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Category: farming

  • Is A State Program To Foster Sustainable Farming Leaving Out Small-Scale Growers And Farmers Of Color?

    Even when there are funds available, the soils program can be difficult for farmers who grow many crops, as well as immigrant farmers who may not speak English fluently, to access or make use of. It’s also hard for lower-income growers who lease their land year to year to successfully complete an application, because the program requires a three-year commitment for all who participate. And HSP takes a largely prescriptive approach—requiring that one practice be applied to the same plot of land for the entire time. But smaller operations tend to grow a diverse range of crops that require intricate rotation and the ability to swap out crops due to weather, water availability and other factors.

    The post Is A State Program To Foster Sustainable Farming Leaving Out Small-Scale Growers And Farmers Of Color? appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The Guardian view: help us to help those on the climate frontline | Editorial

    This year’s Guardian and Observer appeal charities do inspirational work, fighting for climate justice where it matters most

    In August 1965, the German-born, Oxford-educated economist EF Schumacher published an article in the Observer. Titled “Help them to help themselves”, it criticised the prevailing model of aid to the developing world and proposed a new emphasis on regional planning and “intermediate technology”. If the west would give up trying to impose the latest production methods, he argued, it could instead unleash the “power of self-help”.

    That article led to the creation of a charity today known as Practical Action. The approach it pioneered, of supporting local people to make incremental changes to improve their lives, lies at the heart of the Guardian and Observer’s 2021 charity appeal. All over the world, as our recent “Living on the frontline of global heating” series showed, climate breakdown is having disastrous consequences for the people and communities who (along with their ancestors) have contributed least to the problem of global heating. Practical Action and the other three charities that we are supporting cannot stop carbon emissions. But they can, and will, help people in some of the hardest-hit areas and communities to adapt, survive and thrive.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.

  • Key Body Demands Complete Ban on Glyphosate in India

    In October 2020, Pesticide Action Network India and PAN Asia Pacific released the report ‘State of Glyphosate Use in India’. It concluded that the use of the world’s most widely used herbicide is rampant. Despite this, it noted that its disturbing effects on the environment and the health of farmworkers and the public are not being addressed (see: State of Glyphosate Use in India).

    Although Punjab, Maharashtra, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana and several other states have moved towards banning glyphosate due to their concerns for consumers, farmers and environment, the report – based on a field survey in seven states (300 respondents – 30 retailers, 270 farmers/farmworkers) – noted at least 20 non-approved uses of glyphosate, with 16 of them in food crops.

    It concluded:

    In the light of mounting evidences on the unacceptable health and environmental outcomes of glyphosate, the ground reality of its use in India is seen as an ‘anarchic’ scenario. This would have undesirable impacts on soil health, farm productivity, food safety, agriculture trade, public health as well as environmental wellbeing in the country. The scenario of glyphosate use thus necessitates the urgent need of eliminating it from India.

    The report documented many disturbing features of glyphosate use, not least in terms of its impacts on farmers and farmworkers.

    Now in December 2021, the influential Swadeshi Jagaran Manch (SJM) has demanded a complete ban on the use of glyphosate in India, arguing it is carcinogenic and damages ecology and that it adversely impacts cultivators and their livelihoods.

    The SJM has close ties to the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and has consistently adopted a critical stance on the government’s pro-foreign direct investment policies and the ‘globalisation’ (dependency) agenda.

    National Co-convenor of the SJM Ashwani Mahajan recently submitted a petition with 201,609 signatures of people favouring a complete ban on glyphosate to Union Minister for Agriculture and Farmers Welfare Narendra Singh Tomar.

    The organisation argues that the government’s stated intent to restrict (not ban) the use of glyphosate (see Government moves to restrict use of glyphosate – The Hindu BusinessLine) is meaningless.

    The SJM informed the agriculture minister that, though there is a restriction on the use of glyphosate (aside from on tea plantations and non-crop areas), the weedicide is blatantly being used for illegally grown genetically engineered herbicide tolerant (HT) cotton. It added that this has been going on for years with the full knowledge of the Genetic Engineering Appraisal Committee and the state governments.

    The minister was informed that, at present, some “miscreant seed companies” are trying to illegally spread HT Bt cotton, on hundreds of thousands of acres of land, to promote the use of glyphosate.

    The SJM says glyphosate is being used both for weed control and to desiccate crops prior to harvesting and there is a strong opposition to this as the weedicide and its adjuvants are absorbed by the plant and consumed by humans.

    Glyphosate is a known carcinogen and endocrine disruptor and is linked with several serious illnesses. The SJM informed the minister that there are more than 100,000 cases pending against Monsanto/Bayer company for damages by the users of its glyphosate based herbicide after they (the litigants) developed 10 different types of cancer, including non-Hodgkins Lymphoma. The herbicide has been declared carcinogenic by the International Agency for Research on Cancer (IARC).

    Despite this, the push to get illegal HT genetically engineered crops into Indian fields persists. In 2017, for instance, the illegal cultivation of HT soybean was reported in Gujarat. There are also reports of HT cotton illegally being cultivated in the country.

    In a 2017 paper in the Journal of Peasant studies, Glenn Stone and Andrew Flachs show how cotton farmers have been encouraged to change their ploughing practices, which has led to more weeds being left in their fields. The authors suggest the outcome in terms of yields (or farmer profit) is arguably no better than before. However, it (conveniently) coincides with the appearance of an increasing supply of HT cotton seeds.

    Stone and Flachs observe:

    The challenge for agrocapital is how to break the dependence on double-lining and ox-weeding to open the door to herbicide-based management…. how could farmers be pushed onto an herbicide-intensive path?

    They show how farmers are indeed being nudged onto such a path via the change in practices and also note the potential market for herbicide growth alone in India is huge. Writing in 2017, the authors note that sales could soon reach USD 800 million with scope for even greater expansion. Little wonder we therefore see the appearance of HT seeds in the country. These seeds are designed to be used with glyphosate or other similar toxic argrochemicals such as glufinosate.

    A report in the Indian press (June 2021) (Sale of illegal HT Bt cotton seeds doubles – The Hindu) states that the illegal cultivation of HT Bt cotton has seen a huge jump over a 12-month period, with seed manufacturers claiming that the sale of illegal seed packets had more than doubled. Industry lobbyists had been openly encouraging farmers to plant the seeds in violation of government regulations.

    Industry lobbyists and industry-funded scientists often refer to regulatory agencies across the globe which have approved the use of glyphosate in their attempts to invalidate calls for imposing a ban. But if we turn to Europe, long-time campaigner against glyphosate Dr Rosemary Mason says:

    The only reason it has to date remained on the market in Europe is because of the companies behind the European Glyphosate Renewal Group (GRG).

    The GRG is a collection of companies seeking the renewal of the EU authorisation of glyphosate in 2022. Its current members are Albaugh Europe SARL, Barclay Chemicals Manufacturing Ltd., Bayer Agriculture bvba, Ciech Sarzyna S.A., Industrias Afrasa S.A., Nufarm GMBH & Co.KG, Sinon Corporation and Syngenta Crop Protection AG.

    In the run up to the decision on whether to relicense glyphosate in 2022, Mason adds:

    These member companies joined forces to prepare a dossier with scientific studies and information on the safety of glyphosate. This dossier was submitted to the evaluating member states and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) as part of the EU regulatory procedure to continue the authorisation of glyphosate and glyphosate-containing products on the EU market.

    It is telling that researcher Claire Robinson (see: Glyphosate: EU assessment report excludes most of the scientific literature from its analysis (gmwatch.org)) now notes that the preliminary EU report on glyphosate prepared by the Dutch, Hungarian, French and Swedish (the states tasked with evaluating glyphosate) regulators, failed to take into account the overwhelming majority of studies published in the scientific literature.

    Robinson notes that of the 1,550 studies on the toxicity of glyphosate that the organisation Générations Futures found had been published in the literature over the last ten years, only 11 were deemed reliable by the evaluating states. Of the 1,614 ecotoxicity studies identified, once again only 11 were considered reliable. The rate is even lower for endocrine disruption effects: out of 4,024 published studies, only eight are considered reliable by the evaluating states.

    Générations Futures notes that the studies presented by the manufacturers were treated with greater leniency and ended up forming the basis of their (the evaluating member states) assessment – in spite of there being “significant methodological flaws”.

    Key studies indicating the toxicity of glyphosate from Asia or South America were not accounted for in the evaluation.

    Robinson asks:

    Are the studies provided by pesticide manufacturers in support of the glyphosate re-authorisation application subject to the same scrutiny?

    She goes on to explain that this has not been the case. The system is designed to favour the manufacturers.

    Rosemary Mason has been compiling data and citing official and peer reviewed reports on glyphosate for more than a decade. In her dozens of reports (on the academia.edu website), she has been documenting the devastating health and environmental impacts of glyphosate.

    In an era defined by the notion of ‘protecting public health’ and ‘flattening the curve’ to reduce the strain on health services, it must be asked why the agrochemical companies are granted free rein to continue to roll out their health damaging products that – as Mason and many others show – are fuelling a decades-long spiralling public health crisis and result in burdening health services.

    The post Key Body Demands Complete Ban on Glyphosate in India first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • Miyoko’s Creamery Launches Program That Helps Struggling Dairy Farmers Transition to Succesful Plant-Based Crops

    3 Mins Read Californian-based Miyoko’s Dairy is pushing ahead with plans to domesticate its supply chain. Looking for a farm to transition to plant-based crops, the company has launched its Dairy Farm Transition (DFT) program. The chosen location will receive funding and support to move away from animal agriculture in favour of sustainable crops. It will become an […]

    The post Miyoko’s Creamery Launches Program That Helps Struggling Dairy Farmers Transition to Succesful Plant-Based Crops appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • Trees and Crops Don’t Have to Compete. Climate Crisis Calls for Agroforestry.

    A view of an organic pepper plant on a farm where plantations compensate the carbon footprint of its visitors, in Heredia, Sarapiqui, Costa Rica, on October 28, 2020.

