Nelida Martinez worked as a farm laborer for big conventional farms in California for almost 20 years. But after her son, Danny, was diagnosed with leukemia, she says, “I never wanted to work around chemicals again.”

Martinez started selling vegetables from her community garden to help pay for her son’s treatment (he has since recovered), and then got hooked up with Viva Farms, a farm incubator program in Washington state’s Skagit Valley that helped her access land she could farm as if it were her own. Now, Martinez has a three-acre plot there, leases another two acres elsewhere, and sells more than 70 types of organic vegetables at a farmers market, where she also makes fresh tortillas and sells Oaxacan-style tacos.

Martinez wants to expand her business, but access to credit or capital isn’t easy to get if you’re not established. That’s exactly why she was chosen to participate in a new microloan program designed to help small and beginning farmers. Martinez is one of the first two bootstrappers to receive funding from the Farmer Reserve Fund, a project launched jointly by Viva Farms, Slow Money NW, and a local credit union. She has received $2,000 to use primarily for buying seeds and vegetable boxes. “The loan allows me to have more cash throughout the season while I wait to harvest my crops,” she says.

This program is an early example of something that could catch on around the country and make a difference not only for participating farmers and their families, but also for our nation’s food system. In the recent past, microloans have often been used to help start or expand businesses in developing countries, but the concept is now taking off in the U.S. The U.S. Department of Agriculture even proposed a microloan program for small farmers this spring. Between that, the Farmer Reserve Fund, and other programs that have sprouted up like it, this could be the next step for microloans, and a promising future for beginning farmers in the U.S.

Once a farm gets to be a certain size, farmers have a relatively easy time accessing credit. “There are more government programs and [grants] for you once you’re on a more solid footing,” says Ethan Schaffer, Viva Farms’ director of business and organizational development. And, even when they’re just starting out, hipster farmers tend to have access to family loans and low-interest credit cards. But many young farmers — particularly Latino farmers — don’t have those options. So, says Japhet Koteen, the Farmer Reserve Fund’s project manager, they usually resort to high-interest credit. “Then they’re trying to run a business with a 20 percent interest credit card,” he says, which is not the best idea.

That’s why Viva Farms screens and selects Farmer Reserve Fund applicants, Koteen explains. They know the local farming community best and can help farmers access loans based on more than just their credit history.

“The amount of information that banks ask for with a regular loan is pretty small when it comes down to it,” says Schaffer. “We have a huge amount of information, probably more than a typical bank would have for a loan. That’s kind of the secret sauce of the whole thing.”  

In other words, the personal and professional relationships are key. Viva Farms works with farmers to develop business plans and requires on-farm education, with a focus on financial literacy. Then the course instructors for those programs will recommend a dollar amount for the loan to the bank.

The Fund makes loans of between $1,000 and $10,000 — amounts too small for most financial institutions to bother with — for farmers with between two and 10 acres of land.

“We found that that’s where the largest gap is at the moment: that earlier stage, for smaller amounts of money,” says Schaffer.

Koteen expects the program to expand to other parts of Washington within the next couple of months, and he thinks it’s replicable far beyond that, as well. “There are other entities like Viva Farms who know there’s a need and have existing relationships with these farmers,” he says.

Santiago Lozano, a strawberry farmer who was chosen alongside Martinez in the first round of loans, is excited about having $5,000 to spend on strengthening his business. For one, he can now pay his workers before the harvest is sold — something he wasn’t able to do last year.

Plus, Lozano says: “The loan makes it a lot easier to deal with emergencies, like when I lost my strawberry crop this spring from all the rain. Now I have enough to make it to the next harvest.”

It also helps him aim high and dream big.

“Someday I want to buy my own farmland. I like being able to hire my family and friends and give them all jobs,” he says. “I wouldn’t work so hard if I wasn’t working for my own dream. It’s beautiful really. It’s important to have a dream and then make it happen.”

