Peak Oil and a Changing Climate

The Nation is running an very interesting (and disturbing, sorry!) online video interview series called Peak Oil and a Changing Climate:

Bill McKibben, Noam Chomsky, Nicole Foss, Richard Heinberg and the other scientists, researchers and writers interviewed throughout “Peak Oil and a Changing Climate” describe the diminishing returns our world can expect as it deals with the consequences of peak oil even as it continues to pretend it doesn’t exist. These experts predict substantially increased transportation costs, decreased industrial production, unemployment, hunger and social chaos as the supplies of the fuels on which we rely dwindle and eventually disappear.

With recent interviews including the likes of Lester Brown and Joel Salatin talking about food, this series is definitely worth a perusal. Here's a (troubling, yikes!) money quote:

"Probably the best place to be in this situation [economic collapse precipitated by peak oil and a changing climate] would be on a subsistence farm in a village in Sub-Saharan Africa or someplace that's not much effected by what happens in the rest of the world. I think most people don't realize how vulnerable we are. For example, the food supply in the average city in the United States, if it's not daily renewed, would run out in about 3 days. There's not much of a buffer there. The system can come apart pretty fast." -Lester Brown, "The Planet's Scarcest Resource is Time," March 22, 2011.

Happy Story of Sharing Greens

I was going to share follow up stories to the recent earthquake off the shore of Japan and subsequent tsunami and further subsequent difficulties at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant. I will share one news photo of a farmer near Fukushima Daiichi having to plow under his hoophouse of beautiful komatsuna (it did not have recorded high levels of radioactivity as I understood it but was from a zone that was essentially banned from selling vegetables).

In contrast, I have a more happy video story to share about eager to help high-schoolers in Yokohama (south of Tokyo and out of harms way) harvesting greens to send fresh vegetables to the displaced people of the hard hit Kesennuma area in Miyagi prefecture.

Winter CSA: Week 20

Spring marches on... Still feel like we are at least 3 weeks behind, but maybe we are catching up.



A bag of baby pac choi, komatsuna, or Tokyo bekana which over wintered and survived. Still good for sauté or stir fry.



Claytonia



Big bag o kale



Big bag o spinach



Arugula



Carrots

Winter CSA: Week 19

Oops forgot to post this promptly but the harvest volume was definitely picking up this week, yay!



Mustard greens



Arugula



Kale



Big bag of claytonia



Big bag of spinach



Carrots

Winter CSA: Week 18

Inside the hoophouses it is beginning to feel like spring is here. We just need some more sun.



Big bag of spinach



Claytonia



Cress presto variety



Swiss chard



Carrots

Japanese Farms

I'm sure everyone joins me in sending all our hearts and prayers to the people in Japan. All of the pictures and videos are just devastating. I was there for 2 weeks in 2009 and of course took great notice of all the farms and farmland. It is quite integrated into the landscapes in the coastal (flatter) areas so is quite visible from the trains and highways. I literally saw hundreds of thousands (probably more) of hoophouse structures from train rides. So I cannot begin to digest this helicopter video footage below showing 100s of hoophouses washed away in the course of a minute. To put this in perspective many of those structures are each the same size as one of my hoophouses or bigger. I have 4 structures. That was 100s, maybe more. I began counting and stopped. And there are agricultural areas like this up and down that coast. Lets just hope this video is of some of the worst areas to be inundated by the tsunami and subsequent surge. Here in Michigan we've had a lower than average temperature lows this winter as well as above average snow (and thus clouds and dimished light) so I've been dissappointed with the amount of crop volume we've been able to put into the CSA program. But it is hard to think I can even begin to fathom how I would really feel if the site I've spent years building was washed away in an instant, not to mention the soil and soil fertility that has been displaced.

Visualizing Agricultural and Food System Datasets

Above is a low-res version of an animation of the percent of each US county at various points from 1850-2007 that has been improved to cropland. The map uses 5 shades of red increasing in intensity for every 20% of the county that is cropland. There is a high-res version below as a PDF. This was part of a lecture I gave the last full week of February in NRE 639 Sustainable Food Systems, an innovative seminar class that was largely organized by students at the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources & Environment. Most of my lecture slides are provided below.

Contextualizing, Mapping, and Visualizing Food Environment & Food Localization by Shannon J. Brines, February 22, 2011

* agdatascenarios_nre639w2011.pdf - Lecture Slides
* cropacreshistory.pdf - A Historical Context: Percent of Each US County in Cropland from 1850-2007

Subsets of the 2007 US Ag Census Atlas Maps:
* cropsandplants_agcensus2007.pdf - Crops and Plants
* economics_agcensus2007.pdf - Economics
* farms_agcensus2007.pdf - Farms
* animals_agcensus2007.pdf - Livestock and Animals
* operators_agcensus2007.pdf - Operators

Agricultural Subsidies

I'm really enjoying Mark Bittman's switch to more of a blog and commentary pieces. I guess this should be no surprise given his previous pieces, books, and cookbooks.

