Beacon Broadside

Can ‘Climate-Smart’ Agriculture Help Both Africa and the Planet?

One idea promoted at last month's UN Climate Summit in Durban was “climate-smart agriculture," which could make crops less vulnerable to heat and drought and turn depleted soils into carbon sinks. The World Bank and African leaders are backing this new approach, but some critics are skeptical that it will benefit small-scale African farmers. Here, in a post that originally appeared on Yale Environment 360, Fred Pearce looks at what this kind of agriculture could mean for some of the world's poorest farmers. 

Pearce examines this and other issues in his forthcoming book The Land Grabbers: The New Fight over Who Owns the Earth. He is an award-winning former news editor at New Scientist, and is the author of With Speed and Violence, When the Rivers Run Dry, Confessions of an Eco-Sinner and The Coming Population Crash and Our Planet's Surprising Future

The glacial pace of international efforts to curb climate change continued at the UN climate talks in Durban, South Africa last month. Governments concluded that by 2015 they should agree on legally binding targets for greenhouse gas emissions that involve all major nations — including China, India and the United States. But they also agreed that those targets would probably not come into force until 2020.

The climate isn’t waiting for the diplomats. Most experts agree that by 2020 it will likely be too late to halt dangerous warming above two degrees Celsius. So the race is now on to find new, unconventional initiatives to fill the gap. One possibility that came to the fore in Durban is fixing some of that carbon dioxide in the soils of Africa. And that is why the continent’s political leaders met in Durban to launch an initiative known, somewhat cryptically, as “climate-smart” agriculture.
 
The new buzz phrase went down well. Host president Jacob Zuma extolled it. Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian former UN secretary-general, praised it as a panacea to Africa’s problems. “Till now agriculture has been sidelined from climate change discussions,” he said. “But Africa has a huge potential to mitigate climate change.” Beside him sat the Ethiopian Prime Minister Meles Zenawi, the chair of the African Union Commission. They were all on hand as the World Bank announced plans to turn climate-smart agriculture into the next big thing for the world market in carbon offsets.

So what exactly is climate-smart agriculture? It sounds as if it might involve making agriculture resilient to climate change, by making soils and crops less vulnerable to droughts and heat waves. And that is part of the plan. But only part. The real prize — the one that can lure private finance — is the potential for carbon offsetting. If farm soils can be used to soak up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, then they can generate carbon credits that can be sold to industrial polluters who want to offset their emissions.

The offer from the world of carbon finance to poor farmers in Africa and elsewhere is this: Let us use your soils to capture carbon from the atmosphere, and we will, in return, make those soils more productive and less vulnerable to the climate.

This is a big deal. Nurturing the organic matter in soils on the world’s farms has as much potential to absorb carbon dioxide emissions from industrialized countries as the much better-known plans to fund forest conservation, such as REDD. Rattan Lal of the Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center at Ohio State University suggests soils worldwide could capture as much as a billion tons of carbon a year — more than a tenth of man-made emissions.

Climate-smart agriculture neatly combines the twin goals of today’s climate negotiators, helping to prevent climate change while at the same time adapting farms to inevitable change.

Africa is the big prize. Its farmers are more vulnerable than any others to climate change. Some estimates suggest a hotter, more dire world could cut African farm yields by as much as 20 percent by mid-century. Without an African green revolution, that would spell disaster for a continent with a population that is expected to double to two billion people.

But the continent’s huge land area — greater than the U.S., China, India, Mexico and Japan combined — also holds huge potential as a planetary carbon sink that, many believe, could create the necessary green revolution. 

Currently, African soils are leaking carbon as they erode and lose organic matter due to bad farming practices. An estimated 43 percent of Africa’s greenhouse gas emissions come from land clearance, including farming. But the same soils could be turned from a carbon source to a carbon sink, absorbing many tens of millions of tons of carbon a year, according to the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).

If an agricultural carbon offset program were in place, carbon dollars from Western companies could pay for composting, mulching, recycling crop waste, planting farm trees, and much else on the world’s poorest farms. Those improved soils, richer in organic matter, would grow more crops, help soils withstand droughts and floods, and — vital to earning those carbon dollars — capture carbon from the atmosphere.

The World Bank is keen to mastermind a global effort to fix carbon in African soils. It brought agriculture ministers from across the continent to Johannesburg in September to promote the idea and continued to push it in Durban.

For the past year, the bank’s BioCarbon Fund, which sets up demonstration carbon-capturing projects in both forests and farms, has been running the first pilot African soil project among smallholder farmers near Kisumu in western Kenya. The bank’s climate envoy Andrew Steer said in Durban that the maize and bean farmers “are getting higher yields, improving the resilience of the soils to drought and getting stronger soils that sequester more carbon.”

If all goes according to plan, the Kenya Agricultural Carbon Project, which covers 40,000 hectares of farmland in a densely population region of the country, should capture 60,000 tons of carbon dioxide a year. It could also increase annual farm incomes by $200 to $400 per hectare.

That’s the plan. Will it work? The Stockholm Environment Institute, a think tank that looks at both climate and development issues, is supportive. The institute’s Olivia Taghioff, who has studied the Kenyan scheme, says, “Carbon finance even in modest amounts can make a big difference for smallholders.”

But there are concerns. In Durban, Annan warned: “These efforts must have at their heart smallholder farmers. Without their participation we will fail.” And many critics fear that climate-smart agriculture is in reality a Trojan horse for marginalizing smallholder farmers. They believe the arrival of carbon markets, brokers and traders in the fields of Africa can do nothing but harm.

