirstein

Zoya Teirstein graduated from NYU with a degree in Environmental Reporting and worked at amNewYork, Haaretz, and The Verge before coming to Food Tank. She is currently investigating conservative methods of environmentalism in America. Tips welcome @zteirstein.

Award-Winning Re-Nuble Lays Waste To Malnutrition

Award-Winning Re-Nuble Lays Waste To Malnutrition

Growth mode: Founder Tinia Pina's (multiple award-winning) biotech Re-Nuble is pacing the waste-to-table field.

JULY 17, 2017

By GREGORY ZELLER //

An outer-borough biotech with a Long Island lineage is racing to the head of the organic-fertilizer field.

Re-Nuble Inc., founded by scientifically oriented business IT specialist Tinia Pina, has snagged a 2017 American Entrepreneurship Award and the $25,000 interest-free loan that accompanies it – the latest feathers in the cap of a 2015 startup that transforms food waste into fresh produce.

The American Entrepreneurship accolades are doled out by the Libra Group, an international business group containing 30 subsidiaries across several core sectors, including finance, energy, real estate and shipping. The awards program is exclusive to the borough of the Bronx and Florida’s Miami-Dade County, communities that “face disproportionate lack of opportunity,” according to the program website.

That’s similar thinking to the mindset that first set Re-Nuble in motion. Concerned equally by chemical fertilization, the massive waste of “leftover” food and the poor nutritional choices available in Harlem, where she taught an SAT prep class, Pina began researching anaerobic digesters, biological processes in which microorganisms break down biodegradable materials.

That creates both harvestable energy and a residue goop that turns out to be a plus-grade fertilizer – and a super-effective hydroponics growth accelerant.

The leftover liquid is also a rocket fuel for Pina’s primary mission to convert individual communities’ leftover consumables into a renewability-focused product promoting healthier eating within that community, all with zero environmental effect.

The innovator and her research teams have fine-tuned the science as a “virtual tenant” of Stony Brook University’s Clean Energy Business Incubator Program and an actual tenant of the Harlem Biospace biotechnology incubator. Re-Nuble outgrew the uptown incubator in the fall of 2015 and split its operations in two – formulation in a large Long Island City-based shipping container, front office in the Brooklyn Navy Yard industrial park.

Neither of those locations are in the Bronx, obviously, but Re-Nuble was close enough: The $25,000 capital infusion will be used primarily to deepen the biotech’s longtime connection with Baldor Specialty Foods, a regional distributor based in the South Bronx’s Hunts Point section.

Christopher Upperman: Inspirational journeys.

In fact, the award was granted with the specific understanding that at least part of the $25,000 loan would be used to co-locate some Re-Nuble operations at Baldor’s distribution center – something “we haven’t had the working capital to do sooner,” Pina noted.

Such forward thinking (and geographic preferences) perfectly match the sentiment behind the American Entrepreneurship Award, according to awards program CEO Christopher Upperman, who said Re-Nuble and the other AEA winners “remind us of the importance in continuing to work on their behalf.”

“Hearing their inspiring entrepreneurial journey, I’m reminded why more emphasis should be placed on communities such as the Bronx,” Upperman said in a statement. “There are eager business owners and those with aspirations to become successful business owners in communities … all throughout the United States who will take advantage of continued support and additional resources, if offered.

“I commend each of the finalists, and certainly the winners, for their commitment to serving the Bronx and building successful businesses in the process.”

The other Bronx-area AEA winners include Duro UAS, which manufactures drone systems, sensors and components for marine-based industries; NoLogo Backpacks, focused on wearable technology for students, cyclists and pedestrians; Spadét, which is modernizing a 19th century extra virgin olive oil formula into a line of safe and sustainable skin, body and hair products; and Sustainable Snacks, a natural-foods company serving up gluten-free, vegan dark chocolate treats packed with plant-based protein, Omega-3s and fiber.

In addition to the $25,000 interest-free loan from Libra Group, winners receive business support including legal, accounting, communications and IT consultancy services. Each is also assigned a business mentor to provide guidance through the startup and early developmental stages.

While Re-Nuble is several steps beyond the typical startup stage – and gaining speed fast – Pina said she expects the advice to come in handy as she continues to fine-tune her growth-accelerant formulas and expand her product line.

