Civil Eats

A new article in the respected journal BioScience raises important concerns about the harmful influence of genetically engineered herbicide resistant crops on sustainable weed control. As many others have also noted, the excessive reliance on glyphosate-based herbicides, such as Roundup, has resulted in the emergence and spread of many harmful weeds that can no longer be controlled by glyphosate. These weeds now infest millions of acres of farmland the U.S., resulting in greater herbicide use.

But the new article goes well beyond most previous work by providing insight into the state of weed control for major crops in the U.S., and how the current use of engineered herbicide resistant crops is driving agriculture toward reduced sustainability. Read More

As a possible 2012 farm bill looms, the agriculture committee leaders and their industrial agriculture lobby remoras are sorting through the smoking ruins of the 2011 secret farm bill process. They hope to come up with a unified position from which to begin deliberations on a new farm bill. Sadly, one thing they’ve all agreed to cut is 7 million acres from the Conservation Reserve Program. The CRP is administered through the U.S. Department of Agriculture and pays farmers to keep highly erodible land out of production.

While many recognize that putting land into conservation programs leads to cleaner water, healthier soil and robust wildlife habitat, few realize that CRP land also plays a major role in fighting climate change. According to the USDA, one acre of protected land sequesters 1.66 metric tons of carbon every year, carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere.  The 7 million acres about to be cut from the Conservation Reserve Program have been putting 11.6 million metric tons of carbon into the soil every year. Read More

A physicist, a chemist, and an economist are stranded on a desert island with nothing to eat when a can of soup washes to shore. The physicist says: “Let’s smash the can open with a rock.” The chemist says: “Let’s build a fire and heat the can first.” The economist says: “Let’s assume we have a can-opener.”

The attacks coming from economists against the local and sustainable food movement sound a lot like this joke: The arguments are based in flawed assumptions, obfuscated by fancy charts, big words, and complex calculations.  Read More

When most people think of factory farming they typically think of feedlots, hog factories or chicken operations–not massive open net pens growing millions of fish in our oceans. However, factory fish farming will soon pose many of the same threats to the environment and to consumers as its land-based counterparts.

Growing fish in a crowded environment in open net pens or cages and giving them antibiotic-laced feed inevitably leads to pollution. The waste, which includes excess feed, antibiotics and the chemicals used to treat the cages, flows directly into the ocean and, ultimately, on to our plates.

Food & Water Watch’s new report reveals that if the government used factory fish farming to reach its stated goal of offsetting the U.S. seafood trade deficit (that is, importing less seafood than it exports), 200 million of these fish would need to be produced in ocean cages off U.S. coasts each year. Calculations show that this could result in the discharge of as much nitrogenous waste as the untreated sewage from a city nearly nine times more populous than Los Angeles. Read More

Sustainably grown produce is reliant upon sustainable, thriving local farms. But for Jeff and Annie Main, concern mounted over the security and sustainability of their 25-year old farm when the couple started to plan for their retirement. Appalled by the possibility of their family farm and land being swept away into development, the Mains looked for a way to keep the selling price for their farm affordable for a younger farmer’s investment.

Good Humus Produce has been in operation since 1976 and is now a 20-acre organic farm that produces fruit, vegetables, herbs, and flowers. Over the past 10 years, the Mains have been working on an easement initiative, the goal of which is to preserve a sense of place, post-retirement. Read More

Applying* a cancer-causing poison on California’s farm fields sounds like some dastardly plot hatched by a Batman super-villain. Unfortunately, reality is often scarier than fiction. In December 2010, the State of California approved the known carcinogen methyl iodide for use on the state’s farm fields. Yes, you read that right—a chemical that actually causes cancer was approved to be applied* on the fields that grow the Golden State’s most prized crops.

Earthjustice promptly filed a lawsuit in January challenging the state’s approval of the toxic pesticide. As a result of the lawsuit, Earthjustice recently obtained internal documents detailing dire warnings about methyl iodide from scientists at the California Department of Pesticide Regulation. Unfortunately, those dire warnings fell on deaf ears and then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger approved methyl iodide for use. Read More

News flash: the chairman of the board of one of the largest food companies in the world—whose tripling in profits from 2009 to nearly $43 billion in 2010 was generating from selling mainly processed foods produced with inputs from industrial, chemical farms—is “skeptical” of organic food, reports FastCompany.com.

