Design of the Svalbard seed vault as of early 2007

In 1992, the Global Biodiversity Convention (GBC) was adopted in Rio de Janeiro, and which placed the biodiversity issue center stage–calling for the world-wide preservation of biodiversity and its equitable and sustainable use. The convention was established in response to both the increasing rate of plant extinction (through habitat loss), fears by poorer nations of “biopiracy”, and the increasing agricultural use of land for high-value crops, to the exclusion of lesser-value ones–a practice that diminishes crop biodiversity. These lesser-value crops are typically grown by independent and small farms in less economically advanced countries. Many of these so-called “orphan crops” risk becoming extinct. Further, many species of plant or tree that fall outside the conventional definition of agriculture–such as the sea-water tolerant mangrove tree–are being ignored, to the possible peril of future agriculture.

Recent warming trends pose the greatest threat to preserving global “agrobiodiversity” due to its predicted alterations in temperature, precipitation, and sea level (thus the intrusion of saline water into fresh water ecosystems). Also, computer models show that global warming will increase the frequency and duration of flood and drought cycles. To protect civilization’s long-term food supply (and to protect against the social chaos of food shortages from consequent crop failures) from these potentially calamitous effects, scientists and agricultural policy experts, in cooperation with various governments, have begun establishing cryogenic gene banks to preserve the seeds of various, valuable crops for future agricultural use. The most notable example of this is the International Rice Research institute (IRRI) in the Philippines which stores over 100,000 strains of rice.

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Overall, global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels increased 29% between 2000 and 2008 and 41% from 1990-2008, and the current concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is now at its highest in at least 2 million years, according to a new study in the journal Nature Geoscience.

The new report published this week by an international team of researchers who are part of the “Global Carbon Project” shows emissions trends through 2008 (including changes in emissions causes and in the amount of emissions remaining in the atmosphere) and brings up some major questions for the future as well.

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A mindset of green gratitude emphasizes positive abundance, relishing the glass half full perspective.  An important concept to keep on the front burner, especially as tanking economies fuel table conversations that tend to serve up sentiments of fear, scarcity and deprivation.

Add a dash of green reflection and gratitude to your Thanksgiving table by throwing these three questions on eating and drinking better into the conversation mix:

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The stewardship of sending food and other basics in the form of care packages to poverty-plagued countries tends to be ignored.  I got a lesson in this dilemma as I watched a video at] my home church on Lutheran World Relief (LWR), a 64-year-old organization that sends donations of ordinary items we take for granted to help families and children in Third World countries that depend on agriculture for their livelihood and live on less than $2 a day in some areas.  While we go to college in hopes of writing our ticket to success, kids in Mali get wide-eyed at the sight of pencils and paper to write with.  LWR donors typically send simple things such as health kits, toothpaste, soap, needles and thread, quilts, and layettes for new mothers, 40 of which can be sent for $40.

That raises a major question about food.  How can we get that need met in Mali where crops are meager and cows look frail and sickly? A true and false test we took prior to the video presentation included statements such as “There is not enough food to go around,” “The free market can end hunger,” and “We benefit from people’s poverty.”

Just tell that to the Stop Hunger Now, an international hunger relief organization that coordinates the distribution of food and other life-saving aid around the world.  Stop Hunger Now’s vision is to end world hunger in our lifetime and has a mission to provide food and life-saving aid to the world’s most destitute and hungry in the most sustainable, efficient and effective manager.  SHN’s volunteer meal packaging program packages and ships dehydrated, high-protein, and nutritious meals for crisis situations and in school feeding programs.  Food, medicines and medical supplies are also sent to respond to emergency needs.  A recent article in the Charlotte Observer puts the world hunger count at a startling one billion people, a 100 million increase in one year, according to United Nations figures.  “The rise in hunger,” the article adds, “has also triggered riots and acts of violence.”  (See www.stophungernow.org)

While food prices have dropped off since mid 2008 they are still 24 percent higher then in 2006. Another unnerving statistic is that the growing hunger rate has become larger than the growing population rate, a trend that began two years ago. While most of the world’s undernourished live in developing countries, all regions of the world have recorded a two digit increase in hunger.