So I read with interest his recent piece and blog appendix regarding a topic I'm interested in and love to talk about, agricultural subsidies. I'm not sure I would rule out (which Mark seems to do) eliminating all direct payments but he reminded me of two very interesting resources on this topic: EWG's Farm Subsidy Database is intriguing to peruse, and the Times "Room for Debate" discussion "Do Farm Subsidies Protect National Security? from last fall (in which a variety of folks from different political persuasions all stated that renewing things like they have been should not be an option).

Update: An interesting tidbit from EWG on the subsidies received in the last 15 years or so but 23 current members of this US congress who are farmers or have farm interests (which by the way seems like a high proportion of congress given that less than 1% of the US population are farmers).

Yup, agroecology is the way to go

For release today...

GENEVA, 8 March 2011 – Small-scale farmers can double food production within 10 years in critical regions by using ecological methods, a new UN report* shows. Based on an extensive review of the recent scientific literature, the study calls for a fundamental shift towards agroecology as a way to boost food production and improve the situation of the poorest.

“To feed 9 billion people in 2050, we urgently need to adopt the most efficient farming techniques available,” says Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report. “Today’s scientific evidence demonstrates that agroecological methods outperform the use of chemical fertilizers in boosting food production where the hungry live -- especially in unfavorable environments.”

Agroecology applies ecological science to the design of agricultural systems that can help put an end to food crises and address climate-change and poverty challenges. It enhances soils productivity and protects the crops against pests by relying on the natural environment such as beneficial trees, plants, animals and insects.

*You can read the aforementioned UN report here.

Jill Richardson discusses the report here along with further details by the report author on free trade, nitrogen fertilizer, and GMOs. Mark Bittman expanded on this report as well. Some snippets:

On Tuesday, Olivier de Schutter, the United Nations’ special rapporteur on the Right to Food, presented a report entitled “Agro-ecology and the Right to Food.” ... Chief among de Schutter’s recommendations is this: “Agriculture should be fundamentally redirected towards modes of production that are more environmentally sustainable and socially just.”

Agro-ecology, he said, immediately helps “small farmers who must be able to farm in ways that are less expensive and more productive. But it benefits all of us, because it decelerates global warming and ecological destruction.” Further, by decentralizing production, floods in Southeast Asia, for example, might not mean huge shortfalls in the world’s rice crop; smaller scale farming makes the system less susceptible to climate shocks. ... Agro-ecology and related methods are going to require resources too, but they’re more in the form of labor, both intellectual — much research remains to be done — and physical: the world will need more farmers, and quite possibly less mechanization. ...

No one knows how many people can be fed this way, but a number of experts and studies — including those from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, the University of Michigan and Worldwatch — seem to be lining up to suggest that sustainable agriculture is a system more people should choose. For developing nations, especially those in Africa, the shift from high- to low-tech farming can happen quickly, said de Schutter: “It’s easiest to make the transition in places that still have a direction to take.” But, he added, although “in developed regions the shift away from industrial mode will be difficult to achieve,” ultimately even those countries most “addicted” to chemical fertilizers must change.

Certainly the principles of agroecology can work in the developed areas of the world too. The foundations for my Brines Farm operation are my own beyond-organic principles of agroecology which I have stitched together from various sources and research. Thanks for your support!

More Posting

Now that the Local Food Summit is over I'll have a little more time to post a few more things regularly. Thanks everyone who was able to make it to the summit and be sure and keep an eye on LocalFoodSummit.org even if you didn't make it as we recap and make resources available there for our local food system community.

Farm In Snow

Thinking that this post title needs to be said a little bit like how they use to lead into that muppets sketch "pigs in spaaaaace". Anyway wasn't expecting that additional significant snow fall (was anyone?) but it certainly was a pretty snow:



sticking to the trees,



Covering the compost pile,



And bright snow on a bit of house 4 and the woods.

Just read that the Ann Arbor area is 20 inches above average for snow fall this season. That seems to explain the mammoth pile up along house 4. I'll have to get a picture of that, although I guess it is not melting anytime soon.

Winter CSA: Week 17

As we wait on the lettuce and chard and radishes etc to grow (more sun please), this weeks share still has the "oldie but goodies."



Biggest bag of spinach yet (primarily two varieties: the one with the red stem is Bordeaux and the other is Space)



Baby arugula



Red Russian kale



Claytonia (don't forget that it is super high in vitamin C)



Carrots