Don’t you think someone who made $10.7 million in 2010 from a company whose profit primarily depends on chemical agriculture might have a bias in the matter? Yes, it would be understandable to think Peter Brabeck-Letmathe, Chairman of the Board of Nestlé, might. It also might be understandable to want to know what others, those without such a financial interest in the food status quo, think about the viability of non-industrial agriculture. But in the FastCompany.com article, like other press that pooh-poohs organic farming, those who disagree, if they’re mentioned at all, are portrayed as marginal or unqualified to speak to the issue.

In FastCompany.com, the other side is represented by unnamed (and unquoted) “nutrition professors and some food scientists.” No offense to nutrition professors and food scientists, but what if you had, instead, learned that the viability, efficiency, and safety of industrial agriculture is being questioned not only by professors and some food scientists but by countless agronomists, food security experts, economists, epidemiologists, public health experts all around the world? What if instead of “nutrition professors and some food scientists,” you heard about the numerous peer-reviewed and meta-studies that contradict Brabeck-Letmathe’s claims. Read More

Next year, developers plan to apply for permits for the construction of America’s largest open-pit copper and gold mine, in the heart of Alaska’s most valuable salmon runs. It’s not too late for us to stop them if we act now. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is currently considering requests from stakeholders to use its power under the Clean Water Act to protect Bristol Bay. FRESH, Parent Earth and Trout Unlimited are combining grassroots forces to take action and I hope you’ll join us by signing the petition!

Pebble Mine would cover 20 square miles in the Bristol Bay watershed, and require the construction of the world’s largest earthen dam for a 10 square mile waste containment pond. Up to 10 billion tons of toxic mine wastes could be produced. Any release of these wastes could cause irreparable damage to the Bristol Bay salmon runs.

Even worse: while our wild salmon are under threat, genetically modified salmon may be introduced to the market any day. Here is exclusive footage with Paul Greenberg, best-selling author of Four Fish. He explains why hybrid Frankensalmon has no place on our tables, especially when we have an abundant, healthy alternative. Read More

I recently attended a ranch field day at TomKat Ranch in Pescadero, California, hosted by the California Climate and Agriculture Network.  The focus was on the climate benefits of sustainable ranching-an overview of how properly managed rangelands (grasslands where animals graze) can sequester carbon dioxide (CO₂) in soils and help reduce greenhouse gas emission.  This is no easy task, and one that is the subject of much debate. Read More

Recently, I attended an event at New York City’s famous James Beard House that took me back to Yellowstone National Park.

Around this time last summer, I was on a tour boat on Lake Yellowstone with my family, where we learned that lake trout, a non-native species introduced around 1995 (presumably by an angler), had grown extremely problematic for the ecosystem of the lake–in particular, for the prized cutthroat trout, which is easily preyed upon and out-competed by the larger lake trout. Read More

I’m a vegetarian. But my husband’s not. And, go figure, my kids aren’t either. Which is exactly why I care about the meat I buy. Yes, I buy meat. I’d rather not, but if it’s coming into the house–and into my kids’ bodies–then I need to know exactly what I’m buying. And I not only want to know how it’s affecting my family’s health, I also care deeply about how it’s affecting our family’s environmental footprint (including climate change).

Enter Environmental Working Group’s (EWG) new Meat Eater’s Guide to Climate Change + Health. In it, EWG took a close look at how a variety of protein foods rank when their total, “cradle-to-grave” greenhouse gas emissions are calculated. Then we factored in the non-climate environmental impacts (like water pollution) and health effects of meat and confirmed that, indeed, not all meat is created equal. Read More

How many times have you checked a food package to see where it was produced, wondering about all the energy it took to get from the farm to your fork? Once an issue that few people pondered, the “eat local” movement has inspired conscientious consumers all over the country to contemplate how we can each do better by the planet at meal-time. The issue’s gone so mainstream that even TIME magazine published a cover story a few years ago entitled, “Forget Organic—Eat Local.”

Well, according to a recent Harvard Business Review article, we would be wiser to reconsider the amount of meat products on our grocery list rather than merely looking for how many miles our food may have traveled.