“If we do not repopulate our working lands, I don’t know where to begin to talk about the woes,” U.S. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan told The Washington Post this April.

The average age of the American farmer is 57 years old and rising. There are but 120,000 American farm operators age 34 and under. There are 1.3 million American farm operators age 55 and older.

In 2009, I picked up a video camera in order to start documenting something that looked hopeful. As if they had seen a poster with Uncle Sam’s pointing finger, young people with college educations — but absolutely no background in agriculture — were showing up on small organic farms in my home state of New Jersey, seeking training. In many cases, the self-appointed mission of these young people wasn’t just to farm, but to farm as sustainably as possible. I made a film about it, titled The Farmer and the Horse.

The problem is, at least in Jersey, there’s no straight path for young farmers to follow if their goal is to make enough money farming to actually own the farm. (Farmland prices here are the second highest in the nation.) Land tenure, many of these farmers tell me, is what they want: Not to be rich, not even necessarily to be financially secure, but at least to control their own destiny on a piece of land where the blood, sweat, and tears they shed during the 80-hour work weeks will fall on soil they can call their own.

Tom Paduano, one of the stars of The Farmer and the Horse, examined his prospects at the end of the documentary and — spoiler alert — decided his best option was to leave the Garden State and try to farm elsewhere. Tom and his wife are now growing certified organic vegetables on leased land in Maryland.

Tom recently explained the decision to a Baltimore magazine:

We cast a wide net — Jersey, eastern Pennsylvania, and northern Maryland. There were many opportunities managing farms for wealthy people. We weighed that. You get the stability of a salary and health insurance. But it’s not your vision, and the money that’s backing you often comes from Wall Street, which was a consideration for us. It’s harder to be a startup, but we ultimately decided we didn’t want to work for anybody but ourselves.

Turning the camera upward

In 2011, I began work on my second film, Sourlands. My idea was to tell three different stories all at once, all related to sustainability in New Jersey. One storyline delves deeper into the challenges young farmers face; another explores the ecology of Central Jersey’s last big forest; and a third looks into energy and what New Jerseyans are doing to reduce their carbon footprints. I suspected the threads might prove to be connected.

For the section of Sourlands devoted to farmers, I followed 29-year-old Aubrey Yarbrough to Stonehedge Farm in Hopewell, N.J. I first tracked Aubrey’s story in The Farmer and the Horse, when she made the leap from a comfortable office job into her first low-paid farming internship. Now, two years later, she was trying something unique: She was taking over the operation of a small farm for just one summer, as the owners would be spending the season elsewhere. The idea was that she could gain the valuable experience of what it takes to be the decision maker on a farm (in addition to being the bean picker, tractor driver, lettuce washer, bookkeeper, and saleswoman), without a huge financial risk.

At the outset, I thought the farming story in Sourlands would focus on the complicated economics that dictate the farming scene in Central Jersey. The valley between Princeton and what locals call “the Sourland Mountain” is home to the largest cluster of organic farms in the state. The farmers markets here are populated by hungry, affluent, educated customers. Fresh arugula fetches top dollar.

It is at these markets that young farmers, some up to their eyeballs in debt, compete with well-established farms, as well as a throng of other new farms financed by outside wealth. Aubrey and her few acres of vegetables were entering the fray, and I thought it would be fascinating to tag along.

But then something happened that made me turn my camera skyward.

The farming season of 2011 was defined by extreme weather, so much so that it shouldered into my story to become the star of the show. July ranked as the second-hottest month ever recorded in the state, and included one of the hottest days modern New Jerseyans have ever seen. August was, by a huge margin, the wettest month ever recorded, and it included Hurricane Irene, the costliest storm in New Jersey history. Then October brought a huge freak snowstorm. Overall, 2011 ranked as the wettest year in New Jersey history and the third-hottest.

