Food & agriculture news - May 7
Articles included below:
1. Questioning the compost supply
chain
by Deborah K. Rich, SF
Chronicle
2. 100-Mile Diet
by J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith,
The Tyee
3. As the climate warms,
gentler plants move in
by Michael Milstein,
Portland Oregonian
4. No More Scrod
by Sharon
Astyk, Casaubon's Book
5. Could the Mysterious Agricultural
Techniques of an Ancient Amazonian Civilization Make New Zealand Farming More
Competitive?
by David Haywood, Public Address
Questioning the compost supply chain
Deborah
K. Rich, SF Chronicle
As politicians increasingly use composting to solve
municipal waste and recycling issues, what happens to the pesticides, herbicides
and pharmaceuticals that may have gone into the mix along with the lettuce
leaves.
----
If soil, which breaks down fallen plant and animal materials,
can be likened to the Earth's liver, then composting is becoming the liver of
modern society -- tasked with processing and reducing lawn clippings, food
scraps, manure and sewage. Given the chemicals we spray on our lawns, feed our
livestock and swallow to keep us happy and functioning, are we asking too much
of our collective microbial liver? Can composting detoxify chemicals, or are we
spreading heavy metals, pesticides and drug residues in our gardens?
The
answers to these questions are uncertain.
Composting is the mixing and
management of organic waste (plant and animal materials and byproducts) to
achieve ratios of carbon to nitrogen that accelerate and maximize microbial
degradation of organic matter. By harnessing the power of microbes,
municipalities can reduce and recycle plant and animal waste even where land and
time are too scarce to accommodate the soil's comparatively slow rate of
decomposition. "By composting, you are duplicating what nature would do given
the chance," says Dale Arnold, director of quality control and research at
Kellogg Garden Products. Kellogg sells compost and other soil amendments to
3,500 independent retail nurseries, as well as Home Depot and Lowe's. "Nature
takes a long, long time to make compost. All we're doing is speeding up that
natural cycle."
Yard trimmings, wood waste from construction, animal
manure, agricultural byproducts and biosolids from sewage treatment plants are
the primary feedstock for the roughly 170 composters and waste processors that
operate in California.
...Often these feedstock materials enter the
composting process still laden with chemicals. Yet standards for finished
compost, which vary from state to state, generally require regular testing only
for heavy metals and pathogen indicators. Seldom do states ask that producers
test their compost for residual pesticide or pharmaceutical
compounds.
Unlike farmers composting manure and plant residues for their
own use, gardeners purchasing compost at a nursery seldom know what went into
the compost, where the feedstock came from or what chemicals were on
them.
"Compost," says William Brinton, founder and president of Woods End
Laboratories in Maine and a pioneer of modern compost production and testing
systems in the United States, "has become anonymous and untraceable; a single
compost product can now contain a mixture of unknown ingredients from all over a
county or a state."
The compost supply chain is poised to become even
more difficult to trace as city and state politicians turn to composting as a
means to meet their solid-waste reduction goals. "Composting now is being driven
by recycling mandates set by politicians," Brinton says. "When I got my start in
the composting world in the '70s, our motivation was to create products that
nourished the soil. That was the goal, and then we worked backwards and asked
how do we take ingredients like manure and crop residues and make wonderful
compost for the soil?
"Now it's the cart pulling the horse: The recycling
cart is pulling the compost horse. I'm not saying the goals of making good soil
amendments and recycling are incompatible. I'm saying that this sets up the
challenge to maintain the integrity of compost, a challenge that will become
more intense as the industry grows even larger."
...As our dependence on
compost to both reduce our organic wastes as well as to maintain the health of
our soils grows, composting without a more complete understanding of the fate of
chemicals in compost becomes increasingly risky.
"I believe that
composting is the best tool that we have for handling many of the different
types of organic materials that we use," says Richard of Pennsylvania State
University. "It can reduce their impact significantly and at lower cost than
other options that we have, and we really do need to have a society that does a
better job of recycling its organic matter.
"But we need to look pretty
hard at a lot of these different compounds. We are depending on composting to
handle increasing amounts of the 50 percent-plus of our waste stream that is
organic. To not be studying these emerging questions seems to be pretty naive."
(7 May 2007)
100-Mile Diet: Hand Picked from
the Blog
J.B. MacKinnon and Alisa Smith, The Tyee
The idea
of "food miles" continues to be a great wake-up call to get people thinking
about long-distance food -- it was a big part of what inspired Alisa and me to
try a 100-mile diet. But it's important that food miles do not become the start
and end of the argument. A lot of powerful interests are deeply invested in the
current food system and highly resistant to change, and these automatic critics
are looking at food miles as local eating's Achilles heel.
The fact is
that even when it comes to energy use and fossil fuel consumption, food miles
aren't much of a measure. A better bet is what's called a "life cycle
assessment," which attempts to measure the impacts of food production from
"cradle to grave." Unfortunately, life cycle assessments are complex, highly
specific, and have been performed for only a small number of foods.
What
a life cycle assessment may show can be surprising. For example, the emerging
critics of local eating -- yes, there are people who have a problem with you and
I choosing to buy our food from people in our own communities -- often point to
the "tomato study." Research for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural
Affairs in the U.K. found that it can be more energy efficient to ship in field
tomatoes from Spain than to grow tomatoes in the U.K.