“Soil carbon offsets will promote a spate of African land grabs and put farmers under the control of fickle carbon markets,” said Teresa Anderson of the UK-based Gaia Foundation, an NGO that promotes indigenous farming, speaking in Durban. “The [World] Bank’s agenda is more money for the bank and for carbon project developers, not development,” said Doreen Stabinsky of the Minneapolis-based Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

The high costs of employing scientists, consultants, and field surveyors to assess and monitor the carbon uptake of farm soils will make it impossible for smallholder farmers to pocket any income from the sale of the carbon absorbed by their soils, these critics maintain. Only large landowners will be able to reduce these transactions costs sufficiently to profit from the carbon markets, they say, and the result will be a new phase of land grabbing. “Soil grabbing,” some are calling it.

Across Africa, governments are already leasing wide areas of land traditionally used by smallholder farmers to foreign companies for industrial agriculture or for planting trees as carbon sinks in order to gain carbon credits. The fear is that the process will accelerate if the soil itself becomes a carbon commodity.

There is another reason why peasant farmers may lose out. Early evidence gathered by the World Bank in Kenya suggests that the cultivation of commercial crops of the kind that large agribusinesses specialize in have a much greater potential to soak up carbon than smallholder subsistence crops.

Data presented last year at the FAO in Rome by Rama Reddy of the World Bank’s carbon finance unit show that the carbon-capture potential for a hectare of smallholder maize in Kenya is around half a ton of carbon dioxide per year, whereas the potential for commercial biofuels is between 2.5 and 5 tons, and for a sugar cane plantation up to 8 tons per hectare.

The dream of enthusiasts for climate-smart agriculture is that investors will one day invest billions of dollars in the fields of Africa in order to purchase the resulting credits from capturing carbon, while at the same time improving the continent’s soils. In truth, any credible solution to climate change will probably involve finding ways to get the landscape to absorb more carbon, whether in trees or soils, probably financed from carbon markets. Can it be done in a way that helps smallholder farmers? Or will it drive them off their land? That remains far from clear. 

"Tea Plantation in Uganda" photo from Bigstock.

Texas College Converts Football Field to Organic Farm. Is Nothing Sacred?

Mark Winne is the author of Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture.

Highland Hills is one of those down-and-nearly-out communities that’s allowed a glimpse of prosperity but never gets to taste it. The Dallas skyline looms large and shining across the hazy north Texas horizon and is linked to this poverty-plagued neighborhood by a seven-mile ribbon of light-rail steel. Ledbetter Avenue crosses the train line passing by vacant buildings, vast stretches of empty parking lots, and a dizzying array of “For Sale,” “For Lease” and “For Jesus” signs. Named for the renowned guitar picker Lead Belly who did time in these parts – both in and out of prison – the Avenue speaks little in the way of promise, but wails the blues of poverty loud and clear.

Like cockroaches in a post-nuclear winter, the neighborhood’s only commercial survivors appear to be pawn shops, Dollar stores, and fast-food joints. One supermarket, a Minyard whose cinder-blocked and windowless façade is about as inviting as the entrance to Stalag 13, is the only retail food source in the several surrounding miles of food desert. But a lifeline from an unlikely source has been tossed Highland Hills’s way by a group of innovative academics. Paul Quinn College, a historically black college that sits just off Interstate 45 at the neighborhood’s eastern edge, is committed to lifting its neighboring community’s physical and economic health with a combination of food, farming, and servant leadership.

There’s no little irony in this partnership. To drive by the Paul Quinn campus is to, well, keep on driving. There are no signature ivy-clad buildings or tree-shaded quads to invite college-shopping families for a leisurely tour. In fact, the first roadside buildings you see are in various states of demolition, reflecting, in part, the plunge in student enrollment from 600 to 100 (it’s now climbed back to 200) and the school’s loss of accreditation (it’s been able recently to earn back probationary status). At first glance anyway, and like the adjoining neighborhood it wants to help, Paul Quinn appears to be hanging on to life by no more than a pea tendril.

But first glances are deceiving, and pea tendrils are stronger than they look. And when your back's to the wall and nobody, even your own government, will help you, you fight like hell, you do the unexpected, and you take risks.

In Paul Quinn’s case, not only did the college take risks, it committed a grievous sin, at least by Texas standards – they terminated their football program and turned their field into an organic farm. Yes, in the shadow of the Super Bowl, with the specter of Tom Landry looking down, and the holy glare of Friday night lights forever dimmed, Paul Quinn ripped up its sacred turf where football cleats once tread, and planted – goalpost to goalpost – peas, lettuce, carrots, strawberries, and more, lots more.

While the roar from the football stands may have subsided, it doesn’t mean that the field has fallen silent. When Andrea Bithell, the farm manager, announced to student and staff volunteers that the kohlrabi had gone in last week, everyone cheered. Showing a group of farm visitors where the corn would be planted later this spring evoked a round of applause from several students who proclaimed their love of its sweet kernels. Indeed the competitive spirit and enthusiasm so much a part of college athletics is hardly lacking at “Food for Good Farm,” the name chosen to denote it’s larger mission of education, community service, and healthy food for all. Sounding more like a coach than a farmer, Andrea uses words like hustle to describe her student crew’s hectic effort to plant and seed the two-acre field. When the volunteers complained about working in the cold and the rain, they were reminded that football games are played in all kinds of weather. Even the plants are forced to compete in a set of 12 trial beds located in the field’s south end zone. Here students will test different growing methods and evaluate their potential financial rate of return.