At Stonehedge Farm, Aubrey was especially vulnerable to the record-setting deluge. Stonehedge is located on the edge of the Sourland Mountain, which is a raised wetland littered with 200-million-year-old boulders. It was so wet that Aubrey couldn’t get her tomatoes planted until June. Not coincidently, many other cash-strapped farmers have also tried their luck on the less-than-desirable soils of the Sourland Mountain over the past two centuries. If you’re a farmer and you don’t have access to good land, you take what you can get.

The weather last summer would have been simply unfortunate if it were merely bad luck. Instead it’s part of a tragic trend. Climate scientists say extremes of heat and precipitation are symptoms of global warming, and we should expect these extremes to get worse. Scientists are virtually certain that the main cause of global warming over the past century is the burning of fossil fuels by humans.

And so, the thread I was searching for between my farming story and my energy story was no longer hard to see. It buzzed and jumped like a live wire.

Strength in the movement

There’s a reason I’ve been following the sustainable agriculture movement so closely over the past few years. I’m an optimist at heart, but the data shows that in two of the biggest environmental fights of our time — the fight to stop global climate change and the fight to preserve the world’s biodiversity — the home team is on a losing streak.

But I see strength in the food movement. And hope. A brigade of young people are suddenly interested in learning how to grow food in ways that are healthier for the soil, the water, the atmosphere, native wildlife, and human health. Established farmers are stepping up to teach and support these young farmers, regardless of the fact that they represent the future competition. Consumers in New Jersey have responded by gathering en masse at farmers markets to buy produce directly from local farms. And good food just seems to have a way of bringing people and causes together.

At a gathering of Central Jersey organic farmers recently — it was a potluck — I listened in on a conversation between two of the veteran farmers in the room. They weren’t exactly elderly; they just weren’t in their 20s like almost everyone else in attendance. The two farmers discussed how a decade ago, the same potluck would have been a quiet, sparsely populated affair. Tonight the room was alive.

It won’t stay that way unless we find those youngsters some well-drained Garden State farmland to call their own. I suspect it’s the same story all across this nation.

Sourlands official trailer:

For non-commodity farms — a category that includes many diverse, organic, and locally supported operations — the story is about much more than maize. A month into summer, the drought has walloped small Midwestern farmers, the very same farmers already struggling to survive a weak economy, a market dominated by rapacious agribusinesses, and, oh yeah, climate change.

For one thing, the ferocious drought has exposed a great lack of irrigation equipment on small farms. In a typical year, summer rain is common in the Midwest, and many of the region’s fruit growers have never irrigated their orchards. Community-supported agriculture (CSA) farmers also tend to lack the infrastructure to water everything they grow.

“You drive around the countryside and whoever doesn’t have irrigation doesn’t have much of a crop,” says Tom Kercher, who grows tree fruit and vegetables in Goshen, Ind.

Dela Ends runs a CSA operation in Brodhead, Wis. This summer she and her husband Tony have been filling a 450-gallon tank three times a day, and towing it to the fields, where it feeds drip lines. But this system won’t cover their 50 acres. “We just don’t have enough man power or water tanks to get to the fields that are farther away,” says Ends. “We’ve never had to water those fields.”

Not that surviving the drought is a simple matter of buying new irrigation systems. The equipment must be kept operating full tilt around the clock, day after day, and in difficult conditions.

“We’ve had mechanical issues and breakdowns,” Kercher says. “A gearhead failed. It’s not a few hundred dollars to fix that. Plus there’s all the diesel fuel to run these pumps. You work yourself to death to keep the irrigation equipment running.”

The lack of irrigation ties into another pressure point: a widening scarcity of animal feed. Feed crops like alfalfa often go unirrigated in favor of more valuable crops, as do grazing pastures.

“The pasture is drying up,” says Joylene Reavis, another small Wisconsin farmer. “What the sheep have eaten down isn’t growing back. That means having to find them hay. Right now, hay is in scarce supply. Feed prices are going up every day.”

Cows on Marybeth Feutz’ farm must subsist on hay, now that the pasture has dried up.

