BBC News  Science and Environment

Food and farming policies ‘need total rethink’

By Claire Marshall BBC News       October 5, 2017

  Image copyright SPL Image caption The world needs to be fed but in a more sustainable way, says the CiWF

Can farming and food production be made less damaging to the planet?

A big meeting in London will look at how reforms could help halt species extinction, meet climate goals, limit the spread of antibiotic resistance and improve animal welfare.

The organizers of the Extinction and Livestock Conference say diverse interests will be represented.

They include multinational food corporations, native breed farmers, neurologists and naturalists.

McDonalds, Tesco and Compass will be rubbing shoulders with those from the Sustainable Food Trust, Quorn and WWF. The 500 delegates come from more than 30 countries.

Their wide interests illustrate the complex and difficult issues arising from global livestock production.

‘Catastrophic impacts’

The two-day conference is being organized by Compassion in World Farming (CiWF).

The campaigning organization warns that “there will be catastrophic impacts for life on Earth unless there is a global move away from intensive farming”.

The world is on track to lose two-thirds of its wildlife by the end of this decade, largely because habitats have been destroyed to produce food for humans.

There has been a rise in so-called “superbugs” linked to the use of antibiotics in farmed animals. And methane emissions from livestock have made a significant contribution to climate change.

CiWF CEO Philip Lymbery said: “Livestock production, the environment, wildlife conservation and human health are all interlinked, so it’s vital that experts from each of these fields work together to come up with practical solutions to stop this before it’s too late.”

CiWF believes that there should be a total rethink of food and farming policies, enshrined in the framework of a UN Convention.

The aim would be to properly integrate objectives such as food security, climate change, animal welfare and human health – so one isn’t pursued at the expense of the other.

Mr Lymbery added: “Many people are aware that wild animals such as penguins, elephants and jaguars are threatened by extinction. However, few know that livestock production, fuelled by consumer demand for cheap meat, is one of the biggest drivers of species extinction and biodiversity loss on the planet.”

Image copyright CiWF Image caption Future farming must work with Nature, not against it, says Philip Lymbery

Award-winning writer and activist Raj Patel from the University of Texas is speaking at the conference.

He said: “The footprint of global agriculture is vast. Industrial agriculture is absolutely responsible for driving deforestation, absolutely responsible for pushing industrial monoculture, and that means it is responsible for species loss.

“We’re losing species we have never heard of, those we’ve yet to put a name to and industrial agriculture is very much at the spear-tip of that. Conferences are for forging the alliances and building the movement that will change the world.”

Also attending is Martin Palmer, secretary-general of the Alliance of Religions and Conservation.

He said: “Our current food system is not about a healthy, sustainable world of food but about excess, greed and foolishness disguised as ‘market forces’.

“It treats the natural world not as something we are part of and therefore should treasure, but as a larder we can raid and somehow hope it gets filled again.

“But the truth is, it won’t! As a result of this conference I would hope that all the key players – including the great faiths – would find a place at the table and together, each in their own distinctive way, will be able to inspire and guide us towards a better, fairer world.”

TriplePundit….people, planet, profit

Mars Inc. Promises $1 Billion Investment in Climate Change and Sustainable Supply Chain

by Leon Kaye, Climate and Environment        September 7, 2017

Mars & M&Ms North American Headquarters  J Stephen Conn, Flickr

As the current presidential administration seeks to reverse all and any policies enacted during the Obama years, businesses have made it clear that they will fill in the vacuum, whether the problems are related to immigration, race relations or climate change. The questions that arise, of course, include: just how big are these challenges and are they even remotely achievable?

To that end, Grant Reid, CEO of the food giant Mars Inc., has stepped into the climate debate with a warning to the business community that turning away from the Paris global climate agreement and United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been “nowhere near enough.” Reid made his comments as business and government leaders arrive in New York for the UN’s General Assembly and Climate Week.

Reid and Mars say they are backing up their words with action as the company promises to invest approximately $1 billion in its “Sustainable in a Generation Plan.” The program lasers in on three areas where the $33 billion says it can foster the changes Reid says are necessary on some of the world’s largest challenges, as defined by the SDGs. In sum, Mars says its evolved sustainability agenda is about people, the planet and . . . people’s health.

