Compost tea (a mixture of recycled organic matter soaked in water), hydroponic living basil, and organic certification are terms that, at first glance, may not have much of a connection to military veterans. Colin Archipley, a decorated Marine sergeant, and his wife Karen however saw the combination as a win-win when they founded the Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training (VSAT) program outside San Diego, California.

A veteran and participant of the Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training program handles living basil at an organic hydroponic farm, which grows plants in water as opposed to soil. The program, started by decorated Marine sergeant Colin Archipley, passes on agricultural knowledge to veterans to not only provide healing through farming but also to support them in starting their own agricultural enterprises.

Many veterans who have served our country have challenges transitioning to civilian life and struggle with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and high unemployment rates. After three tours in Iraq, Colin found his solace working on the Archipley’s newly-purchased, neglected avocado farm, which sat on 3 acres outside of Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base.

When the Archipleys received their first water bill, they determined their farm needed to be more sustainable. They decided to move to a water-efficient hydroponic system (roots placed in nutrient-rich water instead of soil) that reduces water use by up to 90%. They received a loan from the USDA Farm Service Administration to build a larger greenhouse, tripling their production.

They also were certified organic by California-based CCOF Certification Services (accredited and overseen by the USDA National Organic Program, part of USDA’s Agricultural Marketing Service) and used their hydroponic system to grow organic basil, tomatoes, and variety of greens and other herbs. Produce is delivered as living plants (with roots still attached) to local farmers markets and stores, which saves water and retains freshness.

Colin wanted to help other veterans heal their wounds through organic farming—and to use their acquired skills to start agricultural businesses of their own. The VSAT program has partnered with local community and state colleges to offer veterans an intensive six-week course to learn how to grow hydroponic crops from seed to market. Participants then take an exam and present their business plan to potential investors, produce buyers, and human resources personnel. At the end of the course, participants have a solid business plan and the know-how to start their own similar operation.

I was able to attend the business plan presentations and graduation of a recent VSAT class, and it was very inspiring to see what the Archipleys have done–both how they have helped fellow combat veterans transition to civilian life and that they saw organic agriculture as part of that path.

The Veterans Sustainable Agriculture Training Program has helped over 100 military veterans transition to the civilian work force with other locations on the horizon. One memorable graduate is Mike Hanes, a decorated veteran. He went from being homeless and unable to re-engage in civilian life to creating his own organic hot sauce, DANG!!!, which is now for sale at grocery stores around the country.

Based on the last agricultural census, the average American farmer is 57 years of age, and nearly 30 percent of American farmers are over the age of 65. Nearly 45 percent of the military come from a rural background, and USDA is pushing for 100,000 new farmers. We applaud the Archipleys for continuing to serve their country by supporting our heroes and helping to build the next generation of organic farmers.

The Guardian
by Frederick Kaufman

Recent price spikes in global food commodities – most notably the bubbles of 2008 and 2010-11 – have exposed a fundamental fault of economic analysis: although speculation in the world’s food supply has long been suspected, no one has been able to prove it. The world’s most precious resources may have been transformed into a casino for high rollers such as Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase, Barclays and Deutsche Bank, but it’s nearly impossible to figure out who is betting how much.

Consequently, the UN general assembly recently convened a high-level debate on speculation in global food commodity markets. The discussion lasted all day before ending with earnest calls for further study of this important issue. In other words, business as usual.

Afterwards, I caught up with one of the afternoon panelists, Michael Greenberger, a former director of the division of trading and markets at the US Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). During his CFTC tenure, Greenberger supervised exchange traded futures and derivatives, which makes him an expert on just those financial instruments that are bringing chaos to global commodity markets.

Unlike the other panelists who spoke to the general assembly, Greenberger was no longer debating whether or not speculation had skewed the global price of food. Instead, he was trying to figure out how to close down the casino. The Dodd-Frank act – the latest, greatest attempt to regulate the commodity business – has been thoroughly defanged by Wall Street interests.

Greenberger is not only a reformer, but a law school professor at the University of Maryland, and something of a historian. “Dodd-Frank was a corroboration and an endorsement of a principal that Franklin Delano Roosevelt devised in 1934, when the entire derivative market was agricultural,” he said. Back then, farmers were complaining they had no control over the pricing of their product – food – because the commodity exchanges were being overrun by “locals”, the Chicago speculators who went downtown to bet on the price. “As far back as 1892, you have farmers testifying to Congress about this,” said Greenberger.

