sustainable agriculture
In which a certain box of blinky lights is published in Slate.com pontificating about Prince Charles
oracknows | March 18, 2015After a busy and late day yesterday, I didn't have any gas left in the tank, if you know what I mean, to produce Insolence as epic as my posts about The Food Babe and cries of antivaccine activists of "Help, help! I'm being repressed!" Or maybe I should say that Orac's power supply is drained and his Tarial cells need recharging.
Sometimes, however, serendipity happens. As you might have seen in the news, everybody's favorite Quacktitioner Royal (His Royal Highness, The Prince of Wales) is in the United States for a visit. I wrote about it last month, and—miracle of miracles!—someone at Slate…
jhalper | July 21, 2014Do you know the real price of a piece of beef? Here is a nice, round number to chew on: The environmental cost of beef is ten times that of dairy, eggs or poultry. This means that if you chose to eat a steak over an omelet, (assuming they have equal amounts of protein) the ecological footprint of your meal will go from a size 5 to a size 50.
Drs. Ron Milo, Gidon Eshel, research students Alon Shepon and Tamar Makov realized that even though we might try to make the right choices in our diets, we’re likely to base them on the pronouncements of experts. The problem is that neither we nor they…
sastyk | April 16, 2012"Context is everything. Breastfeeding is almost universally beneficial in infants, but in an elderly cardiac patient, it can be fatal." - Spider Robinson
Quite a number of readers suggested I respond to James McWilliams' piece in the New York Times "The Myth of Sustainable Meat." McWilliams has garnered quite a bit of attention by critiquing the idea of local food, and in some cases, some of his analyses, as far as they go, are right. For example, McWilliams is quite right that if everyone in America eats as much beef as they always have, but converts to grassfed beef his figures are…
sastyk | September 19, 2011A Thought Experiment: Due to a combination of crises - maybe a volcano explosion, the penetration of Ug99 into the main of the world wheat crop, drought in many of the world's grain growing regions, zombie invasion etc... (it doesn't really matter), the Global North experiences a catastrophic failure of its staple crops. All of a sudden grain supplies drop like a stone, and there are virtually none to be had in the market. No bread, no rice, no soybeans or corn - none of those products are available in the markets.
At first, there is panic. The government institutes a ban on the feeding…
sastyk | February 20, 2011What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry
Note: You've got to give the Dervaes' some credit - their asshattery has inspired a wholel lot of focus on urban sustainable agriculture, homesteading and making a good life in the city! Today is "Urban Homesteading Day" and in its honor, here are some meditations on the relationships we need between city homesteaders and farmers, country homesteaders and farmers and everyone in between.
Urbanization is the biggest trend in history. For the first time, more human beings live in cities than in the country. More than 50,000 farmers worldwide…
pronald | November 2, 2010 The Economist is running an online debate and we need your vote.
Vote here.
My opening statement:
The number of people on Earth is expected to increase from the current 6.7 billion to 9 billion by 2050 with food demands expected to rise by 70%. How will we feed them? If we continue with current farming practices, vast amounts of wilderness will be lost, millions of birds and billions of insects will die, scarce water will be wasted, greenhouse gas emissions will increase and farm workers will be exposed to harmful chemicals. Clearly, the future of our planet requires that we improve the…
pronald | May 21, 2010The number of people on Earth is expected to shoot up from the current 6.7 billion to 9.2 billion by 2050. How will we feed them? If we continue with current farming practices, vast amounts of wilderness will be lost, millions of birds and billions of insects will die, and farm workers will be exposed to more and more chemicals. And still, we will not have enough food. Clearly, there must be a better way.
Some scientists and policymakers suggest that genetic engineering, a modern form of crop modification, will dramatically reduce our dependence on pesticides, enhance the health of our…
pronald | April 22, 2010For Earth Day, let's celebrate Stewart Brand, the distinguished writer, lecturer and author of the classic Whole Earth Catalog, which won the national book award in 1972.
He also has a new book called "Whole Earth Discipline" where he argues that the established Green agenda is outdated, too negative, too tradition bound, too specialized, too politically one-sided to address the scale of environmental problems that we face today.
You might want to check out John Tierney's column.
"[Stewart Brand] was the one, after all, who helped inspire Earth Day by putting the first picture of the planet…
pronald | January 28, 2010Read Emily Waltz' interview with Roger Beachy, the new director for the National Institute of Food and Agriculture (NIFA), the new research funding arm of the US Department of Agriculture (USDA).
What does Beachy's appoinment mean for researchers, farmers and consumers?
Larger, longer grants with more money for education or extension, so the knowledge can reach from the lab to the food to the fork; a stonger focus on sustinable approaches; and a regulatory stucture that is science based
We need to build enhanced capacity in the US to address urgent agricultural challenges such as sustainable…
bcohen | April 1, 2009Add this to the list from my prior post: a Locavore app from Enjoymentland, available at the iTunes store. Local agricultural advocates are already using social networking and building virtual marketplaces and identifying market and farm sites nationwide. This feature extends the connection between on-line consumer practices and local food advocacy. Two of my students bought it and are giving it a test run. I'll try to get an update a few weeks into this Spring season.
According to the guy at Enjoymentland who made the app, the iPhone feature does this:
* Automatically detects which…