We Speak For Earth
-
ikenbot CWL -
mohandasgandhi Mohandas Gandhi -
realcleverscience Real Clever Science -
socialuprooting Social Uprooting -
abstractnerd Abstract Nerd -
perscientiamlibertas A Matter of the Most Pleasant Fraternal Confidence
Image: Al_HikesAZ via photopin cc
The world is in transition from an era of food abundance to one of scarcity. Over the last decade, world grain reserves have fallen by one third. World food prices have more than doubled, triggering a worldwide land rush and ushering in a new geopolitics of food. Food is the new oil. Land is the new gold.
This new era is one of rising food prices and spreading hunger. On the demand side of the food equation, population growth, rising affluence, and the conversion of food into fuel for cars are combining to raise consumption by record amounts. On the supply side, extreme soil erosion, growing water shortages, and the earth’s rising temperature are making it more difficult to expand production. Unless we can reverse such trends, food prices will continue to rise and hunger will continue to spread, eventually bringing down our social system. Can we reverse these trends in time? Or is food the weak link in our early twenty-first-century civilization, much as it was in so many of the earlier civilizations whose archaeological sites we now study?
This tightening of world food supplies contrasts sharply with the last half of the twentieth century, when the dominant issues in agriculture were overproduction, huge grain surpluses, and access to markets by grain exporters. During that time, the world in effect had two reserves: large carryover stocks of grain (the amount in the bin when the new harvest begins) and a large area of cropland idled under U.S. farm programs to avoid overproduction. When the world harvest was good, the United States would idle more land. When the harvest was subpar, it would return land to production. The excess production capacity was used to maintain stability in world grain markets. The large stocks of grain cushioned world crop shortfalls. When India’s monsoon failed in 1965, for example, the United States shipped a fifth of its wheat harvest to India to avert a potentially massive famine. And because of abundant stocks, this had little effect on the world grain price.
When this period of food abundance began, the world had 2.5 billion people. Today it has 7 billion. From 1950 to 2000 there were occasional grain price spikes as a result of weather-induced events, such as a severe drought in Russia or an intense heat wave in the U.S. Midwest. But their effects on price were short-lived. Within a year or so things were back to normal. The combination of abundant stocks and idled cropland made this period one of the most food-secure in world history. But it was not to last. By 1986, steadily rising world demand for grain and unacceptably high budgetary costs led to a phasing out of the U.S. cropland set-aside program.
Today the United States has some land idled in its Conservation Reserve Program, but it targets land that is highly susceptible to erosion. The days of productive land ready to be quickly brought into production when needed are over.
Urban farms give city folk ‘food sovereignty’
When Choi Chang-hwan, a 71-year-old retired oil company worker, wakes up every morning to sweet chirpings of sparrows, his top priority isn’t turning the pages of the morning newspaper while waiting for breakfast, like other aged Korean men.
After jumping out of bed, Choi goes straight to the rooftop of his two-story house in Junghwa-dong, northeastern Seoul, to check the progress of his homegrown vegetables.
“There’s nothing like planting a seed, nurturing it and harvesting it,” Choi said. “It’s amazing to see how vegetables go from my roof to my table. I water them every day and feed them with compost. The seeds sprout and the vegetables grow beautifully.”
Choi said he needs to check his crops every morning to make sure seeds and vegetables aren’t attacked by sparrows, pigeons or bugs.
“I don’t use harmful pesticides,” he said. “I use a small metal pincer to pick bugs off the crops. It’s a lot of work, but it’s worth it.”
Choi is just one of a growing army of urban farmers in Korea.
While urbanites groan under food prices that never seem to stop rising, due to the higher cost of transport or the freaky weather conditions that are increasingly common, a potential solution for anyone with a rooftop or a balcony is to move the farm to the heart of the city.
That’s what more and more city dwellers are discovering. Urban farming is springing up in spaces all over Korea’s cities, including abandoned lots, weekend community gardens, rooftops and plastic containers on apartment balconies.
Experts are predicting that urban farming isn’t a mere fad as more Koreans see the virtues of food sovereignty due to agflation and rising concerns over food safety.Green in the city
Urban farming has been catching on in other developed countries including Germany, England, Japan and the United States.
According to a report by the Ministry for Food, Agriculture, Forestry and Fisheries, Germany has 1 million small city farms, while England has 300,000, Japan has 3,000 and New York City is home to 600.
The ministry said the urban farming phenomenon is also slowly becoming mainstream in Korea. While there’s no concrete data, the ministry estimates that over 700,000 city dwellers grow vegetables as a hobby in metropolitan areas.
Among those 700,000 people, 153,000 are in Seoul, the ministry said.
Considering that Seoul, the biggest city in Korea, has a population of 10.5 million, that means that 7 percent of Seoul citizens are partaking in urban gardening.read more at http://koreajoongangdaily.joinsmsn.com/news/article/Article.aspx?aid=2941546
(via organicandurban)
The number of farmers markets in Vancouver has doubled and more than 1,000 community garden plots have been created in the past three years. Image: Ms Baboo, Flickr
The city’s new food strategy depicts a high-density urban environment lush with edible landscaping, community vegetable gardens, green walls, rooftop greenhouses, farmers markets and thousands of green jobs based in a burgeoning local food economy.
