Urban Ecoist

I know, I know, everybody is talking about eating local and seasonal so as to lower your carbon footprint — in that your food doesn’t travel thousands of miles by carbon dioxide spewing trucks because it comes from within 100 miles or so, among many, many other reasons.

But are you drinking local?

Check this out. National Geographic has a one-pager on the carbon emissions from the transport of wine around the world. Another blogger (who says we are all a bunch of hacks?) Dr. Vino Tyler Coleman and Pablo Paster, a sustainability engineer, put together some numbers and Nat Geo put together a rather telling graphic.

The gist of it is that if you are really serious about how many natural resources it takes to put food and drink in your belly, you should not be choosing you wine based on what’s trendy or highly-rated, but instead choose wine (and spirits) from a more local source or if you do have a thing for foreign wine, choose wine from the country that can ship it to you via ocean trade routes.

For instance, according to the map, Napa Valley wines are big emitters due to the lengthy road journeys from California to the East Coast markets. But those same California Cabernets are shipped via boat to Asia and Australia, and thus the cargo ship shipping lowers those per bottle emissions. So, you must figure out where your wine is from, and then figure out a better way to get a buzz.

I happen to live in Oregon, so I am one of those lucky imbibers that lives close to three pretty top-notch wine regions. But I happen to love French and Spanish wine. I could either give up my love affairs with Gigondas and Piorat, or I could move to the East Coast of the US (given that I would remain in the US). This graphic and the idea behind it gives me extra motivation to drink more Pinot Noir. But what about that poor oenophile in Iowa City?

Now, I grew up in Michigan, so I can relate to land-locked winos. And for those of you that don’t live near a coastal port or within a few hundred miles of such ports, there is local wine everywhere. I learned to love Gewurztraminers and Reislings living in Michigan, as those are the grapes that grow well there. I have tried sparkling wines from New York’s Finger Lakes region that were equally tasty. The Chardonelle I tried in Misssouri — not so good, but they did have other varietals. I have even had some Petite Syrah from Mexico.

Use this topic as a challenge to not only find local wine, but local beer and spirits. You may just like what you taste. If not, have a few more drinks, and you will.

wine, transportation, carbon footprint, wine industry, carbon emissions, cargo ships, trucks, New York State wine, Michigan wine, Missouri wine, Oregon wine, French wine, Spanish wine, eat local, local foods, seasonal foods, beer, spirits

I had originally planned on starting this thread in Early April, but a family thing had me effectively offline all month. So I’ll try to pick up the pieces of my failed planned to keep you all abreast of the developments in my garden and *ahem* plow ahead.

A little background on not only my garden, but also why I have decided to focus on the small garden plots in my yard. I begin with the latter. I do not in any way profess to be an expert gardener, in fact far from it. I am however an eager student and an effective researcher. I am also proving to be a cautionary example of what not to do.

For example, this is what I did to a Spanish lavender bush in my yard.

Yeah, don’t do this at home.

Gardening has become rather fashionable as of late, and in so much that maybe you are starting out in your own garden or starting to think about starting, maybe you can glean some value from reading about my own trials and tribulations in the ol’ victory garden.

Now the former…Perhaps overly ambitious, I began gardening with a bang. I was renting a farm house at the time, and hey, it’s a farm. That first garden became a beast, and ultimately led to a lot of mistakes on my part and on the part of bad luck. My next garden was an easy-to-manage raised bed of 24 square feet. If you take one piece of advice from all of this self-indulgence, start small.

Last year was my first season in Portland, Oregon. I live in a funky yard with a lot of different sun-shade patterns that I clearly did not know before planting. Not only that, but ravenous insects were also a major issue (especially cutworms). I definitely learned a lot from that first year. Also, I should mention that I rent my home (as do many urbanites) , so I am limited in what kind of garden improvements I can make.

That said, I did spend a good part of last season composting for this season. Success in that, and I bought a lot of compost last season and dug it in everywhere I could to try and break up all that effing clay that we have here in Oregon. I was a little underfunded last year, so I couldn’t go crazy with soil testing and the fancier soil amendments. I figured that compost was good as an all-around soil amendment, so I settled on composting as a cheap, effective action I could take for future use.

Also, last year I put in peas — lots of peas. I love peas, and they are seriously the easiest veggie to grow. Not only that, but pea plants fix nitrogen into the soil and if you dig the spent plants into the ground after your harvest, they break down into “green manure.” So, really, if you cannot do anything else this year, put in some peas.

My efforts last year included putting in some herbs. Fresh herbs are so super awesome to have around if you like to cook, or if you just want to impress people (if you are that gardener). I put in sage, chives, flat-leaf parsley, rosemary, and thyme.

Oh, yeah, and I put in twelve strawberry plants. A June-bearing variety (Mount Hood) and an ever-bearing. I read that you shouldn’t let your berry plants produce fruit the first year, which is so hard to do, but I trimmed off all flower heads to prevent fruiting. I am expecting some huge rewards for my herculean test of patience.