Roosevelt’s administration came up with a simple solution: position limits. If you were not a participant in the food business – neither a farmer nor a baker – you could trade no more than 5,000 futures contracts. This prescription worked well, and endured until the late 1990s, when position limit exemptions were quietly granted to a number of large investment banks. Wall Street subsequently rushed into commodities, and the world is still reeling.

Commodity markets stand at the base of the $600tn global derivatives business, a generally unregulated miasma of over-the-counter swaps, index fund madness, and Wall Street roulette that ignited the mortgage meltdown, toppled AIG and Lehman Brothers, spurred the global currency crisis, and produced the present sorry state of the global economy, whereby a few chosen hedge fund managers haul in billions of dollars while 1 billion human beings find themselves unable to scrape together enough to eat.

Position limits are a proven dampener on speculative hysteria, and were supposed to be a part of the Dodd-Frank reforms. Gary Gensler, chairman of the CFTC, held hearings on the subject. But as the vote neared, noted Greenberger: “Wall Street overwhelmed the CFTC.”

The upshot is that Dodd-Frank’s position limit rule presently states a speculator can hold up to 25% of the market in global wheat or corn. That may sound like quite a lot of grain, but 25% is an improvement on the previous state of affairs, as estimates suggest today’s grain markets are up to 80% speculative. The new rule would not necessarily stop the futures markets from being controlled by speculative interests, but it would lessen the impact of individual speculative parties, who might be forced to cut back their market positions to the required fraction. The rule would also clarify the previously opaque issue of who holds the most chips in the global grain casino. Nevertheless, spooked by the dread spectre of regulation, bankers sued. As a result, the fate of the CFTC’s position limit rule will be decided in court.

Behind the position limit dispute lies a more profound problem. Even if the CFTC’s new regulations were to be upheld, ubiquitous “over-the-counter” swaps would undermine their effectiveness. “Swaps” is the general term for a wide variety of deals or bets that two financial parties can agree to make, but – unlike the bets financial institutions make on exchanges such as futures markets and stock markets – the size and the nature of the over-the-counter deals are not matters of public information. As a result, over-the-counter swaps enable bankers to camouflage the nature and size of their speculative positions or holdings by means of secret arrangements with other market participants. Before the CFTC can do anything about over-the-counter swaps, they must define the term, which unfortunately they have yet to do. When will the definition appear? “It’s going to be months,” said Greenberger.

All of which leads to the inevitable conclusion that the only way to stop speculation in food commodities is neither high-level debate nor regulation – how quaint and New Dealish – but criminalisation. Indeed, US senator Maria Cantwell and US congressman Ed Markey are now crafting a bill to make gambling on the world’s food supply illegal.

So when can we expect a bill to hit the floor? “They have been working on this for a long time,” said Greenberger.

In other words: not yet.

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – A fast-spreading plague of “super weeds” taking over U.S. farmland will not be stopped easily, and farmers and government officials need to change existing practices if food production is to be protected, industry experts said on Thursday.

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“This is a complex problem,” said weed scientist David Shaw in remarks to a national “summit” of weed experts in Washington to come up with a plan to battle weeds that have developed resistance to herbicides.

Weed resistance has spread to more than 12 million U.S. acres and primarily afflicts key agricultural areas in the U.S. Southeast and the corn and soybean growing areas of the Midwest.

Many of the worst weeds, some of which grow more than six feet and can sharply reduce crop yields, have become resistant to the popular glyphosate-based weed-killer Roundup, as well as other common herbicides.

Monsanto Co’s Roundup worked well for many years. It became prevalent with the commercialization of “Roundup Ready” crops Monsanto developed to tolerate the weedkiller, making it easy for farmers to treat their fields.

But now super weeds have developed a resistance to Roundup, and farmers are scrambling to figure out how to combat their weeds.

“We don’t have that next technology. We have to get back to the fundamentals,” said Shaw, who chairs a task force that is working with the U.S. Department of Agriculture on how to tackle weed resistance problems.

Several farmers spoke out about their struggles at the summit, as did experts from the USDA and crop consultants.

“This is our number one issue,” said Arkansas crop consultant Chuck Farr. “It is a challenge every day, every field.”

Harold Coble, an agromist and weed scientist with the USDA, called the problem of weed resistance a “game changer” and said farmers must become more versatile. Too many have simply been relying on the chemicals for too long, he said.