The food issue seems to be the inability of producers to get quality food to those who need it most. There IS enough food to go around but the free market won’t end hunger unless the system is based on something other than profitable sale.  Global improvements in food distribution logistics and infrastructure would reduce costs and travel distances for the benefit of well-fed shippers and hungry people.  That takes public and private stewardship and cooperative planning and implementation. A solution to poverty would combine food stewardship with showing people in Mali and elsewhere how to grow their own crops better.  It’s like teaching a man to fish so he can fish for a lifetime.

The U.S. food system has all the tools needed to send food to the hungry in an organized, efficient manner. The next step is to establish relationships with countries such as Mali and send our surpluses and provide our knowledge to areas who want a way out of poverty.  Such an effort, combined with public education about the hunger problem to motivate private donations to relief groups such as Lutheran World Relief, or whatever organization has a presence in our communities. No one should live on $2 a day.  The heads of large food companies and the people working for them sure don’t. Globalization involves social responsibility to peoples around the world.  Stewardship is wise use of resources that produce the best results without causing hardship on either side of the food equation.

Profit is possible with global stewardship.  It requires, however, a wider vision of what we can do with what we make to make the world a better place to live for everyone –not just the people in our own fertile back yard. Otherwise Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, a 1960 CBS news documentary about the plight of migrant workers in America will trascend to global poverty that we all pay for in the end.

The Ferry Plaza Farmers Market:

“is a California certified farmers market operated by the Center for Urban Education about Sustainable Agriculture“ ~CUESA

The market is open Tuesday and Saturday.

Below are spotlights on a few of their unique vendors in this city building, such as the Far West Fungi shop, and organics from the Farm Fresh to You store.

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For the 193 national delegations gathering in Copenhagen for the U.N. Climate Change Conference in December, the reasons for concern about climate change vary widely. For delegations from low-lying island countries, the principal concern is rising sea level. For countries in southern Europe, climate change means less rainfall and more drought. For countries of East Asia and the Caribbean, more powerful storms and storm surges are a growing worry. This climate change conference is about all these things, and many more, but in a very fundamental sense, it is a conference about food security.

We need not go beyond ice melting to see that the world is in trouble on the food front. The melting of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets is raising sea level. If the Greenland ice sheet were to melt entirely, sea level would rise by 23 feet. Recent projections show that it could rise by up to 6 feet during this century.

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About two kilometers from the Dead Sea and two from where Jesus was christened, in the country of Jordan, Geoff Lawton of the Permaculture Research Institute and his crew created a near miracle turning desert into a lush permaculture garden.

In August in this location, Lawton says that temperatures could rise above 50 degrees Celsius (122 degrees Fahrenheit). People farming there were farming under plastic strips and using tons of synthetic chemicals and fertilizers. The idea to grow a lush forest or garden of edible plants would probably make people laugh or roll their eyes. Nonetheless, the permaculture crew had exactly this vision in mind and a little funding to help them to do it.

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I knew little about Foreign Animal Disease (FAD) when I walked into a Wisconsin Department of Agriculture (DATCP) talk on the subject Nov. 3 at the Microbial Sciences Center on the UW-Madison campus.  Here is a description of foot-and-mouth disease, an example of FAD, from www.cattletoday:

Foot-and-Mouth Disease is a severe, highly communicable disease of cattle, pigs, sheep, goats and deer.  It is caused by one of the smallest disease producing viruses known.   Humans do not catch the virus.  The disease is characterized by blister-like lesions on the tongue, nose and lips, in the mouth, on the teats and between the toes which then burst, leaving painful ulcers.   The blisters cause a heavy flow of sticky, foamy saliva that hangs from the mouth.  Infected animals sway from one foot to the other due to the tenderness of the feet.  Although older cattle usually do not die from the infection, they suffer a severe illness which leaves them in a weakened state.  They have high fevers, stop eating, give less milk and become lame. 