The $25,000 capital infusion, she added, will also help the B2B enterprise – Re-Nuble sells primarily to specialty retailers, with some direct-to-farm business – expand its market horizons.

One key objective sure to offer a bottom-line boost is third-party organic certification, and “part of the $25,000 will definitely go toward that endeavor,” according to Pina.

The entrepreneur is also aligning her enterprise with Cornell Cooperative Extension researchers and “definitely” plans to continue leveraging SBU’s laboratory resources through Re-Nuble’s ongoing CEBIP affiliation.

“We’re B2B and we’re not deviating from that,” Pina told Innovate LI. “What we want to do right now is strengthen the efficiency of our products and get more published research.”

And while teams of scientists maximize the hydroponics growth formulas to deliver exacting nutrient levels during plants’ changeable growth cycles and otherwise tinker with the delicate intricacies of microbial science, they’ll also investigate some “deodorizing” options, according to Pina, who senses another important step in the commercialization process.

“On the hydroponics side, which is a soilless system, the vegetative growth comes from the nitrogen,” she said. “And the nitrogen comes from a fish hydrolysate.

“Not everyone has the tolerance.”

TOPICS:American Entrepreneurship AwardBaldor Specialty FoodsCEBIPChristopher UppermanCornell Cooperative Extension Of Suffolk CountyDuro UASHarlem BiospaceLibra GroupNewsNoLogo BackpacksRe-NubleSpadetSustainable SnacksTinia Pina

For Farmers Without Land, a Long Island Lawn Will Do

For Farmers Without Land, a Long Island Lawn Will Do

By ARIELLE DOLLINGER  |  JULY 23, 2017

Jim and Rosette Adams, owners of Lawn Island Farms, at the home of Cassandra Trimarco in Bay Shore on Long Island. Ms. Trimarco volunteered to allow the couple to turn her front yard into a farm in exchange for a share of weekly produce. CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

BAY SHORE, N.Y. — Jim Adams met his wife on a trip to Uganda a decade ago. Rosette Basiima Adams, 35, grew up in Kasese, a town, she said, where “everything we ate, we grew.”

“I went to see the gorillas in the Congo,” Mr. Adams, 42, recalled recently. But he left his tour group and ended up meeting Rosette, who was working at a hostel where he stayed.

Today, the couple are trying to grow a business cultivating crops on suburban lawns on Long Island. Their business, Lawn Island Farms, is the result of research and a desire to find a way to farm on the island.

“A lot of it was seeing America through Rosette’s eyes,” Mr. Adams said. In his wife’s hometown, he added, “all their food comes from within miles.”

With lots of ideas and little money, the Adamses began looking for land to farm. They started an online fund-raiser and posted fliers asking area residents to consider turning their lawns into small farms.

“There’s definitely an interest,” Mr. Adams said. “People say, like, ‘How do we replace the lawn and make it into a productive system?’”

The Adamses have received more inquiries than they can handle.

For now, the couple is farming at two locations in Bay Shore: one is a homeowner’s front lawn; the other is behind St. Peter’s by-the-Sea Episcopal Church.

They sent the additional inquiries they received to Pennie Schwartz, a home-farmer in Southold, farther east on Long Island.

Ms. Schwartz, 61, a retired chiropractor, said she wanted to help the Adamses turn each inquirer’s lawn into “an edible space.”

“It’s called foodscaping,” she said. “It’s really getting people to understand that lawns are really environmental energy suckers, for lack of a better word.”

Ms. Schwartz studies permaculture, a phenomenon that she said “combines landscape design with sustainability and environmental ecology” — and holds a certificate from Cornell.

“I don’t want to put the lawn guys out of business,” she said. But, “with all the chemicals that go into it, and all the watering we have to do to keep it green, there are better ways and better things to do.”

Ms. Schwartz wants to set up systems that landowners can maintain independently; each system should meet the landowner’s needs.

In other words, a family with children can still have a swing set.

On the two properties they farm, Mr. and Mrs. Adams are cultivating crops that grow quickly and that do not require much space, like salad greens and radishes.

One evening last month, the Adamses’ 9-year-old twins, Daisy and Curtis, ran through the front yard farm here on Hyman Street in pursuit of a rabbit.

