Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Rodale Institute Newsletter
 June 27, 2008: Big picture questions
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/20080627/newsletter

     "These challengers to the “big-picture” views of farming as we know it 
demand a recalibration of what is acceptable, desirable and doable in a 
post-petroleum, biologically based agriculture."

Welcome to this week’s update, prepared as corn pops up through mats of 
rolled hairy vetch at the Rodale Institute farm and the undulating hills 
around us are ribboned with contoured strips of ripening wheat and oats.

It’s also a week of grim assessment for farmers in the flood-ravaged 
Mississippi Valley from Wisconsin to Missouri, Nebraska to Indiana. 
Weather-related losses so far this season for the United States will top $8 
billion—half of that in Iowa alone—the American Farm Bureau Federation 
estimated Wednesday. There is raw grief being experienced in so many farm 
communities, where actual flood waters scoured away, contaminated or junked 
up lower-lying farmland regardless of how carefully and organically it may 
have been farmed. We respect those losses, and share our advocacy for future 
farming changes as options when people are ready to think about what comes 
next.

This unfolding ecological and agricultural tragedy will be a catalyst, 
however, in a time of already-historic change in attitudes about the 
interplay of land, food and energy. Consider this passage from Felicity 
Lawrence, consumer affairs correspondent for The Guardian (London):

    "History shows that empires rise and fall, and that the fall when it 
comes tends to be fast. Food empires are likely to be no different. We are 
now entering a period of rapid transition. The post-war food system, 
dependent on prodigious quantities of crude oil for its production, has not 
only pushed us to our biological limits but is hitting the environmental 
buffers."

Scientists who connect the dots of research on the impacts of agricultural 
chemicals can speak precisely about some of the critical biological limits 
being breached—a situation that has been largely ignored and denied in a 
pesticide-dependent production system. Lecturing this week at the Rodale 
Institute, Warren Porter, Ph.D., detailed how pesticides—aided by surfactants 
and solvents that enhance their biocidal effect by penetrating water and fat 
pest defenses, respectively—can also find their way into human cells.

Working in several academic disciplines, Dr. Porter and other researchers are 
showing startling impacts during gestation on neurological development, 
learning ability, hormonal activity, immune-function and genetic integrity of 
the offspring. They can explain the intricacies of how this damage happens, 
and show how ultra low-level exposure can do profound damage—often at levels 
well below those considered “safe” from the toxicological appraisal approach 
still used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. Dr. Porter knows 
enough about the different strains of lab animals and methodologies to 
explain how industry-funded studies consistently show safety where he finds 
enough danger to warrant big changes in how pesticides are used.
Read more>>
http://www.rodaleinstitute.org/20080627/n1

Challenging an accepted agricultural paradigm from the opposite direction is 
New York organic dairyman Jerry Snyder. He is meticulously assembling a 
stringent protocol to place raw milk that is optimally full of health and 
nutrition from his grass-based, low-stress herd to retail stores for 
carefully prepared consumers. He believes that shifting to a reliance on 
robust health and natural microbial biodiversity for cows and people will 
yield more benefits than using non-organic dairying practices combined with 
pasteurization to kill possible pathogens in the milk. Read more>>

These challengers to the “big-picture” views of farming as we know it demand 
a recalibration of what is acceptable, desirable and doable in a 
post-petroleum, biologically based agriculture.

Let’s listen well, even when we see mostly difficult choices ahead.

Greg Bowman and the
Rodale Institute editorial team