    Growing up in North Texas, farming to me meant fields of single crops stretching as far as the eye could see. Like many Americans, I’d come to assume that trees had no place in that vista. In fact, most of us probably assume a trade-off between forests and food.

    Now that the climate crisis calls for vastly more trees, it’s time to take in the good news that trees and crops can do well together.

    In fact, from Burma, to India, to the Philippines and countless other places, this is not news at all. Farmers have long known that crops and trees don’t compete — they complement each other. South and Southeast Asia have been credited as the “cradle” of agroforestry.

    In this practice, Africa offers inspiring lessons today.

    The African Sahel, a strip of 10 countries south of the Sahara, was for decades linked in my heart to great suffering due to its recurring famine. From the late 1960s to the early 1980s, drought combined with the legacy of colonialism caused many to die of starvation. Niger — one of the world’s poorest countries — was hit particularly hard.

    However, once crops were able to grow again in the mid-1990s due to improved rainfall, farmers began reviving their traditional, pre-colonial practice of growing trees and crops in the same fields, also called agroforestry.

    You see, with the right mix, trees and crops help each other thrive.

    In Niger, through farmer-to-farmer learning, more and more families came to see that tree stumps — along with tree roots and seeds in the soil — could all be nurtured, sprout and become trees. Farmers also embraced the traditional practice of growing legumes like cowpeas and peanuts that fix nitrogen — so they need not turn to chemical fertilizer, which can be costly and environmentally damaging.

    Ultimately, their work protected and regenerated perhaps as many as 200 million trees, all of which sequester carbon, improve soil fertility and significantly increase crop yields, experts on the ground have explained to me. They also offer fruit, fodder and firewood, and their foliage reduces soil temperature, helping retain soil moisture.

    To underscore farmers’ role as the leaders in this process, these practices are called “farmer-managed natural regeneration.”

    So effective were these practices that by 2009, Niger generated food security for 2.5 million people — then about 17 percent of the population. No one knows for sure how widespread these practices are in sub-Saharan Africa today, but Gray Tappan of the U.S. Geological Survey offered me an extrapolation from what is known: On-farm trees may have spread to more than half-a-million square miles in the region.

    That’s more twice the size of Texas! Amazing.

    And what does this big shift to agroforestry feel like? To help me understand, agronomist Tony Rinaudo shared a comment from a child in Ghana: “We eat fruits any time we want to, and if our parents have not prepared food, we can just go to the bush.”

    West Africa’s revitalization of integrating crops and trees has echoes here in the U.S.

    One is in the spread of alley cropping — a twist on agroforestry. Since 2013, the Savanna Institute in Wisconsin — inspired by native ecosystems — has been working with farmers to spread this practice to Illinois, Iowa, Minnesota and Wisconsin. In alley cropping, widely spaced “alleys” of trees thrive among companion crops that also help store carbon. The practice increases each acre’s total yield by at least 40 percent.

    Plus, alley cropping helps farmers by sequestering carbon, diversifying their income sources, preventing soil erosion and providing wildlife habitat, Jacob Grace of the Savanna Institute explains.

    Almost a quarter of “all Midwestern farmland would be more profitable with rows of trees in it, compared to corn and soybean monocultures,” Grace writes.

    Beyond the Midwest, another contributor to agroforestry’s reach is Soul Fire Farm in upstate New York. It offers immersion learning for those of Black, Indigenous and Latinx heritage in regenerative farming — including Afro-Indigenous agroforestry.

    Agroforestry — from Africa to our Midwest and beyond — holds the technical potential to sequester a significant percentage of total global emissions.

    These leaders, and so many more, build on millennia of experience integrating trees and crops. So, let’s spread the word that trees and crops are natural allies whose relationship we can nurture for the benefit of all.

    Note: This article features topics discussed in the 50th anniversary edition of the author’s book, Diet for a Small Planet, released September 2021. This version features a brand-new opening chapter, simple rules for a healthy diet, and updated recipes by some of the country’s leading plant- and planet-centered chefs. You can join in the Democracy Movement at www.democracymovement.us.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Young farmers hope ecological farm will ‘reconnect people back to the land’

    Four young farmers have spent their life savings on 16 acres of land to build an eco-farm that could feed more than 400 families.

    “A really beautiful, meaningful livelihood”

    Middle Ground Growers have already spent £210,000 to purchase grassland in Bath but need to raise a further £95,000 to complete their farm. Co-founder Hamish Evans said the group hopes the campaign will inspire a cultural change in farming and the UK’s relationship with food. The 23-year-old told the PA news agency:

    It’s a really beautiful, meaningful livelihood that stemmed from a kind of ecological grief

    Our farm is about connecting people back to the land, as part of the local food movement.

    It is about creating different cultural norms through different eating habits and a lifestyle that minimises the impact on the environment.

    Young farmer Hamish Evans washes some carrots
    Co-founder Hamish Evans said the group hopes the campaign will inspire a cultural change in farming and the UK’s relationship with food (Middle Ground Growers/PA)

    Middle Ground Growers is made up of Evans; Xavier Hamon, 35; Olivia Rhodes, 31; and Sammy Elmore, 28, and a host of volunteers. Money raised through their fundraiser will go towards helping the group complete their 16-acre site at Weston Spring Farm. Donors are also offered the chance to name an orchard tree for an environmentally conscious gift this Christmas.

    So far, more than half of the funds have already been raised and Evans said the support has been “overwhelming”. He said:

    I think people can get behind it because our farm will provide local, healthy, affordable food that is grown in a way that does not destroy things.

    There is usually some resistance to major changes like this but we have not had any backlash.

    Middle Ground Growers group shot standing in a field
    Money raised through their fundraiser will go towards helping the group complete their 16-acre site at Weston Spring Farm (Middle Ground Growers/PA)

    The funds raised will cover the costs of tools and equipment to build a five acre, no-dig, market garden and a solar barn equipped with a 12 kilowatt solar panel system. It will also go towards restoring ponds and wetlands.

    A regenerative ecological farm uses special farming and grazing practices to help restore degraded soil diversity and rebuild the natural area. The farm will produce a range of seasonal fruit and vegetables, including acres of apple, pear, damson, and greengage trees, and there are plans for a nuttery to grow walnuts and hazelnuts.

    Middle Ground Growers currently sell seasonal veg boxes from their two-acre plot in Bathampton for 70 families every week. However, they hope their new farm will enable them to expand this to more than 400 homes around Somerset.

    The contents of each box changes according to what vegetables are in season and includes fresh eggs produced by the farm’s 48 free-range hens. The chickens, which the team refer to as their “co-stewards of the land”, benefit the farm’s ecosystem by keeping the grass down and adding manure to the composting system.

    Hamish Evans teaching trainees
    Hamish Evans (left) runs education sessions on ecological farming (Middle Ground Growers/PA)

    Complex

    Evans admitted that changes to food production are a “complex issue”, particularly around affordability for lower income households. He added there needs to be more education about the importance of food being grown locally but “shaming people for their diets” is not the way forward.

    The farm runs educational programmes and workshops to try to combat this by teaching people about seasonal food production and ecological farming. He said:

    People shouldn’t be blamed or made to feel bad because that won’t make anyone change. The education has got to be inclusive, so we can learn together and inspire change rather than forcing it through guilt or fear.

    People need to know about the realities of the situation and how crazy our global food system is. There are solutions, we just need to get cracking with them.

    To find out more about the project, visit their crowdfunder here.

    By The Canary

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • On Contact: Struggle Against Industrial Agriculture

    On the show, Chris Hedges discusses the struggle against industrial agriculture with author Daniel J. O’Connell. The San Joaquin Valley in California is the most agriculturally productive farmland in the United States, but it is also plagued by high levels of poverty and water pollution, as well as the serious health risks that come with […]

    The post On Contact: Struggle Against Industrial Agriculture appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Why Seed Companies Fear México

    Last month México’s Supreme Court provided hope for biodiversity, especially in the Global South, while flaming fear for seed companies. In a historic step, it ruled for corn advocates and against genetically modified (GMO) corn. The decision was a momentous act in country where maíz (corn) carries daily and sacred significance. This promises a way out of stale GMO debates that plague us. One side argues that genetic changes to seeds increase harvests. Seed companies and industrial agriculture make up this side. Another side says GMOs damage plant DNA.

    The post Why Seed Companies Fear México appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Indian Government Forced To Withdraw Farm Laws

    After fighting for almost a year, farmers in India finally won a victory against the three farms laws enacted by the right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) government last year. Prime minister Narendra Modi announced on Friday, November 19, that the three laws would be repealed and all legal processes related to the matter will be completed during the upcoming session of parliament.

    The post Indian Government Forced To Withdraw Farm Laws appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands

    Ag Tech and Big Tech firms are championing a kind of uberisation of farmlands in an effort to dominate all aspects of food production. This ensures that it is the powerless smallholders and agricultural workers who take on all the risks. The German pharmaceutical company Bayer’s partnership with the US non-profit Precision Agriculture for Development (PAD) intends to use e-extension training to control what and how farmers grow their produce, as agribusinesses reap the benefits without taking on risk. This is another instance of neoliberalism at work, displacing the risk onto workers whose labour produces vast profits for the Ag Tech and Big Tech firms. These big firms are not interested in owning land or other resources; they merely want to control the production process so that they can continue to make fabulous profits.

    The post In the Name of Saving the Climate, They Will Uberise the Farmlands appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Israeli Officials Are Barring Thousands Of Palestinian Farmers From Their Land

    According to a new report from Israeli human rights organization HaMoked, the Israeli military is increasingly restricting Palestinian farmers’ access to the Seam Zone. HaMoked’s Freedom of Information request filed to the Jerusalem District Court found only 27% of farmers’ permit requests to enter the area were approved by the military in 2020, while 73% were denied — leaving tens of thousands of Palestinians unable to reach their land. Israel has previously stated that security is the only reason to deny Palestinians access to the Seam Zone, but the data shows fewer than 1% of permits were denied on security grounds. Instead, most requests are rejected due to an inability to meet the military’s criteria for a permit.