Ms. Adams planting sunflowers in Ms. Trimarco’s lawn. Ms. Adams grew up in Kasese, Uganda, a town, she said, where “everything we ate, we grew.” CreditJames Estrin/The New York Times

Mr. and Mrs. Adams had just planted sunflowers when the homeowner, Cassandra Trimarco, drove up.

Ms. Trimarco, a physician assistant, contacted the Adamses after noticing their flier at a coffee shop.

“It’s me kind of donating in a way rather than controlling, because I don’t control anything, and it’s wonderful,” she said. “They think they’re lucky, but I think I’m lucky.”

Ms. Trimarco’s neighbors did not feel lucky, at first.

“We got yelled at,” Mr. Adams said. “One time, a lady pulled up on me and yelled at me for 10 minutes, like, ‘How could you do this? This is disgusting. You’re ruining the neighborhood.’”

Several neighbors declined to comment.

Ms. Trimarco originally volunteered her backyard, but there were too many trees, Ms. Adams said. So they asked about the front yard.

Ms. Trimarco gets $30 worth of produce each week. She also saves on landscaping costs because Mr. and Mrs. Adams do all of the work.

The couple are still working on their business plan. Currently, they sell the crops at two farmers markets and to one restaurant, Henley’s Village Tavern, in nearby Brightwaters.

“When you can deal with a farm directly, and watch it come from that farm, you know you’re getting the freshest product,” said Daniel Kitson, 41, who owns the tavern.

Recently, the Henley’s menu featured a crispy artichoke and chickpea salad with roasted peppers, capers, raspberry vinaigrette and Lawn Island Farms mixed greens.

Cars slowed as they passed the farm lawn. A woman in a truck waved; a man in a minivan said, “Nice!”

Robert Carpenter, administrative director of the Long Island Farm Bureau, said it was not too long ago that a farm in western Suffolk or Nassau Counties would not have looked so out of place.

“Farming was actually very prevalent in that area, going back as little as maybe 75 or 80 years ago,” Mr. Carpenter said.

According to 2012 agricultural census data, the most recent available, Suffolk County is the third-largest agricultural county in New York, Mr. Carpenter said. There remain 35,000 to 40,000 acres of farmland in production in Suffolk County, he said.

“There is agriculture taking place; it’s just not the way that it was 100 years ago or 50 years ago, when you had farms interspaced with houses,” he said. “The days of somebody growing 500 acres of a vegetable, and sending it into the city through the Hunts Point Market, those days are few and far between now.”

At the lawn farm, a Jeep stopped.

“Young man, I want you to know this is fantastic,” the passenger, Bruce F. Stelzer, 64, told Mr. Adams.

Mr. Stelzer said he grew up on a farm in Southold.

“This impressed the hell out of me,” he said. “Except I think a lot of people are going to be picking tomatoes from the street, though, when they walk their dogs.”

“That’s kind of the point,” Mr. Adams said.

A version of this article appears in print on July 24, 2017, on Page A16 of the New York edition with the headline: For Farmers Without Land, a Long Island Lawn Will Do Fine.

LePage Signs Food Sovereignty Law, The First Of Its Kind In The Nation

LePage Signs Food Sovereignty Law, The First Of Its Kind In The Nation

Anne Weinberg of Chase Stream Farm in Monroe smiles next to some of the produce she was selling recently at the new United Farmers Market of Maine in Belfast. Thanks to recently enacted food sovereignty legislation, small producers like Weinberg will have an easier time selling their products locally.

By Julia Bayly, BDN Staff

Posted June 20, 2017, at 6:02 a.m.
Last modified June 22, 2017, at 11:57 p.m.

With a stroke of his pen, Gov. Paul LePage last week enacted landmark legislation putting Maine in the forefront of the food sovereignty movement.

LePage signed LD 725, An Act to Recognize Local Control Regarding Food Systems, Friday legitimizing the authority of towns and communities to enact ordinances regulating local food distribution free from state regulatory control.

According to food sovereignty advocates, the law is the first of its kind in the country.

“This is a great day for rural economic development and the environmental and social wealth of rural communities,” said Rep. Craig Hickman, D-Winthrop. “The Governor has signed into law a first-in-the-nation piece of landmark legislation [and] the state of Maine will [now] recognize, at last, the right of municipalities to regulate local food systems as they see fit.”

