Climate Food and Agriculture

Ag giants launch new public-tv show that promises to be so bad it’s … bad

What do you get when Monsanto and the Farm Bureau (whose sorry politics are discussed here) team up with the National Corn Growers Association, the United Soybean Board, the U.S. Grains Council, and the National Cotton Council (discussed here)?

If your answer is vast-scale, heavily subsidized, environmentally ruinous agriculture, you have a point. But I was thinking of a different response: Television that promises to be so bad that it might qualify as camp.

You Picked a Bovine Time to Peeve Me

USDA loophole lets penned cows get certified organic The U.S. Department of Agriculture may be caving to owners of factory dairy farms by failing to revise some rules on organic milk. At issue is how the agency defines an organic bovine. One requirement is that the cows have “access to pasture,” but another provision allows […]

USDA inaction supports feedlot-style

Consumers looking for milk from grass-fed cows can't rely on the USDA's organic label.

As this Chicago Tribune article shows, the department has been allowing feedlot-style mega-dairies to claim organic status -- despite a recommendation from the National Organic Standards Board that it close existing loopholes.

Access to pasture lies at the heart of any meaningful definition of organic farm-animal stewardship. Grass-fed cows produce a healthier product, they're easier on the environment, and they're not forced to live miserable lives completely enslaved by the mechanized milker.

Organic farms don’t treat workers any better than other farms

As Grist's own Amanda Griscom Little recently reported, a trade group representing Kraft and Dean Foods has been quietly pushing Congress to tweak organic labelling standards to make them more friendly to food-processing giants.

Thankfully, the Organic Consumers Association has led a fight, so far successful, to stymie those changes.

While it's important to preserve the organic label's integrity on the supermarket shelf, it's just as important to interrogate what it means in the field. An interesting study published in UC Davis' Sustainable Agriculture Newsletter sheds much-needed light on that issue.

To create a truly sustainable food system, we’ll need to make some fundamental changes.

The sustainable-food movement has a class problem.

Slow Food, for example, is an essential organization, with its declaration of a universal "right to taste" and its mandate to ...

... oppose the standardisation of taste, defend the need for consumer information, protect cultural identities tied to food and gastronomic traditions, safeguard foods and cultivation and processing techniques inherited from tradition and defend domestic and wild animal and vegetable species.

The group has undeniably done important work internationally toward those goals; yet its U.S. branch tends to throw pricey events accessible only to an economic elite.

Examples like this abound.

Bye, Local

Organic farmers in U.S. losing business to foreign growers Organic is seen as a niche that helps smaller American farmers endure, but a sizeable chunk of the organic foods sold in the U.S. are being sourced from overseas suppliers. The U.S. Department of Agriculture estimates that as much as $1.5 billion of organic food was […]

‘Naked Chef’ dresses down U.S. school lunches, demands ‘real food,

Ten years after sustainable-food doyenne Alice Waters launched her innovative Edible Schoolyard program in Berkeley, U.S. school lunches remain abysmal. In cafeteria kitchens throughout the land, de-skilled workers busy themselves opening cans and zapping pre-made meals in giant microwaves. Out on the floor, kids swill soda and dig their little hands into bags of fried stuff that may have, somewhere far way, once resembled food.

Waters' effort remains laudable, but it's limited to one school. No public figure, no celebrity chef riding the waves of a Food Network show and the opening of an eponymous restaurant in Vegas, has bothered to make decent school lunches a national crusade.

Enter Jamie Oliver, the "Naked Chef" of U.K. TV and cookbook fame.

Fight over synthetic ingredients splits organics community

What do xanthan gum, an artificial thickener, ammonium bicarbonate, a synthetic leavening agent, and ethylene, a chemical that accelerates the ripening of fruit, have in common? These and other synthetic additives commonly lurk behind that “USDA Organic” stamp of approval you see on the organic products increasingly crowding the shelves of big-box stores and boutique […]

Toujours Gas

France contending with bovine-source greenhouse gases France’s 20 million cows account for 6.5 percent of the country’s greenhouse-gas emissions. Researcher Benoit Leguet of the Climate Mission of Caisse des Depots, a state-owned French bank, contends that bovine belches produce about 28.6 million tons of globe-warming gases annually, primarily methane and nitrous oxide. Cow poop (or […]

Who would have thought?

When I wrote about robots months ago, it didn't occur to me that robots could be used to grow our food. And if it had, I probably wouldn't have thought they would be doing it so soon. Ah, but they are! I guess Todd is right: the future is now.

Thanks to Wired, I give you OrganiTech:

Tens of thousands of empty storage containers are stacked in towers along I-95 across from the harbor in Newark, New Jersey. They're heaped there in perpetuity, too cheap to be shipped back to Asia but too expensive to melt down.

Where many might see a pile of garbage, Lior Hessel sees, of all things, an organic farm. Those storage containers would be ideal housing for miniature farms, he believes, stacked one upon another like an agricultural skyscraper, all growing fresh organic produce for millions of wealthy consumers. And since the crops would be grown with artificial lighting, servers, sensors and robots, the cost of labor would consist of a single computer technician's salary.

...

OrganiTech can supply a complete set of robotic equipment plus greenhouse for $2 million. A system the size of a tennis court can produce 145,000 bags of lettuce leaves per year -- that's a yield similar to a 100-acre traditional farm. According to the company, it costs 27 cents to produce a single head of lettuce with its system, compared to about 18 cents per head of lettuce grown in California fields. Factor in the transportation costs and suddenly the automated greenhouse grower saves as much as 43 cents a head.