And somewhere I read that garlic should go into the ground in the fall, so I put in some garlic bulbs from my kitchen that were starting to grow little crowns. I try to only buy organic garlic, so I hope they were okay to stick in the ground. What’s the worse that can happen, right?

The baby on the right is Carlitos. You can read more about him and other children affected by pesticides here.

victory garden, garden, kitchen garden, urban garden, gardening, home gardening, peas, herbs, soil amendment, composting, strawberry, garlic

The other day I wrote about the kitchen garden that First Lady Michelle Obama is putting in on the White House grounds, the first garden since the World War II victory garden tended by Eleanor Roosevelt. Mrs. Obama decided to garden after being gently encouraged by a group called Kitchen Gardeners International, and just when you’d think that the First Lady is going to get some respect for doing something like planting some lettuce and peas for White House dinners, another group has taken offense.

The Catch-22 Garden

Seems the organic garden of Mrs. Obama is ruffling some feathers among those that farm the “conventional” way. Ok, is it odd that the way of farming that has been around for thousands of years and lead to the dawn of civilization is not called “conventional”? No, conventional farming is the newfangled less-than-a-century-in-use chemical farming that everyone thought was the answer to all of our species troubles.

Anyway, the Mid America CropLife Association has sent Mrs. Obama a letter asking her to rethink her plans to go organic in her kitchen garden. The main gist of the argument is that chemical “conventional” agricultural practices are good enough for everyone else, so the Obamas don’t need to go starting something.

Here’s a brilliant passage from the letter, which I got from La Vida Locavore.

Starting in the early 1900’s, technology advances have allowed farmers to continually produce more food on less land while using less human labor. Over time, Americans were able to leave the time-consuming demands of farming to pursue new interests and develop new abilities. Today, an average farmer produces enough food to feed 144 Americans who are living longer lives than many of their ancestors. Technology in agriculture has allowed for the development of much of what we know and use in our lives today. If Americans were still required to farm to support their family’s basic food and fiber needs, would the U.S. have been leaders in the advancement of science, communication, education, medicine, transportation and the arts?

We live in a very different world than that of our grandparents. Americans are juggling jobs with the needs of children and aging parents. The time needed to tend a garden is not there for the majority of our citizens, certainly not a garden of sufficient productivity to supply much of a family’s year-round food needs.

Much of the food considered not wholesome or tasty is the result of how it is stored or prepared rather than how it is grown. Fresh foods grown conventionally are wholesome and flavorful yet more economical. Local and conventional farming is not mutually exclusive. However, a Midwest mother whose child loves strawberries, a good source of Vitamin C, appreciates the ability to offer California strawberries in March a few months before the official Mid-west season.

So, chemicals pesticides and fertilizers are responsible for mankind’s advances in other “fields”…ok, sure, I’ll buy that a constant food supply does allow for surpluses, which would in turn lead to wealth that would be able to fund research and the arts. But a lot of studies are showing that there is very little real advantage to conventional farming methods, and that often the health of the soil is degraded over many seasons as the farmers are throwing chemical nutrients into the soil hoping that the plants will absorb them before they leach through the soils into the groundwater supply. If the nutrients are not staying the soil, then the soil turns to dust.

And I love the part at the end about a Midwestern mother be able to give her strawberry-loving child berries in March rather than waiting for the June strawberry season. Come on, that is a poor argument, especially as we start looking at the total carbon footprint of the agricultural industry and see that transporting produce in off-seasons can really add up in terms of carbon emissions. Not only that, but that California strawberry was picked while it was underripe, and underdeveloped nutritionally-speaking, so that it would be perfectly ripe by the time it made its cross-country trip to that Illinois grocery store.

That Midwestern mother would be better off teaching her kid about seasonality and how local produce is more often than not the produce at the peak of its nutritional load. Better yet, she could plant a strawberry patch with her child and then freeze extra berries for March, or make the berries into jam to have all year like my mom did.

Michelle Obama, organic gardening, White House, kitchen garden, agriculture, crops, farming, conventional farming, chemicals, fertilizers, pesticides, seasonality, local foods, Kitchen Gardeners International, carbon emissions

At first, I was attracted to this article because it was about the inevitable famines the world will suffer, due to climate change and a 50 percent increase in the world’s population. But then reading through, I noted that the US State Department’s Chief Science Advisor, Dr. Nina Fedoroff, made a strong statement about genetically-modified crops.

Like Professor Beddington [Britain’s chief scientist] and Bob Watson, the chief scientist at the Department for Environment Food and Rural Affairs, Dr Fedoroff believes genetic engineering must be expanded if the world is going to be able to feed itself.

Genetic modification, she said, can have strong environmental benefits, such as significant reductions in pesticide use, while improving crop yields. Of crucial important will be the ability of scientists to identify genes which enable plants to survive in hot and dry zones so that they can be used to help the most productive crop strains survive and thrive as global warming intensifies.

