agriculture

'We're looking at a scenario where there's no more agriculture in California,' Part 2

Finally, we have a top administration official telling it like it is. Energy Secretary and Nobelist Steven Chu told a Los Angeles Times reporter:

In a worst case, Chu said, up to 90% of the Sierra snowpack could disappear, all but eliminating a natural storage system for water vital to agriculture.

"I don't think the American public has gripped in its gut what could happen," he said.

Precisely. [You can listen to an interview with the LAT reporter and me on To the Point here.]

We face desertification of perhaps a third of the earth that is "largely irreversible for 1,000 years" -- if homo sapiens are not sapiens enough to sharply and quickly reverse emissions trends. Part 1 looked at the canary-in-the-coal mine for desertification: "Australia faces collapse as climate change kicks in."

But the Southwest from Kansas and Oklahoma to California are right behind Australia, according to a 2007 Science ($ub. req'd) paper:

Here we show that there is a broad consensus among climate models that this region will dry in the 21st century and that the transition to a more arid climate should already be under way. If these models are correct, the levels of aridity of the recent multiyear drought or the Dust Bowl and the 1950s droughts will become the new climatology of the American Southwest within a time frame of years to decades.

[Note: That study "only" modeled the A1B emissions scenario, which leads to 720 ppm by 2100. We are currently on track to 1,000 ppm (see here).]

A December U.S. Geological Survey report also warned that the Southwest faces "permanent drying" by 2050.

Before the permanent drying -- aka a desert -- sets in, you'd expect to see more and longer record-breaking droughts. In fact, Lester Snow, director of California's Department of Water Resources said Friday:

Direct and organic farm sales rise rapidly, new census shows

Direct sales from farmers rose 49 percent, and organic farm sales more than tripled from 2002 to 2007, new USDA farm census data show.

USDA released the 2007 Agriculture Census data today, giving Americans a far more detailed understanding of agricultural trends -- just as interest in local foods expands dramatically.

For me, one of the key indicators of the growth of interest in community-based foods is the rapidly rising sales of food direct from farmers to consumers. Direct food sales rose a whopping 49 percent to $1.2 billion in 2007, up from $812 million in 2002. This includes farmstand, farmers market, internet, or other direct sales of fruit, vegetables, meats, and many other foods.

Canada saved us from more bad peanuts

In the stream of news about the troubling "our peanuts are tainted and our food system is whack" situation, this gem has floated to the surface: It was Canada that first raised the red flag on Peanut Corp's products last spring. The tale unfurls a bit like a parody of bumbling agency hijinks, but the moral is clear: Canada. Always. Rocks.

By naming the root cause behind food crises, we stand a chance at solving them

This is a guest post by Cary Fowler, executive director of the Rome-based Global Crop Diversity Trust and co-author of Shattering: Food, Politics, and the Loss of Genetic Diversity.

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Southern Africa, 2030. A throng of emaciated people waits for food rations to arrive. The maize crop has failed, devastated by hot weather and drought. Yet again. A "food crisis?" Yes. That's what we'll call it in 22 years.

But not today. If we want to do something about future food crises, we should name them today, and name them properly. Problems unnamed or improperly named are problems left unsolved.

In many cases, what we call food crises are more precisely thought of as crop-diversity crises. That's what history's most famous "food crisis" -- the Irish potato famine -- really was.

A paper recently published Science -- abstract here -- by a group of scholars with whom the Crop Diversity Trust collaborates, predicts a drop in maize (corn) yields of 30 percent in southern Africa by 2030 as a result of climate change, unless new climate-ready varieties of maize are developed. A huge drop in production of the region's most important food crop will bring instant famine.

Kent Conrad is trying to kill reform at the USDA

As I surmised might happen in a comment to Tom Philpott's recent post on ag reform, "Sustainable Dozen" member Chuck Hassebrook, Tom Vilsack's choice for deputy secretary, is having trouble getting through the Senate Ag committee. North Dakota's Kent Conrad (D) is trying to kill Hassebrook's nomination before it's even officially announced. Nick Kristof has the details here (h/t Jill Richardson).

In the Senate, a single senator wields enormous power and can put a stop to any bill or nomination if he or she so chooses. With everyone's attention on the stimulus package, this is the perfect time for a little backroom backstabbing. Should you wish to, say, register your feelings about this, the current members (and states) of the Senate Ag committee appear after the jump.

