Most Recent Campaign Headlines
Nationally-known soil scientist Ray Archuleta presented a practical road map for restoration of farm profitability to about 200 farmers gathered at the Tainter Creek Watershed Council’s ‘Reducing Costs and Flood Impacts on the Farm’ events. The program was held Wednesday, July 25 and Thursday, July 26 at Woodhill Farms in rural Vernon County.
For thousands of years, people from Sierra Mixe, a mountainous region in southern Mexico, have been cultivating an unusual variety of giant corn. They grow the crop on soils that are poor in nitrogen—an essential nutrient—and they barely use any additional fertilizer. And yet, their corn towers over conventional varieties, reaching heights of more than 16 feet.
There it sits – in all its green glory – in the produce section of your local grocery store. Broccoli. One of the most nutritious vegetables on the planet. But 70 years ago, it contained twice the calcium on average and more than five times the amount of Vitamin A.
Pakistan is one of the world’s most dangerous countries, grappling with terror attacks, poverty, religious extremism and crumbling public services. But its new government is aiming to tackle a different problem by planting 10 billion trees within five years to fight the effects of global warming by restoring the country’s depleted forests.
Felix Finkbeiner is a young man in a hurry to get the world to plant trees. The 19-year-old from a small Bavarian village near Munich, now studying at a university in London, has founded a global youth movement, Plant For The Planet, which has spearheaded the planting of over 15 billion saplings, signed up 75,000 children as climate ambassadors.
The era of soil health is dawning – that is the conclusion we heard from David Montgomery, keynote speaker at the New York Soil Health Summit, and the theme of his hot-off-the-presses book Growing a Revolution: Bringing Our Soils Back to Life.
The concept of silvopasture challenges our notions of both modern agriculture and land use. For centuries, European settlers of North America have engaged in practices that separate the field from the forest, and even the food from the animal. Silvopasture systems integrate trees, animals, and forages in a whole-system approach that offers a number of benefits to the farmer and the environment.
Significantly more investment is needed to lift hundreds of millions rural poor out of poverty and make agriculture environmentally sustainable, according to Rob Vos from the International Food Policy Research Institute. With a growing world population, hunger and undernutrition are on the rise, and governments are looking for private alliances to alleviate these issues.
Agricultural soils are a strategic resource for states, as they are indispensable in feeding the population, and are thus important for food security. If, on the one hand, they can support solid economic activity, which is particularly important in rural areas where agriculture constitutes the spinal column of human activity, they are also a fragile resource.
“Now we live well,” say both Givaldo and Nina dos Santos, after showing visiting farmers their 1.25-hectare farm in Brazil’s semi-arid Northeast, which is small but has a great variety of fruit trees, thanks to innovative water and production techniques.
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