Sponsored by Sen. Troy Jackson, D-Allagash, LD 725 does not include food grown or processed for wholesale or retail distribution outside of the community from which it comes.

Supporters of food sovereignty want local food producers to be exempt from state licensing and inspections governing the selling of food as long as the transactions are between the producers and the customers for home consumption or when the food is sold and consumed at community events such as church suppers.

“This is definitely a big deal,” Jackson said Monday. “This is going to allow small producers to become more engaged in the market and free enterprise.”

Hickman introduced similar legislation last year, but it was killed by the Senate. His bill would have made food sovereignty part of the Maine constitution by amendment.

For his part, Jackson credits the work done by Hickman in the past for getting the legislation enacted and said the bill’s emphasis on decreasing regulations for local food producers likely appealed to LePage.

“The governor is not a fan of red tape,” Jackson said.

LePage’s office did not respond to requests for comment on Monday.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Hickman said. “Food sovereignty means the improved health and well-being of the people of Maine by reducing hunger and increasing food self-sufficiency through improved access to wholesome, nutritious and locally produced foods.”

To date, 20 municipalities in Maine have enacted food sovereignty ordinances, with Canton becoming the most recent last week.

“I think we are going to see a real groundswell of towns that will not even hesitate to pass [food sovereignty] ordinances because they now won’t have any problems with the state,” said Betsy Garrold, the acting executive director of Food for Maine’s Future. “Maine is that shining beacon on the hill [and] I have been in touch with friends across the country in the food sovereignty movement and they say we are doing it right.”

Garrold, who said she was fighting back tears of happiness on Monday with the news of the law’s enactment, said it is impossible to overstate its impact.

“This means face-to-face transactions are legal if your town has passed a food sovereignty ordinance [and] you can sell food without excessive government regulations,” she said. “If we can feed ourselves, no one can push us around.”

As word of the law spread over the weekend, Garrold said she has been fielding phone calls from people who want to get on board.

“My phone has been ringing off the hook with people from towns saying that now the law says they can [enact food sovereignty ordinances] they will do it,” she said. “It’s hard to say this early where it’s going to go, but we are figuring it out.”

Jesse Watson, owner of Midcoast Permaculture Design, helped craft language adopted as a resolution in Rockland supporting local food production, called Friday’s signing a huge win for the food sovereignty movement.

“We have always been focused on the municipal scale,” Watson said Monday. “The [food sovereignty] agenda — if you will — was never focused on changing state laws, it’s really about the authority of the municipality to produce for for itself.”

With enactment of LD 725, Watson anticipates that movement to speed up.

“This really clears the way for it to keep spreading from town to town to town,” he said.

Stressing that supporters of food sovereignty are not anti-safe food regulations, Garrold said the movement is about recognizing the one-size-fits-all model of costly regulations does not work when it comes to small farmers and producers.

“Now if a small vegetable farmer wants to diversify their holdings and run a few meat birds, they can,” she said. “It decreases one of the major hurdles of getting into farming.”

Given that Maine is the the only state in the country in which the average age of farmers is falling, Gerrold said it’s important to give those young farmers every advantage possible.

“This law will help young folks who want to start small and build,” she said. “They can get started selling face-to-face by selling the same food they are feeding their own families.”

That is a key point, Garrold said.

“We believe face-to-face transactions with your neighbors is safe and beneficial to both parties,” said Garrold, “They know you, you know them and, frankly, poisoning your neighbors is a very bad business plan.”

Hickman said he has heard equal parts disbelief and jubilation from food sovereignty supporters around the state and he predicted this is just the beginning.

“Today we import 90 percent of the food that we consume and too much of it is processed junk,” he said. “Many more towns will now take up consideration of [food sovereignty] ordinances as soon as they can.”

First of Its Kind ‘Food Sovereignty’ Law Just Legalized Local Food Trade Without Govt

First of Its Kind ‘Food Sovereignty’ Law Just Legalized Local Food Trade Without Govt

Raw milk? Free Range Eggs? Organic Vegetables? No Problem. State's 'Food Sovereignty' Law just legalized their food trade once again.