    The post Israeli Officials Are Barring Thousands Of Palestinian Farmers From Their Land appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Biden’s Farm Methane Plan Could Worsen Consolidation And Pollution

    Reducing methane emissions took center stage at the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow ending Friday. More than 100 countries pledged to reduce their methane emissions by 30% over the next decade. Methane is a significantly more potent yet shorter-lived greenhouse gas, making it a target to prevent near-term warming as societies hurtle towards the 1.5 degrees of warming deemed disastrous for life on Earth.

    In tandem with this global commitment, the Biden administration released its plan to bring down U.S. methane emissions. While this plan would set new limits on methane emissions coming off oil and gas plants, it does not regulate the single largest source of U.S. methane emissions: animal agriculture.

    The post Biden’s Farm Methane Plan Could Worsen Consolidation And Pollution appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • The COP26 pledges on agriculture are missing vital ingredients

    The UK announced that it had secured the support of 45 governments “in new pledges to protect nature” at COP26 on 6 November. A number of these promises focused on agriculture and how to make farming more “sustainable for the future”.

    Many civil society and small farmer-focused organisations argue that agroecology is key to truly sustainable farming. This is the practice of cooperating with nature to yield agricultural produce, rather than using artificial inputs like pesticides and fertilisers. It’s an ecological, not a technological, approach.

    But the word agroecology doesn’t feature in the UK government’s announcement on the nature-focused pledges. And that wasn’t the only omission either.

    Not an outlier

    As the University of California’s Miguel A Altieri explained in a report titled Agroecology: The Bold Future of Farming in Africa:

    Agroecology is deeply rooted in the ecological rationale of traditional small-scale agriculture, representing long established examples of successful agricultural systems characterized by a tremendous diversity of domesticated crop and animal species maintained and enhanced by ingenuous soil, water and biodiversity management regimes, nourished by complex traditional knowledge systems.

    It is, in a nutshell, an approach that works with and harnesses local ecosystems to produce food that’s fitting for – and benefits – the environment its grown or produced in. It largely shuns artificial and damaging inputs like pesticides and fertilisers. And it’s already practised by many small-scale farmers around the world.

    Beyond the “new pledges to protect nature”, the membership organisation Climate Land Ambition and Rights Alliance (CLARA) highlighted that the word agroecology has also been missing elsewhere during the COP26 negotiations.

    The UN describes the Koronivia Joint Work on Agriculture – the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s (UNFCCC) only programme that focuses on agriculture – as a “landmark decision” that “recognizes the unique potential of agriculture in tackling climate change”. Co-facilitators have put forward draft conclusions during COP26. CLARA pointed out on 5 November that the different versions on offer at that point talked about taking into account “the diversity of agricultural and ecological systems”, sustainability, climate-resilience, and “integrated systems” approaches. But it said none mentioned the word agroecology. The organisation raised the question:

    Who’s afraid of the term ‘agroecology’? Why the heavy resistance?

    No inputs? Heaven forbid

    Nigerian environmental justice advocate, poet, and author Nnimmo Bassey told The Canary at COP26 that the omission isn’t surprising. He said that the UN’s system in relation to agriculture has been “contradictory”. He gave the example of the body characterising plantations – areas where a single tree species or other cash crops are grown – as forests.

    As academics have previously pointed out, monoculture (single species) plantations are hugely inferior to diverse forests in terms of storing carbon. Plantations are also terrible for biodiversity.

    Bassey highlighted that “agroecology would not tolerate” the artificial inputs that the current corporate-led and globalised system of agriculture demands. This of course threatens the interests of big business who profit from those inputs. And Bassey says that such corporations have an “overbearing influence” over the negotiations at events like COP26.

    He also asserted that in some countries, these artificial inputs are “political tools” and governments may resist supporting practices like agroecology, which would benefit the majority of farmers, due to the “political clout” that big agriculture has. However, Bassey suggested that eventually, hopefully, governments may “come around to” agroecology.

    No one size fits all

    The UK government argues that it has recognised the potential of agroecology, both inside and outside of COP26.

    When asked by The Canary about the lack of the word in its pledges announcement, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) pointed to the COP26 “Policy Dialogue” on the transition to sustainable agriculture and the “Policy Action Agenda“. The former includes one reference to “agro-ecological approaches”, in relation to where countries could direct investment. The policy action agenda doesn’t mention the word, either in its “principles” of what constitutes sustainable agriculture or elsewhere. It does, however, concede that artificial inputs can be detrimental to the climate and environment. A Defra spokesperson also said:

    To keep 1.5 degrees alive, we need action from every part of society, including an urgent transformation in the way we manage ecosystems and grow, produce and consume food on a global scale.

    The UK government is leading the way through our new agricultural system in England, which will incentivise farmers to farm more sustainably, create space for nature on their land and reduce carbon emissions.

    Defra further asserted that the government has avoided being “prescriptive” about sustainable agriculture, in order to recognise that “that there is no one size fits all”.

    One corporate size for all

    But the agricultural pledges suggest that a ‘one size fits all’ is, in practice, dominating the corporate-heavy COP26 approach. That’s despite the UK’s environment secretary promising that “farmers, indigenous people and local communities” will play “a central role in these plans”.

    In its announcement on 6 November, the UK asserted that billions of public money will fund “agricultural innovation” in pursuit of “sustainable agriculture”. It seems these innovations are heavily rooted in technology and include the creation of “new” crop and livestock “varieties”, aspects of agriculture that are dominated by corporations. Meanwhile, the Policy Action Agenda’s list of ‘allies’ includes some of the biggest agricultural chemical and seed names in the business, including Syngenta and Bayer (a company that merged with Monsanto).

    In short, the COP26 proposals and plans, with their talk of ‘innovation gaps’ and “technology development”, largely sound like the “technofix mess” that small farmer-focused organisations and advocates have long-criticised.

    That criticism stems from the fact that the corporate-led, industrial agriculture system imposed on people around the world after the second world war has been a recipe for disaster in terms of the climate and biodiversity. Moreover, it has stripped farmers of their sovereignty over seeds, lands, and food.

    Notably, the phrase food sovereignty was also missing from the “new pledges to protect nature” announcement and related policy documents.

    Corporate-capture

    Many have criticised COP26 for the corporate capture on display, particularly in relation to its fixation on what many argue are false solutions and its shielding of the fossil fuel industry. But the reach of corporations is wide, and it continues to strangle real progress on many issues at the conference.

    The agricultural pledges, with their absence of focus on agroecology, food sovereignty, and indeed no mention of the meat and dairy industry, have got corporations’ fingerprints all over them.

    Featured image via Ivan Radic / Flickr

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Yakama Nation Acquires Inaba Produce Farms

    “When the Inaba family began farming here on the Yakama Reservation in the early 1900’s, Yakama tribal members supported their efforts, leasing land to them when the laws of the United States did not permit Japanese immigrants to be landowners. Today, the Inaba family honors our historic relationship by selling Inaba Produce Farms to the Yakama Nation to support our sovereignty and food security,” said Virgil Lewis, Sr., the Yakama Tribal Council Vice Chairman and Yakama Nation Farms Board Chair.

    The post Yakama Nation Acquires Inaba Produce Farms appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Smashing The Heads of Farmers: A Global Struggle Against Tyranny

    According to Reuters, more than 500,000 farmers attended a rally in the city of Muzaffarnagar in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh on 5 September. Hundreds of thousands more turned out for other rallies in the state.

    Rakesh Tikait, a prominent farmers’ leader, said this would breathe fresh life into the Indian farmers’ protest movement.

    He added:

    We will intensify our protest by going to every single city and town of Uttar Pradesh to convey the message that Modi’s government is anti-farmer.

    Tikait is a leader of the protest movement and a spokesperson of the Bharatiya Kisan Union (Indian Farmers’ Union).

    Since November 2020, tens of thousands of farmers have been encamped on the outskirts of Delhi in protest against three new farm laws that will effectively hand over the agrifood sector to corporates and place India at the mercy of international commodity and financial markets for its food security.

    Aside from the rallies in Uttar Pradesh, thousands more farmers recently gathered in Karnal in the state of Haryana to continue to pressurise the Modi-led government to repeal the laws. This particular protest was also in response to police violence during another demonstration, also in Karnal (200 km north of Delhi), during late August when farmers had been blocking a highway. The police Lathi-charged them and at least 10 people were injured and one person died from a heart attack a day later.

    A video that appeared on social media showed Ayush Sinha, a top government official, encouraging officers to “smash the heads of farmers” if they broke through the barricades placed on the highway.

    Haryana Chief Minister Manohar Lal Khattar criticised the choice of words but said that “strictness had to be maintained to ensure law and order”.

    But that is not quite true. “Strictness” – outright brutality – must be imposed to placate the scavengers abroad who are circling overhead with India’s agrifood sector firmly in their sights. As much as the authorities try to distance themselves from such language – ‘smashing heads’ is precisely what India’s rulers and the billionaire owners of foreign agrifood corporations require.

    The government has to demonstrate to global agricapital that it is being tough on farmers in order to maintain ‘market confidence’ and attract foreign direct investment in the sector (aka the takeover of the sector).

    The farmers’ protest in India represents a struggle for the heart and soul of the country: a conflict between the local and the global. Large-scale international agribusiness, retailers, traders and e-commerce companies are trying to displace small- and medium-size indigenous producers and enterprises and restructure the entire agrifood sector in their own image.

    By capitulating to the needs of foreign agrifood conglomerates – which is what the three agriculture laws represent – India will be compelled to eradicate its buffer food stocks. It would then bid for them with borrowed funds on the open market or with its foreign reserves.

    This approach is symptomatic of what has been happening since the 1990s, when India was compelled to embrace neoliberal economics. The country has become increasingly dependent on inflows of foreign capital. Policies are being governed by the drive to attract and retain foreign investment and maintain ‘market confidence’ by ceding to the demands of international capital which rides roughshod over democratic principles and the needs of hundreds of millions of ordinary people.

    The authorities know they must be seen to be acting tough on farmers, thereby demonstrating a steely resolve to foreign agribusiness and investors in general.