When it comes to the planet, Mars’ focus on environmental sustainability is hardly new. In recent years, the company insists it has bolstered its anti-deforestation policy, while  its United Kingdom operations reportedly run 100 percent on clean energy technologies such as wind power. On this side of the pond, Mars says its renewables portfolio in the U.S. is now enough to offset the company’s power needs to make all of its M&M’s in the U.S. And in the next several years, Mars says it will focus even more on issues such as climate action, water stewardship and land management. Furthermore, the company has a long-term goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions across its entire value chain by 67 percent by 2050 – a considerable expansion of its GHG goals made in previous years.

Like any multinational, Mars has a complicated supply chain that crosses many borders. The company said it is working on fine-tuning the traceability of many of its ingredients, including palm oil and cacao. Now Mars says it will build upon its efforts to improve the lives of smallholder farmers by including one million people in its long term plan to boost incomes, improve its human rights performance and open up more opportunities for women. Examples of this work include the launch of the Livelihoods Fund for Family Farming to accelerate sustainability and poverty reduction across its supply chains as well as the Farmer Income Lab, which the company describes as a “think-do tank” focused on eradicating smallholder poverty.

Finally, Mars is working on widening its portfolio of more nourishing foods. Its “Nourishing Wellbeing” program seeks to integrate science, innovation and marketing in an attempt to reach out to billions of people – and incidentally, their pets as well. This builds upon the company’s efforts on what it says are a focus on food safety and security.

In a public statement, Barry Parkin, Chief Sustainability and Health and Wellbeing Officer of Mars said:

“We know we cannot grow and prosper unless the planet, people and communities on which we rely are healthy and thriving. Doing what’s right, not just doing better, is at the very core of our new plan. It’s about pushing the boundaries and extending our bold ambitions across our extended supply chain. When we do that, and when others join us, only then will we have the greatest impact.”

Based in Fresno, California, Leon Kaye is a business writer and strategic communications specialist. He has also been featured in The Guardian, Sustainable Brands and CleanTechnica. When he has time, he shares his thoughts on his own site, GreenGoPost.com.

EcoWatch:

The Regenerators: A better way to farm.

Beyond Organic: How Regenerative Farming Can Save Us From Global Catastrophe

Ronnie Cummins     June 4, 2017  

A growing corps of organic, climate, environmental, social justice and peace activists are promoting a new world-changing paradigm that can potentially save us from global catastrophe. The name of this new paradigm and movement is regenerative agriculture, or more precisely regenerative food, farming and land use.

Regenerative agriculture and land use incorporates the traditional and indigenous best practices of organic farming, animal husbandry and environmental conservation. Regeneration puts a central focus on improving soil health and fertility (recarbonizing the soil), increasing biodiversity, and qualitatively enhancing forest health, animal welfare, food nutrition and rural (especially small farmer) prosperity.

The basic menu for a regeneration revolution is to unite the world’s 3 billion rural farmers, ranchers and herders with several billion health, environmental and justice-minded consumers to overturn “business as usual” and embark on a global campaign of cooperation, solidarity and regeneration.

According to food activist Vandana Shiva, “Regenerative agriculture provides answers to the soil crisis, the food crisis, the health crisis, the climate crisis and the crisis of democracy.”

So how can regenerative agriculture do all these things: increase soil fertility; maximize crop yields; draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere and sequester it in the soils, plants and trees to re-stabilize the climate and restore normal rainfall; increase soil water retention; make food more nutritious; reduce rural poverty; and begin to pacify the world’s hotspots of violence?

First, let’s look at what Michael Pollan, the U.S.’s most influential writer on food and farming, has to say about the miraculous regenerative power of Mother Nature and enhanced photosynthesis:

Consider what happens when the sun shines on a grass plant rooted in the earth. Using that light as a catalyst, the plant takes atmospheric CO2, splits off and releases the oxygen, and synthesizes liquid carbon–sugars, basically. Some of these sugars go to feed and build the aerial portions of the plant we can see, but a large percentage of this liquid carbon—somewhere between 20 and 40 percent—travels underground, leaking out of the roots and into the soil. The roots are feeding these sugars to the soil microbes—the bacteria and fungi that inhabit the rhizosphere—in exchange for which those microbes provide various services to the plant … Now, what had been atmospheric carbon (a problem) has become soil carbon, a solution—and not just to a single problem, but to a great many problems.

