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I am a professional agroecologist trained in ecosystem processes with experience in sustainable agriculture. I feature dry farming in a chapter of my textbook of Agroecology that I used in my teaching at the University of California at Santa Cruz, for over 30 years. Our farm is our personal example of how to do agroecology.
One key reason: the industrial food chain and its ultra-processed foods are deeply dependent on fossil fuels. At nearly every step of this ultra-processed foods path from the field to the grocery store, fossil fuels are key. The food system is responsible for an estimated one-third of all greenhouse gas emissions driving this crisis.
We’ve got 150 acres of grain.” ” He eventually bought a mill from a grain farmer who went out of business, but finding the other equipment necessary for both farming and processing grain was an ongoing struggle. Prior to that, they had all either harvested by hand, an intensely laborious process, or hired someone with a combine.
Once the Clean Water Act passed in 1972, many chemicals and toxins that had flowed freely from paper mills into Maine’s rivers started to be processed through sewage plants. Further studies need to be done and the process of complete soil rehabilitation would likely take several years. The sources of contamination were numerous.
As Adrian Lipscombe, a chef and the Founder of the 40 Acres Project, put it: “If we don’t have soil health, we’re not going to have food.” Of course, some of these processes are natural—but healthy soils have the resiliency to resist excess erosion, whereas degraded soils are more vulnerable to even natural climatic cycles.
Agroecology Hub With more secure local markets, farmers can focus on production and new tools (and vice-versa). And yet, most farmers in the SJ Valley and across the world are small producers, with nearly 94% of all farmers globally operating on less than 15 acres of land. Image sourced form civileats.co
An application of GE bacteria could release 3 trillion genetically modified organisms every half an acre that’s about how many GE corn plants there are in the entire U.S. That we can tinker with genetic regulatory processes does not mean we understand the complexity of the system. And BASF sells a 2.0
The crisis in Ukraine reveals that now more than ever, we must embrace a food system grounded in local agroecology. These are costs that are very limited or non-existent on small-scale, organic agroecology farms. The recent rise in food prices is buoyed by increased fertilizer, energy, and transport costs. Among the 12.6
Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund The Acres of Ancestry Initiative/Black Agrarian Fund is a multidisciplinary, cooperative nonprofit ecosystem that aims to regenerate custodial land ownership, ecological stewardship, and food and fiber economies in the American South.
Following the Civil War and General Sherman’s Field Order 15 , which set aside roughly 400,000 acres in forty-acre sections for emancipated formerly enslaved people, many Freemen developed a network of towns along the stretch of coastal land between Northeastern Florida and Cape Fear, North Carolina.
In an email to High Country News , Roy Smith, a Sonoma County farmer who runs a seven-acre hay operation, wrote that the debate lacks nuance: “Both sides argue a truth, and both sides permit a falsehood,” he said. In a country dominated by large-scale farming operations comprising thousands of acres of monocrops, Sonoma County is an outlier.
Over the next 15 years, California will have to repurpose about 1 million acres of cropland, most of it out of the 5.5 million irrigated acres in the San Joaquin Valley. In the case of Allensworth, the town is surrounded by hundreds of acres of pistachios that belong to a trillion-dollar insurance company.
acres in Southwest Philadelphia, produces over 15,000 pounds of food per year using natural agricultural practices, and is powered by paid high school interns working alongside community elders, neighbors and volunteers. Sankofa spans 3.5 Read more → John Boyd, Jr.
By Luz Ballesteros Gonzalez, NCAT Agriculture Specialist The Hub of Prosperity is an urban 5-acre farm managed by sustainable agriculture students like me at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley in Edinburg, Texas. A key point that is discussed in our tours of the farm and with community garden members is why we use drip irrigation.
The first post details an overview of the markup process, the bill as a whole, and its likely (or unlikely) path to becoming law. NSAC believes strongly that grazers need dependable access to technical assistance and that such funding should not be subject to the whims of the annual appropriations process.
Twenty-five leading philanthropies issued a joint call for a step-change in funding for regenerative and agroecological approaches, which currently receive just $44bn of the $250-430bn they need. The launch of the COP28 Declaration on Climate and Health , which again represents the first time this topic has formally been on the agenda.
Through captivating case studies, Thurow’s hopeful book showcases farmers who have boldly gone against the grain of modern agriculture orthodoxy and are instead embracing regenerative practices—like agroecology and permaculture—that restore soil health, enhance biodiversity, and promote resilience against climate change.
Virginia Tech and Virginia Cooperative Extension’s project team conducted 11 semi-structured interviews and conversations across Virginia to learn and better understand farmers’ and ranchers’ agroecological motivations and overall values related to the protection and conservation of water resources.
If GM corn and glyphosate pose health risks to humans, as suggested by a growing body of research, then those risks are magnified in Mexico, where the national diet revolves around minimally processed white corn, especially in the form of its iconic flatbread, the tortilla. This was a market opportunity of astounding proportions.
Other steps in the supply chain such as processing, distribution, retail, and the final journey to our table also contribute to emissions. This money went to popular but underfunded science-backed programs that help farmers apply conservation practices that have measurable climate benefits to millions of acres of land.
Brazil’s national requirement that 30 percent of school food ingredients be sourced from local and regional family farms helps empower and fund women agroecological producers. That changed, however, after Moyer and her partner established an organic farm on 10 acres in the Sierra foothills of California. Meanwhile, in the U.S.,
Such changes reduced the overall resilience of the agroecological system. May be granted to anyone who invents or discovers any new and useful process, machine, article of manufacture, or composition of matter, or any new and useful improvement thereof. per planted acre of seed in 1990 paid $93.48
Last December, LVEJO received the national Food Sovereignty Prize , awarded for grassroots, agroecological solutions from the people most harmed by the injustices of the global food system, according to a press release from the U.S. acre greenspace, La Villita Park , which opened in 2014 on a portion of the converted Celotex site.
As our diets in the UK are increasingly oriented around ultra-processed food, comprising over half of the calories consumed by adults and, more concernedly, over 65% of those consumed by children , there needs to be far more learning and engagement in what constitutes healthy eating. It seems a sea change isnt far off.
The US agriculture sector covers 654 million acres of pasture and rangeland for grazing cattle and another 391 million acres to produce corn, soybeans and other field crop monocultures—and all of them pollute one way or another. Let me give you a better idea of what we’re up against. By 2017, they accounted for only 1.6
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