    The Indian government’s willingness to cede control of its agrifood sector would appear to represent a victory for US foreign policy.

    Economist Prof Michael Hudson stated in 2014:

    American foreign policy has almost always been based on agricultural exports… It’s by agriculture and control of the food supply that American diplomacy has been able to control most of the Third World. The World Bank’s geopolitical lending strategy has been to turn countries into food deficit areas by convincing them to grow cash crops – plantation export crops – not to feed themselves with their own food crops.

    On the back of India’s foreign exchange crisis in the 1990s, the IMF and World Bank wanted India to shift hundreds of millions out of agriculture. In return for up to more than $120 billion in loans at the time, India was directed to dismantle its state-owned seed supply system, reduce subsidies, run down public agriculture institutions and offer incentives for the growing of cash crops to earn foreign exchange.

    The drive is to drastically dilute the role of the public sector in agriculture, reducing it to a facilitator of private capital and leading to the entrenchment of industrial farming and the replacement of small-scale farms.

    Smashing protesters’ heads

    A December 2020 photograph published by the Press Trust of India defines the Indian government’s approach to protesting farmers. It shows a security official in paramilitary garb raising a lathi. An elder from the Sikh farming community was about to feel its full force.

    But “smashing the heads of farmers” is symbolic of how near-totalitarian ‘liberal democracies’ the world over now regard many within their own populations.

    The right to protest and gather in public as well as the right of free speech has been suspended in Australia, which currently resembles a giant penal colony as officials pursue a nonsensical ‘zero-COVID’ policy. Across Europe and in the US and Israel, unnecessary and discriminatory ‘COVID passports’ are being rolled out to restrict freedom of movement and access to services. And those who protest against any of this are often confronted by a massive, intimidating police presence (or actual police violence) and media smear campaigns.

    Again, governments must demonstrate resolve to their billionaire masters in Big Finance, the Gates and Rockefeller Foundations, the World Economic Forum and the entire gamut of forces in the military-financial industrial complex behind the ‘Great Reset’, ‘4th Industrial Revolution, ‘New Normal’ or whichever other benign-sounding term its political and media lackeys use to disguise the restructuring of capitalism and the brutal impacts on ordinary people.

    This too, like the restructuring of Indian agriculture – which will affect India’s entire 1.3-billion-plus population – is also part of a US foreign policy agenda that serves the interests of the Anglo-US elite.

    COVID has ensured that trillions of dollars have been handed over to elite interests, while lockdowns and restrictions have been imposed on ordinary people and small businesses. The winners have been the likes of Amazon, Big Pharma and the tech giants. The losers have been small enterprises and the bulk of the population, deprived of their right to work and the entire panoply of civil rights their ancestors struggled and often died for. If a masterplan is required to deliver a knockout blow to small enterprises for the benefit of global players, then this is it.

    Professor Michel Cossudovsky of the Centre for Research on Globalization says:

    The Global Money financial institutions are the ‘creditors’ of the real economy which is in crisis. The closure of the global economy has triggered a process of global indebtedness. Unprecedented in World history, a multi-trillion bonanza of dollar denominated debts is hitting simultaneously the national economies of 193 countries.

    In August 2020, a report by the International Labour Organization (ILO) stated:

    The COVID-19 crisis has severely disrupted economies and labour markets in all world regions, with estimated losses of working hours equivalent to nearly 400 million full-time jobs in the second quarter of 2020, most of which are in emerging and developing countries.

    Among the most vulnerable are the 1.6 billion informal economy workers, representing half of the global workforce, who are working in sectors experiencing major job losses or have seen their incomes seriously affected by lockdowns. Most of the workers affected (1.25 billion) are in retail, accommodation and food services and manufacturing. And most of these are self-employed and in low-income jobs in the informal sector.

    India was especially affected in this respect when the government imposed a lockdown. The policy ended up pushing 230 million into poverty and wrecked the lives and livelihoods of many. A May 2021 report prepared by the Centre for Sustainable Employment at Azim Premji University (APU) has highlighted how employment and income had not recovered to pre-pandemic levels even by late 2020.

    The report, ‘State of Working India 2021 – One year of Covid-19’ highlights how almost half of formal salaried workers moved into the informal sector and that 230 million people fell below the national minimum wage poverty line.

    Even before COVID, India was experiencing its longest economic slowdown since 1991 with weak employment generation, uneven development and a largely informal economy. A recent article by the Research Unit for Political Economy highlights the structural weaknesses of the economy and the often desperate plight of ordinary people.

    To survive Modi’s lockdown, the poorest 25% of households borrowed 3.8 times their median income, as against 1.4 times for the top 25%. The study noted the implications for debt traps.

    Six months later, it was also noted that food intake was still at lockdown levels for 20% of vulnerable households.

    Meanwhile, the rich were well taken care of. According to Left Voice:

    The Modi government has handled the pandemic by prioritising the profits of big business and protecting the fortunes of billionaires over protecting the lives and livelihoods of workers.

    Michel Chossudovsky says that governments are now under the control of global creditors and that the post-Covid era will see massive austerity measures, including the cancellation of workers’ benefits and social safety nets. An unpayable multi-trillion dollar public debt is unfolding: the creditors of the state are Big Money, which calls the shots in a process that will lead to the privatisation of the state.

    Between April and July 2020, the total wealth held by billionaires around the world has grown from $8 trillion to more than $10 trillion. Chossudovsky says a new generation of billionaire innovators looks set to play a critical role in repairing the damage by using the growing repertoire of emerging technologies. He adds that tomorrow’s innovators will digitise, refresh and revolutionise the economy: but, as he notes, let us be under no illusions these corrupt billionaires are impoverishers.

    With this in mind, a recent piece on the US Right To Know website exposes the Gates-led agenda for the future of food based on the programming of biology to produce synthetic and genetically engineered substances. The thinking reflects the programming of computers in the information economy. Of course, Gates and his ilk have patented, or are patenting, the processes and products involved.

    For example, Ginkgo Bioworks, a Gates-backed start-up that makes ‘custom organisms’, recently went public in a $17.5 billion deal. It uses ‘cell programming’ technology to genetically engineer flavours and scents into commercial strains of engineered yeast and bacteria to create ‘natural’ ingredients, including vitamins, amino acids, enzymes and flavours for ultra-processed foods.

    Ginkgo plans to create up to 20,000 engineered ‘cell programs’ (it now has five) for food products and many other uses. It plans to charge customers to use its ‘biological platform’. Its customers are not consumers or farmers but the world’s largest chemical, food and pharmaceutical companies.

    Gates pushes fake food by way of his greenwash agenda. If he really is interested in avoiding ‘climate catastrophe’, helping farmers or producing enough food, instead of cementing the power and the control of corporations over our food, he should be facilitating community-based and lead agroecological approaches.

    But he will not because there is no scope for patents, external proprietary inputs, commodification and dependency on global corporations which Gates sees as the answer to all of humanity’s problems in his quest to bypass democratic processes and roll out his agenda.

    India should take heed because this is the future of ‘food’. If the farmers fail to get the farm bills repealed, India will again become dependent on food imports or on foreign food manufacturers and lab-made ‘food’. Fake food will displace traditional diets and cultivation methods will be driven by drones, genetically engineered seeds and farms without farmers, devastating the livelihoods (and health) of hundreds of millions.

    This is a vision of the future courtesy of Klaus Schwab’s (of the elitist World Economic Forum) dystopic transhumanism and the Rockefellers’ 2010 lockstep scenario: genetically engineered food and genetically engineered people controlled by a technocratic elite whose plans are implemented through tighter top-down government control and more authoritarian leadership.

    Since March 2020, we have seen the structural adjustment of the global capitalist system and labour’s relationship to it and an attempted adjustment of people’s thinking via endless government and media propaganda.

    Whether it involves India’s farmers or the frequent rallies and marches against restrictions and COVID passports across the world, there is a common enemy. And there is also a common goal: liberty.

    The post Smashing The Heads of Farmers: A Global Struggle Against Tyranny first appeared on Dissident Voice.

    This post was originally published on Dissident Voice.

  • How Vegan Meat Brand Quorn Is Working Towards A Regenerative Food System

    3 Mins Read British vegan meat brand Quorn Foods has signed a manifesto about its commitment to building a regenerative food system.

    The post How Vegan Meat Brand Quorn Is Working Towards A Regenerative Food System appeared first on Green Queen.

    This post was originally published on Green Queen.

  • There’s less than 24 hours to save the latest victim of the government’s flawed TB testing regime

    The Conservative government’s flawed TB testing regime has already cost over 140,000 badgers their lives. In less than 24 hours, critics say it could count an alpaca called Geronimo as its latest victim.

    Thousands of people, including the conservationist Chris Packham and ex-Badger Trust CEO Dominic Dyer, are calling on the environment minister George Eustice for a stay of execution for Geronimo. That’s because they believe the flawed TB testing regime has wrongly put a target on his back.

    Geronimo’s fight

    The alpaca farmer and veterinary nurse Helen McDonald brought Geronimo to the UK from New Zealand in 2017. As Dyer explained in a video on the issue, Geronimo had TB tests back in New Zealand that showed he didn’t have the disease.

    After arriving in the UK, however, he had further tests and those tests suggested he did have it. As a result, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) says he must be killed. McDonald has taken the situation to the courts, but ultimately lost the case. So if she doesn’t kill Geronimo by 5 August, the authorities will do it for her.

    What’s the problem?

    Here’s the rub though. The UK tests on Geronimo apparently aren’t “validated” for alpacas. His vet Bob Broadbent told ITV News in 2020:

    The test that was used on him when he came into the country was not the test that’s validated in alpacas. There’s a really good blood test that works well, that we know works well, and Defra amended that test to the way in which they use it in cattle, and we don’t know how that test works in alpacas. And I suspect that that test, amended, gave a false positive result.