Elizabeth Wattley, Paul Quinn’s Director of Service Learning, proclaimed with pride that the farm’s tomatoes were better than anything she’d ever bought in a grocery store (she confessed that until her introduction to the farm during its first spring in 2010 she had been afraid of dirt). One student, biology major Symphonie Dawson, giggled when she described the farm’s mascot emblazoned on their t-shirts. “It’s the ‘Fighting Okra,’ an image of the vegetable wearing boxing gloves. We chose it because last year’s okra crop seemed to go on forever.” The “Rah-rah, Go Team, Go!” energy previously reserved for football games has been channeled into the end-zone to end-zone planting of 1,500 strawberry plants, 6,600 onions, a new asparagus bed, and dozens of varieties of vegetables. “The farm is the light of the college,” is the assertive way Elizabeth put it.

For a school that was on the ropes, Paul Quinn has gained a reprieve by discovering the multiple benefits of farming while also turning its attention outward to the community. One prominent need that the farm is already addressing is healthy living and eating, no small concern on today’s college campuses, especially one that is surrounded by a food desert. “Before their work on the farm, students wouldn’t eat carrots unless they were smothered in Ranch dressing,” noted Andrea. But by getting their hands in the dirt – a task that usually took two or three visits to the farm to get past the “yuck” declaration – students started eating carrots right out of the ground, dirt and all. “They actually taste,” said Elizabeth, pausing for a moment to find the right adjective, “carrot-tee.”

By engaging students enrolled in the school’s biology and social entrepreneurship courses, the farm gives scores of people in their late teens and early twenties a chance to get hands-on laboratory experience at the same time they get their hands in the dirt. Even the students who don’t care to venture into the world of bugs and compost get a taste of the farm’s output. Paul Quinn’s cafeteria now offers a monthly feature designed to showcase the farm’s harvest and introduce students to food that is healthy, tasty, and oh-so local.  But Jasmine Wynn, a freshman legal study major, may have summed up the farm’s health benefits best. “I’m a city girl from Dallas, and for me the farm was something new. I liked being out there. I also started getting serious about my diet last year and decided that organic food is better for you. It’s just part of a healthier lifestyle, and I want to stick around for a long time.”

The lack of farming experience or a farm background has not been a deterrent to anyone’s participation, including Paul Quinn’s President Michael J. Sorrell. With public policy and law degrees from Duke University, his stellar resume indicates he has represented American Airlines and Morgan Stanley, served on numerous prestigious commissions including an assignment at the White House, and was selected in 2009 as one of the 10 Best Historically Black College and University presidents.  Notably lacking from Dr. Sorrell’s career synopsis, however, are any agricultural credentials, and ironically, his business achievements include representing top-flight athletes like Utah Jazz All-Star Deron Williams. So why did he eliminate the football program and then have the audacity to convert the field to a farm?

A big part of the answer no doubt lies in his personal commitment to the concept of servant leadership, which, like the farm, he brought to Paul Quinn. With such simple but difficult to live by ideas like putting others before self, leaving the world a better place than you found it, and maintaining a spiritual faithfulness, Dr. Sorrell not only preaches what he practices (he personally teaches a freshman course in servant leadership), he practices what he preaches. And the farm is at the center of that practice.

Isaiah 58: 9-12 gets prominent mention on the College’s website which also touts the school’s Christian underpinnings. The scripture admonishes us (some would say “teaches us”) “to pour yourself out for the hungry…then shall your light rise in the darkness…and you shall be like a watered garden.” Holding aside the self-interest in doing good (and why not?), The Food for Good Farm has its heart and mind set on serving the hardscrabble community that surrounds it. Though a share of the harvest goes to the school’s cafeteria, 10 percent goes to a local food pantry, a sizeable share is also sold on a weekly basis to the community from the field’s former hot dog stand, and just to preserve some historical symmetry, the Dallas Cowboys buy a small share of the farm’s organic veggies, which, if sustained over time, will no doubt catapult “America’s Team” into a Super Bowl.

The school’s initial attempt to solve the community’s food access problem was to offer free land to any supermarket that wanted to build a store there. But there were no takers in a marketplace where nearly 40 percent of the residents lived in poverty. So like in days of old when the nearest general store was 100 miles away, and your only choice was to shoot or grow your dinner, Paul Quinn took to farming. The “adaptive re-use” of the football area has been impressive under Andrea’s and Elizabeth’s leadership. Not only are the hash stripes gone but so are the top four inches of sod and dirt that were replaced by dump truck loads of pure organic matter. Reflecting the program’s absolute commitment to organic farming, there was simply too much distrust of the chemical residues from years of maintaining a perfectly green gridiron. The goalposts remain as do the blocking sled, scoreboard and the entire set of bleachers running the length of both sides of the field. But the former press box is about to be turned into a chicken coop and Elizabeth retains some hope that the bleachers can be retrofitted as a greenhouse. Acres of adjoining and nearly vacant land are already being eyed for farm expansion, especially if a recently applied for federal grant comes through. On the day this reporter visited, a local apiarist was scouting out locations for nearly a dozen beehives. And according to Symphonie, the campus’s coolest guy, a very sharp dresser from Brooklyn, NY, wants to join the “bee program.”

None of this extraordinary progress has come cheaply. Elizabeth estimates that well over $100,000 in capital expenditures have been required to accomplish this conversion, and the on-going operating costs –Andrea is on the payroll half-time as is a variety of students who receive some compensation, especially during the summer season – are only marginally offset by farm sales. An upcoming April fundraiser featuring urban farming rock star Will Allen will hopefully swell the coffers sufficiently to enable the farm to buy its own tractor (it now pays for contract equipment services).