She said it was important that both GM technologies and conventional crop development were encouraged now because the process of bringing new strains from the laboratory to the field took years. — TimesOnline

Ah, CM crops. Thay sound like such a great idea, don’t they? Just go in and tinker with a plant until it doesn’t need water to grow or frightens away certain insects. But we have a multitude of examples of science being used to catastrophic ends, and I am of the opinion that genetically-modifying crops is most probably a bad idea.

However, that said, we may not have a choice in the matter, and due to desperation, we may just have to play god and hope that things work out.

The “top US Scientist” as the title of the Times article suggests, is in France for the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development conference this week. Dr. Fedoroff is there to talk about food shortages and the action needed to prevent them.

Fedoroff is “convinced that food shortages will be the biggest challenge facing the world as temperatures and population levels rise. Food security in the coming years, she said, is ‘a huge problem’ that has been met with little more than complacency. ‘We are asleep at the switch,’ she said.”

It’s funny that she’d advocate for GMO’s over population control. If there will be a shortage of food in 2030 that will affect 1 billion people, and the population at that time would be around 9 billion, why not instead try to promote family-planning and reduce the future population by one billion people? Problem solved.

And yes, I’m being glib.

US, State Department, Nina Fedoroff, famine, food shortage, climate change, population

Ok, so a little insight into me…I like watching cooking competition shows. You know, like Top Chef or Iron Chef. And I really like watching shows that pit restaurant against restaurant, like last year’s Last Restaurant Standing on BBC or this year’s The Chopping Block.

Anyhoo, while watching The Chopping Block last night, there was quite a little to-do over Chilean Sea Bass. The restaurant’s client did not approve of serving Chilean Sea Bass as it is severely over-fished (thanks to a brilliant marketing decision to rename the Patagonian Toothfish). The “chefs”, and I use that term loosely in this case, had already ordered 25 pounds of the Chilean Sea Bass. They quickly tried to get a different fish, halibut, but that did not last the night. When a lady’s order for halibut could not be made, the kitchen suggested the Chilean Sea Bass. The client actually went into the kitchen to express that she did not want Chilean Sea Bass served…at all. Bravo to you, Nicole Miller. But alas, the “kitchen” (now that is loose too) sent out farmed-raised salmon. Another no-no.

And on top of that a few days ago, I found out about a campaign to stop the unregulated swordfish trade. Which makes me cringe as I wrote my very first newspaper-published article back in 1997 about how swordfish were being overfished and responsible chefs were taking off their menus. Sigh.

Which leads me to my topic today. Do you know what fish is safe and responsible to eat?

I know there are some people out there that think that if a restaurant has it on the menu, it must be okay to eat. Wrong. You see, the thing about Chilean sea bass is that is brings in a really good price due to its growing scarcity. Same with tuna. Same with swordfish. And if something brings in enough money, it doesn’t matter if it is harvested in a responsible manner or not. Think of fish as the tar sands of wild foods. It may still make money for people, but at what cost?

And unfortunately, with fish, there are fewer and fewer good choices out there. I’m pretty nerdy about this kind of thing, and yet, I even have a hard time keeping up with what’s ok to eat. I pop by the Monterey Bay Aquarium Seafood Watch website (click here to go) a few times a year to check out their handy guides (paper or mobile) about not only which fish are overfished or unsustainably harvested, but which fish tend to carry heavier burden of ocean pollution (i.e. mercury and other heavy metals) and pass them onto their devourer in a sort of poetic justice.

I know what a a pain it can be to be picky about the species of fish you will and won’t eat. But trust me, all chefs are total whores for your approval. The kitchen may make fun of you for bitching about farm-raised salmon, but not for long. They will know that you are right, and I bet they’ll change that menu as soon as they run out of the product.

The Chopping Block, farm-raised salmon, chilean sea bass, overfished, Monterey Bay Aquarium, Seafood Watch, seafood, fish, restaurant, pollution, mercury, responsible fishing, sustainable fishing, unregulated fishing, swordfish, tuna, patagonian toothfish

I ran across an excellent article today on AlterNet (alternet.org). Usually, I am not one to simply phone it in and copy and paste an article onto this site, and I won’t do that, but I will paraphrase the article a bit and urge you to click here to go to the source article.

The writer, Andrea Whitfill, is a kindred spirit in that she also reads lots of labels to see whence our consumer products come (wow, not often I get to correctly use whence in a sentence). This annoying habit has plagued me for years. So much so, that my boyfriend won’t buy toilet tissue without checking with me about the producer and whether “we” support them or not.

However, sometimes there are no good choices.

Ms. Whitfill decided to look beyond the labels, as many a label is downright misleading, to see who was really behind some of those “crunchy” eco-sustainable-green brands that we (suckers) have come to love and support religiously (but in an atheistic way). And for many of us that think of ourselves as Earth-lovers, we may not want to met the “man behind the curtain.”