    Defra claims that the test used on Geronimo is “highly specific”. But Alastair Hayton, who was involved in the development of the test, said there was “very reasonable doubt from a clinical and epidemiological perspective as to whether the animal [Geronimo] is a true M bovis [TB] positive” in a statement read out in a High Court hearing.

    McDonald says the UK tests were “unsound, unethical and dishonest”. In addition to this, she argues that Geronimo is “completely fit and healthy”, despite data on TB in alpacas showing that “they die very quickly” from it. So McDonald wants to pay for Geronimo to be re-tested, using a different test. But that would be against the law. So it’s now essentially Geronimo’s final hour and Dyer, Packham and others are calling for the government to change course:

    A testing mess

    A Defra spokesperson told The Canary:

    We are sympathetic to Ms Macdonald’s situation – just as we are with everyone with animals affected by this terrible disease. It is for this reason that the testing results and options for Geronimo have been very carefully considered by Defra, the Animal and Plant Health Agency and its veterinary experts, as well as passing several stages of thorough legal scrutiny.

    Bovine TB causes devastation and distress for farmers and rural communities and that is why we need to do everything we can to reduce the risk of the disease spreading

    But Dyer argues that the situation “really shows how terrible the whole TB control system” is in the UK. He explained that “the government are using ineffective TB tests” to test cows, therefore allowing the disease to spread among them and into wildlife. As a 2019 paper by veterinarian Iain McGill and Born Free’s Mark Jones noted, the traditional skin test used for detecting TB in cows “has a sensitivity of around 50 per cent” and therefore is likely “missing half of the infected animals” in a tested herd. Dyer says that despite this “badgers are then blamed for spreading the disease” and killed in their hundreds of thousands. Moreover, the government doesn’t test badgers, before or after killing them, to see if they have TB. Analysis of badgers ‘found dead’, however, such as those killed on roads, suggests that TB levels among the species is low.

    In short, the government’s TB testing regime is currently less than adequate. Geronimo may be the latest victim of the flawed system, but with experts saying that badger killing is set to continue indefinitely, he certainly won’t be the last.

    Featured image via SaveGeronimo / YouTube

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • Michael Field: On saying sorry – who next? The Banabans?

    COMMENT: By Michael Field of The Pacific Newsroom

    Apologies are, more or less by custom, the end of things.

    Say sorry, and don’t mention it again.

    As warm and moving as New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s apology was over the immigration Dawn Raids of the 1970s, it will mostly fade away. At the function, standing under an Auckland Town Hall plaque honouring one of New Zealand’s worst administrators of Samoa (and Tokelau), no one I spoke to, knew who he was.

    Auckland Town Hall plaque
    The Auckland Town Hall plaque honouring Major-General Sir George Spafford Richardson. Image: Michael Field

    And yet nine years ago Prime Minister Helen Clark formally apologised for his actions and others.

    Apologies are a bit of a sugar rush; something else is needed.

    Which brings me to Australian-based academic Katerina Teaiwa who, during the dawn raid apology, tweeted it was great to hear, and added: “We’ll have to work on some specific recognition and support for Banabans from Kiribati & Fiji whose island was sacrificed for NZ, Aus & UK development/agriculture/farming/food security.”

    Understanding what happened to Banaba is vital for Pacific futures; not just for correcting historical wrongs that can be dealt with a glitzy Town Hall confession of guilt.

    Tragic story of Banaba
    That said, the tragic story of Banaba and New Zealand’s role in it – and in Nauru – justify a formal state apology but Teaiwa is right to suggest a rather more ongoing process.

    Banaba is vitally important for a number of reasons.

    First there is the brutal business of not only robbing a people of their land, but also of enforced exile to another part of the world. Sea level rise, alone, may well make this more the norm, than unusual. Banabans, how they were treated and their response, offer much to an endangered low lying Pacific.

    And as Pacific states move toward the business of seafloor mining, Banaba offers lessons in issues as diverse as “beware strangers offering lavish gifts” to “and where do we live after the strangers have taken all the riches….?”

    What is also alarming about the Banaba story (and Nauru’s) is that their corrupt, illegal and deceptive plunder was done to make, in particular, Aotearoa and Australia rich. The soils of Banaba and Nauru contain motherlodes of phosphate which is needed to grow grass for agriculture.

    Here is the rub: almost no New Zealanders know the story of Banaba or Nauru. And when pressed, some will say, reflecting colonial propaganda, that “we paid a fair price for the phosphate”.

    No ‘fair price’
    A simple reply: no we did not. Never did.

    An apology to Banaba is necessary but only after Aotearoa and others come to terms with what they did to around a thousand people who, for centuries, have lived peacefully on a beautiful island.

    Its stark ruins today should remind us that just saying sorry is mostly not enough.

    This post was originally published on Asia Pacific Report.

  • Trump Loyalists Are Behind Lawsuits Excluding Farmers of Color From Debt Relief

    The right-wing-funded legal challenges are about maintaining a conservative base of voters heading into 2022 and beyond.

    “Equality before the law” — for a constitutional principle, it is one of the most basic, perhaps the most important.

    It is also the idea (at least the one openly stated by right-wing law firms, such as the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty) that is driving the legal injunctions blocking President Joe Biden’s $4 billion debt relief initiative for farmers of color. The effort is part of the American Rescue Plan, a COVID-19 stimulus package.

    As the argument runs, it is not fair for any specific group of farmers, although they may belong to historically marginalized groups of people, to be singled out for special treatment.

    We are told that farming is tough for everyone in the occupation. White farmers also have debts that could be forgiven. Everyone should have equal access to the same resources. Therefore, Biden’s proposal is being decried as unconstitutional. Yet, as simple and logical as this line of reasoning sounds, the arguments provided are deeply flawed.

    What these injunctions really display is a ploy by right-wing political actors and the conservative law firms that give them cover, to gin up the support of rural white people.

    There have been three separate injunctions filed — in Texas, Florida and Wisconsin. Each represents white farmers not only from those three states but around the country.

    The filing from Wisconsin roots its argument in individual rights. Here, the reasoning is based on the 1995 case Adarand Constructors, Inc. v. Peña, which held that group-based allegations of racism must be scrutinized with respect to the effects on individuals.

    Specifically, the plaintiffs take a quote from the late Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia in his concurring opinion from Adarand, which reads, “Individuals who have been wronged by unlawful racial discrimination should be made whole; but under our Constitution there can be no such thing as either a creditor or a debtor race. That concept is alien to the Constitution’s focus upon the individual.”

    There is an interesting bit of constitutional philosophy here but also one that is problematic: Basically, it’s debatable whether there is a “focus upon the individual” in the Constitution.

    The fact is that there are many references to group rights in our country’s founding document. Look no further than the First Amendment, with respect to the freedom to practice religion free of discrimination. As far as I know, a religion comprised of one individual does not exist.

    The same could be said of the Second Amendment and militias. Again, this is a clear “focus,” not on individual, but rather on group rights. So, for the plaintiffs filing these injunctions to base their arguments on the idea that the U.S.’s magna carta is rooted solely on individual rights is incorrect.

    The Florida injunction, which the Texas plaintiffs claim is the basis for their case, takes issue with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) designation of “socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers” (SDFRs).

    Here, the reasoning goes that direct evidence needs to be shown as to the experiences of racism. The plaintiffs argue that, “although the government argues that historical discrimination against SDFRs also included things such as higher interest rates, less advantageous loan terms, and delayed approvals, the record evidence does not appear to show that SDFRs with current loans suffered such discrimination.”

    The problem is that evidence is not the issue; or rather, claims that evidence of racism must be provided are not required for the USDA to act with respect to historically marginalized farmers and ranchers.

    It is worth noting that the SDFR designation was created as part of the 1990 Farm Bill, referring explicitly to producers who have been subjected to racial or ethnic prejudice because of their group identity. Included are not only African Americans, but also Latinos, Indigenous people, and Asian and Pacific Islanders.

    With the designation, the USDA secretary of agriculture was granted the power to “carry out an outreach and technical assistance program to encourage and assist socially disadvantaged farmers and ranchers, and veteran farmers or ranchers, in owning and operating farms and ranches, and in participating equitably in the full range of agricultural programs offered by the Department.”

    The main point here is on “participating equitably.” Specifically, the USDA has the power, in ways that it sees fit, to directly work with historically marginalized groups of people to counter systemic discrimination.

    Debt forgiveness is one such initiative. After all, if people are in debt, then they are less likely and able to participate in other programs. For instance, Natural Resources and Conservation Service (NRCS) loans — which provide resources to farmers to practice farming in ways that improve soil, water and animal health — in part depend on having sound financials. So, the case coming out of Florida misunderstands the SDFR designation, which has been on the books for over 30 years.

    But really, these injunctions have little to do with sound reasoning. Digging into the actual forces behind these cases, we find Donald Trump loyalists including former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows and former White House Senior Adviser Stephen Miller. They started the nonprofit that filed the injunction in the Texas case.

    The Pacific Legal Foundation, which filed the injunction in Florida, is bankrolled by various conservative and libertarian groups such as the Sarah Scaife Foundation, the Bradley Foundation and the Donors Trust, which is tied to the Charles G. Koch Foundation.

    Additionally, the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty, which is behind the case filed in Wisconsin, draws most of its financial support from the Bradley Foundation. This foundation is behind funding several right-wing nonprofits around the country that are hostile to unions and skeptical of climate change.

    In line with this strategy, leaders of the Wisconsin Institute — a recipient of Bradley foundation grants — have publicly stated that they have political objectives in mind with this injunction, intending to expand nationally in projects that target leftists and anti-racism.

    The point is that these lawsuits against farmers of color have little to do with “equality before the law.” Bankrolled by conservatives with political ambitions, this race-baiting, white-identity politicking is all about maintaining a conservative base of voters heading into 2022 and beyond.

    If the interests behind these injunctions really thought farming was tough, then they would invest time and energy in backing legislation that would actually help our country’s producers, like the Justice for Black Farmers Act; the Farm System Reform Act; Sen. Kirsten Gillibrand’s proposed program to restructure farm loans; and/or Sen. Amy Klobuchar’s bill that would strengthen antitrust enforcement.