A joint report from the USDA and the Weed Science Society of America said “a significant proportion of growers are not practicing adequate proactive herbicide resistance management.” Such “indiscriminate” use of herbicides is effectively making the problem worse, year after year.

It will be at least 20 years before any new chemical modes of action are available in the market for farmers to fight weeds with, said Coble.

Many weed experts recommended at least a partial return to limited tillage, which is largely frowned upon because it encourages soil erosion. Some experts recommended use of “cover” crops, planted to cover a field after harvest to stymie weed development while adding nutrients to the soil.

The industry is also looking at the use of multiple herbicide mechanisms with newer and more specific labeling to combat varying weed densitites. Experts discussed using equipment that can collect weeds and weed seed at harvest along with grains, so weed seed can be removed and destroyed.

Because short-term strategies can be costly for farmers, many industry players would like to see government or industry incentives to help producers.

“Why would I want to do something that is going to cost me more and make me do more work,” said Steve Smith, a corn and soybean farmer. “This is what growers are saying.”

Smith is also a member of the Save Our Crops coalition that is fighting a new Dow Chemical proposed herbicide that he and other critics say will be harmful and exacerbate weed resistance over the long term.

Dow is seeking regulatory approval of a newly formulated herbicide built on traditional 2,4-D chemical herbicide that would be marketed in conjunction with genetically altered 2,4-D resistant crops.

Critics say the Dow products can do more harm than help, but the company and supporters say it is at least a short-term answer.

“We need the technology now,” said John Davis, an Ohio corn grower who is helping Dow promote its new 2,4-D products.

The Seattle Times
By Erin Flemming

PCC Natural Markets is unveiling Tuesday a new alternative for dealing with food waste at its Issaquah location.

For the past two years, the local grocery co-op has been working with WISErg, a Washington startup developing a “harvester” machine to convert food waste into liquid fertilizer. All nine PCC locations will carry the fertilizer, a brown liquid the consistency of water.

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Diana Crane, director of sustainability at PCC, said the co-op is testing the device and will soon decide whether to continue the partnership with WISErg.

She said the company was excited to participate in the pilot project.

“There was no downside for us,” she said. Once the harvester is commercially available, she said, “I think people will be beating down their doors.”

After working together at Microsoft, Jose Lugo and Larry LeSueur, co-founders of Issaquah-based WISErg, left in 2005 to independently pursue other projects. They both ended up looking into the possibilities of green projects involving anaerobic digestion — essentially composting without air.

In 2009, they reconnected through a mutual friend and formed WISErg, in the hopes of creating a new way to deal with food waste.

Similar anaerobic digesters have been used in agriculture and wastewater-treatment plants for years, but Lugo and LeSueur said they saw a need for this kind of system in an urban environment.

At first, the two co-founders financed their startup costs with some help from family and friends. Last year, WISErg obtained more funding from Microsoft alumni and Northwest Energy Angels to get the harvester up and running.

Brian Arbogast, an investor with Northwest Energy Angels who knew LeSueur from Microsoft, said he sees a lot of potential in the WISErg business model.

“The idea that you can mine urban waste and get valuable stuff out of it is very compelling,” he said. “I love the fact that they’re taking something that is a cost to companies … and then turning it into a product that is of high value.”

The WISErg harvester is made up of two large metal structures, the food-waste loading station and the processing unit. Employees of PCC dump organic materials into the loading system, where the material is weighed, ground up and transported into a silver structure resembling a silo.

In the silo, nutrients and liquid are extracted from the organic matter. The resulting slurry — which Lugo said is about the consistency of chili — is transported about every 10 days to WISErg’s processor.

There, it is broken down through anaerobic digestion, and goes through a chemical-stabilization process to create the liquid fertilizer.

One of the formulations has been approved by the Washington State Department of Agriculture for use in organic farming. It starts at $8 for a 32-ounce container.

The other formulation, with a higher level of nitrogen, has to pass national certification for use in organic farming, which could happen this year, said Tim Robie, organic-fertilizer engineer for WISErg. This variety starts at $12 for 32 ounces.

LeSueur and Lugo said their top priority when developing the harvester was simple: minimizing the nasty odor that comes with decomposing food.

LeSueur said they scrapped an earlier model of the machine because it couldn’t be serviced without an odor problem, and switched to the enclosed design.

