"I really don't like their policies of taking away your car, taking away your airplane flights, of ‘let’s hop a train to California,’ or ‘you’re not allowed to own cows anymore!'” So bellowed President Donald Trump in El Paso, Texas, his first campaign-style salvo against Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Ed Markey’s Green New Deal resolution. There will surely be many more.
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For years, "sustainable" has been the buzzword in conversations about agriculture. If farmers and ranchers could slow or stop further damage to land and water, the thinking went, that was good enough. I thought that way too, until I started writing my new book, "One Size Fits None: A Farm Girl's Search for the Promise of Regenerative Agriculture."
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If you believe all the headlines, in a few short years or even less time, the way meat is grown will radically change. Brewing like tanks full of dividing cells will replace farms and factory farms raising livestock, thus no more animals will be slaughtered, all environmental issues- including climate change and water scarcity- will be resolved, world hunger will no longer exist, and deforestation will no longer be necessary.
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Most of us wish we could eat with the confidence that everything on our plate has a story we can feel good about, a story about taking care of both people and the environment. In the food system (as elsewhere) these twin issues, justice and sustainability, have often been talked about as if they were unrelated, independent problems with separate solutions.
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The Green New Deal (GND) has arrived!
Now that we’ve passed the dangerous tipping point of 350 parts per million (ppm) carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (we’re at 410 ppm), we have to figure out a way to draw down that CO2—or we will continue to suffer the cascading impacts of global warming even after we’ve eliminated greenhouse gas emissions.
The safest and most effective way we have of doing this is to increase the carbon content of our soils in farmland, pasture land, forests, wetlands and coastal marine ecosystems. This can be done on working lands through regenerative organic agriculture techniques that increase fertility and control pests by replacing chemicals with management practices. These include holistic planned grazing, composting, no-till, cover cropping, diverse crop mixes and rotations, and the incorporation of crops that return nutrients and organic matter to the soil.
This is the piece of the puzzle that most climate activists and legislators are unaware of. That’s why it’s so important that this is included in the GND, and why we need to get Congress to support it!
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As many in the United States agriculture community breathed a sigh of relief that the recently passed Farm Bill isn’t as bad as it could be, our neighbors to the south are moving forward quickly and decisively with bold new plans to transform their food and farm system. Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador took office on December 1 with an inaugural address outlining 100 promises for the transformation of the country’s government and economy.
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From the air, the Grand Valley Water Users Association canal — 10 feet wide and 8 feet deep — tracks a serpentine 55-mile-long path across the mountain-ringed landscape of Mesa County, Colorado. It’s a line that separates parched, hard-baked desert and an agricultural nirvana of vast peach and apple orchards and swaying fields of alfalfa.
The future of this thin brown line that keeps the badlands of the Colorado desert at bay, however, is growing more uncertain by the day.
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At the 4,000-acre San Juan Ranch near Saguache, the practice of humane animal handling requires an affinity with the animals. It is an approach and strength that Julie Sullivan believes women are uniquely equipped to bring to ranching.
“We raise young women to be relational, to be more conscious of other people’s needs and concerns,” she said. “Young men often think they have to prove themselves and cowboy up. We don’t cowboy up around here, so we get cattle that follow us around.”
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For millennia, women have played a central role in farming and ranching communities. Today, a new generation of women are taking on new roles of carbon farmers and ranchers managers.
In the U.S., there are more than 900,000 women farmers, according to data collected in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That means women constitute 31 percent of the agricultural sector, and contribute upwards of $12 billion to America’s economy.
Historically, men have been considered a better fit for work in the agriculture field, work often characterized as rugged and ruthless. But as regenerative agriculture becomes more popular, women are bringing unique strengths to the field.
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