    Instead, what we have are nothing but right-wing ploys that do nothing but divide rural people and distract them from working on creating meaningful change in our communities.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Farmer Co-Ops Are Giving Latinx Communities Room To Grow

    On Sundays, Edith Alas Ortega travels 20 minutes from her home to a farm field in Henderson County, North Carolina, and takes a deep breath. “There’s a mental and physical healing that happens out here,” she said in Spanish. Ortega is one of five members of Tierra Fértil Coop—“fertile ground” in English—an agricultural, worker-owned cooperative for and by Latinx immigrants. The group—three Salvadoran and three Mexican immigrants—meet every week on their one-acre parcel in Hendersonville that provides vegetables for the families involved as well as enough for resale, with a focus on culturally appropriate ingredients for the Latinx market.

    The post Farmer Co-Ops Are Giving Latinx Communities Room To Grow appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Lake Erie Advocates Launch Billboard Against ‘Factory Farms’

    “Nothing happens until we start talking about it, and that’s why we’ve kicked off this campaign to start the conversation about banning factory farms,” Mr. Ferner said. “When enough people demand that, it will happen, thousands of farmers will be able to go back onto the land that they’ve been kicked off of by this industry to produce the meat, milk, and eggs that we need just like they did a mere 20 years ago.”

    The post Lake Erie Advocates Launch Billboard Against ‘Factory Farms’ appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Badger cull is ‘crass hooliganism’ that’s set to continue indefinitely, experts say

    The UK is continuing its massacre of badgers for at least the next five years. The optics of the mass killing plan are terrible for a government that is attempting to position itself as a biodiversity champion. But, more importantly, what is the controversial and years-long slaughter doing to UK badger populations and the ecosystems they are part of?

    This is one of the issues The Canary discussed with ecologist Tom Langton and veterinarian Iain McGill in wide-ranging conversations about the ongoing policy. Both experts have consistently opposed the slaughter on scientific, ecological, and ethical grounds.

    Legal action

    The government began the badger killing policy – or ‘culling’ – in 2013. Over 140,000 badgers have died as a result of it so far. The government claims the massacre of the protected species is necessary because badgers transmit tuberculosis (TB) to cows. But the policy is not only deeply unpopular, many argue it’s based on cherry-picked science and flawed claims. The evidence appears to back up those arguments.

    Langton has brought a legal case against the government over the killing. It will challenge how “allowing the mass destruction of a protected species to enable intensive livestock production… fits within governments wider statutory duty” to have regard to conserving biodiversity. That duty is detailed in the 2006 Natural Environment and Rural Communities (NERC) Act.

    A mindset unfit for our times

    The idea that killing wildlife is an acceptable solution to issues isn’t new or uncommon. But with the UN warning that the destruction of nature and ecosystems poses an existential threat to human civilisation, it’s increasingly becoming an ‘answer’ that’s unfit for our times.

    Indeed, McGill told The Canary that proponents of the cull are:

    out of step with society, they’re out of step with a world where biodiversity is shrinking. They’re just very out of step with culture and what the right thing to do is.

    The government’s rhetoric of late suggests it’s taken note of this disconnect. It’s announced policy changes that environment secretary George Eustice says will allow it to “start to phase out badger culling as soon as possible”.

    McGill explained what the ‘phasing out’ means in practice:

    they’re not really phasing it out, they’re expanding it massively before they phase it out.

    He said the government is adding another 10 or 11 intensive culling areas this year, and a further 10 or 11 in 2022. Intensive cull licences last for four years, so they will enable the continuing mass slaughter of badgers up to 2026. The Badger Trust estimates that the government’s plan will cost a further 140,000 badgers their lives.

    Forever plan

    Langton, meanwhile, highlighted what the government’s plan is for after 2026. The ecologist says the government is proposing an “expansion of the policy” on a local level, whereby “100% of badgers” could be targeted in smaller designated cull areas. He warned:

    We could end up with just as many badgers being killed, via either a general licence for the whole of England… so instead of 50 large culls, we could have say 500 farm clusters given a licence to eradicate badgers.

    In its strategy, the government outlines that it will draw up a “new policy of culling” moving forward. It says that “vaccination in badgers and surveillance would first have to be carried out before reverting to culling”. The strategy says culling that took place in East Cumbria will, in part, “be the basis” for the future culling policy. There was no maximum limit on the amount of badgers East Cumbria could kill in its cull. Langton says that the plan there was to “remove them completely and that is what they did”. He called it “badger scorched earth”.

    Not what it says on the tin

    The ecologist concluded that the plan going forward:

    doesn’t really do what it says on the tin. The policy messaging has all been about phasing out culling, but in fact it’s not. It’s just a rebranding, a rehashing, of the original policy which is to see badgers reduced in number across much of the country by 70%.

    Figures from a 2017 study suggest the culling policy so far may have knocked out around a third of England’s badger population. The plan for the next five years could remove a further third.

    McGill said that the scale of destruction means that it’s likely “local extinctions will happen” for badgers in parts of England, mostly where they have faced intensive culling. The government claims that:

    Culling activities are strictly licenced and monitored closely to ensure badger populations remain viable in culling areas

    “Crass hooliganism”

    Badgers are the UK’s largest land predator. As such, they play a key role in the ecosystems in which they live. A 2011 evaluation by the Food and Environment Research Agency (Fera), now called Fera Science, warned that ecosystems could face direct and indirect impacts from “badger control”. It found that direct impacts, such as the disturbance or accidental killing of other species during culling operations, could:

    have significant negative impacts on either individual species, assemblages of species and/or designated sites

    In terms of indirect impacts, it said “Manipulating carnivore populations” could have “significant effects on the structure of ecological communities” and “wider knock‐on consequences for the ecology of other species and communities”.

    McGill explained that removing badgers:

    causes something called mesopredator release, where the other predators can move into the area where badgers would have been controlling those things… stoats, weasels, foxes, can increase.

    He said that this, in turn, could “have an impact” on ground-nesting birds, hedgehogs numbers and more. McGill emphasised that “you don’t know what’s going to move in and change”, but asserted:

    It’s a very stupid thing to do if you’re trying to conserve biodiversity. It’s just a crass hooliganism. It’s environmental hooliganism.

    Government response

    The Canary contacted the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) for comment. A spokesperson said:

    Bovine TB is one of the most difficult and intractable animal health challenges that the UK faces today, causing considerable trauma for farmers and costing taxpayers over £100 million every year.

    The badger cull has led to a significant reduction in the disease but no one wants to continue the cull of a protected species indefinitely. That is why we are now building on this progress by accelerating other elements of our strategy, including cattle vaccination and improved testing so that we can eradicate this insidious disease and start to phase out badger culling as soon as possible.

    Forging ahead regardless

    Langton also stressed that there are lots of unknowns in relation to the potential ecological impacts. He told The Canary that the Randomised Badger Culling Trial (RBCT) recommended further study for there to be any level of certainty on the ecological consequences of killing badgers. The RBCT was a 10-year-long assessment of the impact of culling badgers on TB levels in cows.

    The Godfray review, a government-sponsored review of the cull, also called for further ecological studies into the impact of reducing badger numbers due to their ‘key role’ in ecosystems.

    That essentially means that widespread badger killing has been taking place for eight years without the government knowing for sure how its actions will impact affected species and ecosystems. Indeed, in a prior legal case he mounted, Langton said the judge ruled that Natural England (NE) had breached its statutory duty by not taking “steps to look for potential [ecological] effects” of the cull.

    National England’s capacity

    That case prompted NE to produce guidance on “evaluating the ecological consequences of culling” on certain sites. Langton said NE also committed to undertaking impact assessments. Indeed, the body did produce a monitoring report in conjunction with the British Trust for Ornithology in 2018. However, it hasn’t made that report public.

    Langton has called for a pause in the killing until NE has “designed, tested and [put] in place” a “robust system” to monitor its impact on sites and species. NE might, however, not have the capacity for such a system. In itself, that calls the government’s commitments to biodiversity protection – and adherence to legal obligations – into question.

    As Langton told The Canary, Tony Juniper, the chair of NE, warned the public and government in 2020 that it lacked the ability to properly monitor protected sites due to funding cuts. A 2018 House of Lords report highlighted that NE appeared to have faced “a budget cut of over 44% in an 11-year period” by that year. The Landscape Institute, meanwhile, said that:

    the status of Natural England has been incrementally diminished, so that it struggles to impose essential constraints on developments that will inevitably give rise to environmental damage.

    Wildlife isn’t the problem

    Although research into the ecological impacts of killing badgers is severely lacking, the RBCT did flag an inconvenient fact for the government related to biodiversity in its findings. Langton said that the trial’s studies of ground nesting birds showed that:

    never mind the badgers or the foxes, it was the overstocked cattle that are destroying the nests. They were treading on them, eating them, and actually the conservation problem is the cattle. They’re far too dense, there’s far too many of them now and that’s one reason why rural birds are declining.

    Many have long argued that the answer to TB control lies in changes to the farming industry. Clearly, changes to farming aren’t only key to eradicating TB in cows, though. They’re also essential for reversing the UK’s catastrophic biodiversity loss and tackling the climate crisis. Last, but certainly not least, changes are necessary to ensure better lives for farmed animals. As a Guardian article highlighted, they face “systematic cruelty”, with female dairy cows in particular trapped in a “cycle of hell”.

    “We defend the animal”

    McGill says that there needs to be “a total change in the way we’re farming”. He argues that Defra needs to start looking at issues “in the round”, with an “aim that isn’t just industry”. Instead, it should base policy on the health and welfare of wild and farmed animals, “the whole environment itself”, public health and public opinion, as well as the needs of industry.

    McGill says that in farming:

    We need to go back to looking at the animal as the starting point. The veterinary profession has a key role to play here by saying: ‘well, we defend the animal, and its health, and its welfare, and its right to exist as a creature, which is sentient’. Then it all flows from that. That’s what’s been forgotten in our headlong rush for cheap food.