In summary, so as to encourage you to read the source, almost every company that you like to think of as “small” or “family-owned” or “natural and organic” is in reality a small subsidiary of a much, much larger corporation.

Clorox owns the Burt’s Bees brand. Tom’s of Maine is owned by Colgate-Palmolive. Coca-Cola bought Odwalla (also HonesTea) and Pepsi owns Naked. And there’s more in the article, and in the graphic below. Click here to see larger version.

The only upside to Big Corporations owning those specialty brands is that yes, those brands can now reach a bigger stage in the major grocery chains, so maybe more people will make the choice to go organic or natural (if those brands are still organic and natural — I have a hard time trusting that a major corporation wouldn’t tweak a “natural” brand to cut costs).

And maybe I am too much of a Pollyanna here, but maybe the parent corporations will learn something from their granola-lovin’ stepchildren…eh, probably not.

AlterNet, organic food, sustainable agriculture, food processors, natural food, health food brands, Clorox, Burt’s Bees, Tom’s of Maine, Colgate-Palmolive, Coca-Cola, Odwalla, HonesTea, Pepsi, Naked juices, major corporations

File this one under dire news…

Less than two weeks after the Governator, Arnold Schwarzenegger (who despite all my fears has turned out being one of the better governors out there — I may just yet change my mind about actors going into politics) declared a state of emergency in the state of California due to drought, a new report details that California will be hit hard by rising sea-levels in the next century.

Maybe California should start building more desalination plants like the proposed Poseidon desalination plant below.

First, it is true that California is suffering under drought conditions. The US Drought Monitor shows an improvement this past week, but that improvement is from “exceptional drought” to “severe drought.” Click here to go to a nifty 12-week animated drought map of the US. But for the month of January and February, the northern “ice cap” of the High Sierra’s presented a dangerous situation for a state that must support not only a huge population, but also a major agricultural region in the Central Valley.

California’s state water board is busy crunching the data on conservation efforts underway, including the Governor’s request for voluntary residential reduction in usage and if need be, the state may have to impose water rations.

Secondly, the Pacific Institute has released a report on possible impacts of sea-level rise on the California coastline, a popular spot for not only residential areas but also waste dumps. If the dire predictions of the IPCC come true, California could expect losses in the billions when it comes to property and infrastructure lost.

And the bad news is that most of the available climate models used by the Pacific Institute do not take the possible melting of Greenland and Antarctica ice sheets into account, so the estimates of a 1.5 meter rise in sea levels may be a little on the low side.

Geez, poor California…If an earthquake doesn’t destroy the coastline, global warming will.

governator, California, Schwarzenegger, drought, state of emergency, sea levels, global warming, agriculture, infrastructure, climate change, Greenland, Antarctica, water, rationing, Pacific Institute, High Sierras, earthquake

Within days of getting my email from the Great Sunflower Project asking me to confirm my mailing address for my free sunflower seeds, I also get news that the Natural Resources Defense Council is campaigning to get the EPA to suspend use of and review its approval of the pesticide imidacloprid, a “moderately” toxic pesticide that works on the neurotransmitters in insects.

If you are a regular reader, you know that I often lambaste the EPA for its shortsightedness when it comes to approving chemicals for use in industry and agriculture (and pharmaceuticals and consumer use) without any true long-term testing. And in the case of imidacloprid, the NRDC is asking that something as simple as multi-generational studies on how this pesticide affects honey bees.

Imidacloprid was first patented and put into use in the late 1980’s. The pesticide is a neonicotinoid, which is based on the chemical makeup of nicotine. Imidacloprid works on a an insect’s nervous system, after the insect ingests the chemical after feeding on a plant’s sweet juices. A neonicotinoid blocks a receptor in the brain and causes an excess amount of acetylcholine. The excess creates paralysis and then death in the victim.

France has banned imidacloprid, sold thereunder the name Gaucho, for use on sunflowers since 1999 after one-third of all the country’s honeybees dies after a season of wide-spread usage. The French further banned the chemical on sweet corn, and last year, decided not to approve its use at all. Germany banned imidacloprid and its 8 neonicitinoid cousins last year after a huge die-off of honeybees following an application of the pesticide, clothianidin. Furthermore, imidacloprid’s maker, Bayer, is being sued by various groups, from farmers to local and national environmental groups.

What you can do

You can write to the EPA calling for action. Click here for the NDRC action site to send a pre-written letter to the Office of Pesticide Programs.

Also, buy organic produce and support farmers that eschew chemical pesticides.

EPA, pesticide, agriculture, imidacloprid, neonicotinoid, honeybees, colony collapse disorder, bees, toxicity, chemicals, organic, France, US, Gaucho, corn, farming, Germany, banned, Europe, clothianidin, acetylcholine, brain, nervous system, insects, plants

This is just like the whole Clean Coal ad campaign of which I am a big fan. You can read some of my odes here and here.