Besides taking large amounts of carbon out of the air—tons of it per acre when grasslands [or cropland] are properly managed … that process at the same time adds to the land’s fertility and its capacity to hold water. Which means more and better food for us…

This process of returning atmospheric carbon to the soil works even better when ruminants are added to the mix. Every time a calf or lamb shears a blade of grass, that plant, seeking to rebalance its “root-shoot ratio,” sheds some of its roots. These are then eaten by the worms, nematodes, and microbes—digested by the soil, in effect, and so added to its bank of carbon. This is how soil is created: from the bottom up … For thousands of years we grew food by depleting soil carbon and, in the last hundred or so, the carbon in fossil fuel as well. But now we know how to grow even more food while at the same time returning carbon and fertility and water to the soil.

A 2015 article in The Guardian summarizes some of the most important practices of regenerative agriculture:

Regenerative agriculture comprises an array of techniques that rebuild soil and, in the process, sequester carbon. Typically, it uses cover crops and perennials so that bare soil is never exposed, and grazes animals in ways that mimic animals in nature. It also offers ecological benefits far beyond carbon storage: it stops soil erosion, re-mineralizes soil, protects the purity of groundwater and reduces damaging pesticide and fertilizer runoff.

If you want to understand the basic science and biology of how regenerative agriculture can draw down enough excess carbon from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and forests (in combination with a 100-percent reduction in fossil fuel emissions) to not only mitigate, but actually reverse global warming, read this article by one of North America’s leading organic farmers, Jack Kittridge.

If you want a general overview of news and articles on regenerative food, farming and land use, you can follow the newsfeed “Cook Organic Not the Planet” by the Organic Consumers Association and/or sign up for Organic Consumers Association’s weekly online newsletter (you can subscribe online or text “Bytes” to 97779).

You can also visit the Regeneration International website, where you’ll find this list of books on regenerative agriculture.

Solving the Soil, Health, Environmental and Climate Crises

Without going into extensive detail here (you can read the references above), we need to connect the dots between our soil, public health, environment and climate crisis. As the widely-read Mercola newsletter puts it:

Virtually every growing environmental and health problem can be traced back to modern food production. This includes but is not limited to:

• Food insecurity and malnutrition amid mounting food waste
• Rising obesity and chronic disease rates despite growing health care outlays
• Diminishing fresh water supplies
• Toxic agricultural chemicals polluting air, soil and waterways, thereby threatening the entire food chain from top to bottom
• Disruption of normal climate and rainfall patterns

Connecting the Dots Between Climate and Food

We can’t really solve the climate crisis (and the related soil, environmental, and public health crisis) without simultaneously solving the food and farming crisis. We need to stop putting greenhouse gas pollution into the atmosphere (by moving to 100-percent renewable energy), but we also need to move away from chemical-intensive, energy-intensive food, factory farming and land use, as soon as possible.

Regenerative food and farming has the potential to draw down a critical mass of carbon (200-250 billion tons) from the atmosphere over the next 25 years and store it in our soils and living plants, where it will increase soil fertility, food production and food quality (nutritional density), while re-stabilizing the climate.

The heavy use of pesticides, GMOs, chemical fertilizers and factory-farming by 50 million industrial farmers (mainly in the Global North) is not just poisoning our health and engendering a global epidemic of chronic disease and malnutrition. It’s also destroying our soil, wetlands’ and forests’ natural ability to sequester excess atmospheric carbon into the Earth.

The good news is that solar and wind power, and energy conservation are now cheaper than fossil fuels. And most people are starting to understand that organic, grass-fed and freshly-prepared foods are safer and more nutritious than chemical and GMO foods.

The food movement and climate movements must break through our single-issue silos and start to work together. Either we stop Big Coal, Big Oil, fracking and the mega-pipelines, or climate change will soon morph into climate catastrophe, making it impossible to grow enough food to feed the planet. Every food activist needs to become a climate activist.

On the other hand, every climate activist needs to become a food activist. Our current system of industrial food, farming and land use, now degenerating 75 percent of all global farmland, is “mining” and decarbonizing the soil, destroying our forests and releasing 44-57 percent of all climate-destabilizing greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane, nitrous oxide and black soot) into our already supersaturated atmosphere, while at the same time undermining our health with commoditized, overly processed food.