    Beggars belief

    In short, these experts argue that there was – and is – a path to a TB-free future for cows without the mass slaughter of badgers and any associated ecological carnage. But the Conservative government charged head first down the lethal route. McGill summed the situation up, saying:

    It beggars belief really that this is the 21st Century and they’re getting away with it.

    It does indeed beggar belief, not least because the government made its choice amid a biodiversity emergency and in one of the most nature-depleted countries in the world.

    Featured image via caroline legg / Flickr

    By Tracy Keeling

    This post was originally published on The Canary.

  • The Undervalued Small Farmer and Food Insecurity

    The average hourly wage for someone working in farming in the US is less than $13 an hour. Ignore the numbers for the total average income of farm families, because they nearly always include the income of one full-time wage earner. For a couple, it could be either partner, but trust me, one of them works a full day and then returns to work the farm until dark during most of the year. And guaranteed, the work they do when they come home is much harder than what they do at their outside job.

    I thought maybe that had changed in the years since we had a small farm, but apparently it hasn’t. I recently spoke with a young farm wife and mother who stopped by to pick up some tomato starts on her way home from her office job. She named several women from neighboring farms who were also in the workforce, even though they’d rather be home weeding vegetables in preparation for the weekend farmers’ markets and being with their kids.

    If you farm in the West, where heat and drought are growing worse every year, you may have foregone planting the usual vegetable crops, culled your animals, and stripped your fruit trees. That’s because most of California is under drought emergency, which is not expected to improve.

    So where will our food come from if the West Coast farmers are forced to give up? The large corporate farms typically grow one crop, and this lack of diversity also means a lack of food security. We rely most heavily on Western states for the bulk of our US-grown vegetables and fruits. Farms in other regions, including here in New England, are often smaller, more diverse, and run by a couple, one of whom earns that “less than $13 an hour.” Drought and temps are increasing here too.

    One of California’s main crops is almonds. We raise and export most of the nuts grown on a million acres in this $10 billion market. One almond requires one gallon of water to grow to maturity. That’s a lot of water. Raising beef requires a lot of water too—for the corn to feed them. We also export beef and other meat products. The companies who make the big bucks benefit from big government subsidies. Remember that small farmer who sells through a CSA or at the farm markets? The only subsidy she gets is maybe a “thank you” from someone who knows the hard work that went into that lovely tomato or beautiful squash, which she probably picked before you even had your first cup of coffee that morning.

    If ever there were a subsidy that should be created, it would be one for the small farmers, because they deserve to make a living and because eventually you may have to look to them for much of your family’s food. Part of our trade deficit with China is made up of imported food products that include 90 percent of the vitamin C consumed by Americans, 78 percent of the tilapia, 70 percent of the apple juice, 50 percent of the cod, 43 percent of the processed mushrooms and 23 percent of the garlic. Right, that apple juice you give your kids probably didn’t come from New England or the Northwest, nor did the cod come from coastal Maine. I won’t even go into the health and safety concerns surrounding so many imports, nor will I elaborate on the geo-political risks associated with our food security or lack thereof. And if small farmers decide to switch professions so they can actually “feed” their own families, well . . . Use your imagination.

    Why must we use our resources (water) to export more than $4 billion worth of almonds, for example, when we could be helping farmers and orchardists produce safe, locally grown food for us? Why did we import $10 billion worth of vegetables in 2020, equal to a third of the quantity available to US consumers? We rely on California for most of our US-produced produce, with Mexico being the secondary source.

    Getting back to climate change, or what it was known as before the term frightened too many media progressives, climate catastrophe. What happens when California can no longer supply our food, if China shuts down exports, if there is political upheaval south of the border, if hackers shut down our transportation systems? So many possibilities. How friendly are you with the lady next door who grows vegetables in her little raised bed garden? Maybe you should get to know her better—and ask her for tips on growing some of your own.

    The post The Undervalued Small Farmer and Food Insecurity first appeared on Dissident Voice.


    This content originally appeared on Dissident Voice and was authored by Sheila Velazquez.

    This post was originally published on Radio Free.

  • Air Pollution From Livestock and Fertilizers Kills Nearly 18,000 People Yearly

    A curious pig looks at visitors to the barn on one of the Silky Pork farms in Duplin County in a 2014 file image. Air pollution from Duplin County farms is linked to roughly 98 premature deaths per year, according to a new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

    A new study from a group of agricultural researchers found that nearly 18,000 deaths occur annually in the United States due to air pollution coming from farms.

    The study, which was published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, noted that gases associated with manure and animal feed are producing particles that are able to drift hundreds of miles away from their source. Most of the deaths attributable to farm pollution, however, come from animal-based agriculture, accounting for 80 percent of the deaths the study uncovered.

    Chronic exposure to increased levels of fine particulate matter (sometimes shortened to PM2.5) that is released from farms “increases the risk of heart disease, cancer, and stroke,” an analysis of the study noted.

    Notably, deaths associated with farm pollution are more localized than deaths that occur with greenhouse gas pollution. Communities upwind from farms discharging the pollutants are at greatest risk, said Jason Hill, University of Minnesota professor and a lead author of the study. In other words, the health effects from agriculture-based air pollution tend to be more localized, dependent upon local weather patterns and other factors.

    While that reduces the risk from these pollutants at the national and global levels (areas most affected by this type of pollution are in eastern North Carolina, California’s Central Valley and the Upper Midwest), the annual number of deaths caused by farm pollution now exceed deaths caused by pollution from coal power plants in the U.S.

    The biggest culprit behind the deaths from farm pollution, in the study’s estimation, is ammonia, a chemical that’s released by manure and fertilizer, and which often combines with other pollutants found on farms, including nitrogen and sulfur. Hill, speaking with The Washington Post about the study, pointed out that animal waste is often stored in “lagoons” on farms, where huge amounts of ammonia are generated by the breakdown of animal feces. Ammonia is also created when farmers apply too much fertilizer on crops.

    According to the study, livestock waste and fertilizer overuse likely accounted for about 12,400 deaths per year. While particulate matter emanating from “dust from tillage, livestock dust, field burning, and fuel combustion in agricultural equipment use” accounted for around 4,800 more deaths annually.

    Agriculture industry leaders were quick to push back against the study’s findings. “U.S. pork producers have a strong track record of environmental stewardship,” claimed Jim Monroe, a spokesperson for the National Pork Producers Council.

    A spokesperson for Smithfield Foods, which runs industrial hog operations in North Carolina, agreed with Monroe’s contentions, citing a study from the North Carolina Department of Environmental Quality, which said it didn’t find air quality problems in the areas where they had farms. But that study has some noteworthy flaws, including the fact that monitors used to detect ammonia levels were set up far away from the farms themselves.

    Ammonia is a reactive chemical, and is difficult to detect unless a significant amount is released at one time.

    In spite of this pushback, the study on agricultural air pollution noted there are potential solutions to the problem that could reduce yearly deaths in the U.S.

    “Air quality–related health benefits … can be achieved through the actions of food producers and consumers,” the study’s authors said. Reducing particulate-related emissions, promoting dietary shifts in animals, reducing food loss and waste, and other methods are cited in the study as helpful to reducing the number of deaths from agricultural air pollution.

    “The greatest benefits are from changes in livestock waste management and fertilizer application practices,” the study said. “Producer-side interventions in the 10 percent of counties with the highest mitigation potential alone could prevent 3,600 deaths per year.”

    Methods based out of regenerative agriculture — described as “a system of farming principles and practices that seeks to rehabilitate and enhance the entire ecosystem of the farm” by the Climate Reality Project — could also be beneficial for scaling back farm-based air pollution, particularly in California, where such efforts could potentially reduce the impact of wildfires in the state. Such methods (including encouraging animals to graze natural plants, shrubs, or grass on the land, rather than animal feed, and engaging in no-till farming strategies to increase moisture levels in the soil) have been cited by farmer Alexis Koefoed as helping her family’s farm survive a wildfire last year.

    “I think what the fire reinforced for me is that regenerative agriculture, managing the soil, using animals as grazers to build healthy soil is absolutely the direction to go in,” Koefoed said.

    Beyond saving family farms, reducing the impact of wildfires could result in better health outcomes for nearby areas, particularly since smoke from those fires has been found to be 10 times more harmful than from other sources, including car exhaust.

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Race, Poverty, Farming And A Natural Gas Pipeline

    Five years ago, the mayor of Hopkins Park, a Black, rural community in Kankakee County, Illinois, argued for building an immigration detention center there to boost the economy. The people who lived there said: No, thanks. 

    Mayor Mark Hodge now has another idea for new development in his town and the surrounding, historic farming community of Pembroke Township, south of Chicago. He’s backing a proposal for a pipeline, built by the utility Nicor, that would run through the area and, he hopes, bring with it natural gas and a boost to taxes and the local economy. And again, some residents are not pleased. 

    “People here love the earth,” said Dr. Jifunza Wright-Carter, who farms 45 acres with her husband in Pembroke Township and promotes sustainable agriculture.

    The post Race, Poverty, Farming And A Natural Gas Pipeline appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • For Small Farms Surviving The Pandemic, Co-ops Are A Lifeline

    Ian Colburn, Zoey Fink, and Casey Holland all operate small, diversified farms in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. The farmers already had plants in the ground in March when they realized restaurants and farmers’ markets—two of their biggest sales channels—would likely shut down due to the pandemic.

    Colburn of Solarpunk Farm worried his acreage was too small to support a robust Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and that he hadn’t planned for the kind of crop diversity that model demanded. Fink works part-time at Farm Shark Farm with her husband. They already had a CSA but didn’t think they could increase membership enough on their own to sell the rest of the vegetables.

    “It was a scary time,” she said. “We thought: if we work together, we can be scaling up and serving 100 families per week.”

    The post For Small Farms Surviving The Pandemic, Co-ops Are A Lifeline appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • A Grim Season Looms — But Regenerative Agriculture Could Offer Hope

    People watch the Walbridge fire, part of the larger LNU Lightning Complex fire, from a vineyard in Healdsburg, California, on August 20, 2020.