The virus is extremely contagious and spreads rapidly unless it is contained. This usually requires quarantining infected farms, followed by slaughtering and burning all susceptible animals. Anyone having contact with animals in infected countries should not go near susceptible animals for at least five days.  Because the virus is spread so easily, countries with the disease are banned from exporting animals and their products, creating further economic hardship.  Foot-and-Mouth Disease was last seen in the United States in 1929. The U.S. Government places an extremely high priority on keeping the disease out of the country. 

The FAD Threat

The first speaker i heard reviewed the horror stories of millions of hogs killed in Europe between 1997 and 2001 from either foot and moth disease or classic swine fever, including a 2001 outbreak in the United Kingdom that killed 10 million animals at a total cost of $13 billion.

The numbers are staggering but foreign animal disease hasn’t caused nearly as much carnage in the U.S. or the state of Wisconsin — yet.  The major concern is that foreign animal disease can enter the country and disrupt the Wisconsin farm economy without warning. Two main causes are live animals that can come from elsewhere and spread the disease, or people coming or returning from abroad and smuggling diseased meat products into this country.

Preparing a Plan

The USDA, DATCP and local governments continue to develop a response plan acceptable to all sectors of Wisconsin agriculture that will effectively deal with an incident or outbreak. The big challenge is to get the word out about foreign animal disease so that a plan can be put in place that will work quickly and efficiently. That’s because the onset of foreign animal disease requires precautions so that the incident or outbreak is addressed qicklu without disrupting the transportation, distribution, and production of agricultural products, particularly raw milk that drives Wisconsin’s dairy industry.  According to DATCP, Wisconsin produces 25.1 billion pounds of milk each year from 1.25 million cows from nearly 13,000 dairy farms.  An outbreak severely disrupts the process.  A response plan reduces the disruption significantly.

A response would include setting up what amounts to safety zones around the affected farm and those closest to the occurrence and moving milk within specified zones to identified milk processing plants to get the product moving as quickly as possible. This is critical for raw milk, which can spoil after 48 hours. Though destroying affected herds has been done elsewhere, officials say it’s not a practical solution in Wisconsin. 

The Job Ahead

The main task for agricultural officials and milk marketers is to educate all players involved about foreign animal disease and develop an efficient response system.

the Wisconsin Agro-Security Resource Network (WARN) has a Web site intended to mobilize the entire food industry — dairy, beef, pork, egg, and poultry — to build relationships prior to an occurrence. Officials want to build on existing research and response plans from other areas to complete a plan that has total support.

“We are better prepared but we still have a long way to go,” USDA’s Ty Vannieuwenhoven told the audience.  That’s where citizen journalism plays a role. We can get the word out through GO Media and other outlets and participate in the public education needed to prepare for FAD, which is not a fad, but a potentially serious economic, logistic, and public health problem.

(Map courtesy Epoch Times Web images).

A new report, The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB), attempts to bring to the world’s attention the truly great economic value of ecosystems and biodiversity, as well as the benefits of taking these into account when making policies.

The value of the world’s natural ecosystems and biodiversity is something lacking in most economic analyses. Lack of value for what is truly priceless doesn’t just hurt the environment, however. It is also a sort of economic suicide. This new report, hosted by the United Nations Environment Programme and supported by key EU, UK, German, Swedish, Dutch, and Norwegian bodies, attempts to bring all of this to our attention more and show some positive case studies of how taking the environment into consideration can actually save us money.

As the report says: “the failure of markets to adequately consider the value of ecosystem services is of concern not only to environment, development and climate change ministries but also to finance, economics and business ministries.”