In southern Indiana, where the drought has reached extreme proportions, Marybeth Feutz and her husband John are facing a similar predicament with their small herd of beef cattle. “Our pastures are done,” says Feutz. “There’s no new growth. We’ve turned to feeding hay already because there is not enough grass for the herd.”

The Feutzes usually harvest 10 bales of hay at this time of year, which go into the barn for winter. This year, the fields produced just two, and those may soon be eaten.

“Because we’re feeding hay so early and the hay ground isn’t producing, we’re concerned about having enough to get through the winter,” says Feutz, who has been chronicling the drought on her blog.

These two challenges — lack of irrigation and dwindling feed stocks — are compounded by the second-class status forced upon many small farmers. “Some of the larger farms do business with multiple feed sources, so if one dries up they can move on to others,” Feutz explains. “Farmers around us are already looking outside the state for hay sources. If these get bought up early by the big farms, it will be even harder for small farms to find enough hay.”

Bryn Bird runs a CSA farm in Newark, Ohio, northeast of Columbus. “We’re probably going to have 100 percent sweet corn failure this year,” she says. “That’s probably 30 percent of our income.” Bird estimates the loss of her corn at between $30,000 and $40,000.

Having 210 CSA members invested in the farm — whom Bird is providing with boxes of vegetables she’s irrigated — will help the operation survive, even if she can’t offer them the variety some would prefer. But, Bird adds, “It’s been a good chance to talk to our members about the risks of eating local.”

Despite the media’s constant coverage of their losses, commodity farmers (or those who grow less-perishable crops like corn, wheat, and soy) are eligible for government-subsidized crop insurance and do not face the same kind of lost income that “specialty crop” growers do, says Bird. “I drive around and see the fields of [commodity] field corn and know they are insured. Even if they have 100 percent failure, they’re going to get a check in the mail. We’re completely uninsured. In Ohio, we don’t have specialty crop insurance.”

Emus — like these from Joylene Reavis’ farm — adapt easily to drought and heat.

Moreover, if Congress decides to provide additional drought relief, as Illinois’s governor has urged, big commodity farms get to be first in line. “If it comes down to government help, it usually goes to large farmers instead of small ones,” Joylene Reavis explains. “We probably wouldn’t qualify because we have a small number of acres.”

In addition to sheep, Reavis raises emus for meat and oil. She currently has 100 of the Australian birds strutting around her 10 acres. Toughened by a desert habitat, the creatures long ago adapted to extreme heat and drought.

The question is: How many small farmers will survive long enough to do the same?

Even on a small, family-owned dairy farm, life as a milk cow looks not so great. I mean, you do spend a lot of time standing around in a stall with devices attached to your nipples. That’s cool if it’s your thing, and if there are enough of you who feel that way, I should maybe try to market my manuscript 50 Shades of Hay. But most of us look at that scenario and think “jeez, you could at least get them some fancy furniture, maybe a massage now and then.” Which may be why the Van Loon Dairy just spent $100,000 on 300 waterbeds for its cows.

The cow stalls are normally filled with a soft grass seed byproduct, but that gets shifted around when the cows lie down and stand up. Waterbeds always move cushioning right where it’s needed — when a cow steps on the bed, it pushes water forward to the spot where her knees will hit when she lies down — and then snap back into place. Plus, the rubber beds are bacteria-resistant, and apparently tough enough to not be punctured by a hoof.

The Van Loons aren’t the first to outfit their cow stalls with bourgeois bedroom furniture. The trend started in Wisconsin, then moved to California, and is now catching on in Oregon. Pretty soon all small-farm dairy cows will sleep better than you or me. Which, considering what the rest of their lives are like, seems pretty fair.

From Vittles, the production company behind this gorgeous trailer:  “Alex Sutton is a combat veteran with six tours in Afghanistan and Iraq. In 2008 an IED explosion ended his military service and destroyed his legs. Back home in North Carolina, medically discharged and standing on new titanium legs, Alex still possesses a strong desire to serve his country. He believes that he can do this best through farming.”