“No matter how pretty or functional the system is, if it smells bad, nobody wants that in there,” Lugo said.

The harvesters will cost from $40,000 to $55,000 per store, plus $350 or more in monthly service costs, according to WISErg, which projects purchasers will get a return on their investment within seven years.

LeSueur said he hopes the idea of a “full-circle” waste cycle will appeal to other large producers of food waste, and that they are open to lease and purchase options for the harvesters at this point.

“What we realized very quickly is that we’re fortunate to be in the state of Washington and the Pacific Northwest because culturally people are receptive to the concept of composting or doing something different with this organic waste other than landfill,” LeSueur said. “But … they’re so focused on the traditional composting that they don’t necessarily see the value of it.”

When WISErg approached PCC, the store saw the “full-circle” benefits beyond just saving on compost pickup.

PCC sends its food waste to the Cedar Grove compost facility, but the sheer volume is difficult to manage, Crane said.

Brandon Baker, director of operations for WISErg, said the Issaquah PCC’s food waste, including organic material from its juice bar, totals approximately 600 to 800 pounds a week.

“It was hard for us to imagine that we were creating so much waste and not doing anything productive with it,” Crane said.

Debbi Montgomery, the Issaquah store’s director, said she’s excited to carry the fertilizer and also hopes to reduce compost pickup from three times a week to one.

She said the harvester has been received well by store staff. “They’re really pumped about it.”

Erin Flemming: 206-464-2718 or eflemming@seattletimes.com

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Organic and other agro-ecological farming systems can help the world feed itself, but in addition to changing our farming systems, we need to eat differently, waste less food and change how we feed our livestock. These are the main conclusions from a recent Soil Association report, Feeding the Future.

Today we produce enough food to satisfy the nutritional requirements of every person on the plant. Yet nearly 1 billion people are hungry and another billion are malnourished, most of them living in poor rural areas of the Global South. At the same time, at least a billion people are overweight or obese, mostly resident in richer Western countries.

Predictions indicate that by 2050 there will be 9 billion people in the world. Some have argued that, in order to accommodate for this, we would need to increase our food production by 70%. This argument rests on two assumptions; (i) that there will be no reduction in the consumption patterns of the Global North, (ii) and that the current Western diet, involving much higher quantities of meat and dairy products, will spread to the Global South. But there is another way.

A different system

Right now, 35–40% of all cereals produced worldwide are fed to livestock, and this could rise to 50% by 2050 if meat consumption continues to rise as predicted. If all cereals were fed to people rather than animals, we could feed an extra 3.5 billion people. If meat and dairy consumption were held at levels reached in 2000, 400 million tonnes of cereals would be available for human consumption, enough to feed an additional 1.2 billion people in 2050. Replacing meat mainly fed on grains, with beef, lamb and mutton from animals grazing on grass, would not only provide better quality meat, but also reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Reducing food waste is also crucial. Globally, around one third of the food produced for human consumption is either lost or wasted. The majority of this wastage occurs in Europe and North America and food wastage low income countries is mainly caused by financial and technical limitations in harvesting, storage, infrastructure and packaging.

Scientists have modelled ways to feed 9 billion people in 2050 on healthy diets, in an environmentally sustainable way. These models have shown that waste reduction could reduce food demand by 25% in richer countries. A further study found that organic agriculture could feed a world population of 9.2 billion in 2050 if relatively modest diets were adopted and equality in food distribution was assured. These scenarios assume that countries like the UK will both produce food differently and eat differently. It is clear, for both environmental and health reasons, that diets must change.

Find out more

Our report ‘Feeding the Future’ provides a summary of the latest research on how organic food can feed the world, while our report ‘Telling Porkies’ looks in detail at claims around the level of future food production needed.

The previous article was written by the British Council’s Green Ambassadors who took part in the closing Earth Debate Dinner, details of which are in article 2. In order to inject international perspectives into the Earth Debates, British Council invited forty delegates from countries around the world, to take part in an all day workshop on Rio+20 and the Earth Debate. Participants discussed the topics covered in the Earth Debates series – adding experiences from their countries – and prepared short statements, which they presented to their tables at the dinner in the evening. The following four articles include short insights from some of the Ambassadors on the aspects of a green economy they believe to be most important.