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Last weekend Madison was host to Tales from Planet Earth, a local environmental film festival screening 50 films over three days. One film I saw was Our Daily Bread, a German film about the industrial food production and high-tech farming that managed to comment on the process without actually doing any talking. The image above, reminiscent of old movies and war films, is just one visual that’s stuck with me since.

Rather than my trying to muddle out a summary, here’s the filmmakers’ synopsis of the movie:

To the rhythm of conveyor belts and immense machines, the film looks without commenting into the places where food is produced in Europe: monumental spaces, surreal landscapes and bizarre sounds - a cool, industrial environment which leaves little space for individualism. People, animals, crops and machines play a supporting role in the logistics of this system which provides our society’s standard of living.

When the synopsis says the film “looks without commenting,” that’s exactly true. There is no narration and almost no actual talking throughout the entire movie. And since it’s in German I couldn’t understand any speaking anyway, meaning all I could interact with in the movie were the images.

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I’m probably going to irritate some people with this post.  I apologize in advance because that is not at all my intention.  For those readers that don’t think climate change is a real problem, I respect the fact that there is uncertainty in that science, but if the majority position of climate scientists is true, the stakes in terms of human suffering among the poor are too high not to act.  For those who think Organic farming is the answer, I’m not trying to argue the whole issue here - I just want to talk about the science associated with climate change and farming.  I have spent months reading the scientific literature on this topic.  That science points to some very specific changes in how we need to farm.  If those changes were compatible with Organic I’d be a big promoter.  The short answer is “Organic farming is not the best option from a climate change point of view.”

I know this sounds like heresy in the “Green Blogosphere,” but before you react, please read on.  I agree in advance that the Organic/non-Organic discussion is much broader than climate change.  In fairness, climate change was never something that “Organic” was designed to address either during its origins in the early 20th century or during the development of the USDA Organic rules between 1990 and 2000.  I have no desire to get in the way of Organic growers making a living (including my good friends who grow Organic of the old school category) or get in the way of Organic customers getting what they want.    I simply believe that it is critical that we, the declining subset of people who take climate change seriously, be accurately informed about this issue.  If we believe we “have the answer” for farming when that answer is wrong, that keeps us from continuing to find the real answer.

Focusing on the Major Crops

Because it would be far too complex to discuss this question for all crops,  I’ll only be talking about the “carbon footprint” of the major row crops (see the pie chart above) - the wheat, corn, hay, barley, oats, corn, soybeans, hay, oats, dry beans, lentils… that make up the bulk of our calorie intake, our vegetable protein intake, and our animal feeds for meat and dairy.  Those crops also make up the vast majority of farmed land, so they are what matters for climate change.  Fruit and vegetable crops are extremely important for health and food enjoyment, but not much for climate change.  Organic today is heavily weighted to the fruit and vegetable segment and beyond that, it is extremely small. Actually, all of Organic only represents 2.6MM acres ( ~0.7%  of US cropland), so it has almost no effect on climate either way. This is only a discussion about the widely held opinion that Organic would help in a climate change sense.

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One issue that’s come to my attention since I started thinking more about my food is the debate about organic foods — are they healthier, and is the cost worth the potential benefits?

I’d love to buy organic food all the time, but it’s just not financially possible for me right now. That said, I believe in the health risks of pesticides on foods and would like to start moving in the direction of eating foods grown without them. But if I’m going to get a bang for my buck, which foods should I buy organic in order to protect myself from ingesting the most pesticides? Are some fruits and vegetables more susceptible to absorbing pesticides than others?

One list I found that can help answer this question is the Shopper’s Guide to Pesticides, which ranks 47 popular fruits and vegetables based on how many pesticides they contain, often after being washed and peeled. The list was put together by the Environmental Working Group, a non-profit group working on public health and the environment.

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With seasons changing yet again, starting a garden might be the last thing on a person’s mind. Not so here in Madison, Wisconsin, where a local group is pushing for more community garden spaces in the downtown area. This isn’t especially newsworthy until you hear where they’re proposing to add the garden – the top of the Madison Public Library.

