agriculture

Doomsday seed vault’s stores are growing

CHICAGO — The stores of seeds in a “doomsday” vault in the Norwegian Arctic are growing as researchers rush to preserve 100,000 crop varieties from potential extinction. The imperiled seeds are going to be critical for protecting the global food supply against devastating crop losses as a result of climate change, said Cary Fowler, executive […]

Until real middle-class wages start rising, we can't end agricultural subsidies

Watching this gripping animation (h/t Ezra Klein) that charts the spread of Wal-Marts across the country got me thinking. I felt like I was really watching the spread of wage stagnation across the country. I'm not suggesting there's any clarity as to which came first -- Wal-Mart or the grinding halt in middle-class wage growth. But Wal-Mart's accelerated growth in the 1980s matches this chart on wage inequality nicely (note the bottom two lines).

It's a pointless chicken-and-egg debate at a certain level. You can't blame Sam Walton (much less Sebastian Kresge or James Sinegal) for the fact that discounters that thrive on downward price pressure represent the only means most Americans have of maintaining the illusion of a rising standard of living.

Many political conflicts stem from undue population pressure on water and grasslands

As land and water become scarce, competition for these vital resources intensifies within societies, particularly between the wealthy and those who are poor and dispossessed. The shrinkage of life-supporting resources per person that comes with population growth is threatening to drop the living standards of millions of people below the survival level, leading to potentially unmanageable social tensions.

Access to land is a prime source of social tension. Expanding world population has cut the grainland per person in half, from 0.23 hectares in 1950 to 0.10 hectares in 2007. One-tenth of a hectare is half of a building lot in an affluent U.S. suburb. This ongoing shrinkage of grainland per person makes it difficult for the world's farmers to feed the 70 million people added to world population each year. The shrinkage in cropland per person not only threatens livelihoods, but in largely subsistence societies, it also threatens survival itself. Tensions within communities begin to build as landholdings shrink below that needed for survival.

The Sahelian zone of Africa, with one of the world's fastest-growing populations, is an area of spreading conflict. In troubled Sudan, 2 million people have died and over 4 million have been displaced in the long-standing conflict of more than 20 years between the Muslim north and the Christian south. The more recent conflict in the Darfur region in western Sudan that began in 2003 illustrates the mounting tensions between two Muslim groups -- camel herders and subsistence farmers. Government troops are backing Arab militias, who are engaging in the wholesale slaughter of black Sudanese in an effort to drive them off their land, sending them into refugee camps in neighboring Chad. At least some 200,000 people have been killed in the conflict and another 250,000 have died of hunger and disease in the refugee camps.

The story of Darfur is that of the Sahel, the semiarid region of grassland and dryland farming that stretches across Africa from Senegal in the west to Somalia in the east. In the northern Sahel, grassland is turning to desert, forcing herders southward into the farming areas. Declining rainfall and overgrazing are combining to destroy the grasslands.

Climate Central takes on Iowa corn

Climate Central bills itself as "a think tank with a production studio." This is what they do:

Using both staff experts and an extended blue ribbon network of scientists, Climate Central assesses and synthesizes the latest science, technology, and policy proposals. Our experienced communications team turns that information into creative, easily understood, and graphically rich pieces for print, television and the web.

They've got some serious names behind the project, including John Holdren and Jane Lubchenco before they were snapped up by the Obama administration. (Full disclosure: Grist board member Ben Strauss is a member of the CC team.)

CC just got up and running recently -- the full site doesn't debut until Spring -- but it's already turning out some great stuff. The latest is "Iowa: Corn and Climate," a video that recently aired on PBS's The News Hour with Jim Lehrer. Here it is (starts about a minute in):

The coolest thing, though, is that the video comes with an annotated transcript that takes virtually every sentence and substantiates it with a relevant bit of science, news report, or infographic. You get the public-friendly video and the wonk-friendly reference work, all in one package. Not bad.

CC aims to be an impeccably credible source of information on a highly contested set of subjects. It looks like they're off to a great start.