The above article was written by a British Council Green Ambassador who took part in the closing Earth Debate Dinner, details of which are in article 2. To inject international perspectives into the Earth Debates, British Council invited forty delegates from countries around the world, to take part in an all day workshop on Rio+20 and the Earth Debate. Participants discussed the topics covered in the Earth Debates series – adding experiences from their countries – and prepared short statements, which they presented to their tables at the dinner in the evening. The following four articles include short insights from some of the Ambassadors on the aspects of a green economy they believe to be most important.

MONTPELIER, Vt. — A committed “locavore,” Robin McDermott once struggled to stock her kitchen with food grown within 100 miles of her Vermont home. She once drove 70 miles to buy beans and ordered a bulk shipment of oats from the neighboring Canadian province of Quebec.

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Six years later, she doesn’t travel far: She can buy chickens at the farmers market, local farms grow a wider range of produce, and her grocery store stocks meat, cheese and even flour produced in the area. A bakery in a nearby town sells bread made from Vermont grains, and she’s found a place to buy locally made sunflower oil.

Nationwide, small farms, farmers markets and specialty food makers are popping up and thriving as more people seek locally produced foods. More than half of consumers now say it’s more important to buy local than organic, according to market research firm Mintel, and Deputy Agriculture Secretary Kathleen Merrigan called the local food movement “the biggest retail food trend in my adult lifetime.”

But with no official definition for what makes a food local, the government can’t track sales. And consumers don’t always know what they are buying. A supermarket tomato labeled “local” may have come from 10, 100 or more miles away.

Strict locavores stick to food raised within a certain radius of their home — 50, 100 or 250 miles. Others may allow themselves dried spices, coffee or chocolate.

“I don’t treat it as a religion,” said Valerie Taylor, of Montgomery, Ohio, who tries to eat locally when she can but won’t go without a salad in the winter or an avocado if she wants it. She estimated 95 percent of the meat and 70 percent of the produce she eats is local in the summer, but not in the winter.

McDermott has eased up after eating locally during a Vermont winter, which meant a lot of meat and root vegetables. She now allows herself olive oil and citrus and in winter, greens.

“In 2006, I felt like a Vermonter of years past,” she said. “You know, I was going down into my root cellar and saying, ‘I guess it will be potatoes again.’”

Two of the more common standards used by locavores are food produced within 100 miles or within the same state that it’s consumed. A new locavore index ranked Vermont as the top state in its commitment to raising and eating locally grown food based on the number of farmers markets and community supported agriculture farms, where customers pay a lump sum up front and receive weekly deliveries of produce and other foods.

Vermont has 99 farmers markets and 164 CSAs, with a population of fewer than 622,000, according to the 2012 Strolling of the Heifers Locavore Index, which relies on U.S. Department of Agriculture and census figures. Iowa, Montana, Maine and Hawaii rounded out the top five.

But the bottom of the index raises questions. Florida, which produces much of the nation’s citrus, strawberries and tomatoes, was in the bottom five with only 146 farmers markets and 193 CSAs for 18.5 million people.

“The whole purpose of this is really to stimulate the conversation about locavorism, which fits into the mission of Strolling of the Heifers,” said Martin Cohn, a spokesman for the group, which works to save farms in New England.

USDA spokesman Aaron Lavallee said the definition of local varies from state to state and region to region depending on the season. In small New England states, food from 100 miles away could be from another state, while food could travel hundreds of miles in Texas or Montana and still be within the borders.

In cases where produce is labeled “local,” with no point of origin, he advised consumers to ask sellers where it was raised.

The locavore movement grew out of consumer concerns about how and where food is produced, following episodes of contamination in spinach, meat and other foods. People committed to it buy locally produced foods to support farmers, because the food is fresher and to reduce the environmental effect of trucking it across country.

But there’s more to it, said Jessica Prentice, a San Francisco Bay-area chef who coined the term locavore.

“Really what it’s about is moving into a kind of food system where you’re connected to the source of your food,” Prentice said. “You’re buying from people that you know or can meet and you’re buying food grown in a place that you can easily drive to and see.

“This is more about creating an oasis really in the context of a globalized food system that’s completely anonymous,” she said.

But James McWilliams, a Texas State University professor who has written a book critiquing the local food movement, said people often think it solves more problems than it does.

“There’s this sense that because a food is local there’s automatically nothing wrong with it, and the fact is even on a local level certain foods are more energy intensive to produce than others,” said McWilliams, who is a vegan. “Specifically, animal-based products, even on a local level, while they may be more efficient, pound for pound are still significantly more energy intensive to produce than plant-based products.”