By Justin Gardner  |  July 21, 2017

Maine has taken a bold step toward freedom, becoming the first state in the U.S. to enact a ‘food sovereignty’ law giving communities power to regulate their local food economy. The bill, titled An Act To Recognize Local Control Regarding Food and Water Systems, was passed unanimously by the state Senate and signed into law by Governor Paul LePage.

“LePage signed LD 725, An Act to Recognize Local Control Regarding Food Systems, Friday legitimizing the authority of towns and communities to enact ordinances regulating local food distribution free from state regulatory control…

Supporters of food sovereignty want local food producers to be exempt from state licensing and inspections governing the selling of food as long as the transactions are between the producers and the customers for home consumption or when the food is sold and consumed at community events such as church suppers.”

What this means is that neighbors can sell their eggs, milk, and other wholesome food to neighbors, without fear of state-level interference. This includes raw milk sales, a particular area where government has cracked down on those who dare engage in voluntary exchange.

Maine’s move is very welcome at a time when freedom is generally being chipped away by the police/surveillance state and the corporatocracy. Longstanding alliances between corporate food giants and government agencies have come to exert vast control over what we put in our bodies.

Almost every large food and beverage brand is controlled by 10 corporations, which pay off politicians to stifle smaller, more localized competitors. Regulatory burdens are created which do little or nothing to actually help the consumer or environment, but create enormous burdens that the little guy operating in a more localized area can’t handle.

The result is more unhealthy processed foods, massive factory farms poisoning humans and polluting the environment, more pesticide use from industrial monoculture which damages ecosystems, and loss of family farms.

The food and agriculture biotechnology Industry spent more than half a billion dollars over a decade to influence Congress for the privilege of feeding America. To politicians running DC, that kind of money makes the will of the people meaningless.

Betsy Garrold of Food for Maine’s Future summed up the simple, undeniable rationale behind food sovereignty.

“We believe face-to-face transactions with your neighbors is safe and beneficial to both parties,” said Garrold, “They know you, you know them and, frankly, poisoning your neighbors is a very bad business plan.”

Food freedom is certainly popular among the people, as 20 municipalities had already enacted food sovereignty ordinances prior to the bill being signed. Garrold said her phone “has been ringing off the hook” with townspeople who have every intention of using this freedom to build a thriving local, healthy food economy.

This demonstrates the hunger that likely exists all across the nation to take back control of our food supply, bringing a more localized, diverse approach which in turns provides health and environmental benefits.

“This is a great day for rural economic development and the environmental and social wealth of rural communities,” said Rep. Craig Hickman, D-Winthrop. “The Governor has signed into law a first-in-the-nation piece of landmark legislation [and] the state of Maine will [now] recognize, at last, the right of municipalities to regulate local food systems as they see fit.

“It’s been a long time coming,” Hickman said. “Food sovereignty means the improved health and well-being of the people of Maine by reducing hunger and increasing food self-sufficiency through improved access to wholesome, nutritious and locally produced foods.”

Maine’s move seems like an unusual and novel idea in these times, but food freedom has been around for most of humanity. Other states, including California, are considering similar food sovereignty measures.

USGBC-LA Announces Veggie Bus Project

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USGBC-LA Announces Veggie Bus Project

The project uses a reclaimed bus as a mobile classroom, plant nursery and seed library.

The U.S. Green Building Council-Los Angeles (USGBC-LA) Chapter is working on its summer endeavor, the veggie bus classroom project. Proposed by Community Services Unlimited Inc. (CSU), Los Angeles, the veggie bus was selected by the USGBC-LA as its 2017 Legacy Project due to its reuse, recycle and upcycle and additional sustainability goals.

USGBC-LA is providing funding and volunteers to help CSU transform an old diesel school bus, no longer in use, into a classroom, plant nursery and seed library. The beneficiaries of the project will be residents of South L.A. who participate in educational programs and classes offered by CSU.

The Legacy Project is a permanent project by USGBC-LA with the goal to provide a means of service and education. The LA chapter decided to continue awarding annual Legacy Projects after last year’s eco-tech makerspace project, a gift to the city for hosting the Greenbuild International Conference and Expo, was deemed a success for and by the local community of Gardena and Two-Bit Circus Foundation, formerly T4T.org, who runs the makerspace.