City council intends the Vancouver of the near future to be a model system of just and sustainable locally-grown food, a city as pretty as it is delicious.
“People will be able to see the fruit of this plan everywhere, when they walk down the street, in schoolyards and community centres, you’ll see it on empty lots and on vertical walls, farms that pick up and move from location to location,” said Coun. Heather Deal. “Food will be grown everywhere.”
We won’t have to wait long to see how it all works out. Most of the 71 recommended actions in the new 150-page document being considered by council on Tuesday are designed to be achieved in the next seven years, by 2020.
“We are taking this gardening issue beyond the realm of hobby or avocation and bringing it firmly into the world of business, health, social justice and food security,” said Deal, council’s liaison to the city’s community-based food policy advisory council. “By creating an integrated plan of action we are really making food central to all of our actions and policy decisions.”
The draft report, titled What Feeds Us, depicts the local food system as a complete loop from food production, processing, storage, distribution and, finally, food waste collection for composting.
“The city is in some ways a food eco-system and we need to consider all aspects of that,” said food policy council co-chair Brent Mansfield. “This document will make food visible and understandable to all the city’s institutions and it describes what has to happen at every level across that eco-system.”
A report published by the RSC says that innovative research in soil science will be fundamental in overcoming the growing threat of global food and fuel crop shortages as the world’s population continues to increase.
Food security is one of the great global challenges of the 21st century. The global population grew to seven billion in 2009. By 2050 it is expected to reach over nine billion.
But the world’s resources to feed all these people are limited. In 1960, one hectare of land produced enough food to feed two people. By 2050, we will require the same amount of land to feed six people.
One answer to meeting these demands lies on the Earth’s surface. Soils will play a central and critical role in delivering enough food and fuel crops to sustain the increasing global population.
Soils are also critical for ensuring the quality of our food, particularly in the face of inclement weather. A recent report on BBC Farming Today said that nutrients available to plants are reduced during periods of heavy rainfall such as those the UK has experienced recently, because they are leached from the soil.
Securing soils for sustainable agriculture - a science led strategy - a joint report by the RSC, the University of Sheffield, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network (ESKTN) - highlights a number of actions that must be taken to ensure that the UK soil research is at the forefront of technological advances in this area.
Securing soils for sustainable agriculture - a science led strategy - a joint report by the RSC, the University of Sheffield, the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) and the Environmental Sustainability Knowledge Transfer Network (ESKTN) - highlights a number of actions that must be taken to ensure that the UK soil research is at the forefront of technological advances in this area.
The report is the outcome of a research strategy workshop that drew on the collective input of experts from universities, national research centres, industry and government. The event was held as part of a NERC-funded soils research project led by the University of Sheffield, with the University of Leeds and the University of Bristol.
Professor Steve Banwart of the University of Sheffield, who co-authored the report, said: “Our research consortium has shown how plants and soil fungi work together to direct the solar energy captured by photosynthesis into the root zone to target and extract specific nutrients from soil minerals.
“Advances like this are paving the way for precision agriculture, where crops and soil are managed together to gain a much more targeted and efficient uptake of nutrients. It’s exactly the type of science that the UK can utilise for new agricultural technology that increases production and reduces the demand for energy and chemical inputs to fields.”
Continue readingFurther reading:
Urban agriculture is the growing of plants and the raising of animals for food and other uses, and related processing and marketing activities, within and around cities and towns. Urban agriculture has received increased attention in the past few years from development organisations and national and local authorities in developing countries. With its multiple functions, urban agriculture plays an important role in urban poverty alleviation and social inclusion, urban food security, urban waste management and urban greening.
Since 1999, partners of the International Network on Urban Agriculture and Food Security (RUAF Foundation) have been playing a crucial role in improving access to information on urban agriculture and in enhancing the capacities of local authorities, NGOs, farmer organisations and other stakeholders regarding local participatory diagnosis and strategic action planning on urban agriculture.
This publication presents the “state of the art” of the development of sustainable urban agriculture and as such indicates progress made since the first major publications on urban agriculture: the UNDP publication “Urban Agriculture”(published in 1996 by Smit et al.) and the DSE publication “Growing Cities, Growing Food: Urban Agriculture on the Policy Agenda”(published in 2000 by Bakker et al). You may order your 460 pages hard copy from IIRR: bookstore@iirr.org | www.iirr.org Please use the previous and next buttons to scroll through the different chapter pages and click on the pdf attachment to read the full chapter.
Increasingly hot summer weather could cause a fall in crop yields over the next two decades unless farming techniques are improved more quickly, scientists at the University have found.
High temperatures are having an increasingly damaging effect on maize (sweetcorn) in France – the largest supplier of the crop to the UK – which may explain a recent slowdown in the trend towards higher yields, according to researchers at the Universities of Leeds, Reading and Exeter.
Improvements in agricultural technology, such as fertilisers and new crop varieties, will need to increase yields by up to 12% by the 2020s to be confident about offsetting future decreases in yield from heat stress.