The Farmer Veteran Project is a work-in-progress documentary and the filmmakers are raising funds through Kickstarter (their campaign ends Tuesday, July 17).

Meanwhile, Bill McKibben called the event a “formulaic bureaucracy-fest” wherein the only real excitement was a walkout staged by young activists.

So where was food and agriculture in all this? Food was one of seven “critical issues” identified by the U.N. before Rio+20 began, as population growth (we’ll have another 2 billion people on the planet by 2050) and climate change have put the question of food access into sharp focus. But a quick look at the “issue brief” prepared before the summit will tell you most of what you need to know about the vast chasm that exists between the kinds of goals articulated in meetings like this and the level of real change occurring on the ground. “Global delivery of the food security and sustainable agriculture-related commitments has been disappointing,” the brief reads. And it’s easy to see why; a table reporting on target goals set as early as 1995 is filled with stalled progress, lack of funding, and a general dearth of political will. Here are a few examples:

Target: To develop and maintain in all countries the integrated plant nutrition approach, and
 to optimize availability of fertilizer and other 
plant nutrient sources.
Year proposed: 2000
Progress: Not achieved. Several areas are nutrient depleted.

Target: National systems for environmentally sound management of chemicals, including
 legislation and provisions for implementation
 and enforcement, should be in place in all
 countries to the extent possible.
Year proposed: 2000
Progress: Some progress made. Limited resources and political will hamper progress.

Target: Globally harmonized hazard classification and 2000 compatible labeling system, including
 material safety data sheets and easily
 understandable symbols, should be available, 
if feasible.
Year: 2000
Progress: Harmonized system developed. Uptake is slow.

Target: Improve the efficient use of water 
resources and promote their allocation
 among competing uses in a way that gives 
priority to the satisfaction of basic human
 needs and balances the requirement of preserving or restoring ecosystems and their functions.
Year: 2005
Progress: Not achieved — several areas are running out of water.

Target: Halve the proportion of the world’s 2015 people whose income is less than $1 a 
day and the proportion of people who suffer from hunger.
Year: 2015
Progress: On track to reach poverty but not hunger target.

You get the idea. Every few years, the international community comes together to think big about how agriculture could and should really change. And then they let a few years pass before they meet again to reiterate the same goals.

In Rio last week, food did end up in the final document — in the form of something called a Zero Hunger Challenge — but it appears that to save themselves the embarrassment of missing the mark later down the road, the negotiators kept the targets nice and vague.

The Zero Hunger Challenge comes with a list of five worthwhile goals, including “all food systems are sustainable,” along with food security (or an end to hunger through redistribution), support for small farmers, and the reduction food waste. But, as The Guardian adds, “there is no reference to how [sustainable food systems] could be achieved” and “no deadline has been set for achieving these aims.” The Rio+20 draft outcome document also mentions the need to “address the root causes of excessive food price volatility.”

There was also a whole daylong event in Rio dedicated to food and farming, but it too was full of grand, vague messaging about sustainability. (Ever since companies like Monsanto started using “sustainable agriculture” to describe their work, it has become especially difficult to tell if and when the term has any teeth.) Try reading this Huffington Post blog entry, written by a representative from a food and climate NGO, and you’ll see what I mean.

To feed a global population of 9 billion people by 2050 will require a 60 to 70 percent increase in global food production and a 50 percent rise in investments in food, agriculture, and rural development. Unabated climate change could cost the world at least 5 percent of GDP each year and seriously undermine the ability of small-scale farmers to provide food for their families and national and global markets. We must take heed of the reminder from Dyborn Chibonga, CEO of the National Smallholder Farmers Association of Malawi, that “the hand hoe is an instrument of mass urbanization,” and step forward to develop and disseminate appropriate technologies for meeting gaps in yields, in livelihoods, and in climate resilience.