Solving the Crisis of Rural Poverty, Democracy and Endless War

Out-of-touch and out-of-control governments of the world now take our tax money and spend $500 billion dollars a year mainly subsidizing 50 million industrial farmers to do the wrong thing. These farmers routinely over-till, over-graze (or under-graze), monocrop and pollute the soil and the environment with chemicals and GMOs to produce cheap commodities (corn, soy, wheat, rice, cotton) and cash crops, low-grade processed food and factory-farmed meat and animal products. Meanwhile 700 million small family farms and herders, comprising the 3 billion people who produce 70 percent of the world’s food on just 25 percent of the world’s acreage, struggle to make ends meet.

If governments can be convinced or forced by the power of the global grassroots to reduce and eventually cut off these $500 billion in annual subsidies to industrial agriculture and Big Food and instead encourage and reward family farmers and ranchers who improve soil health, biodiversity, animal health and food quality, we can simultaneously reduce global poverty, improve public health, and restore climate stability.

As even the Pentagon now admits, climate change, land degradation (erosion and desertification) and rural poverty are now primary driving forces of sectarian strife and war (and massive waves of refugees) in places like Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Somalia. U.S. military intervention in these regions, under the guise of “regime change” or democratization, has only made things worse. This is why every peace activist needs to become a climate and food activist and vice-versa.

Similarly corrupt, out-of-control governments continue to subsidize fossil fuels to the tune of $5.3 trillion dollars a year, while spending more than $3 trillion dollars annually on weapons, mainly to prop up our global fossil fuel system and overseas empires. If the global grassroots can reach out to one another, bypassing our corrupt governments, and break down the geographic, linguistic and cultural walls that separate us, we can launch a global regeneration revolution—on the scale of the global campaign in World War II against the Nazis.

One thing we the grassroots share in all of the 200 nations of the world is this: We are sick and tired of corrupt governments and out-of-control corporations degenerating our lives and threatening our future. The Russian people are not our enemies, nor the Chinese, nor the Iranians. The hour is late. The crisis is dire. But we still have time to regenerate our soils, climate, health, economy, foreign policy and democracy. We still have time to turn things around.

The global regeneration movement we need will likely take several decades to reach critical mass and effectiveness. In spreading the regeneration message, and building this new movement at the global grassroots, we must take into account the fact that most regions, nations and people (and in fact many people who are still ignorant of the facts or climate change deniers) will respond more quickly or positively to different aspects or dimensions of our message (i.e. providing jobs; reducing rural and urban poverty and inequality, restoring soil fertility, saving the ocean and marine life, preserving forests, improving nutrition and public health, eliminating hunger and malnutrition, saving biodiversity, restoring animal health and food quality, preserving water, safeguarding Mother Nature or God’s Creation, creating a foundation for peace, democracy and reconciliation, etc.) rather than to the central life or death message: reversing global warming.

What is important is not that everyone, everywhere immediately agrees 100 percent on all of the specifics of regenerative food, farming and land use—for this is not practical—but rather that we build upon our shared concerns in each community, region, nation and continent. Through a diversity of messages, frames and campaigns, through connecting the dots between all the burning issues, we will find the strength, numbers, courage and compassion to build the largest grassroots coalition in history—to safeguard our common home, our survival and the survival of the future generations.

Chicago Tribune

Farmers in Wisconsin and Minnesota are now recycling millions of pounds of plastic

Tom Meersman, Minneapolis Star-Tribune     August 9, 2017

Minnesota and Wisconsin farms generate 60 million to 80 million pounds of plastic each year but until now had no real options to recycle it. They had to make a choice of paying for it to go to a landfill, burying it on their own land or illegally burning it — none of them, they knew, good for the environment.

An Arkansas company has come up with a solution: In the past two years, it has given more than 4,400 dumpsters to farmers in the two states and then picked up the waste to turn into trash bags that are being used in parks locally.

“Recycling Ag plastics is a problem that’s bedeviled me for 20 years,” said Anne Morse, recycling and sustainability coordinator for Winona County in southeastern Minnesota. “There wasn’t a system that I could set up that made sense and wasn’t extremely costly.”

That ended last December, when Winona became the first county in the state to welcome Revolution Plastics, the Arkansas-based company that has been in the plastics recycling business in Southern states since 1996.

Revolution, wanting to expand its reach, set up pilot programs in the Midwest in 2014 and 2015 and initiated a full launch in Minnesota and Wisconsin last year, said Price Murphy, the company’s director of operations.