But the rapid development of the farm and the rising fortunes of Paul Quinn College have come with a price – small or large depending on your perspective. The Good Food Farm is the result of a fifty/fifty partnership between the college and PepsiCo’s Food for Good Initiative. The college makes it clear that this is an equal partnership and that PepsiCo has not placed any strings on their giving. While Elizabeth acknowledges some inherent contradictions – yes, Pepsi and other soda manufacturers have contributed more than their fair share of calories to America’s obesity crisis – she feels their support has been entirely above board. Other than cleaning up its tarnished image, one cannot detect either covert or overt sinister motives in PepsiCo’s support. Yet, with 11 teaspoons of sugar in each 12 ounce can of Pepsi-Cola and their ferocious attempt over the years to hook children with their iconic brand, one can’t help but confront the ethical contradictions: where does the greater good lie, and when does one begin to slide down the slippery slope? Though the Bible offers little in the way of guidance when dealing with the PR strategies of modern corporations (obesity, for instance, having not appeared on the world stage for another 2000 years), the college might choose to at least make the topic grist for future classroom discussions.

In the meantime, it’s hard to argue with the outcome of the Paul Quinn/PepsiCo partnership. Texas has one less football field and one more organic farm, clearly a net gain for humanity. Students from the captain of the basketball team to entering freshman are eating better, getting over their aversion to bugs, and getting their hands in the dirt (Symphonie noted that her nails look much healthier now that she regularly jams them into the soil). And the Highland Hills neighborhood is enjoying the health and aesthetic benefits of living adjacent to Dallas’s closest farm.

Under Dr. Sorrell’s able leadership Paul Quinn is rising from the ashes, or should we say compost pile. Elizabeth and Andrea are guiding the growth of what would be considered an ambitious venture at a major university let alone a college as small as Paul Quinn. And the Fighting Okra, well, they just might be on their way to a national championship.

Photo of farm from Snacks.com.

Watch video of the farm under construction at YouTube.

Ripped from the Headlines – A Brief Look At 2010 Food Stories

Mark Winne is the author of the forthcoming book Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture.

This fall I had the privilege of releasing my second book Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture. As it makes the rounds of book reviews, and I tour the interview and lecture circuit – casting myself as it were to the lions of the marketplace – I have found that the book's first responders are drawn to its main title and less so to the subtitle. This is as I expected. People naturally want to hear stories about doers, real-life action heroes, and pioneers who might lead us out of the wilderness of the industrial food system. They are eager to get their hands in the dirt and less patient with the intellectual gymnastics required to deconstruct the half-truths of Big Food and its kissing cousin, Big Agriculture. The philosophical framework, so to speak, that mountaintop above the din and the thrum of the real world where many writers, including this one, love to dwell, is too often by-passed by the harried reader earnestly searching for a shortcut to the answer.

So allow me to use this space to reacquaint you, diligent reader, with the Big Idea of Food Rebels and why, in my humble opinion, it matters. I opened the book with a few lines from from Fyodor Dostoevsky's parable The Grand Inquisitor: "Today, people are persuaded more than ever that they have perfect freedom, yet they have brought their freedom to us and laid it humbly at our feet…And we alone shall feed them…Oh, never, never can they feed themselves without us! In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, 'Make us your slaves, but feed us.'" I spare little subtlety in drawing a parallel between this iconic passage of Western literature and the industrial food system's quest to control the hearts and minds of us, the dependent food consumer. After all, we know, as the industrial food system loves to remind us, that we are staring down the twin barrels of too many people and too little food.

Interestingly, the same lead was used in a recent review of Food Rebels by "Food Safety News." After going on for nearly three pages with an accurate, blow-by-blow account of the book's main points, the reviewer concludes with "Although Winne delivers strong arguments for the alternative food system, his book too glibly disparages the benefits of the industrial food system—namely, an inexpensive food supply, a system that can meet the growing worldwide food demand…." So, in the spirit of Auld Lang Syne, let me offer a selective retrospective of the industrial food system's sins for 2010 'less them "be forgot, and never brought to mind."

Salute to Food Rebels III: Maurice Small Brings Farms to Cleveland

In Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture, Mark Winne introduces us to innovative "local doers" leading the charge to bring nutritious, sustainable, and affordable food to all, and we wanted to give a shout-out to organizations that we consider "Food Rebels" here on the blog.

Last week, we saluted Connecticut's Working Lands Alliance and the National Farm to School Network on Thursday, and the Sustainable Food Center, headquartered in Austin, Texas, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation's Food and Community Program on Friday. Today, Mark Winne talks about a Food Rebel in Cleveland: Maurice Small of City Fresh.

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Mark Winne on Food Rebels and urban farming in Cleveland

Salute to Food Rebels II: Working to Create Healthier Communities

 

Yesterday, we looked at two of the organizations featured in Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture by Mark Winne. In the book, Winne introduces us to innovative "local doers" leading the charge to bring nutritious, sustainable, and affordable food to all, and we wanted to give a shout-out to organizations that we consider "Food Rebels" here on the blog.

In our first post, we featured Connecticut's Working Lands Alliance and the National Farm to School Network. Today we profile the Sustainable Food Center, headquartered in Austin, Texas, and the W. K. Kellogg Foundation's Food and Community Program.

 

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The Sustainable Food Center's mission is to cultivate a healthy community in Austin, Texas, by strengthening the local food system and improving access to nutritious, affordable food. SFC envisions a food secure community where all children and adults grow, share and prepare healthy, local food. Through organic food gardening, relationships with area farmers, interactive cooking classes and nutrition education, children and adults have increased access to locally grown food and are empowered to improve the long-term health of Central Texans and our environment. 