How much more concerned should we be? A lot. Read More

There has ostensibly been a dialogue among New York City legislators around food, as seen through Council Speaker Christine Quinn’s Food Works resolution, Public Advocate Bill de Blasio’s (at the moment dormant) NYC Foodprint legislation, and Manhattan Borough President Scott Stringer’s Blueprint for Sustainable Food System initiative. But there has yet to be a watershed policy that explicitly acknowledges and addresses the connection between “cool foods” and reducing the effects of climate change. Read More

Four years ago, the United States government held the first congressional hearing on Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), an as yet unknown affliction responsible for the devastating and sudden losses of native honeybees, which mysteriously disappear and never return to their hives. While the news has been relatively silent on CCD the past couple of years, there’s been a resurgence of other media around this phenomenon, including “Vanishing of the Bees,” a documentary film directed by George Langworthy and Maryam Heinen and narrated by actress Ellen Page (“Inception” and “Juno”). Read More

Earlier this year, I was contacted by a PR firm working for Dow Chemical to contribute a 60-second video for The Future We Create virtual conference on water sustainability the company launches today. As a vocal advocate for strict regulation of toxic chemicals—especially for food and farming—I was surprised the company would approach me. Dow is the country’s largest chemical maker, and profits handsomely from developing some of the world’s most polluting products, many of which are widely used in industrial and consumer goods as well as agriculture.

In the video I submitted, which you can watch below, I stress that one of the greatest threats to clean water is chemical contaminants—and that Dow Chemical has a long history of water pollution. The PR representative e-mailed to say “unfortunately we can’t use your video,” but that she would be happy to include me, still, if I would consider re-recording it. When we discussed what that would mean she said, no “fingerpointing;” they wanted a “positive, inclusive discussion.” Read More

It’s like one of those bar jokes: An ethnobotonist, an agroecologist, and a chef walk into a chile field…but there isn’t a punch line because this book is about climate change.

Thankfully, the writers of the new book Chasing Chiles manage to keep despair at bay as they carry the reader along on a fascinating journey in their van, “The Spice Ship,” visiting pepper fields all over North America to seek out iconic regional peppers and the people who grow them. Read More

The produce lobby is livid that consumers might be concerned about pesticides. They are taking their fury out on the USDA for its annual report on pesticide use (via The Washington Post):

In a recent letter to Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, 18 produce trade associations complained that the data have “been subject to misinterpretation by activists, which publicize their distorted findings through national media outlets in a way that is misleading for consumers and can be highly detrimental to the growers of these commodities.” Read More

Helene York is both an educator and coach for Bon Appétit Management Company, the socially responsible food service company that operates more than 400 on-site cafés for universities, corporate employers, and museums in 31 states. She is also the director of the Bon Appétit Management Company Foundation, whose mission is to educate chefs and consumers about how their food choices affect the global environment and to catalyze changes in the supply chain. Read More

It usually surprises people when I say that it’s a great time to be in agriculture. While the number of farmers has declined significantly since our parents’ generation, there’s no denying that food prices are up, as are the prices for farmland. And the pressure is on to feed a world population growing from six billion to nine billion. We all need to eat, and it seems that finally we’re coming to realize how critical agriculture is. Read More

With strawberries lining grocery shelves from Boston to Tokyo, some say that global food supply chains are becoming ever more complex. In one sense, that’s true: speeding fresh-picked fruit across the country, or around the world, is no small trick. But in order to achieve this, it is actually necessary to simplify the way food is grown—to turn food from a source of nutrition and local pride into an industrial commodity produced by industrial-scale farms. Read More

[editor's note: You can see Dan Imhoff speak about CAFO's tonight at NYU, read here for more details.]

Imagine a series of pits that, if combined, would cover an area 40 acres in size carved 20 feet deep. Laid out as a perfect square, each side is 1,320 feet long, enough to hold 16 football fields. Now imagine it full of millions of gallons of festering manure from over 5,000 dairy cows plunked down into rural Jo Daviess County in northern Illinois. Imagine also, that these cesspools would be excavated from a porous Karst geological formation, with the propensity to percolate directly into the groundwater, along with a cocktail of nitrates, phosphorous, hydrogen sulfide, bacteria, and other substances like antibiotic drugs. Read More

Bad federal policy and intensifying storms are washing away the rich dark soils in the Midwest that made this country an agricultural powerhouse and that remain the essential foundation of a healthy and sustainable food system in the future.