    When Alexis Koefoed’s farm burned for the first time in 2008, she and her husband, who made a living raising pasture-grazing chickens at the time, lost 1,000 baby chicks and a brand-new barn. “I thought there could never be anything worse than this experience, until it happened three more times,” she said.

    That first time, an arsonist was to blame. But parts of the farm, in Vacaville, California, ignited again in 2010 after an incident with power tools, and once more in 2013, though she doesn’t know what started that one. Then in August 2020, the “whole valley went up.”

    At 1 am, Koefoed and her husband were given 10 minutes to evacuate. They grabbed their dogs, the deed to their house, and left. “We did not imagine we would ever come home,” Koefoed said.

    The fire was part of the LNU Lightning Complex, started by the convergence of numerous lightning-sparked fires, which according to Solano County data, killed six people, scorched 192,000 acres and 1,491 structures, and burned for 46 days. In general, the 2020 fire season was the worst California has ever seen.

    When Koefoed and her husband broke through the police barrier and made it back to their farm later that morning, the olive orchard was still ablaze. Embers the size of baseballs dropped from above. Pacific Gas and Electric had cut off their power, which meant water pumps weren’t working, so Koefoed and her husband and daughter spent six hours patting down the fire with shovels and small buckets of water they carried by hand from animal troughs. Miraculously, their house still stood, as did the lavender field. And they were able to save the olive trees.

    How is it possible that any of Koefoed’s farm survived this fire? She wonders if her embrace of regenerative farming — a set of practices that restore soil health by mimicking natural processes — may have helped. In 2015, Koefoed shifted her philosophy on farming after coming across a lecture by Allan Savory, the Zimbabwean ecologist known for his systems-thinking approach to managing land. Before doing so, she had concentrated her efforts on taking care of the animals, trees and plants on her farm. But learning about Savory’s holistic farming practices caused her to flip her focus to the ground and work her way up. “First we’re building soil and everything else comes from that,” Koefoed said.

    She stopped tilling the dirt. “No-till” practices help the soil sequester more carbon among other nutrients, and store water. She encouraged her animals to graze and added hedgerows (lines of native shrubs and trees which support pollinators).

    Koefoed has not formally measured moisture levels since making these changes, but says she saw signs that things were shifting. Since she began employing more holistic practices six years ago, the grass stays greener later in the summer and there are more perennial grasses — signs of increased water-holding capacity.

    “I think what the fire reinforced for me is that regenerative agriculture, managing the soil, using animals as grazers to build healthy soil is absolutely the direction to go in,” Koefoed said.

    “As Soon as It Hit Our Grassland, It Slowed Down”

    Other farmers and ranchers who have survived California wildfires have made similar observations.

    Doniga Markegard is a cattle rancher in Half Moon Bay, where she leases 11,000 acres from regional parks, private land trusts, and other individual landowners. Markegard’s animals graze on grasses, instead of corn, as they’re often given on feedlots. Their grazing prevents the emergence of the most flammable kind of woody undergrowth that, when left unmanaged, contributes to fires growing hotter and getting out of hand. The animals eat and trim the grasses just enough to stimulate more root growth, which thereby improves water-holding capacity. Markegard moves them on to a new patch of land before they deplete the grasses, similar to how herds of wild animals used to migrate before humans built roads, cities and subdivisions.

    Markegard says the benefits of the approach are visible, even to the untrained eye, during wildfire season.

    In 2019, a brushfire began on a neighboring property, and spread quickly. “As soon as it hit our grassland, it slowed down,” Markegard described. Then, when CalFire arrived, they were able to cut a fuel break because unlike elsewhere, the fire had been tamed so much, they could walk over the land safely. If the land hadn’t been managed, Markegard speculates, the fire could have become devastating like so many others.

    Markegard saw the same thing happen on other ranchers’ land last year. But she says there’s a marked absence of holistic practices on public lands, which contribute to the level of devastation of the 2020 wildfire season. Big Basin Redwoods State Park, California’s oldest, was devastated by the CZU Lightning Complex Fire, for instance. “The problem is that so many of these parks have removed agriculture. They’ve removed livestock and they haven’t put anything in its place to manage those lands. If you have no management, then a fire is going to come in and burn that vegetation,” Markegard said. The founding of many state and national parks also entailed the violent displacement of Indigenous peoples living there, many of whom practiced traditional ecological knowledge, which what we now call regenerative agriculture draws from.

    According to an article published in January 2021 in the journal Global Environmental Change, the removal of livestock grazing, which in the study area in the Rocky Mountains declined 62 percent since 1940, can lead to decreases in biodiversity, increases in fuel loads for wildland fire and encroachment of trees and shrubs into meadows. Project Drawdown calls managed grazing number 16 of the top 100 solutions for limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius by 2050.

    Lightning Could Strike Anywhere

    On account of ongoing megadrought conditions in the state, climate scientists say California could be on track for an even earlier and more grim fire season this year. Half of the U.S. is also experiencing drier than usual or drought conditions.

    Amid the ongoing risk, farmers, ranchers, and other land stewards are making their usual preparations. Pie Ranch is a regenerative farm in Pescadero dedicated to food accessibility and youth education. Co-founder Jered Lawson told Truthout those working the land on their ranch are removing eucalyptus trees and replanting with a more diverse landscape in partnership with the Native Stewardship Corp of the Amah Mutsun Tribal Band, which is bringing back cultural burns to the area, a practice that restores culturally significant plants and helps mitigate the risk of devastating fires. The Indigenous women-led Sogorea Te’ Land Trust, which facilitates the return of Native land to Native people in San Francisco’s East Bay area, has built its first community resiliency center in anticipation of future fires and power outages. The center combines a ceremonial space, seed saving library, first-aid supplies, and food and medicine gardens.

    But only so much is in the realm of control of a single farm or land trust, since lightning could strike anywhere.

    Fire departments should more formally partner with farmers and ranchers on fire management, Lawson and Markegard say, because they know the land intimately. State governments might consider re-embracing grazing as a fire prevention strategy.

    Reforms to fire insurance are also needed. A report quantifying the impacts of last year’s wildfires by the California Council on Science and Technology found that data on crop losses to wildfire is not systematically tracked across the state, and that high-value crops in California are not covered by federal crop insurance. Only 50 percent of agricultural producers have insurance, the report found. Of all that burned on Koefoed’s farm — decades worth of work — only a shipping container and a barn were covered by her policy. “Replacing 500 trees and waiting 22 years for them to grow is kind of an overwhelming idea,” Koefoed said.

    Sherri Dugger, executive director of the Socially Responsible Agriculture Project, envisions farms and ranches like Koefoed’s, Lawson’s and Markegard’s dotting the landscape all over the country to feed communities fresh, healthy and locally raised foods and provide ecosystem services like fire management.

    “The Farm System Reform Act, which will be reintroduced this year to Congress, and the Climate Stewardship Act, which was just reintroduced, are two really good first steps to supporting these regenerative-focused independent farmers, to halting environmental injustices, and to mitigating climate change,” Dugger told Truthout, noting that boosting regenerative agriculture programs might be funded by rerouting $25 billion in subsidies that industrial agriculture operations receive annually. A 2019 report by the Food and Land Use Coalition found that globally, just 1 percent of the $700 billion annually given to farmers is used to improve the environment and thereby, community well-being.

    In 2023, the next U.S. Farm Bill is the Biden administration’s most significant opportunity to restructure, hold multinational corporate agribusinesses accountable for their pollution and reduce our agriculture system’s climate impact, Dugger said. It’s also an opportunity for the administration to call on farmers and agricultural workers to more formally collaborate on averting traumatic, high-carbon emitting wildfires on an economy-wide scale.

    “We know the solution to managing the understory. We know that animal impact can make a huge difference in clearing out old debris and oxidized material,” Koefoed said. “But there’s just this disconnect between understanding this and moving it forward into the hands of decision makers.”

    This post was originally published on Latest – Truthout.

  • Pasture Cropping – The Innovative No-Kill, No-Till System

    Regenerative agriculture is a global farming revolution with rapid uptake and interest around the world. Five years ago hardly anyone had heard about it. It is in the news nearly everyday now. This  agricultural revolution has been led by innovative farmers rather than scientists, researchers and governments. It is being applied to all agricultural sectors including cropping, grazing and perennial horticulture.

    In previous articles we have described how regenerative agriculture maximizes the photosynthesis of plants to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to increase soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is a good proxy for soil health, as it is important for improving fertility and water capture in soils, thus improving productivity and profitability in farming.

    The post Pasture Cropping – The Innovative No-Kill, No-Till System appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • Add Atmospheric Drying To Climate Change Toll

    Drier air brought on by climate change could put a dent in crop yields, triggering smaller and slower-growing plants, a new study says.

    “Globally, the atmosphere is drying as the climate warms up,” said Danielle Way, an associate professor of biology at Western University. “That’s been correlated with reduced crop yield.”

    Because air wants to hold as much water as possible, it starts to pull moisture from plants as its dries, with potentially devastating impacts on crops and vegetation.

    Way, working with researchers at the University of Minnesota, studied 50 years of data and 112 plant species, including wheat, corn and birch trees, to assess how they’re affected by drier air.

    The recently published findings show plants react to atmospheric drying — even if they don’t lack water in the soil — by triggering a drought-like response, growing smaller, shorter and slower.

    The post Add Atmospheric Drying To Climate Change Toll appeared first on PopularResistance.Org.

    This post was originally published on PopularResistance.Org.

  • MEPs back law to hold firms to account for environment and human rights abuses

    Big majority in EU parliament vote for corporate due diligence along entire supply chains, which will include UK businesses

    The EU took a step closer to holding companies to account for environmental damage and human rights abuses committed by their subsidiaries and suppliers overseas, with a vote in the European parliament on Wednesday.

    MEPs voted by a large majority, 504 to 79 (with 112 abstentions), to push forward with proposed legislation that would require companies to conduct due diligence throughout their supply chain, to root out abuses and environmental harm such as deforestation and pollution.

    Continue reading…

    This post was originally published on Human rights | The Guardian.