The SFC's major projects include the Grow Local program, which provides education to increase proficiency in food gardening, and aid in the establishment and long-term sustainability of community and school gardens; the Happy Kitchen, a cooking and nutrition education program; and Farm Direct, which runs the Austin Farmers Market and connects local growers with institutional consumers. 

In December, the Happy Kitchen will hold a facilitator appreciation banquet at a local library. And SFC will benefit from a CharityBash fundraiser for young professionals on December 8th. 

The W. K. Kellogg Foundation's Food and Community Program is focused on creating healthy places where all children thrive. The program includes efforts to improve school food, aid community-led initiatives to increase access to good food and opportunities for physical activity, and works to build movements to promote healthy eating and active living.

Among the many programs supported by the foundation is Double Up Food Bucks, a Detroit-based group which helps families receiving food assistance benefits purchase more fresh fruits and vegetables at farmers’ markets. This brings benefit to both the families and to the local farmers selling the fresh fruits and vegetables. Watch a video here or at YouTube to find out more about the program.

Salute to Food Rebels: Organizations That Are Making a Difference

In his book Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture, Mark Winne introduces us to innovative "local doers" leading the charge to bring nutritious, sustainable, and affordable food to all. Heeding Emerson's call to embrace that great American virtue of self-reliance, these leaders in communities all across the country are defying the authority of the food conglomerates and taking matters into their own hands.

Today we profile two groups of "Food Rebels": the Working Lands Alliance and the National Farm to School Network.

 

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Working Lands Alliance at their "No Farms, No Food" rally at the Connecticut State Capitol in spring 2009.

The Working Lands Alliance was formed in 1999 with the sole purpose of preserving Connecticut’s most precious natural resource – its farmland.  WLA is a coalition whose supporters include more than 600 individuals and 200 businesses and organizations that include farmers, conservationists, anti-hunger groups, planners and local food enthusiasts.  This coalition has joined together in an effort to halt the loss of Connecticut’s remaining farmland.

This week, the Working Lands Alliance and the CT Trustees of the Eastern States Exposition announced the winners of the 2010 Farmland Preservation Pathfinder Awards. The town of Pomfret, a community of 4,100 residents, won the Pathfinder Group Award for their preservation efforts, including a bonding resolution of $4 million for land preservation and a one-time preservation of 17 parcels totaling over 700 acres in 2009 (unprecedented in the State of Connecticut). WNPR radio host Faith Middleton is the winner of the Pathfinder Individual Award for outstanding achievement in advancing farmland preservation in the State of Connecticut. And for their determination and success in restoring an agricultural asset to their community and founding a community farm that features educational programs about farming, raises vegetables for a CSA, and makes weekly donations of product to local families in need, the Woodbridge Conservation Commission & the Board of Directors of Massaro Community Farm is the winner of the Pathfinder Education Leader Award for significant contributions in the area of educating the public about the importance of farmland preservation.

The National Farm to School Network increases access to local food and nutrition education to improve children's health, strengthen family farms, and cultivate vibrant communities. Founded in 2007, the National Farm to School Network provides training and technical assistance, information services, networking, support for policy advocacy, and media and marketing activities in all 50 states with national staff and eight Regional Lead Agencies. The National Farm to School Network envisions a nation in which Farm to School programs are an essential component of strong and just local and regional food systems, ensuring the health of all school children, farms, environment, economy and communities. 

Photo by Emily Hart Roth

In May 2010, the White House Childhood Obesity Taskforce Report recommended both Farm to School and school gardens as a community based solution to childhood obesity. Specifically, recommendation 3.6 of this report states: "USDA should work to connect school meal programs to local growers and use farm to school programs, where possible, to incorporate fresher, appealing food in school meals." Michelle Obama’s Let's Move campaign website also specifically promotes community gardens, school gardens and Farm to School programs.

Farm to School is involved with Root 4 Kids, a campaign from Annie’s that calls on parents and teachers nationwide to help one million kids dig and plant new veggies harvest 2010 through harvest 2011. Annie’s will award the school with the most people who join Root 4 Kids by December 31, 2010, with their choice of a garden, a new Farm to School program or gardening supplies for one year. In addition, for every 1,000 people who join, Annie’s will contribute funds toward a garden or Farm to School program in an underprivileged school.

Read about Farm to School's social media campaign to put Child Nutrition Reauthorization back on Congress’s radar and build momentum to pass the child nutrition bill. Join the Twitter campaign to pass the Healthy, Hunger Free Kids Act, or share the following video on Facebook, Twitter, or through email.

Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture

The struggle between human freedom and authority is eternal and universal. With the advent of industrialism and its widespread application to our food supply (through factory farms, genetic engineering, and reliance on chemicals), that struggle has reached its latest stand-off. Will corporations fear-mongering about the lack of an adequate food supply and their promise of abundance prevail, or will we rise to the challenge of pursuing self-reliance and democratic control of our food system?

While the framing of Winne’s argument draws from great thinkers like Dostoevsky and Emerson, it also moves from philosophy to action, with the stories of myriad “local doers” leading the charge. Covering everything from urban farming in Cleveland, and buffalo restoration on Native American reservations, to food-education classes in diabetes-prone neighborhoods, Winne shows how people are reclaiming their connection to their food and their health. It’s hope is that these types of efforts, scaled up and adopted more widely, will allow the alternative food system to dethrone the industrial.

Food Rebels, Guerilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin’ Mamas challenges us to go beyond eating local to become part of a larger solution, demanding a system that sustains body and soul.