Denny's serves up a plate of petroleum

The millions of Americans (Grist included!) glued to their TVs Sunday for Super Bowl XLIII got a personal invite from fast food chain Denny's to swing by any of its 2,500 U.S. locations this morning for a free "Grand Slam" breakfast -- two eggs, two sausages, two slices of bacon, two pancakes (a whopping 800 calories).

True agricultural policy reform may require climate reform first

I'm becoming more and more convinced every day that addressing climate change and reforming food production are pretty much the same thing. You can't do one without the other. And -- as Yogi Berra might say -- vice versa. The food and agriculture industries, aided and abetted by governments worldwide (not to mention by consumers), have succeeded in offloading just about all external costs involved with feeding us. Environmental issues, public health issues, natural resource utilization issues, even most economic issues related to food have all been socialized to the extent that the industry is almost totally isolated from the societal consequences of its actions.

Until now, few have complained, as this system has led to ever lower food prices in the developed world and thriving export markets in the developing world. But the costs, which for 60 years or so seemed to have been pushed back beyond the horizon, are beginning to loom.

Many of us have high hopes that the new administration can make serious progress on reform, but it's important to focus on how serious the challenge before us actually is. In this way, it's like the global warming debate back in the '90s. The science was pretty clear even then. There were visionaries like NASA's James Hansen and, yes, Al Gore, who understood that we needed to act. But for most Americans, hearing about climate change in the '90s was like being reminded to carry an umbrella on a sunny day. Where exactly were the portents of doom?

Seattle museum opens coffee exhibit, downs third cup of the day

Coffee culture is king in Seattle. Whether it's because of the eternally gray weather, the cool, rainy climate, or our inability to socialize outside a dimly lit café, there's no denying the importance of the caffeine bean in a Seattleite's daily life.

And certainly we've earned our rep as a highly caffeinated metropolis, with more coffee shops per capita than anywhere else in the country -- many of them artisanal roasters selling specialty coffees. But the story of your steamy mug of joe doesn't begin and end with a moody barista.

In fact, it probably started in the hands of someone like Edwin Martinez, a third generation coffee grower who has been picking coffee beans in Guatemala with his family since he was a young boy. From there, they may have passed through a co-op set up to help small farmers process and market their beans. Then they'll move on to someone like David Griswold, the founder of Sustainable Harvest, a specialty coffee importer who bridges connections between the farmers in tropical coffee-growing nations and the roasters in, say, Seattle.

The roasting process will awaken the coffee beans' complex aromas and flavors -- and they'll soon be passed from barista to half-awake patron. And though you might be sipping on a half-caf soy latte with sugar-free vanilla syrup, you've really got the whole world in your cup.

It's this story that a new exhibit at Seattle's Burke Museum aims to tell. Opening weekend of Coffee: The World in Your Cup featured exhibit tours, coffee tastings, and informative talks by Martinez, Griswold, and University of Washington professor Max Savishinsky. "We're really putting a huge topic in a small space," said Education Director Diane Quinn.

Let's get a little something in exchange for our biogas

Here's something someone should run with. Via Green Inc. I learned that Sen. Ben Nelson just introduced a bill that would encourage development of the agricultural biogas industry with hopes of including it in the stimulus package. Biogas is a renewable form of natural gas derived from any methane source, like, say, manure. While burning biogas does create carbon emissions, it's more than offset by its effect in eliminating methane, a far more potent greenhouse gas (Marc from the Ethicurean explains how much of an offset in this comment).

In many ways, it's not a particularly high-tech approach and it's currently in common use in China and India - although unlike with the digesters in use in the developing world, the US biogas industry is attempting to significantly increase biogas content to almost pure methane. Because biogas can be produced and used on site as well as shipped via pipeline to power stations, it's theoretically possible for farms to become energy self-sufficient AND deal with excess manure. This isn't a magic bullet, of course, and in the future, farms are likely to use a lot more manure as fertilizer (remember Peak Phosphorus?). But, even in the post-CAFO world we all dream about, there will continue to be excess manure around. Indeed, this is exactly the sort of thing USDA chief Tom Vilsack means when he talks about developing "new technologies and expanded opportunities in biofuels and renewable energy."