That’s the alarming finding of a new Environmental Working Group report that highlights innovative research by scientists at Iowa State University. The report is titled Losing Ground, and it shows in stark terms what industrial-scale crop production is doing to our soil and water in the Corn Belt. Read More

Last week’s California Climate and Agriculture Summit, hosted by the California Climate and Agriculture Network (CalCAN), made three things clear: California agriculture has a lot to lose if climate change is not addressed; agriculture can be part of the solution; there is a science gap and a practice gap, and more resources are needed to close them both.

The Summit took place at UC Davis on March 31 and the 200 participants included a diverse range of farmers and ranchers, researchers, non-profit staff, government agency representatives, and agricultural business people. Read More

Yesterday, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack held a secret meeting between organic and conventional farmers who plant genetically modified seeds, which is being dubbed the “mint julep” summit by Washington insiders because of the USDA’s choice to offer the beverage in support of a new check-off program for mint farmers.

On the agenda was a plan to hash out what coexistence between the two forms of agriculture might look like, in light of the many lawsuits currently being brought by organic farmers whose seed stock and crops are under threat from contamination. Read More

Genetically modified seed giant Monsanto is notorious for suing farmers [PDF] in defense of its patent claims. But now, a group of dozens of organic farmers and food activists have, with the help of the not-for-profit law center The Public Patent Foundation, sued Monsanto in a case that could forever alter the way genetically modified crops are grown in this country. Read More

More Americans are demanding higher quality meat–animals fed appropriate, antibiotic-free diets on small farms and slaughtered humanely–and they are choosing to eat less of it, too. Whether turned off by endless recalls, or turned on by the health and environmental benefits of eating less meat, growth in campaigns like Meatless Monday show a powerful shift in the Zeitgeist.

Meanwhile Big Meat is taking on the Environmental Protection Agency to maintain its right to let manure run into our waterways, as it defends the excess antibiotic use (80 percent of antibiotics used in the U.S. are given to livestock), inhumane practices, and consolidation of the industry as the only way to feed the world. The beef industry has even invested in a communications degree that aims to revitalize the consumer image of industrial beef.

The conversation around how we bring meat to the table is multifaceted and is the subject of a lively discussion on April 14 at New York University entitled “What’s the Matter With Mass-Produced Meat?” Read More

This is a story about crap–literally, tons of it. Piling up in Confined Animal Feeding Operations (CAFOs) and being sprayed onto farm fields, animal manure is polluting the nation’s waterways and is nearly impossible to regulate.

Last week, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals handed down a ruling [PDF] reversing the decision by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) requiring CAFOs to obtain a Clean Water Act permit in order to pollute. The court did uphold the EPA’s right to fine those that do pollute after the fact. Here’s the rub: Farmers are not responsible for manure that exits their property and enters waterways when it rains. Read More

California’s top pesticide regulator is leaving her job to work for Clorox. Mary-Ann Warmerdam, the director of the Department of Pesticide Regulation (DPR), announced her resignation on Tuesday. Warmerdam’s departure was voluntary, but environmental and public health advocates have been pushing for her removal for months. They say she let the chemical industry’s influence trump science and the public’s health when her agency approved the use of methyl iodide—which causes cancer, nerve damage and miscarriage—for use in strawberry cultivation. (See more Civil Eats coverage of the issue here, here and here.) Read More

The Land Institute sits atop a sloping hill on the south end of Salina, Kansas, its 600 acres showcasing a living laboratory of grasses and grains being bred to “solve the problem of agriculture.” Founder Wes Jackson lays out the urgent necessity of this task in his latest book, Consulting the Genius of the Place: An Ecological Approach to a New Agriculture, published in October 2010. Read More

I’ve heard stories of making granola bars under the heat of the sun, and I’ve seen advertisements attempting to sell $250 solar ovens. But developed and developing countries alike are proving that a scaleable solution for widespread use and availability of the sun’s heat has the potential to greatly affect our daily cooking practices and the concepts behind food production. In America, restaurants are experimenting with solar panels for operational use, even though the cost is still high for harnessing the power of the sun. And in some developing countries, solar cooking has come to mean survival–its value as an energy resource is vital to human sustenance. Read More