For twenty-five years Mark Winne was the executive director of the Hartford Food System in Hartford, Connecticut. He speaks and consults extensively on community food-system topics and is the author of Closing the Food Gap. Winne lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

How Do You Like Your Eggs? Industrial or Local?

Mark Winne is the author of the forthcoming book Food Rebels, Guerrilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture.

Picture this: three long-haired college kids are unloading crates of food from the bed of a battered pick-up truck. It's parked curbside at the Androscoggin Food Co-op located in the equally battered mill town of Lewiston, Maine. The year is 1971 and these kids are, unbeknownst to them, the vanguard of the local food movement.

They've spent the day rounding up goods directly from local farms and food processors, not because they're devout locavores (the word wouldn't be invented for another 35 years) but because sourcing locally was the cheapest way to get food for a co-op whose members were largely lower income. Some crates are full of apples from a nearby orchard; others contain 12-pound wheels of a so-so cheddar from a small cheese plant; and one cardboard box contains 30 dozen eggs from a chicken farm only 10 miles down the road. That box is labeled DeCoster Farms.

Yes, the product of this family egg farm (now headquartered in Iowa) at the eye of the current salmonella storm was being handled contentedly by these prehistoric foodies, I among them. As a company that was started with 125 hens in the mid-1960s by Austin "Jack" DeCoster in the farm town of Turner (pronounced "Turna" by everybody except out-of-state college kids), it was as local as you could get.

Funny how times change. Jack, now 71, was an ambitious man who wasn't going to be happy selling locally produced eggs just in northern New England. According to one DeCoster employee, Jack is a born-again Christian who doesn't engage in any leisure pursuits other than work, which he apparently pursues 18-hours a day. With a work ethic like that, growth was inevitable. Now operating under the names of Wright County Egg and Quality Egg, Jack's egg empire now produces 2.3 million dozen eggs a week in Iowa while his "starter" farm back in Turner, renamed Maine Contract Farming, keeps 3.5 million hens gainfully employed.

Fran Hawthorne: Green Advice Books and Reality

Fran Hawthorne is the author of The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting,and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism. Hawthorne has been a writer or editor at Fortune, BusinessWeek, Institutional Investor, and other publications. She is the author of three books on health care and investing, including Inside the FDA and the award-winning Pension Dumping.

It's bad enough to walk into a library or bookstore and confront shelf after shelf of books with titles like True Green: 100 Everyday Ways You Can Contribute to a Healthier Planet. And The Little Green Book of Shopping: 250 Tips for an Eco Lifestyle. And 1001 Ways to Save the Earth.

I am immediately consumed with guilt. How can I possibly manage to do ONE HUNDRED things every day for the environment – let alone TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY or ONE THOUSAND AND ONE? My God, I'd better start immediately.

Still, I assume that each of those 100 or 250 or 1001 things are actions that a reasonable person could do one by one, if not en masse. Then I start reading the lists.

And I have to start wondering if the people who write these books actually live on the planet they claim to be saving.

How NAFTA Produced Mexican Migration

Today's post is from David Bacon's Illegal People: How Globalization Creates Migration and Criminalizes Immigrants. David Bacon spent thirty years as a labor organizer and immigrant rights activist. In the excerpt below he looks at how NAFTA and the World Bank and International Monetary Fund policies forced Mexicans into the migrant stream. For more information about Beacon Press books on immigrant rights, we invite you to visit our home page.

Beginning around 1980, the World Bank and the IMF began imposing a one-size-fits-all formula for development, called structural adjustment programs. These required borrowing countries to adopt a package of economic reforms, such as privatization, ending subsidies and price controls, trade liberalization, and reduced worker protections. After more than two decades, there is no strong evidence that this approach has achieved its stated goal of stimulating growth, while the toll on working people has been staggering. The IRCA commission report acknowledged the potential for harm by noting that "efforts should be made to ease transitional costs in human suffering."

The North American Free Trade Agreement, however, was not intended to relieve human suffering.

Fred Pearce: Out of the Demographic Trap: Hope for Feeding the World

Fred Pearce is the author of The Coming Population Crash: and Our Planet's Surprising Future. He is environment consultant at New Scientist and a weekly columnist and investigative journalist for the Guardian. He has also written for Audubon, Popular Science, Time, the Boston Globe, and Natural History. His other books include Confessions of an Eco-Sinner, With Speed and Violence, When the Rivers Run Dry, Keepers of the Spring, Turning Up the Heat, and Deep Jungle.

Watch Fred Pearce tonight at 11 p.m. EST on "The Daily Show."

I bring good news from Machakos, a rural district of Kenya, a couple of hours drive from Nairobi. Seventy years ago, British colonial scientists dismissed the treeless eroding hillsides of Machakos as "an appalling example" of environmental degradation that they blamed on the "multiplication" of the "natives." The Akamba had exceeded the carrying capacity of their land and were "rapidly drifting to a state of hopeless and miserable poverty and their land to a parched desert of rocks, stones and sand."

Fran Hawthorne's Tall Order: Maintaining Sanity While Shopping With a Conscience

Fran Hawthorne is the author of The Overloaded Liberal: Shopping, Investing, Parenting,and Other Daily Dilemmas in an Age of Political Activism. An excerpt from that book appears below. Click here to listen to an interview with Fran, then vote your values.