However, the current rate of improvement, driven by technological innovation, is not quick enough to meet such a high target, says research published today in the journal Global Change Biology.
Professor Andrew Challinor, from the University of Leeds’ School of Eearth & Environment, said: “Feeding a growing population as climate changes is a major challenge, especially since the land available for agricultural expansion is limited. Supplies of the major food crops could be at risk unless we plan for future climates.”
Dr Ed Hawkins, from the National Centre for Atmospheric Science (NCAS) at the University of Reading, said:
“Our research rings alarm bells for future food security. Over the last 50 years, developments in agriculture, such as fertilisers and irrigation, have increased yields of the world’s staple foods, but we’re starting to see a slowdown in yield increases. Our research into maize suggests the increasing frequency of hot days across the world might explain some of this slowdown.
“We expect hot days to become more frequent still, and our work on maize suggests that current advances in agriculture are too slow to offset the expected damage to crops from heat stress in the future.”
The Plant now houses a basement-level hydroponic farm, where the staff grows swiss chard, basil, arugula, and other plants and herbs, which are sold to local markets and cafes. Image: Plant Chicago, Flickr
The 93,500-square foot building in Chicago’s Back of the Yards neighborhood once housed the Peer Foods meatpacking factory. Day after day, men gathered to process slaughtered pigs and turn them into sausage, ham steaks, and other cuts for grocery stores all over the country. When Peer Foods relocated to Indiana in 2006, taking 400 jobs with it, the building sat vacant for years. No one knew what to do with it: The meatpacking industry was gone, and the building would be too expensive to fully retrofit for a new purpose.
But when John Edel, an industrial designer, bought the whole building for just $525,000 in 2010, he had a plan in mind. He would turn the desolate, rundown factory into a thriving vertical farm.
“The building was too rundown for modern manufacturing, but it’s just fine for farming,” he says. “Plants don’t care what floor they’re on.”
He already knew it could be done. His company, Bubbly Dynamics, had previously purchased a derelict paint warehouse and converted it into a sustainable manufacturing plant. Today, that factory is a thriving enterprise, the Chicago Sustainable Manufacturing Center, which houses a diverse range of businesses including a tutoring program, a custom screen printing company, several bike-related businesses, and a metal artist.
Edel wanted to do the same thing with The Plant, but focused specifically around the possibilities offered by food and farming to build a fully sustainable, self-contained business enterprise.
For the last two years, he and his team have been working to bring that vision to life.
The building, renamed The Plant, now houses a basement-level hydroponic farm, where the staff grows swiss chard, basil, arugula, and other plants and herbs, which are sold to local markets and cafes. Next to that, a series of tanks house tilapia fish. The fish waste is used to provide nutrients to the plants. The plants filter out the waste, producing clean water that can then be used to refill the fish tanks. “Each solves the problem of the other,” says Edel.
Detailed analyses of wheat yields around the world show a disconcerting stagnation or collapse in many locations since the heyday of the Green Revolution. Image: Deepak Ray, Institute on the Environment
The Green Revolution has stagnated for key food crops in many regions of the world, according to a study published in the Dec. 18 issue of Nature Communications by scientists with the University of Minnesota’s Institute on the Environment and McGill University in Montreal, Canada.
Led by IonE research fellow Deepak Ray, the study team developed geographically detailed maps of annual crop harvested areas and yields of maize (corn), rice, wheat and soybeans from 1961 to 2008. It found that although virtually all regions showed a yield increase sometime during that period, in 24 to 39 percent of the harvested areas (depending on the crop) yield plateaued or outright declined in recent years. Among the top crop-producing nations, vast areas of two of the most populous – China and India – are witnessing especially concerning stagnation or decline in yield.
“This study clearly delineates areas where yields for important food crops are stagnating, declining, or never improved, as well areas where yields are still rapidly improving,” Ray says. “As a result, it both sounds the alert for where we must shift our course if we are to feed a growing population in the decades to come, and points to positive examples to emulate.”
Interestingly, the researchers found that yields of wheat and rice – two crops that are largely used as food crops, and which supply roughly half of the world’s dietary calories – are declining across a higher percentage of cropland than those of corn and soybean, which are used largely to produce meat or biofuels.
“This finding is particularly troubling because it suggests that we have preferentially focused our crop improvement efforts on feeding animals and cars, as we have largely ignored investments in wheat and rice, crops that feed people and are the basis of food security in much of the world,” said study co-author and IonE director Jonathan Foley, professor and McKnight Presidential Chair in the College of Biological Sciences. “How can we meet the growing needs of feeding people in the future if one-third of our cropland areas, in our most important crops, are not improving in yield any more?”
The paper suggests two actions based on its findings. First, it recommends working to maintain the positive trajectory for the 61 to 76 percent of croplands where yield is still climbing. Second, it encourages crop-producing regions around the world to look at their yield trends and those of others to identify what’s working and what might be improved.
“Previous research suggests that many factors work together to limit yield growth, from cultivation practices to pests to a need for improved seeds,” Ray said. “What this paper does is provide concrete, detailed information policy makers can use to identify regions where yield growth has stagnated or reversed, figure out what limiting factors are at play, then work to turn that trend around.”