The “dissemination of appropriate technologies for meeting gaps in yields”? In this context that phrase could refer to something as simple as adding a mule to the farm, or something as complex as introducing a combined program of GMO seeds and the pesticides they’re engineered to be used with.

Especially confusing in this regard is the use of the relatively new term “climate smart agriculture,” which was established at the U.N. conference on climate change in Durban, South Africa, last December. The plan was to reduce and sequester carbon emissions while conserving soils and feeding people in Africa. That sounds great, right?

But, as Tristan Quinn-Thibodeau writes in Climate Connections, these aren’t the same as true agroecological practices.

International social movements like La Via Campesina had argued compellingly for years that “small farmers cool the planet,” relying on many studies that ecological agriculture can reduce climate change. Ecological agriculture or “agroecology” uses no chemicals like fertilizers or pesticides derived from fossil fuels, and biodiverse agriculture systems greatly reduce carbon in the atmosphere while maintaining local resilience in the face of climate change.

Meanwhile:

 “Climate smart agriculture” still uses fossil fuel-based chemicals. A U.N.-commissioned panel of experts issued a report again touting the climate change reduction potential of sustainable agriculture. The Montpellier Panel report advocated a transition to agroecology, but defined it as a technique that can be used with existing industrial practices like “transgenic crops, conservation farming, microdosing of fertilizers and herbicides, and integrated pest management.”

But as prominent agroecology scholar Miguel Altieri has recently written [PDF], “Agroecology does not need to be combined with other approaches … it has consistently proven capable of sustainably increasing productivity and has far greater potential for fighting hunger [than industrial agriculture].”

Meanwhile corporations like Pepsi Co. were also present in Rio, where they were trumpeting food investments that purported to support developing world farmers while going after cheap raw materials for their own needs. Take this promising-sounding initiative to address malnutrition in Ethiopia. It would “dramatically increase chickpea production” as a “locally sourced, nutrient-rich, ready-to-use supplementary food (RUSF) to address malnutrition” through “modern agricultural practices” (there’s that vague term again). And, of course, the company also admits that for PepsiCo, “chickpea-based products are an important part of the company’s strategy to build a $30 billion global nutrition business by 2020.” (Remember that the Quaker, Tropicana, Gatorade, and Frito-Lay brands are all now under the Pepsi Co. corporate umbrella.)

The company’s official, full-color brochure [PDF] tells us that the effort is “part of a global strategy to make Pepsi Co. a leader in sustainable agriculture around the world.” Just like Monsanto. We can all rest easier now.

Nick Maravell has been farming organically and cultivating heirloom seeds on a leased 20-acre plot of land in Potomac, Md., for over three decades.

Nick’s Organic Farm is an anomaly in wealthy, suburban Potomac, where McMansions dominate the landscape, and its location has made it possible for Maravell to cultivate heirloom breeds of organic soy and corn seeds native to the Chesapeake Bay region. Corn seed is wind-pollinated, meaning organic varieties are easily contaminated by genetically modified pollen if grown anywhere near conventional farms. But Maravell’s farm is isolated, protected by a buffer of suburbia — an ideally situated piece of land that would be difficult to replace.

All this might explain why, when it became clear that Maravell would lose his lease, the surrounding community didn’t take it lightly. His landlord, the Montgomery County Board of Education, transferred the lease to the county, which then awarded a contract to a private developer to build soccer fields. The announcement — and subsequent findings that the county had violated the Open Meetings Act in handing the land over to developers without first soliciting public input — caused an uproar.

A group of supporters started a campaign called Save Nick’s Organic Farm, and a subsequent petition on the group’s website gained over 25,000 signatures. There’s also been an effort — spearheaded by Sophia Maravell, Nick’s 24-year-old daughter — to start a farm-based school for area children and a farm incubator program on the property.

Nick Maravell.

It’s unclear whether or not the campaign can do enough to put pressure on the county, but regardless, Maravell’s struggle raises big question about future of food in this country — if we want to have a future at all.