“The veggie bus is a bright, inspiring endeavor for our volunteers to get involved in a hands-on project that has direct benefits for the local community in South LA,” says USGBC-LA Executive Director Dominique Hargreaves.  “Urban agriculture is an important facet of sustainable communities and this project is at the intersection of urban ag and sustainable building.”

The veggie bus will become a permanent part of the urban farm and wellness center that is being developed at CSU’s headquarter, the Paul Robeson Community Wellness Center in South L.A., and will include and feature sustainable design elements such as: reclaimed materials; solar panels; and water catchments systems.

To date, USGBC-LA volunteers have worked with CSU and community members to strip old flooring and seating from the bus, help with design specs for its interior, organize material donations by USGBC-LA member companies and retouch the exterior mural. Upcoming volunteer opportunities to work on the bus are: 

Saturday, Aug. 12—install solar panels and electrical, interior design elements and vertical planters;

Saturday, Sept. 9—prepare seed library, install awnings, plant native and edible plants and install signage; and

Saturday, Oct. 28—bus unveiling/USGBC-LA Green Apple Event.

“We are working to help a decommissioned bus get back into the business of moving people from point A to B. While, the bus can no longer physically transport people, it can and will move people to rethink and reimagine what is possible,” says Legacy Project chair Maya Henderson of Kilroy Realty Corp.  “CSU and this project are showcasing what engaged development looks like and why it is critical to the health and sustainability of a community, both social and ecological.”

The veggie bus will be incorporated into CSU’s existing and future programming “designed to foster the creation of communities actively working to address the inequalities and systemic barriers that make sustainable communities and self-reliant life-styles unattainable,” according to its proposal. It will be accessible to residents of the greater Los Angeles area during joint CSU and USGBC-LA events.

July, 2017

New City Council Bill Would create a Comprehensive Urban Agriculture Plan For New York

New City Council Bill Would create a Comprehensive Urban Agriculture Plan For New York

JULY 21, 2017  |  BY MICHELLE COHEN

Image courtesy of Gotham Greens.

A new bill introduced in New York City Council Thursday addresses the need for an urban agriculture plan that doesn’t fall through the cracks of the city’s zoning and building regulations, the Wall Street Journal reports. The bill, introduced by Councilman Rafael Espinal and Brooklyn Borough President Eric Adams and assigned to the Land Use Committee, also raises the possibility of an office of urban agriculture. If a New York City farm bill seems surprising, you may also be surprised to know that NYC has the country’s largest urban agriculture system, including community gardens, rooftop farms and greenhouses.

Image: 6sqft

The city’s urban farmers have been facing a regulatory system that doesn’t know quite what to do with them, making logistical needs like insurance even more thorny than they’d otherwise be. Brooklyn Borough President Adams said, “We’re not talking about our mom and dad growing tomatoes in the backyard, we’re talking about the potential of having major farming on rooftops to deal with food deserts. This is the wave of the future.” He’s referring to the 14,000 acres of rooftop space that’s currently unused and, if converted to gardens, could have the potential to feed millions.

But according to a recent report by the Brooklyn Law School, current zoning codes make little or no mention of small hydroponic operations that, for example, supply microgreens and rare herbs to the city’s Michelin-starred restaurants. Rooftop gardens are only allowed in non-residential areas, and there are restrictions on where produce can be sold.

Councilman Espinal believes a comprehensive food plan should lift restrictions, untangle regulations and make it easier for the city to encourage agriculture, creating jobs and more access to fresh produce as well as reducing the carbon footprint associated with transporting food. “It would be a win, win, win across the board for the entire city.”

Clearer regulations would also attract more investors. John Rudikoff, head of the Center for Urban Business Entrepreneurship at Brooklyn Law School points to nearby Newark, which has revamped its zoning code to include urban agriculture-specific language. The city is now home to AeroFarms, which is among the country’s largest indoor farming businesses. Less confusion around urban farming rules could also benefit nonprofits that use agriculture as a teaching and community-building tool.

BrightFarms CEO Paul Lightfoot reports that doing business in big cities like New York, Chicago and Washington is, “devilishly difficult and expensive and slow.” And according to Jason Green, co-founder of Edenworks, a Bushwick aquaponic farming company that has raised $3 million in investment in two years, “There’s a barrier to entry here. It’s often up to the operators to work through a fragmented regulatory and incentive environment and figure out who you are accountable to.”