Now, let me tell you something, Smart Black Lady who is ironically more at risk for the disease that high fructose corn syrup is known to cause — Diabetes.

A little history on the corn industry — think again, if you think it’s all just quaint little family farms growing corn on their daddy and granddaddy’s land. Too often, those who live in the cities have a very naive view of farming and where their food really comes from. Those little guys were bought out years ago, and now huge corporations are farming a big percentage of America’s farmland. And due to some crazy farm laws, corn growers get subsidized to grow corn. That’s right. Big corporate farms make money just to grow corn on top of what they sell it for, and then they get tax breaks that mean they make more on selling their product. And gee, I wonder how you can make even more money from this magical crop?

Yes, find more uses for corn. I mean, come on, who can eat corn for every meal, right? So, let’s process that corn and strip it down to its basic components, namely the glucose. Add an enzyme and you can make fructose. Blend that fructose with the right ratio of sucrose, and viola, you get HFCS, a fine substitute for expensive cane or beet sugar. But the problem is that by “watering down” the sucrose, you are creating a larger problem within your body. You see, it’s sucrose that helps you feel satisfied, and studies are indicating that your body does not process fructose in a way is regulated. Sucrose needs sucrase to break it down, and your body only produces so much of it. Think of sucrose like wheat bread with fibre, and fructose as white bread. Fibre helps you feel full, which in turn helps you stop eating. And Americans don’t stop eating…

Anyway, the corporate farmers figured that if they can convince American food processors to use more HFCS in place of sugars, then that is a whole new market in which to make billions. Real sugar is more expensive than sugar, so food processors and soft drink makers were more than happy to use a ready-to-mix liquid that can save them money. And guess what? The same corporations that own the farms also own the companies that make the processed food. So essentially, corporations like Cargill and ArcherDanielsMidland, grow corn to make into HFCS and then use that cheaper HFCS to make the foods we all know and love, foods that are sold with mascots and big advertising campaigns. And it’s all making us fat and unhealthy, which in turn makes us spend more on health costs, which in turn means that American pharmaceutical and insurance companies are making money.

Do you ever get the feeling that the US Government has really sold us out?

And long-term testing…what long term testing? We see it all around us. Americans not only drink the stuff in soft drinks, but with more and more people using packaged, processed ready-to-eat meals (made by the same corporations that grow the corn and make the HFCS remember), and, well, the hens are coming home to roost.

Mmm…chicken.

Don’t get me started on the Chicken Industry.

high fructose corn syrup, corn, obesity, diabetes, disease, health, American diet, soft drinks, sucrose, sucrase, enzyme, processed foods, industry, corporate farms, farming, government, subsidies, chicken, Cargill, ArcherDanielsMidland, HFCS

Americans don’t seem all that keen on their fruits and veggies, or at least not as keen as they should be, unless we are talking potatoes. And especially when they eat out, Americans are more concerned about proteins and starches, relegating the veggies to mere side dishes, if included in the meal at all.

And then, add the seasonality of fresh fruits and veggies, and we can see that sometimes eating fresh produce is hard to do, especially if you are on a budget or if you don’t want to purchase imported produce that requires fuel and produced more carbon emissions to ship to your local grocery chain. Also, keep in mind that so-called fresh produce was most likely picked unripe (which means that it did not spend enough time “on the vine” to develop all its healthy nutrients) and has been traveling for a week or more before it even gets to your store.

What’s an urban ecoist to do?

Two options are canned or frozen vegetables and fruits. But which is better?

The canning process involves heating, which will kill any microorganisms that may be living on or in vegetables and fruit. It is very rare that a canned product will carry food-borne illness (which has become a problem with fresh produce lately). However, some nutrients withstand the canning process better than others. Vitamin C and folate are two such nutrients that can be lost during canning.

Frozen produce may be a better choice for most fruits and veggies. Produce undergoes freezing soon after it is picked, so there are less nutrients lost due to age, which may make frozen produce better than some imported “fresh” produce.

Of course, we wouldn’t be very responsible ecoists if we didn’t take some other things into consideration, such as packaging. Cans are highly recyclable and can be reprocessed almost infinitely, but more and more cans are lined with a plastic that contains Bisphenol-A (BPA), which more and more research is showing to leach into foods (especially acidic ones, like tomatoes). Scientists are finding evidence that BPA may cause developmental damage in humans. The EPA is working with some manufacturers to voluntarily reduce BPA use in cans, but I can forecast a day soon when you will be looking for a “no BPA” label on canned goods.

Frozen produce are usually packaged in plastic bags, and the plastic, usually HDPE (#2), used is not as easily recyclable and rarely included in curbside recycling programs. Unfortunately, even the cardboard packaging used with frozen produce is lined with plastic, which also makes it harder to recycle.