The local food movement also doesn’t address problems with agriculture on a global scale or the expected increase in demand for food over the next 40 to 50 years, he said.

“I guess the pragmatic side of me thinks well, these locavore values are great and they work really well in places such as Vermont, but they don’t work everywhere,” he said. “And it’s not a universally shared ethic.”

The locavore movement has helped create jobs, particularly in rural areas hard hit by the recession, Merrigan said. Orly Munzing, executive director of Strolling of the Heifers, said it also builds community. She has seen its benefits in Brattleboro, Vt., where her group hosts a popular annual parade inspired by Spain’s running of the bulls, and also at a farmers market in New York City.

“It’s amazing to see these people I’ve watched walking on Second Avenue … they don’t even say hello to each other,” she said. “But I see the same people at that little farmers market, all of a sudden they turn into different people. So it creates a community that is very needed.”

McDermott said being a locavore has changed how she and her husband eat. They used to have steak often; now it’s only once a year. She grows garlic, onions, potatoes and carrots and freezes large amounts of tomatoes each year.

While local foods tend to cost more than those mass produced, McDermott figures she still spends less. She and her husband buy half a pig with a friend each year and use most of the animal. They eat lesser cuts, making stews and braising meat to make it tender.

“We eat low on the hog,” she said.

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Oregon has long been on the forefront of the local food movement but what started as a trend on Portland menus has grown into a global economic shift that has the attention of creative entrepreneurs and top-shelf investors.

Oregon’s head start in thinking about local food, sustainable agriculture and land-use planning has positioned the state to benefit from this new age of agriculture finance.

That new age is earmarked by a variety of approaches to finance. One example is the rise of a new class of impact investors — investment organizations looking to collect a return that delivers not only financial results, but also environmental and social good — has trained its focus on food. And for good reason.

Read the full article online at SustainbleBusinessOregon.com.

Like a good buffet, Nature’s recent meta-analysis comparing the productivity of industrial and organic agriculture offered something for every taste.

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For enthusiasts of large-scale, chemical-intensive agriculture, there was this headline finding: Yields on organic farming—the amount of crop produced per acre—are on average 25 percent lower than those of industrial farming.

And for biodiversity fans like me, the study had a caveat: Most of organic’s so-called yield penalty lies in grain crops like wheat; for fruit and some vegetables, organic ag is nearly (but not quite) as productive as its chemical-laced counterpart.

It was interesting to see how the story played around the web. Time’s Bryan Walsh, who has been a critic of Big Food in the past, saw the study as the occasion to stop worrying and learn to love industrial agriculture—or at least marvel at its efficiency. “Whole Food Blues: Why Organic Agriculture May Not Be So Sustainable,” declared Walsh’s headline. “Conventional farming gets more and more crop per sq. foot of cultivated land—over 170 bushels of corn per acre in Iowa, for example—which can mean less territory needs to be converted from wilderness to farmland,” he wrote. (Parke Wilde of US Food Policy has a good rejoinder to Walsh.)

Meanwhile, according to veteran New York Times climate reporter Andy Revkin, the Nature study actually makes a strong case for it. The paper points to a “hybrid path in agriculture,” Revkin wrote, one “incorporating both industrial-style production and organic practices where they make sense.” Given how relatively little land is devoted to organic ag both globally and here in the United States, Revkin’s reading would mean significantly expanding organic ag.

What do I take away from the Nature paper? I think it’s too narrow in scope to offer many insights at all.

First of all, it’s important to understand what the researchers did. They rounded up all the rigorously documented studies, both domestic and global, they could find that compared organic yields and conventional yields (66 studies met their criteria) and averaged them out. The only focus was gross output per acre—no consideration of, say, ecological trouble like the plight of honeybees and other pollinators in a sea of pesticide-laced crops, or resources consumed, like synthetic nitrogen fertilizer, which is made with natural gas. So, despite what Walsh wrote, the study didn’t really tell us much about the relative efficiency of the systems beyond output per chunk of land. Viewed through the study’s yield-per-acre lens, industrial agriculture looks hyperefficient, and organic like a laggard.

