…an alternative food culture is emerging. We now know that the industrial food system has been at least partly responsible for the deterioration of our rural communities. At the same time, there is a growing interest in moving back into rural areas and reconnecting with some aspects of that quality of life. As energy costs spiral upward, more urban dwellers may migrate to rural communities to produce some of their own food and enjoy the quality of life that comes from being more intimately connected with nature. Richard Heinberg calls this the “reruralization” of America, which he sees as the “dominant social trend of the twenty-first century.”
The problem in the United States is not that we’re not producing enough food. It’s a problem of food access, and it’s a problem of food price. To me this represents the failure of the current industrial ag system. I think that what’s going to happen is that as oil prices rise, all commodities that are relatively heavy, with a relatively low unit value, we’re going to start producing for ourselves. That is the ultimate problem with the industrial commodity ag system right now, that this massive buying and selling at a national and a global level is just going to fall apart economically because foodstuffs don’t make sense to ship thousands of miles.
It doesn’t take high-level math to realize if we’re serious about averting the climate crisis, we need to add the food chain to our conversation. (Of course, we should be talking about agriculture’s impact on the environment for a host of other reasons, too. Agriculture is the world’s single largest user of land and water, using up 70 percent of the world’s freshwater resources every year. Agriculture is also responsible for widespread air and water pollution and agricultural chemical runoff that causes aquatic dead zones around the world. At last count, there are more than 400, including one in the Gulf of Mexico that swells every year to a size three times larger than the BP oil spill.
Over the next twenty years the US and the world will need to transition from an industrial agriculture model to one based on permaculture and more organic, labor intensive approaches to growing food. Oil is going to decline, meaning that diesel fuels to run tractors and combines will become increasingly costly. And natural gas, meaning fertilizers, will also go into decline. The era of agribusiness is coming to a close sooner than anybody might have imagined. And we are not prepared for what follows.
A federal district court judge revoked the government’s approval of genetically engineered sugar beets Friday, saying that the Agriculture Department had not adequately assessed the environmental consequences before approving them for commercial cultivation. The decision, by Judge Jeffrey S. White of Federal District Court in San Francisco, appears to effectively ban the planting of the genetically modified sugar beets, which make up about 95 percent of the crop, until the Agriculture Department prepares an environmental impact statement and approves the crop again, a process that might take a couple of years.
WHY Hunger has released a brand new online film called “The Food and Climate Connection: From Heating the Planet to Healing It,” that highlights the impact of today’s global food system on the climate and how a community-based food movement around the world is bringing to life a way of farming and eating that’s better for our bodies and the planet. Featuring interviews with farmers, community leaders, and sustainability advocates, the film highlights how the industrial food system is among the greatest contributors to global warming and how sustainable farming practices can pose a powerful solution to the crisis.
We need new strategies for agriculture that emphasize efficient nutrient use in order to lower production costs and minimize negative environmental effects. The trouble is, the best soils on the best landscapes are already being farmed. Much of the future expansion of agriculture will be onto marginal lands where the risk of irreversible degradation under annual grain production is high. As these areas become degraded, expensive chemical, energy, and equipment inputs will become less effective and much less affordable.
…In a town where you can’t swing a reusable canvas shopping bag without hitting a restaurant touting its locavore credentials, Forage and its talented young chef, Jason Kim, have managed to take the concept of “locally grown” to a new extreme. The restaurant’s Home Growers Circle allows Los Angeles residents to trade produce from their backyard plots in exchange for credits at the popular restaurant.
…As I’ve said before, I don’t yet consider myself a farmer, but I’ll use myself as an example anyway. I have a demanding full-time job that I love, and I often spend my evenings and weekends tending to and experimenting with the things we’re growing. Someday we’ll get to the point where we have enough products to start selling them in addition to eating them. But will we have time to grow them and spend so many hours a week trying to find customers for them?
…If we could double, triple, or quadruple the organic carbon content of soils in the decades ahead, the benefits would be incredible. The productivity of the land would climb and soils’ ability to hold and attract moisture would increase dramatically. The ability of the land to support economic activities would diversify and expand. If the scale of the soil-creation project was large enough, then soil building, as much as any other program currently being considered, could help lower atmospheric carbon dioxide and create a more stable climate.