I have to confess that I was kind of smug about my lifestyle before I started this book. I knew that I took a lot of steps to save energy, to support unions and small stores, and to put my money in mutual funds that invested in causes I believe in, and I was quite pleased with myself for all of that. I used cloth napkins instead of paper. I never crossed a picket line. I brought my own shopping bags to stores. I recycled nearly every scrap of paper, metal, glass, and plastic possible, and then I bought recycled paper, and . . . Well, I won't go through my whole self-satisfied list right here. (If you're interested, it's in the book.) Let's just say that every time I opted for the more expensive, no-antibiotics, no-added-hormones ground beef, I thought I was managing to live pretty much according to my liberal values.

Except that guilty reminders were always tapping at the edge of my brain. If I really were an ethical consumer, wouldn't I buy the beef at the farmers market and the food co-op, not the chain grocery store? In fact, wouldn't I avoid eating beef altogether? But if the ethical goal is to avoid eating beef, why was anyone bothering to make antibiotic-free beef, if not for people like me who care about animal welfare and the environment? Wasn't this better for the environment, or at least the cow? And if the grocery store I sometimes went to was, as it claimed, an "individually owned and operated," unionized member of a purchasing and distribution cooperative, was it really an evil Big Chain?

Mark Winne: Black Farmers and Savannah Foodies Join Forces for Healthy Food

Mark Winne is the author of Closing the Food Gap: Resetting the Table in the Land of Plenty. For 25 years, Winne was the Executive Director of the Hartford Food System, a private non-profit agency that works on food and hunger issues in the Hartford, Connecticut area. He currently writes, speaks, and consults extensively on community food system topics including hunger and food insecurity, local and regional agriculture, community food assessment, and food policy. His new book, Food Rebels, Guerilla Gardeners, and Smart-Cookin' Mamas: Fighting Back in an Age of Industrial Agriculture, will be published this fall.

The outstretched limbs of Savannah's live oaks sent dappled sunlight along a wide promenade separating two rows of farm stalls in Forsyth Park. The Saturday morning farmers market was in full swing, with boxes heaped high with red peppers, collard greens, and bright orange carrots.

Hilton Graham was doing a brisk business in just-picked organic produce from his nearby Telfair County farm. Dressed in an old polo shirt and well-worn jeans, Graham was assisted by two sheepish teenage boys whose baggy shorts and designer sweatshirts gave them a decidedly un-farmer like appearance. While one hand was fluffing up bunches of greens and the other pointing his helpers in the direction of a waiting customer, he told me with a big wide grin that, "It's a great day for a market, and as crazy as this place gets, it still gives me peace of mind being here."

But the experience of Graham and other African-Americans farmers selling organic produce in this park at this time is not just another farmers' market story. Excluded for decades after World War Two from public funds that helped white farmers prosper, black farmers have also been left out of the growing ranks of organic farming, a movement that is giving small farmers across the country a chance at success. Fortunately, that is now changing. By taking matters into their own hands, black farmers formed the Southeast African American Organic Network (SAAFON). And at the same time that they were converting more of their members to organic agriculture, black farmers, with partners in local multiracial organizations, were organizing a farmers' market in a public space previously denied to them.

Steven I. Apfelbaum: Introducing Winter at Stone Prairie Farm

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm. Read all of Apfelbaum's dispatches from Stone Prairie Farm here. 

It seems but a few evenings ago when the soft calming chirp of crickets gave measure to the warm breeze. That was early September. Now, in late November, only strong, cold winds blow across Stone Prairie Farm. And the crickets are burrowed in for winter and silent.

In the prairie, summer's gently swaying mass of vegetation is now being shaken and snapped back and forth by the wind. That green, growing plant life is replaced by columns of reddish tan prairie grasses that loom skyward ten to fifteen feet. Sounds are like that of a giant threshing machine; the swishing of grass stems beating against others, with each breath of the wind.

Every year around this time, I wonder where summer went. Why is it almost winter again, seemingly so soon? I haven't harvested honey, and the garden beds still need their warming blanket of straw mulch. Remaining crops also need harvest.

Stone Prairie Farm: Fall Beginnings

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm. You can read all of Apfelbaum's dispatches from the farm here.

I only caught a fleeting glimpse of the immense animal, where its head and horns came into view as the grasses parted, and then the mystery pulled back and was gone. I was looking out across the distant, gently swaying mass of prairie grasses, tan and beige and increasingly rosy or chartreuse toward the towering upper seed heads, some plants well over ten feet in height. My eyes were drawn to the movements, and there were many, all occurring simultaneously. And there were sounds… a cacophony of sounds.

On such mornings, as the sun is coming up, igniting the grass with a flaming golden hue, the land appears to be on fire, and the activity of wildlife suggests they are escaping some intense conflagration. But some moved into the intensity, others away. Something, suggesting change, was occurring.

I watched the "v" shape convert to "u", then to a "w" as the flock of Canada geese attempted to move low over the land, to cross the windy landscape. They entered the sun's rays and also ignited, and my first reaction was that I was observing a flock of meteorites plummeting to earth. This changed as they moved in and out of the intense rays, and as the winds forced them through a swirling motion, each goose following closely behind the next over the rolling landforms of Stone Prairie Farm.

Nancy Gift: Trying Again

Today's blog post is from Nancy Gift, author of A Weed by Any Other Name: The Virtues of a Messy Lawn, or Learning to Love the Plants We Don't Plant. Gift is an assistant professor of environmental studies and acting director of the Rachel Carson Institute at Chatham University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where she lives with her husband, two daughters, and a lawn full of weeds. This post originally appeared at Gift's Weeds and Kids blog.

Whatever sense of crazy excitement or optimism August brings, I usually associate this time very strongly with new beginnings, having had an academic-year schedule for at least 32 of my 38 years. So when we were down in Kentucky last week, perhaps we were drawn to the boldness of the idea of another new beginning, this one by choice. Or perhaps we just couldn't resist. But we are, once again, raising chickens.