And indeed, big farms in Iowa—the example Time’s Walsh pointed to—do produce mountains of corn per acre. But dig a little deeper, and the picture muddies. The authors note that conventional ag produces high yields through abundant use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer. But they don’t account for the fact that nitrogen runoff from farms generate also contributes to a massive annual dead zone that snuffs out a swath of what should be a highly productive fishery in the Gulf of Mexico. Such externalities, as economists call them, are not accounted for in the study.

Moreover, the study’s fixation on yield puts a shiny gloss on a system that actually wastes huge amounts of resources. Let’s take corn again. According to the National Corn Growers Association (NCGA), more than a quarter of US farmland, around 90 million acres, is typically planted in corn, more than any other crop. US corn agriculture is indeed productive—our farmers churn out about 40 percent of the globe’s entire corn crop each year. If the aim was to use those calories efficiently, we’d focus on consuming them directly—in, say, the form of corn bread, polenta, tortillas, or cereal.

How much do we consume directly of this bountiful crop? According to NCGA’s figures from 2010, less than 2 percent. More than 40 percent of it goes into the mouths of animals we then consume, in the process squandering huge amounts of resources. According to Earth Policy Institute, it takes seven kilograms of grain to produce a kilogram of beef—the rest is lost to the huge parts of the carcass we don’t consume. Pork and chicken are more efficient, but it still requires four kilograms and two kilograms, respectively, of grain to produce a kilogram of their meat.

Another third of the corn crop or so goes to ethanol, bypassing our stomachs and gushing into our gas tanks instead (and delivering little or no net energy in the process). Nearly 20 percent is exported to other countries, mainly as livestock feed. The rest goes into products like high-fructose corn syrup and other sweeteners—leaving, again, just 2 percent for direct consumption.

Keep in mind, as you ponder the frivolous uses to which we put our biggest crop, that US corn is a massive user of agrichemicals. Using gross yield as a lens to judge the efficiency of our corn crop is like gauging the health of a steroid-addled bodybuilder by measuring his biceps.

Moreover, by focusing on yield, the authors presume that maximizing production should be the chief goal for ag policymakers. But as the eminent agriculture development expert Hans Herren, president of the Millennium Institute, told me, the globe’s farms are already producing 4,600 calories per day—enough in gross terms to support a population twice as large as the current one.

“We don’t need to grow more food, we need to shift what we grow, where we grow it, and who grows it,” Herren told me. He said that in places like Africa, East Asia, and South America, crop yields could be doubled “almost overnight” if farmers had the training and infrastructure to proper organic and/or low-input farming. Their crops yields might still lag behind, say, those of industrial-scale corn farmers in Iowa. “But they wouldn’t need all of those inputs [like fertilizer and pesticides], and they’d produce more than enough food,” he said. As for the United States and Europe, “they would do well to grow less food and focus more on things like improving quality and building soil.”

And even in terms of gross yield per acre, the Nature study might be misleading. Matthew Dillon of Seed Matters, an expert on organic seeds, reminded me that seeds play a huge role in determining yields. Conventional farmers use seed varieties that are well adapted to great lashings of synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, and irrigation water, bolstered by decades and billions of dollars in research, much of it publicly funded. The availability and quality of seeds bred for organic farming is improving, but organic seed research remains in its infancy. “Most organic farmers are [still] using seed bred for conventional systems, or seed that has not been improved at all,” Dillon wrote.

Dillon pointed me to research from a team at Washington State University looking at the yield effect of using seeds adapted to organic agriculture. The study authors looked at wheat—a crop that the Nature paper identified as one that badly lags in yield for organic producers. They found organically managed fields planted with adapted seeds delivered yields as high as 31 percent over similar fields planted in unadapted seeds. Their conclusion:

With crop cultivars bred in and adapted to the unique conditions inherent in organic systems, organic agriculture will be better able to realize its full potential as a high-yielding alternative to conventional agriculture.

This raises a key issue: the paucity of funds we invest in organic research. According to the latest numbers I’ve seen, 4 percent of the food consumed in the United States—and 11 percent of the fruits and vegetables—is organic. How much of the USDA’s research budget is devoted to organic research, including projects like developing proper organic seed lines? Less than 1 percent, the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition’s Ferd Hoefner recently told me. The other 99 percent goes to industrial ag—yet another de facto public subsidy to the agrichemical industry.

I fear that a lot of policy makers and pundits will glance at the Nature study and conclude that at least the agricultural part of our food system isn’t broken and doesn’t need fixing. They’re wrong.

