It may be true that you can take the boy out of the country, but it’s apparently not so easy to get the CEO out of Silicon Valley.
In mid-June, Will Harris, owner of White Oak Pastures, publicly invited Pat Brown, CEO of Impossible Foods, to visit Harris’ ranch in Bluffton, Georgia. The invitation was prompted by a statement Harris got wind of, in the latest Impossible Foods Impact Report, which facetiously referred to regenerative grazing as the “clean coal” of meat.
The company has also claimed that grassfed beef “generates more GHGs than feedlot beef”—a claim that didn’t sit well with Harris, whose ranch in Bluffton, Georgia, stores “more carbon in the soil than our cows emit in a lifetime,” according the website.
Harris told a reporter for Civil Eats that he was “stunned” by the “clean coal” analogy. “I think there were many mistruths in that attack,” he said.
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Americans are getting fatter. But we aren’t getting healthier.
We can expect that trend to continue, unless we fix our food. And we can’t fix our food unless we fix our soil, which means we stop saturating it with herbicides, pesticides, fungicides, synthetic chemical fertilizers and antibiotics.
How do we fix our soil, food and health? We need a microbiome renaissance. And that begins with showing Mother Nature a little respect.
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Neonicotinoid insecticides are water soluble and used to coat the seeds of most corn, soybeans and canola. However, the toxins affect the insects pollinating plants, kill the birds eating the seeds and get into the groundwater; in addition, the use of genetically engineered seed has increased the need for pesticides in the past 25 years.
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Paul Kernaleguen says regenerative agriculture has brought bees back to his farm. “With the flowering species [of plants] we have now, you definitely see more,” he said. He’s referring to the mixture of plants in his fields, near Birch Hills, Sask. Along with his partner, Erin Dancey, he now grows flowers like red clover, phacelia and sunflowers, along with barley, oats and peas they grow to feed their dairy cattle.
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As food writer Mark Bittman recently remarked, since food is defined as “a substance that provides nutrition and promotes growth” and poison is “a substance that promotes illness,” then “much of what is produced by industrial agriculture is, quite literally, not food but poison.” Of course, it doesn’t have to be this way.
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It’s time to take soil seriously. As the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change states with very high confidence in its latest report, land degradation represents “one of the biggest and most urgent challenges” that humanity faces.
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A cereal and beers are now being made with a new variety of perennial grain known as Kernza. Proponents say this marks a significant advance for a new agriculture that borrows from the wild prairie and could help ensure sustainable food production in a warming world.
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For the environmentally minded carnivore, meat poses a culinary conundrum. Producing it requires a great deal of land and water resources, and ruminants such as cows and sheep are responsible for half of all greenhouse gas emissions associated with agriculture, according to the World Resources Institute.
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You’re probably more familiar with the work we do in the U.S. But the Organic Consumers Association is also a co-founder of two other organizations: Vía Orgánica, based in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and Regeneration International, which has staff and close allies working in the U.S., Mexico, South Africa, Australia, Belize, the Philippines, London and elsewhere.
Reporter Tracy L. Barnett recently was assigned to cover the work of these two organizations, for an article in Permaculture Magazine.
Calling it the “one of my most inspiring assignments so far this year,” Barnett produced a version of the story that appeared in several online publications, including the Esperanza Project.
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If you’re excited about the potential of soil carbon sequestration to reverse climate change, the Climate Stewardship Act of 2019 is the bill you’ve been waiting for.
Sponsored by presidential candidate and U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-N.J.) and Rep. Deb Haaland (D-N.M.), chairwoman of the House Natural Resources Subcommittee on National Parks, Forests, and Public Lands, this bill would fund natural carbon sequestration through voluntary farm stewardship on more than 100 million acres.
The Climate Stewardship Act would also fund the planting of more than 15 billion trees and the restoration of more than 2 million acres of coastal wetlands.
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