“It’s very rare to find farmland that is geographically isolated from conventional farms,” says Sara Shor, who has managed the campaign to save the farm. And she’s right. Once upon a time, para-urban farmland — fertile land on the outskirts of the city from which farmers could easily transport their product — was commonplace. Today, as cities grow and suburbs expand, farmland must compete with other valuable types of open space.

And while parks and soccer fields are crucial to our well-being, the fact is that farmland is disappearing at a rate of more than an acre every minute, according to the American Farmland Trust. From 1982 to 2007, at least 41 million acres of farmland in the U.S. were developed.

“The No. 1 obstacle to small farmers, and especially new and beginning farmers, is land access,” says Sophia. With so little land and startup capital available, leasing property is not uncommon, nor is the threat of being kicked off.

“That is the hidden danger of working leased land,” says Dea Keen, manager of the educational farm. “A lot of young farmers have gone that route because access to land is so difficult.”

But all land is not the same. Maravell — a farming veteran and member of the national decision-making body that shapes organic standards — has done more than simply lease these 20 acres; he’s transformed them. And he’s not alone — that’s what organic farmers do.

Nick Maravell grows, and saves the seeds of, heirloom varieties like this Indian corn.

Abandoning soil that’s been cultivated organically for over 30 years and starting from scratch is no small setback. As Keen says, “the soil is a living thing you invest in,” and the loss of Nick’s farm would be as devastating as the loss of any major investment. It’s troubling that the people calling the shots don’t seem to understand that.

Doug Schuessler, executive director of company building the soccer fields, says opponents of the project are misinformed about the “phenomenal shortage of fields” in the county. And he may be right. Dena Leibman, whose two daughters have played soccer with on the company’s fields for years, agreed that existing fields are in poor condition. But to her, the tradeoff isn’t worth it: “We’re going to evict this stellar farmer, scrape away 32 years of organic soil, take away his opportunity to turn this into a real agricultural education center, all for two fields and several parking lots? It’s like, how important is soccer?”

That’s a strong statement coming from a suburban soccer parent anywhere in the U.S. these days, and it shows how this conflict has galvanized a community. “The entire issue has brought people together,” Keen says. “They differentiate between local food and Whole Foods.”

They also may be starting to grasp the importance of good organic soil — and the importance of preserving what little of it we have left. If soil actually added monetary value to land — which it should, considering the quality of food that can be grown in quality soil — controversies like this one in Potomac might play out very differently, and we might have a lot more farmland to show for it.

The developers offered to compromise by setting aside one to three acres of the soccer park for an educational farm in its proposal. But that wouldn’t be enough for the farm incubator program or to continue seed saving.

The county has offered Maravell the option to farm on an old waste site, but Sophia says that doesn’t seem safe. Besides, she adds, “legally it takes three years to convert to organic farmland. But if you talk to a farmer like my dad he would say it takes much longer.”

Both the county and the developers are confident that the project will go ahead, and Keen admits that supporters of the farm don’t have many options left. They’ve considered staying put, taking a cue from the recent student occupation of the last remaining fertile farmland in Berkeley, Calif. — another battle over good soil. The developers’ lease starts in August. Until then, Sophia says, “the strategy is to keep applying pressure and try to get our proposal and our vision out there. Once we tell people what our vision is, they’re very supportive.”

“It’s a very emotional connection I have to this land,” she continues. “I think that sense of place is lost to a lot of people in the U.S. It’s something else we’re trying to teach here.”

A parasitic caterpillar fungus that grows in the Himalayas has many names, according to Scientific American — yarsagumba, yarchagumba, yartsa gunba, yatsa gunbu. But we are only going to remember one name: Himalayan Viagra.

This fungus, which leeches off of Tibetan ghost moth larvae, is said to get the fellas going when boiled and consumed in tea or soup. Oh, it also cures cancer and fights fatigue. Miracle drug! (Scientific American — always with the science! — notes, “These medical claims have not been borne out scientifically.”)