Global Use of Wastewater To Irrigate Agriculture At Least 50 Percent Greater Than Thought

Global Use of Wastewater To Irrigate Agriculture At Least 50 Percent Greater Than Thought

Credit: CC0 Public Domain

July 24, 2017

The use of untreated wastewater from cities to irrigate crops downstream is 50 percent more widespread than previously thought, according to a new study published this week in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

The study relies on advanced modeling methods to provide the first truly comprehensive estimate of the global extent to which farmers use urban wastewater on irrigated cropland. Researchers analyzed data with geographic information systems (GIS) rather than depending on case study results, as in previous studies.

The researchers also assessed for the first time 'indirect reuse', which occurs when wastewater gets diluted but still remains a dominant component of surface water flows. Such situations account for the majority of agricultural water reuse worldwide, but have been difficult to quantify on a global level due to different views of what constitutes diluted wastewater versus polluted water.

Considering consumer safety the foremost priority, study authors highlight the need to mitigate public health risks through measures taken along the entire food supply chain. This includes improved wastewater treatment, but also preventive steps on farms and in food handling, since capacity for water treatment is increasing only slowly in developing countries.

According to the study, farmers' use of wastewater is most prevalent in regions where there is significant wastewater generation and water pollution. In these circumstances, and where safer water is in short supply, wastewater offers a consistent and reliable means of irrigating fields, including high-value crops, such as vegetables, which often require more water than staple foods. Where raw wastewater is available, farmers may tend to prefer it because of its high concentrations of nutrients, which can lessen the need to apply purchased fertilizers. In most cases, however, farmers' use of this water is motivated by basic needs; they simply do not have alternatives.

"The de facto reuse of urban wastewater is understandable, given the combination of increasing water pollution and declining freshwater availability, as seen in many developing countries," said Anne Thebo, a recent graduate at the University of California, Berkeley in the USA and lead author of the study. "As long as investment in wastewater treatment lags far behind population growth, large numbers of consumers eating raw produce will face heightened threats to food safety."

Results show that 65 percent of all irrigated areas are within 40 km downstream of urban centers and are affected by wastewater flows to a large degree. Of the total area of 35.9 million hectares, 29.3 million hectares are in countries with very limited wastewater treatment, exposing 885 million urban consumers as well as farmers and food vendors to serious health risks. Five countries - China, India, Pakistan, Mexico and Iran - account for most of this cropland. These new findings supersede a widely cited 2004 estimate, based on case studies in some 70 countries and expert opinion, which had put the cropland area irrigated with wastewater at a maximum of 20 million hectares.

"Gaining a better grasp of where, why and to what extent farmers use wastewater for irrigation is an important step toward addressing the problem," said second author Pay Drechsel of the International Water Management Institute (IWMI), who leads the CGIAR Research Program on Water, Land and Ecosystems. "While actions aimed at protecting human health are the first priority, we can also limit the hazards through a variety of tested approaches aimed at safely recovering and reusing valuable resources from wastewater. These include the water itself but also energy, organic matter and nutrients, all of which agriculture needs. Through such approaches, we have been helping the World Health Organisation (WHO) respond to the wastewater challenge over the years."

"We hope this new study will focus the attention of policy makers and sanitation experts on the need to fulfill Sustainable Development Goal 6, particularly target 3, which calls for halving the proportion of untreated wastewater, and increasing recycling and safe water reuse," added Drechsel.

"One major challenges is to cultivate behavior change from farm to fork, especially where risk awareness is low. Another consists of larger scale efforts to put the recovery and reuse of resources from wastewater and other waste on a business footing to make its management more attractive for the public and private sectors. Safe resource recovery and reuse have significant potential to address the health and environmental risks, while at the same time making cities more resilient and agriculture more sustainable, contributing to more circular economies."

 Explore further: Drugs in wastewater contaminate drinking water

More information: A L Thebo et al, A global, spatially-explicit assessment of irrigated croplands influenced by urban wastewater flows, Environmental Research Letters (2017). DOI: 10.1088/1748-9326/aa75d1 

Journal reference: Environmental Research Letters  

Provided by: Institute of Physics

Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2017-07-global-wastewater-irrigate-agriculture-percent.html#jCp