Copyright (c) 123RF Stock Photos

Organic sales are up in Washington state, but the number of acres grown organically is shrinking, a new survey shows.

In the survey, David Granatstein, sustainable ag specialist at Washington State University, found that even as organic farmgate sales increased 16 percent to $244.6 million for 2010, Washington had 12 percent fewer acres in organic production in 2011.

“This is about farmers managing their own risk,” he said. In Eastern Washington, dryland organic farming presents many difficulties, and some growers are switching to conventional wheat production because “it’s more of a guaranteed thing.”

Nationwide, organic food sales have continued to grow, both in farmgate value and in market share, during the recession.

Organic sales in 2011 grew by 9.4 percent over the previous year, with the greatest increase in fresh produce, according to the Organic Trade Association. In 2010, organic food sales in the U.S. reached 4 percent of all food sales, up from 3.7 percent in 2009.

Granatstein said he credits the continuing trend in part to consumers buying less processed food and eating more at home.

“People adjusted their habits during the recession, but they didn’t leave out organic because it had become part of their lives,” he said.

Also, he said, the premium — the price differential between organic foods and their conventional counterparts — has shrunk in some products.

Tilth Producers of Washington board president Diane Dempster agreed some premiums have decreased, especially as larger companies have increased their acreage.

“In some crops, say carrots, with their high weeding costs, those costs haven’t gone down, but in the salad mix industry they are a lot more competitive,” she said.

The other side of the coin is making organic production profitable.

Severine von Tscharner Fleming, founder of the young farmers group Greenhorns, said organic farming attracts startup growers because it is more profitable per acre than conventional farming.

Direct sales is the key to success, she said. “The venue of sale is more critical than the price point. It’s all about which part of that retail price you’re able to capture as producer.”

Starting small makes success possible, she said.

Granatstein said it’s predictable that organic production will always ebb and flow.

The three-year period of getting land certified organic “makes for a less-smooth transition,” he said. “There’s the risk of getting out too early, and it takes a long time to get back in.”

Another trend that Granatstein called “an amazing statistic:” Farms with sales of more than $1 million per year account for 56 percent of organic sales in Washington. The smallest 30 percent of organic farms, in contrast, contribute about 1 percent of the economic output.

Move over Pink Slime, now there’s Meat Glue. Restaurants and fancy chefs know it as transglutaminase, an enzyme that permanently bonds two pieces of flesh when pressed together. Examples are imitation crab meat, chicken nuggets, and filet mignon.

That pricey filet mignon dinner for sale at a posh restaurant could just be a patty of meat scraps or stew meat pieces pressed together and held in place with a powdery chemical known in the industry as “meat glue”.

Gizmodo.com reports that restaurants know that the “glue” which was originally made from livestock blood is now cultivated from bacterial cultures. And it’s an idea that catching fire. Just last week, almost every country in the European Union voted yes to the use of transglutaminase although some consumer groups in countries like Sweden are aghast at using it, calling it “meat make-up”.

Meat glue is no secret to the dining industry. In fact, it is used liberally by big hotels, catered events, and restaurant chains, anywhere that bulk amounts of filet mignon are served. There are some restaurants now able to give away a Surf and Turf plate for just $8.99. That’s because with the glue, $4-a-pound stew meat, which has to set in the refrigerator for 24 hours to meld, now looks like a $25-a-pound prime filet.

The Learning Channel reports that TG (transglutaminase) is really an enzyme that catalyzes covalent bonds between free amine groups in a protein, like lysine, and gamma-caroxminid groups, like glutamine. These bonds are permanent and cannot be degraded once the food item has been formed.

There are dangers associated with eating it. Technorati.com quotes Endocrinologist Dr. Bart Duell who says it is very important that fused meat be cooked to at least 165 degrees, or to well-done. However, the problem is that most people who eat a filet mignon want it cooked rare or medium. The doctor says if that’s what is ordered, the insides of the fused meat could offer diners various food-borne infections.
Adding insult to injury, restaurants are not required to tell diners that they’re eating glued meat.

Supermarket products like sausages, crab meat, yogurt and cheese will probably have the words “transglutaminase,” “formed” or “reformed” in their ingredient list. But in a restaurant, there is really only one way to learn that the meat or the fish has been glued. If you look very carefully, you may be lucky enough to spot a slight seam where the pieces were joined together.

Read more: http://www.digitaljournal.com/article/324114#ixzz1tvAkV3OB