Green Options

Someone needs to review first grade math. Talk about an unequal equation: Women make eighty-five percent of household food purchase decisions and own fifty-percent of our nation’s farmland. Women, particularly those over 55, add up to the largest and fastest growing group buying new farms today. So why then have women, historically, been so underrepresented in agriculture policy and national farming agendas?

Ask Iowa farmer, Denise O’Brien. But she’s not trying to teach the old farm dogs new math – she’s advocating for women to organize and reinvent the system.

For the past twenty years, O’Brien has led the charge of organizing and promoting the voice and face of women in agriculture and is founder of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network. “Finally, the tides are starting to turn for women farmers as policies just start to change,” explains O’Brien. “But it should have happened a long time ago and there’s still much we as women, from growers to grocery shoppers, can do to create a healthy food system for future generations.”

O’Brien racks up a history of seeing opportunity in crisis.

Quick trivia question: What’s the second verse to “The Farmer in the Dell”? Anybody? Here you go:

The farmer takes a wife,
The farmer takes a wife,
Hi-ho, the derry-o
The farmer takes a wife.

Talk about stale lyrics in dire need of an update. As women make up the largest and fastest growing group buying new farms today, we should be teaching kids something more like:

“The wife took over the farm.
To the land she did no harm,
Hi-ho, times change, you know, These chicks can really grow.”

Consider Iowa farmer, Denise O’Brien, chief song lyric rewriter and female farmer stereotype smasher extraordinaire. For the past twenty years she has led the charge of organizing and promoting the voice and face of women in agriculture and is founder of the Women, Food and Agriculture Network. “Finally, the tides are starting to turn for women farmers as policies start to change,” explains O’Brien. “But it should have happened a long time ago and there’s still much we as women, from growers to grocery shoppers, can do to create a healthy food system for future generations.”

O’Brien racks up a history of seeing opportunity in crisis.

Editor’s note: Part three of Alexis Madrigal’s series on California’s ethanol mandate focuses on the challenges of transporting the fuel.

III. How to Move A Billion Gallons of Fuel from Iowa to California

Back in the 1980s, with smog choking American cities, the government decided to tinker with the gasoline hydrocarbon formula to create cleaner burning fuels. The easiest way to do that is to add a little oxygen to the gas. Adding O2 is a little like blowing on a flame: the controlled fire inside your car’s engine burns a little more efficiently and thus a little cleaner, reducing toxic air pollutants, carbon monoxide, and ozone.

Spurred by state and Federal regulations but committed to selling the most petroleum they could, oil companies found the cheapest oxygenate they could, a crude-derived chemical called MTBE. Subsequent environmental impact studies determined that MTBE was a groundwater pollutant, and in 1999, then-Governor Gray Davis ruled that all MTBE had to be removed from California’s gasoline by the end of 2002 (though the phase out was extended).

That left the state casting around for an alternative way to get extra oxygen into its gasoline blend while maintaining the smog-control benefits of the previous blend, and quick. They settled on ethanol, the only scaleable oxygenate available.

“This actually was a major shift in a lot of different things. The phase out was something extremely rapid. It required [the oil industry] to use the only other oxygenate alternative, which was ethanol,” says Rahul Iyer, a founder of the biofuels infrastructure startup Primafuel.

What started out as a innovative, new program to keep old medications out of the waste stream in LaCrosse County, Wisconsin, has grown to become an award-winning initiative now used by more than 30 counties in three states.

Special waste manager Jeff Gloyd created the program in which LaCrosse County began collecting old over-the-counter drugs and prescription medications to keep them out of the regular waste stream. Pharmaceuticals thrown out that way have increasingly seeped into natural waterways and, eventually, human drinking water supplies, raising concerns about environmental and health dangers.

I’ve not posted much yet on the Iowa floods. I think, perhaps, I was holding my breath, waiting to exhale. The exhale is likely to come out more like a long sigh.

While the floods have peaked, Iowans are now dealing with the aftermath. Many of the 36,000-plus who were evacuated have still not returned home. I imagine, when they get there, the real work will begin.

It’s devastating for the state. And, in the wider picture, devastating for all of us. Even if your home was high, dry, and several states away, you, too, will feel the impacts.

Details after the jump.

Sorry, Popeye. Your tin can of spinach just can’t compete with the brawny nutritional wallop from a bunch of fresh greens from a local farmers’ market or home garden.

Too bad Popeye didn’t know Angie Tagtow, an environmental nutritionist based in Iowa and a leading advocate championing public access to fresh, affordable, sustainably raised food. “Local food is a dream team blend of nutrients and health benefits,” explains Tagtow. “Food’s nutrient value starts to decrease right after it is harvested. Local food is picked and then quickly eaten at the peak of ripeness. It’s thereby fresh, tastes great and packs a more nutritious punch than what might be shipped and processed 1,500 miles away.”

Local, fresh spinach would have also gifted Popeye with a decent long-term health insurance plan.

Texas comes out on top in the American Wind Energy Association’s (AWEA) 2007 rankings of wind energy leaders, not only in its overall total number of wind turbines but in the amount of new capacity added last year.

Texas wind turbines generated 4,446 megawatts of energy in 2007 — enough to power nearly 1.2 million homes. The state added 1,618 megawatts of new wind power capacity last year, more than double the amount of second-place Colorado.

A lot of the time I write on what needs to happen, on the lack of action being taken across the world, and how it is that, without said action, we’re all going to H-E-double-hockey-sticks in a hand basket. This time, I get to write about people who have already done something, and how maybe we can follow in their steps.

An Associated Press article tells of a farmer from Creston, Iowa,

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Two proposed coal-fired power plants in Iowa could negate the state’s efforts to cut emissions with clean, renewable power.

LS Power Group wants to build a 750-megawatt (MW) plant near Waterloo, and Alliant Energy wants a 630 MW coal plant near Marshalltown. A new MidAmerican Energy coal plant just began operation near Council Bluffs on June 1.

Local and regional supporters of clean and efficient energy will fight the plants.

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When Iowa Governor Chet Culver signed the $100 million Iowa Power Fund into law this spring, Iowa committed to investing in cutting-edge research and development to continue leading the nation towards a new energy economy. But it also established something even more ambitious: The Office of Energy Independence - and they’re hiring.

The Office of Energy Independence is charged with weaning the Hawkeye state off of foreign oil by 2025 – no small feat

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