Farmers who use at least 2,000 pounds of plastic a year can sign up for the program, Murphy said. More than 100 dumpsters will be distributed in Fergus Falls, Minn., and Buffalo, Minn.

Once farmers drive the dumpsters home, Revolution picks up the plastic from them on a regular schedule, determined by the size of the farms, mostly dairies, and the amount of plastic used.

“I have some farms where I collect as much as every other week, and I have some farms where it’s maybe two or three times per year,” Murphy said. “We try to help as many farmers as possible, large and small farms alike, and we just put them on different route schedules.”

Jeff Beckman, owner of Golden Meadows Dairy, about 35 miles south of Minneapolis, was one of 110 farmers to pick up a dumpster in late May in Goodhue County.

“As I’m feeding the cows each day, I cut off the plastic that I’m feeding off and I put it in the dumpster,” he said. “It’s as simple as five minutes and we’re done.”

With 100 cows, Beckman said he was spending $1,700 a year to have 3,000 to 4,000 pounds of plastic trucked to a landfill, and he now gets it picked up once every eight weeks for free.

“In farming today you have to be very cautious about what you spend, so any time you can recycle or reuse something, it’s just to our advantage,” he said. “It’s also a gain for the environment, so it’s fun when things are a double win.”

Brita Sailer, executive director of the nonprofit Recycling Association of Minnesota, said many farmers in the past 20 years have increasingly turned to plastic covers or bags to store hay and silage — chopped up cornstalks — that are fed to cows. The bags are safer and less expensive than the traditional method of storing the fodder in silos, she said, and they also keep the silage fresher and help it retain more nutrients.

But Sailer said the bags, which can range from 100 to 300 feet long and 6 to 12 feet tall, created a waste problem that the state didn’t have before and there was no way of coping with it other than landfills. For farmers who use the bags or covers, she said, the amount of plastic used per cow amounts to 15 to 20 pounds per year.

Revolution Plastics is not the first business to be interested in the waste plastic, Sailer said, but it’s the first to offer free pickup and have its own processing plants. Other firms also are working on projects to recycle plastic waste from the marina industry, she said, which uses massive amounts of blue plastic to cover boats and protect them during winter.

Charles Krause, a dairy farmer near Buffalo, west of Minneapolis, said that he uses plastic mainly to cover bunkers of silage for his 200-cow operation. Krause said he tried to obtain a dumpster twice earlier this year but was unsuccessful because they were all spoken for. Late last month he was finally able to pick up a dumpster and said it’s “awesome” that he won’t need to pay for the plastic to be picked up.

“The nice thing about Revolution is they’re not funded by a grant, because a lot of programs get started and then they’re done when the grant runs out,” Krause said. “Hopefully this will be a long-term solution.”

Achieving success in recycling programs depends both on the markets and being able to connect the dots, said Wayne Gjerde, recycling market development specialist at the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency.

“It still gets back to the basics of where’s the material, do you have enough of it, are there things that you can make it into and who’s going to do that,” he said.

After on-farm pickups, Revolution bales the plastic and ships it by truck or rail to its processing plant in Arkansas. There the plastic is washed, shredded, heated and extruded into plastic resin pellets, which can be used to make other products such as bags or construction films.

The company accepts agricultural plastic bags and wraps but not other plastics or nylon such as netting used to secure bales. Its collection system does not cover the entire state but uses hubs near concentrations of dairies that are economical to service.

“We understand what we’re getting into,” said Murphy. “It’s not a huge moneymaker as much as it’s a product we can use that not only keeps it out of the landfill but uses less energy than virgin resin to produce other products.”

Morse said that 146 of the 172 dairy farms in Winona County with more than 100 cows are now participating in the program. Murphy said that 1,132 dumpsters have been distributed in Minnesota and about 3,300 in Wisconsin, with 3,000 more farmers in the two states signed up and waiting for future deliveries.

Morse said the best part of the program is that Revolution’s sister company in Arkansas uses the recycled plastic to produce plastic trash liners and other products.

Winona County spent two months testing the liners for garbage cans in its parks and public buildings, she said, and has now decided to buy them after finding that the recycled bags were just as strong and less expensive than liners the county was using previously. Three Rivers Park District is also buying the recycled bag liners, and its suburban system uses about 33,000 of them annually.

“We’ve literally closed the loop — buying back a product that was made from materials we recycled — which is pretty much the holy grail for recycling,” Morse said. “That’s a big achievement for us.”