Another consideration is where those canned and frozen fruits and vegetables are coming from, and usually that’s a factory farm. Depending on where you live, that can of peas may have traveled thousands of miles to get to your grocery store shelves.

Geez, it’s not easy being green…but if you are serious about it, you may want to can or freeze your own veggies and fruits. When you are at your local farmers market or farm stand this summer, buy larger quantities of fresh produce and process them yourself for winter consumption. Start out freezing fruits like berries, which are easy, and as you become more comfortable and savvy, try your hand at tomatoes.

I remember the cellar at my great-grandfather’s house in Dearborn, Michigan and the shelves stocked with mason jars full of stuff like tomatoes and pickles. He grew everything in his own urban backyard. It’s too bad that as a society, we have become more and more reliant on grocery stores to bring us our produce, when really we could be providing our own — saving money and nutrients at the same time.

fruits, vegetables, healthy eating, nutrition, frozen, canned, produce, carbon emissions, seasonality, BPA, Bisphenol-A, plastics, HDPE, recycling, home canning, factory farm, farmers market, fresh produce, imported produce, EPA, vitamin C, folate

The controversy over biodiesel and biofuels is coming to a head, and in Germany, the biodiesel industry is feeling the effects of a government that fears increasing food prices are a result of increased ratios of biofuel in the nation’s petrol supply.  To counter the ill effects of more crops going into automobiles rather than humans, Germany has passed laws to increase the taxes on biofuels in addition to setting a lower standard for mixing biofuels into traditional fossil-based fuels.  Taxes to supposedly even out the playing field and make biofuels more prohibitively expensive, and lower standards in the mix ratio to ensure that farmers will still grow food crops. The result could be that smaller biofuel firms will have to close their doors.

The problem is that in Germany there are small firms that make biodiesel, and up until recently, those businesses were doing quite well.  Germans wanted to reduce their carbon footprint and carbon emissions, green industry was ready to jump in to provide a product and a service, and the German government thought that biofuels were going to be the next big thing that could save the planet.

But then reality sunk in. More and more crops were going to biofuel processors rather than food processors and markets. Food prices started going up, going up so much and so quickly that parts of the world saw rioting in the streets due to the increased price of rice and wheat. It’s simple economics. Even is demand were to remain steady, if the supply is reduced, prices will go up to reflect the now-increased demand. The equation is always balanced, so if supply goes down, demand goes up. Higher demand means that people will pay more for it, whether it is a luxury item or a staple.

And of course, there is the whole matter of whether or not certain crops used for biofuels actually create more carbon than the carbon emissions they may or may not be preventing. And then you have the whole issue over deforestation in certain parts of the world as more and more people are looking to plant things that can be sold to biofuel processors, like palm and soybeans.

Germany, biofuel, biodiesel, taxes, industry, food, crops, sustainable, food shortages, riots, economics, agriculture, carbon, emissions

Seems quite a lot…if used as mulch.

I ran across this little item in the American Society for Horticultural Sciences, and though I had to actually say out some of the sentences as they read like gobbledygook in my brain — all those weights, orange fruit weights, average weights and percentage of orange fruits, I think. Basically, a study found that applying leaves (in this case, municipal leaves) to pumpkin patches as mulch improved the pumpkin patch.

And you wonder where universities spend their money?

So some people from Rutgers University laid out four test plots where pumpkins were planted. Two of the plots had city leaves applied as mulch. The other two plots went with the old bare soil with the added treatment of herbicide. One of the mulched plots and one of the bare soil plots were given side dressings of 25 pounds per acre of Nitrogen as fertilizer. The other two had three-times the amount of fertilizer, but again, one had mulch, one bare soil/herbicide.

Over two years, definite differences were detected by the second growing season.

In 2006, there were no differences in total number of fruit, number of orange fruit, and percentage of orange fruit at harvest between production systems. Total weight, weight of orange fruit, and average fruit weight of pumpkin fruit was significantly higher and similar at both sidedress N rates in both leaf mulch production systems compared with bare soil…Applying municipal leaves to the soil surface exhibited a marked advantage over bare soil in producing clean fruit. In both years, the percentage of clean fruit at harvest was higher in both leaf mulch production systems compared with bare soil. –HortTech

See what I mean…gobbledygook in the brain voice.

Personally, I’d want to further expand on the experiment and try different mulches, but I understand the point of using urban leaves to see if it could be a win-win situation for pumpkin farmers in outlying areas and for city-dwellers. In many parts of this country, the autumn rain of leaves from city trees can be a tremendous amount of leaf debris to find a home for. Leaves take quite a while to decompose, especially when in such large amounts, and if a city does not have a large commercial scale composting facility at its, ahem, disposal (sorry), then that city needs to come up with some creative methods of getting rid of all those leaves.