Community gardens and downtown green space aren’t new ideas, but at a public presentation on Thursday night, members of Downtown Madison Community Gardens, said if their proposal is accepted, the garden would be the first rooftop community vegetable garden on a public library in the world.

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Finding sustainable sources of seafood is becoming increasingly difficult.  Should you buy farmed or wild caught?  And what are the most sustainable choices?  I’ve talked about sustainable seafood before, and since shrimp is the most commonly consumed seafood in the United States, you might want to have a bit more information about that shrimp cocktail you’re about to eat.

Did you know Americans ate 1.2 Billion pounds of shrimp in 2007, an average of 4.1 pounds of shrimp per person (figures here)?  This figure is actually a decline from the previous year, in 2006, when the average American ate 4.4 pounds of shrimp.  Now if you consider that 85% of shrimp consumed in the US is imported, and since wild caught shrimp are rarer than ever as fisheries are depleted, there’s a good chance that the shrimp you just ate were farmed and imported to the US.

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Fall crops – from butternuts to beets – require taking out the big sharp knives, the cutting boards, and usually can’t go from garden to plate in ten minutes or less. (Case in point: the yummy, yet rather complex, Beet Burger recipe I wrote about last week). But there’s a reason for that: these types of fall vegetables are meant to store and be savored through the winter months, particularly here in through our Wisconsin winters. Tougher skins and harder insides hold up to seasonal and local eating booty through our lean Midwest growing months, providing the opportunity to still eat fresh year round.

Consider this Roasted Root Vegetable recipe my point of entry into the winter cooking season. Cooked in olive oil with some simple seasonings, this recipe showcases the distinct, hearty flavors of root vegetables. Potato recipes get temporarily bumped off the breakfast plate at Inn Serendipity this time of year as this flavorful, unusual recipe prompts folks to rethink their assumptions about rutabagas and other roots.

Roasted Root Vegetables (Vegan)

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A new study led by Marine Biological Laboratory (MBL) senior scientist Jerry Melillo says no, they aren’t green (when it comes to climate change). However, there are still many important factors to keep in mind before claiming this is the end of a long and complicated discussion.

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This is a very adaptable, forgiving recipe—feel free to modify and experiment with ingredients.   Carrots can easily substitute for some of the beets.  The burgers freeze well (and taste surprisingly good cold), so we usually make a triple batch in a jumbo bowl.

Here’s the recipe:

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Industrial hemp may be one of the most versatile and environmentally benign crops out there, but because of its relationship to marijuana, the cultivation of this crop has been banned in the United States since the late thirties. Last week, a group of farmers, along with David Bronner, president of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, staged a protest in front of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Washington, DC, and were promptly arrested for planting hemp seeds on the agency’s front lawn.

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As a female farmer myself, running Inn Serendipity farm and B&B with my husband, John Ivanko, in Wisconsin, this increasing blending and crossover between new women farmers with a passion for raising both cabbage and change cultivates a hefty serving of inspiration. These new women farmers grow more than food for our table; they rethink the status quo approach to our food system and provide keen insights into what needs to change.

“As one of the fastest growing groups of new farmers, women can be the change makers that transform our agricultural system into one that provides organic, healthy and fair food to us all,” explains Faye Jones, Executive Director of the Midwest Organic and Sustainable Education Service (MOSES), a Community Food Security Coalition (CFSC) member organization that sponsored two women farmers to attend this conference. Wisconsin women farmers Jai Kellum of King’s Hill Farm and Erin Schneider of Hilltop Community Farm attended the CFSC Conference on behalf of MOSES.“It is important to keep the voice of farmers represented in the national discussion on food and agricultural policy and priorities,” sums up Jones.

Here are four of their tips for politicians to policy makers from Kellum and Schneider to improve our agriculture and food system:

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