As a result of its awesome properties of making everything sexy and cancer-free and sexy, this stuff is almost worth its weight in gold. (The price per gram puts its worth between silver and gold, Agence France Presse says.) And there’s a global market for it worth between $5 billion and $11 billion.

Thus, Nepalese people living in the area where the fungus grows have been making a fair bit of money harvesting and selling it. But this year, they found little to grab — a dozen or so pieces in fields where hundreds once grew. Which means less money and fewer erections. Date night in the Himalayas just got a lot less interesting.

Scientists blame overharvesting for the shortage. (It definitely wouldn’t be the first time humans ran a species into the ground because they thought it would give them a hard-on.) But climate change could play a role, too: Recently this area has gotten less snow and rain than it has in the past and suffered through higher temperatures. For aphrodisiac seekers, there’s always the option of actual Viagra. But the Nepalese communities who depend on the fungus for a big chunk of their income are simply screwed.

Did you have your morning cup of coffee today? Probably shouldn’t have:

The international trade in Central American coffee has spurred forest clearing that eradicates habitat for the endangered [black-handed spider] monkey and, ultimately, the monkey itself.

The monkey’s woes come despite its protected status. This spider monkey (Ateles geoffroyi) shelters behind the legal shield of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, meaning it cannot be openly sold, which is meant to keep it from becoming a pet (yes, it’s that cute). But no such protection exists for its habitat, which may ultimately make any other protections moot. Not even the monkey’s amazing gripping tail can help it hang on in the face of forest clearing.

And that’s why this spider monkey is just one of at least 25,000 animals currently threatened around the globe.

Did you drive to work? So did everyone else even though they know they shouldn’t:

[A]bout half in the poll said they would find it difficult in the next year to take steps such as buying a more fuel-efficient car or carpooling. This, despite knowing that such changes would make a difference. A clear majority — 64 percent — said Americans use a lot of energy and are unwilling to reduce their demand, making that the most frequently blamed reason for the country’s energy problems

Smaller steps, such as turning off the lights, turning down the heat, installing more energy-saving appliances and driving less, were the more common ways respondents said they chose to reduce energy in the last year.

“Americans are extremely wasteful,” said Army veteran Jerry Winter, 39, of Arnold, Mo., reached during a vacation.

Did you prepare for the increasingly likely collapse of civilization as we know it and the ensuing era marked by resource limitations up to and including coffee and gasoline? Maybe you should.

The earth could be nearing a point at which sweeping environmental changes, possibly including mass extinctions, would undermine human welfare, 22 prominent biologists and ecologists warned on Wednesday.

Acknowledging in a new paper that both the likelihood and timing of such a planetary “state shift” were uncertain, the scientists nonetheless described warning signs that it could arrive within a few human generations, if not sooner.

Our Dave Roberts has a whole lot more on this last point. Have a nice afternoon.

Tyrion Lannister is my favorite character in Game of Thrones (both the HBO series and the book series, which I refuse to call by its goofy official name), and Peter Dinklage is super-handsome and deserves 300 Emmys. So it’s nice to know that, unlike Tyrion, Dinklage wears his good-heartedness openly — he’s the new national spokesperson for the Farm Sanctuary’s Walk for Farm Animals campaign. Book series fans, maybe don’t tell them about Pretty the Pig.

The idea behind the Walk for Farm Animals is that participants organize walks in 35 cities, to fundraise and increase awareness of farm animal mistreatment. This is probably good PR for an actor whose show has so far featured several horse slaughters, not to mention a dead wolf and a skinned deer and who knows what else. (No animals were harmed in the making of these mild spoilers.) I just hope HBO doesn’t take a hint and switch to walking instead of horseback riding for season three. It wouldn’t be accurate, and besides, the horses are my dog’s favorite part of the show.

This video does make me glad that the series did away with Tyrion’s beard from the books, though. Come on, Peter, let us see your pretty face.