Of course, I’d be remiss if I didn’t bring up the problem of urban leaf litter picking up not-so-nice stuff that leak from cars. The study didn’t mention it, but sure, in a perfect world, municipal leaves would not touch the roadway and cars wouldn’t leak coolant and oil and transmission and brake fluids. How can a city ever guarantee that the leaves would be clean?

Maybe I should apply to the Rutgers Horticulture program…

city, leaves, autumn, study, mulch, pumpkin, disposal, compost, decompose, leaf litter, farmers, herbicide, Rutgers, American Society of Horticultural Sciences

Cows fart.  Cows fart a lot. Cows fart methane, and methane is twenty times more effective at trapping heat in the Earth’s atmosphere. So are cows to blame for global warming?

Way back in high school debate class, a friend and I were debating global warming (yes, way back then in 1993 — this argument is nothing new, people). She was flying through the negative side of the argument and blithely read a piece of evidence that read something along the lines of cows are to blame for global warming and humans have nothing to do with it. It was kind of besides the point in the argument, and anyone who participated in high school-level debate knows that most of what you do is read quotes from articles and scientific journals as fast as you can in hopes that your opponent doesn’t have time to refute it. I didn’t even catch this little tidbit of silliness, until Mrs. Gillespie (shout out!) pointed out the cow fart argument. Luckily, Lori brought it up in a rebuttal, so I didn’t have to refute it — and yes, I won, but as always I am digressing. Kind of.

Cows and their flatulence have been the focus of some global warming nay-sayers for years, but those farts are also a valid contributor to rising methane levels. But hardly can anyone point the finger at cows without also pointing four fingers back at ourselves?

Do cows live in the wild? Yes, they do. The San Diego Zoo website can tell you all about it if you click on this link. But how many cows live on this planet simply because we like to eat them and drink their milk?

There is approximately one cow per 4 people on this planet, or 1.5 billion cows. Ironically, India has the most cows, despite the fact that they don’t eat them. In the US, we have about 100 million head of cattle, or one cow per 3 people, slightly higher than the world’s average. That’s a whole lotta fartin’ goin’ on.

You may run across the whole issue of cow farts in the news here and there, as the US Environmental Protection Agency had proposed putting a tax on cows in an attempt to curb greenhouse gases and curb global warming. Of course, the cattle industry went berserk, and the EPA said, just kidding, we were only saying that to see what the cattle industry would say.

Huh? Actually, double huh, because I am not sure how effective a tax on cattle would be in reducing the emissions of greenhouse gases. Yeah, taxes on cows would increase beef prices to consumers and then maybe consumers would give up beef, but if you think of the scope of how much beef is consumed in the US alone, by way of fast food, golly, would Americans really be able to give up red meat?

Methinks that the fast food industry would find some way to “water down” beef with more fillers to keep people hooked.

But for those of us that can see the forest for the trees, it is hard to deny that if we did in fact reduce the amount of beef consumed, maybe that could have a real impact on the amount of methane pumped into the atmosphere. Granted, it may not make a tremendous difference once that permafrost melts and all that methane trapped under ice and frozen soil comes bubbling up, but we urban ecoists try to make individual efforts in hopes of creating a larger change.

And I have written in the past about how much water it takes to raise cattle. Giving up beef could help out this planet in more ways than just in terms of methane. Cows drink a lot of water and eat a lot of grain, which also needs water. Processing beef also required water. And water is something we ain’t got to spare anymore.

cows, fart, flatulence, methane, tax, global warming, water, beef, fast food, EPA, Environmental Protection Agency, India, US, cattle industry,

I want to say yes here, but it really depends on what your bio-diesel is made from.

Researchers at the University of Illinois have tested various sources of bio-diesel and have determined that the best choices for bio-diesel and ethanol production that actually reduce the net carbon released into the atmosphere is …drumroll, please…perennial grasses.

The researchers analyzed published estimates of changes in soil organic carbon in landscapes converted from natural or agricultural land to biofuel crops.

They focused on corn, sugar cane, Miscanthus, switchgrass and native prairie grasses. They also evaluated the impact of harvesting and using corn stover (the plant debris left over after corn is harvested) as a cellulosic biofuel source.

Their analysis showed that converting native land (grassland or forest) to sugarcane dramatically reduced soil carbon, creating a carbon deficit that would take decades to repay. While perennial grasses add carbon to the soil each year, DeLucia said, it could take up to a century for the sugar cane to rebuild soil carbon to former levels on native land.

Harvesting the corn residue for cellulosic ethanol production also reduced the carbon in the soil. The more plant residue was removed, the more the soil carbon declined.

Planting perennial grasses on existing agricultural lands had the most beneficial effect on soil carbon, the researchers found. –SPX via Biofuel Daily

Maybe you have and maybe you have not heard that corn-based ethanol is not the wisest choice for biofuels. First, you have the issue that 20% of American-grown corn is being diverted into ethanol production, and that is corn that is not being consumed as food, by Americans or anyone for that matter. Most ethanol is produced from corn kernels, so it’s not like this is waste plant matter that would be tossed or composted anyway. No, this is food stuff that no one is eating, which means if there is less corn in the supply side of the economic equation, the price of corn has gone up. With the price of corn rising, more and more farmers (yes, especially the big corporate farms) are planting corn.