At left, you see Emily cuddling with one of the most cuddly chickens I have ever met, one belonging to Louisville garden writer and commentator, Jeneen Wiche. This chicken was practically purring while the girls held her, having been hand-raised by Jeneen's niece. That was Wednesday. Thursday found us at the Kentucky State Fair, looking at chickens of all sorts, plus a few odd pens of chicks, at $3 apiece. I was thinking how I wished we could try again, when Emily came up to tell me "Daddy said we could get a couple of chicks!" Given that it was Brian who witnessed the fox's massacre last time, if he was ready, I could be ready.

Each girl picked out two, Hazel two black ones - Japanese cochins, the farmer told us; Emily two yellow, with brownish marks, which she hopes are Ameraucana, like her favorite chicken from our last group. I took it as a sign of both remembrance and healing that these choices reflected their favorites from our last batch.

Stone Prairie Farm: Swimming the Midsummer Prairie

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm. You can read all of Apfelbaum's dispatches from the farm here.

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I now understand the stories about pioneers having to stand up in their saddles on the backs of their horses to get oriented in a prairie. From my vantage, the vegetation over Stone Prairie Farm looks like a silky-smooth, blowing and swaying mass of varying shades of green, punctuated every here and there with diffused patches of yellow and lavender flowers. Those flowering stalks are tall enough to rise above the sward of moving, blurring grass. Compass plant is one such, which sends its tight clusters of three-inch-wide, sunflower-like flowers up from within the grass sea, into the light and air above.

Yesterday I walked the trail through the prairie here at the farm. A few months ago, in early spring, these same individual grass plants were the height of a mowed lawn, but now many are well over ten feet in height. The mowed trail offered a perspective and route through the wildness. It wasn't long before I wanted to inspect the status of the several Turks cap lilies, which I photographed a few weeks earlier before the grass bolted. I was off the trail, into the soup.

I swam through the prairie, a cross between a breast stroke and freestyle crawl, the most satisfying way to move through the sway and motion of the dense vegetation. When I stopped directing the stems they came crashing in. Blocking the assaults was necessary to see the direction indicated by the sun, and to orient myself so that I could find the lilies.

From Stone Prairie Farm: August 2009

Stone Prairie Farm: Thrilling Evening and Foggy Morning

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm.

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Last night seems like a dream now. So where do I start? What do I remember?

This morning, as the sun slowly rose, the engulfing fog began to glow and my eyes opened to a dripping landscape, where coalescing dew slowly formed into earth-bound droplets from every plant leaf and flower around my head. The fog-muffled calls of birds were accompanied by the sound of these drips careening from upper leaves on the grape vines as I watched from my bed on our screen porch. On such mornings, my mind and the land are awash in this fog.

About the time I was preparing to go to bed last night, our dog, Willow, started pacing in circles from room to room. He sensed the low grumble of a distant thunderstorm well before I did and probably couldn’t decide which bed to hide under. Driven by his need to be with his pack-- me in this case-- he followed me out to the screen porch where I would do some reading and then, hopefully, simply fall asleep. I placed his white fabric “fuzzy bed” next to mine and settled in to read about managing our apple orchard. His unsettled behavior amplified as the storm flashed its way closer and finally arrived at Stone Prairie Farm. After a single attempt to push under my blankets, the flashes and cracks of lightning sent him into the house to hide under a real bed. I turned off my reading light and lay back to experience the show.

Stone Prairie Farm: The Sights and Sounds of Late Springtime

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm.

Dreaming about Stone Prairie Farm. 7:30 am, Saturday, May 31, 2009

This week I've been in Gainesville Florida on a project and right now, this beautiful Saturday morning, I'm waylaid in the Atlanta airport hoping to get back sometime today to Milwaukee, and then drive the several hours back west to Stone Prairie Farm. Gainesville's live oaks and pendent, draping Spanish moss, a relative of pineapple (not a moss at all), and the old stalwart loblolly pines create such a different ambience than the open prairies at Stone Prairie farm. When we drove by fields, even plowed up farm fields, my eyes and spirits perked.

These views over the landscape were more familiar, more like home, and I dreamed about the farm. While I've only been gone a few days, I'm missing those rare idyllic spring days and evenings, where the wafting fragrances of blooming phlox fill the air and remind me of how comfortable it is before summer's heat and humidity sets in.

Thinking and writing is being disrupted: "Any standby passengers needing a seat assignment and a boarding pass please come to the gate D5 immediately for flight 435 to Milwaukee." Computer and brain shutdown and I race to the gate, to home, to Stone Prairie Farm.

Stone Prairie Farm: Green, the Truly Happy Color

Today's post is from Steven I. Apfelbaum, author of Nature's Second Chance: Restoring the Ecology of Stone Prairie Farm. Apfelbaum is founder, president, and senior ecologist of the firm Applied Ecological Services, known for its international science-based ecological design and restoration work. He lives in Juda, Wisconsin, on Stone Prairie Farm.

Prescribed burned lands at Stone Prairie Farm were under a state of prolonged blackness, not just at night, but also during the day. After the burning in March, cold weather has encouraged little growth of even the cool season plants that usually grow quickly from the blackened landscape. This year, rather than the normal annual landscape metamorphosis from black to lime green and then darker green as plant leaves and stems mature, the black faded to gray and green just didn't budge from the earth.

That is, at least, until this week, particularly today; after several days of warm drizzle, living plants have returned. They have jumped skyward, in a few short days, to make up for the several weeks of suspense. And with this green comes other life.