Vilsack continues to lay the groundwork for reform

There was some curiosity as to what stance U.S. Department of Agriculture chief Tom Vilsack would take in his speech this week before the National Association of Wheat Growers. Surprisingly, he came as the bearer of bad tidings. According to this report:

Vilsack called on farmers to accept the political reality that U.S. farm program direct payments are under fire both at home and abroad and therefore farmers should develop other sources of income. In his remarks to the groups he said he intends to promote a far more diversified income base for the farm sector, saying that windmills and biofuels should definitely be part of the income mix and that organic agriculture will also play an increasing role.

Um, what? Leave aside the "prepare for a pay cut" thing for a moment. Did Vilsack just use the O-word in front of a bunch of large-scale industrial farmers? Once they stopped laughing, I wonder if they starting thinking about the implications of what he was saying. Maybe this guy is for real.

Vilsack's comments certainly jibe with his plans for the new USDA Office for Ecosystem Services and Markets -- an entity that is charged with cataloging the climate impacts of forestry and farming practices. The Christian Science Monitor characterized it thusly:

Umbra on composting tainted food

Dear Umbra, This tainted peanut butter recall is crazy. I have a box of crackers with peanut butter. Can I safely compost them in my hot compost pile? Jane Vallejo, Calif. Dearest Jane, Let me first say I am very sad for those who have been killed in this outbreak. My deepest sympathies to their […]

Movement for metro pollinators spreading

Let loose the bees! Like the surging movement for backyard chickens, bees also have urban anthropic allies, and Denver is the newest metropolis to allow beehives in town. Led by the intrepid Denver Urban Gardens (DUG) crew, bees will now be invited to pollinate mile-high metro-veggies, just like in Seattle, Minneapolis, and San Francisco.

Enjoy the ordinance's entertaining rules on how hives are to be kept at DUG's site, but consider that native bees are also to be encouraged.

Check out this article on Sacramento's Urban Bee Project, which tries to bolster biodiversity and urban pollination through the planting of vegetation favored by native bees, such as the cantankerous 'headbonker.' Me, I'd plant any damn thing if I thought something by that name might come bumbling by.

Why is it so hard for farmers to donate their crops?

Because there aren't enough roadblocks to getting hungry people healthy food, here's another one. And it's something that could be fixed with a small dollop of legalese (ideally right on top of the stimulus package). Someone at Bread for the City, which runs the biggest D.C. food pantry, pointed me to a post on their blog that sets up the problem thusly:

[L]iterally tons of fresh fruits and vegetables will be grown this year that will never make it to market for one reason or another. (For instance, major supermarkets turn away curvy cucumbers since they don't stack well ...) In a country where about half of all food grown is wasted, the gap between the field and the market is where a shockingly large amount of the loss occurs.

Their goal is to get this "wasted" food to the people who need it. Naturally, it's not easy (although nothing about helping the poor ever is). But it's not finding the produce that's the problem -- many farmers are more than happy to participate. It's getting it: the food pantries have to organize teams of volunteers to harvest, pack, and transport the produce themselves. Why not just have the farmers do it for them? Sometimes they do, of course. But for many farmers already on the edge financially, throwing in labor and fuel as part of the deal just isn't possible. The tax-savvy among you will no doubt object -- what about the write-off?

It's official: Nutrition will play a big role in reform at the USDA

After reading Tom Philpott's post on Tom Vilsack's recent comments to the WaPo, I think it's worth digging in a bit more.

To this point, we've all had to be content with reading tea leaves and parsing statements. But now we are finally getting a taste of the tea. Philpott highlighted Vilsack's line about his desire to represent the interests of those "who consume food" -- a long-awaited distinction to be sure.

Of course, claiming to represent eaters is no panacea. The USDA can easily describe its efforts to support a system that provides vast amounts of cheap calories as "helpful" to consumers -- and that kind of disingenuous wordplay would be par for the course at the old USDA. But it appears that Vilsack takes a broader, more progressive view as he pointed out the following:

His first official act was the reinstatement of $3.2 million in grant funding for fruit and vegetable farmers that had been rescinded in the final days of the Bush administration. Though the dollar amount was small, Vilsack said it sent a message of his emphasis on nutritious food.