With more corn going into the limited amount of arable farmland available to the US, that means less of everything else being planted. So, we now have an issue with other food crops supplies decreasing — pushing up the prices of well, everything. Have you noticed the cost of a loaf of bread lately? Less wheat is being planted and the decreased supply leads to increased prices, even if demand were to remain steady.. which it won’t as more and more people join us on this wacky blue marble in space.

So, what kind of biofuels are okay, for all us urban ecoists that want to help the planet, live lightly, be kind and rewind our consumption practices, etc? The latest study, that is going to be published in next month’s Global Change Biology Bioenergy journal (try saying that three times fast), details that every time the Earth is plowed or dug up, that action releases carbon. Soil acts as a carbon sink, and that carbon is what makes soil good for crops. Plants really, um, dig carbon dioxide, remember?

Hmm, what “crop” needs no plowing, or at least not yearly plowing? Perennial prairie grasses. The grasses grow during the growing season, can be cut or harvested at the end of that season, and the plants spend the winter dormant, and then grow again the next season. No plowing, no seeding, and little to no fertilizer required.

How ironic that so many farmers spent years and years and years plowing under the native prairie grasses of the Great Plains, only to find that those perennial grasses just may save the US transportation fleet one day…

bio-diesel, University of Illinois, biodiesel, biofuel, biofuels, corn, ethanol, perennial grasses, prairie grasses, carbon, carbon dioxide, crops, farms, farming, wheat, prices, food supply, carbon sink, plowing

So, last week, I wrote a post about turkeys, and I really meant to continue on the whole tip-sheet on being more sustainable in your giving of Thanks to our corporate benefactors. I was planning on writing about vegetables and their seasonality, making your own gravies and stocks and soups, buying organic, you know all that good stuff, but then I got other ideas for things to bitch write about, and here we are. I could try to cover things in this post today, maybe extend it through tomorrow, but you have most likely figured it all out last week when everyone else wrote about sustainable or “green” Thanksgivings.

Instead of rehashing what others are rehashing, today, I am thinking about generations, namely that of my grandparents and mine. I was raised by my grandparents, who were really fantastic people that made me who I am today, and their generation was born during the Great Depression. My grandfather fought in Korea and married my grandmother soon afterward in 1953. Their generation saw great hardship, and it was from this time that the Agricultural Revolution was born.

My great-grandparents passed down recipes and gardening skills to their children, and my grandparents were into farmers markets and making things from scratch. And then my grandmother started getting lazy…

She admitted, so it’s not like I am calling her out here. She started buying graham cracker crusts at the grocery store for her cheesecake. My grandfather would make little digs about it, saying it was not how he remembered it, or not as good as his mothers. My grandmother would remind him of his diabetes and maybe he shouldn’t be eating cheesecake.

The Agricultural Revolution did increase yields and provided this nation with a great deal of food, and some of that food went to countries around the world, preventing millions from starvation. But the AR also lead to the rise of the Processed Foods Industry. The Archer Daniels Midlands and Cargills lead to the Sara Lees and the Krafts, which filled our kitchen cupboards with all sorts of partially-hydrogenated deliciousness and high-fructose goodness. Just today, a new Government Accounting Office report finds that farm subsidies are profiting millionaires (and corporate farms) rather than that small, family-based farm, and health doesn’t get in the way of big profits.

Enter my generation. Actually, I doubt that I can speak that generally about my generation. I live in two bubbles when it comes to food. I live in Portland, which is a localvore’s dream, and I have spent many years working in pretty decent restaurants that at least tried to source locally, even in Michigan. That and being raised by an older generation that didn’t always rely on buying everything in a handy box-kit or frozen prepackaged, I may not be as common as I like to think I am. But the fact that more and more organic food is available and more and more people are talking about organic produce (and fabrics, furniture, cleaners, etc), I am convinced that my generation is making progress.

Funny how things come full circle. Now, it’s all the rage to make your own stocks and sauces, compost your vegetable peelings, recycle your glass jars. For my grandparents, and their parents, and their parents, you had to make your own stocks. Composting wasn’t called composting, it was just burying the kitchen scraps, because what else are you going to do with them. Jars were precious commodities for “canning” the vegetables from your summer garden, and insuring that you had food for February. Sure, the Agricultural Revolution may have freed us from the seasons, but at what cost?

Thanksgiving, sustainable, green, organic, vegetables, generations, Great Depression, Agricultural Revolution, farming, processed foods, junk food, agriculture, Archer Daniels Midland, ADM, Cargill, Sara Lee, Kraft, partially hydrogenated, high fructose, subsidies, Government Accounting Office, composting, recycling