...Well, not so
fast.
"The problem with life-cycle assessments," said my friend and
systems analyst Ruben Anderson, who has grown a bit of a beard and now looks
even wiser, "is that they can only compare systems within the current
paradigm."
You see what he means if you give more than a glance at the
tomato study. The fine print is this: it compares Spanish tomatoes that travel
thousands of miles to U.K. tomatoes that are grown in gas-fired greenhouses from
February to November, far beyond the natural tomato growing season.
Each
of the more controversial life-cycle studies makes these kinds of comparisons,
pitting unsustainable systems against unsustainable systems. To examine the New
Zealand study and conclude that the best way forward is to continue shipping
11,000-mile apples is particularly ludicrous. A more rational message is clear:
Britain needs to shift toward less energy-intensive forms of agriculture, such
as organics.
(7 May 2007)
As the climate
warms, gentler plants move in
Michael Milstein, Portland
Oregonian
Backyard - A debate rages, however, over how much to alter the
gardener's venerable guide: the rainbow-like hardiness map
----
New
Zealand flax, a decorative plant with sword like leaves, used to have a hard
time surviving Oregon's winters. But the past dozen years have been so mild, the
plants now flourish, lending an exotic touch to more and more Oregon
backyards.
"Plants in the past that have not survived more than a year or
two are now surviving six or seven," said Paul Bonine, co-owner of Xera Plants,
a wholesale nursery in Sherwood.
It appears increasingly that global
warming, nudging temperatures up and easing winters, helps gardeners grow plants
once frozen out. The trend is altering the rainbow-colored plant hardiness map
that splits the nation into zones based on how cold they get.
(6 May
2007)
No More Scrod
Sharon Astyk,
Casaubon's Book
...By now most of you may have read the study that says
that the oceans will be entirely depleted of edible fish by 2048 at present
rates of consumption. Now speaking as a girl from the Massachusetts coast, the
granddaughter and step-sister of fishermen, and someone who thinks that there
really is no such thing as too much sushi, fish is practically an article of
faith. And within my lifetime, it may all be gone. I've cut way back on fish
over the last few years, because mercury and PCB contamination are bad news for
pregnant women and nursing mothers, but I do miss it.
Now this is
terrifically sad for me, of course - my culture too is tied up in its food - but
it is really terrifying for people whose indigenous diets revolve around fish.
Most Island and Arctic peoples rely on fish for a large percentage of their
diet. They're already struggling with rising seas, melting ice and mercury and
PCB contamination of their staple food - and now they stand to lose fish
altogether.
There are 1 billion people who rely on fish or fish predators
as their primary source of animal protein, and another 3 billion people who eat
it regularly. But the big problems come from industrialized nations - the US,
Japan, Britain, where we increasingly want to eat a lot of fish and seafood
imported from far away. Our own waters are depleted, so we go off to the waters
of other people, and take their fish. And the oceans cannot endure
it.
This is an even bigger problem because we are entering a period in
which food supplies themselves are destabilizing.
(6 May
2007)
Could the Mysterious Agricultural Techniques
of an Ancient Amazonian Civilization Make New Zealand Farming More Competitive?
David Haywood, Public Address
A month or so ago, I wrote an article
on Public Address in which I implied that it would be very difficult to reduce
greenhouse gas emissions from New Zealand agriculture. Well, it turns out that
perhaps I was being unduly pessimistic -- as structural biologist Alfred Harris
has subsequently explained to me.
Alfred's good-news story begins -- like
all the best stories -- with a mysterious substance hidden deep in the Amazon
region of South America. Terra Preta de Indio or 'Amazonian Dark Earths' are
areas which contain soil of exceptionally high fertility.
Naturally
enough, scientists were very keen to find out what made these soils so special
-- but no-one expected the answer that they got. It turns out that these soils
were actually man-made.
Pre-European Amazonians had manufactured these
soils by working charcoal and manure into ordinary low-fertility earth. Of
course, the fertilizing properties of manure are well-known, but it was the
addition of charcoal which dramatically improved soil fertility. So much so, in
fact, that the soil was still extremely fertile hundreds of years after the
collapse of the civilization that produced it.
And here's an interesting
co-incidence -- go a third of the way around the world to New Zealand, and
archaeologists discover that pre-European Maori also worked charcoal into the
soil to improve fertility.
It seems like an extraordinary co-incidence.
Structural biologist Alfred Harris takes up the story...
Alfred Harris:
In Waimea, for example -- where there's hundreds of acres of what they call
'Maori soils' -- the experimental work was done on that site, and it was very
clear that charcoal was mixed far further into the soil than would be expected
simply from just the burning of the site.
Interviewer: It's fascinating
that two cultures so far apart should both discover the effects of charcoal in
terms of agriculture. At a scientific level, how the does charcoal actually
improve soil fertility?
...Voiceover: So it's possible that the use of
charcoal in New Zealand agriculture could reduce fertilizer use, save energy,
and sequester carbon all at the same time. With rising petroleum costs it seems
like maybe the time has come to re-learn a few lessons about charcoal from the
ancient Amazonians [and pre-European Maori].
(5 May
2007)
