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It was one of the first plants to be spun into usable fiber 10,000 years ago. It has been grown and used all over the world. The first president of the United States of America even grew it as a cash crop.
Sir Albert Howard made a radical observation. When farmers returned all the agricultural wastes to their fields and grew cover crops to maintain the organic matter in the soil, the crops were healthier.
As Howard observed even more carefully, he saw that the animals that ate those crops were also healthier. And in his final burst of clarity, he saw that the people eating those crops and those animals were also healthier.
Howard recorded these observations in books such as “Soil And Health,” which became the foundational thinking of the organic farming movement.
When countries run short of food, they need to find solutions fast, and one answer can be urban farming. That was the remedy Cuba seized with both hands 30 years ago when it was confronted with the dilemma of an end to its vital food imports.
An enormous global reforestation program could be the most efficient and cost-effective way to buy us some time in the climate crisis. Researchers analyzing satellite data calculated about 2.2 billion acres of available land around the world that could be converted into forest cover, capturing 205 gigatonnes of CO2. This could bring down atmospheric levels by twenty five percent.
Thanksgiving dinner means only one thing for millions of us: turkey. Of the 100 million turkeys on farms around the U.S., 46 million of them will be eaten on Thanksgiving Day. Americans will consume another 22 million turkeys over the Christmas holidays, according to the National Turkey Federation.
When turkeys arrive at our supermarkets, plucked and cleaned, there’s nothing to alert us to the conditions endured by most of the birds that eventually land on our holiday tables. But the vast majority of the turkeys sold during the holidays come from industrial factory farms, where as many as 25,000 birds—pumped full of antibiotics and GMO corn—are crammed into a single barn.
So at a time of year when we are supposed to be thankful for the good things in life, spare a thought for that factory-farmed bird whose life is definitely nothing to be thankful for.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation initiated the latest effort to modernize African agriculture. It launched the Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa (AGRA) in 2006 with the ambitious goal of doubling productivity and incomes for 30 million farm families by 2020. There is little evidence AGRA will come anywhere near achieving those goals.
The burning Amazon rainforests, with their jaguars, monkeys and colourful birds, have grabbed global attention in a way the destruction of the world's mossy peatlands never has. Yet protecting the world's peatlands, which store at least twice as much carbon as forests, is critical in the fight against climate change.
First, a little background: atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide have been rising significantly since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. In May, the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii reported an average monthly level of carbon dioxide above 415 ppm, the highest concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide in millions of years.
A project using inga trees hopes to show smallholders that they can earn a decent living from the land. Inga trees, known as ice-cream bean trees, fix nitrogen into the soil, boosting productivity levels. Scientists hope the scheme will convince smallholders not to sell their land to large agri-businesses and remain farmers in the Amazon.
As we wrote last week, we’re invested in the climate movement for a number of reasons, including this one: Floods, droughts and extreme temperatures will ultimately lead to a food crisis.
Nobody knows this better than farmers.
And farmers are already struggling with the impact of climate change.
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