Recently in Sustainable & Organic Farming Category

By following intensive biological farming practices, Sustainable Cotton Project growers reduced the use of the most toxic pesticides on their cotton. Moreover, they slashed overall pesticide use by up to 70%.

A short documentary produced by the Davis, California-based Sustainable Cotton Project (SCP)has been produced by Gibbs and videographer Liam Creighton. The "Cleaner Cotton" video documents the cotton project's impressive campaign to improve the environment, public health and agriculture economy of Firebaugh, a small rural Central Valley farming town about 40 miles west of Fresno.

"Look at the things we're doing for the community, reducing pesticides in the watershed," Firebaugh grower John Texeira says in the video. The eco-friendly farming practices paid off at harvest, too. "We had yields better than our neighbors."

Indeed, Sustainable Cotton Project growers are leaving an imprint on the San Joaquin Valley, which produces some of the finest cotton in the world, a high-quality fiber that can command a premium price.

The region produces about 90% of the nation's Pima cotton, the Cadillac of cotton in the U.S., rivaling the fine Egyptian quality.

Global Green Cotton Market

In the past six years, participating farmers have produced more than one million pounds of Sustainable Cotton Project's trademarked Cleaner Cotton® for the $5 billion-a-year global green cotton market. The project is working with major retailers such as Gap Inc, Levi Strauss & Co, Williams Sonoma, North Face and others to incorporate the eco-friendly cotton into their product lines.

View "Cleaner Cotton" Online

The cotton video is part of the work of the Sustainable Cotton Project. Learn more at: Cleaner Cotton. The Sustainable Cotton Project is a private non-profit working under the direction of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers in Davis.

Organics are usually considered part of the resulting crops...not the value of the land itself.  But that might be changing.  In New Jersey, the residual pesticides in the soil of farmland is being looked at carefully for the implications on future residents.  Hmmm....

A New Jersey case raises questions about what restrictions should be placed on builders seeking to develop former farmland where pesticides were used.

Long-term exposure to the contaminants found in the soil, arsenic and dieldrin, can lead to skin, liver and pancreatic cancer, according to the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection's Web site. No illnesses have been reported among residents, but the uncertainty has altered daily routines.

NJ SUITS PUT FARMLAND DEVELOPMENT UNDER MICROSCOPE"

A tangle of New Jersey lawsuits raises issues about what restrictions
should be placed on builders seeking to develop farmland where
pesticides were formerly used. David Porter reports for the Associated
Press August 2, 2009.

Who, if anyone, was legally obligated to notify the homeowners is at the heart of the case, and the answer isn't readily apparent in existing state and federal environmental law.

New Jersey and other states have laws that require property owners to notify potential buyers if a property is near a former toxic waste site, for example, but those laws generally don't apply to farmland where pesticides were used.

Decontaminating soil isn't just about immediate food or crop production.  It also has long term land value implications, and risk management.  There are ways today to quickly decontaminate soils using new methods.  The solution is to decontaminate soil of toxic chemicals in a cost efficient way.  The value is immediate and long term.

I've followed the honey bee crisis known as "colony collapse disorder" because of their close connection with our food supply, with nature, and because bees are one of the few "domesticated" insects in our economy.

Science is finally making headway on what is causing the die off of complete hives of bees.

Penn State researchers worked with the National Science Laboratory of the U.S. Department of Agricultural Marketing Service that already tests commodities such as milk and fruits and vegetables.

Honey has not regularly been analyzed, and bee pollen was not a commodity and so was not analyzed at all. The researchers decided to use types of screening the lab uses for milk and apples, which looks at over 170 pesticides. What they found is quite astounding to me... because of what it says about our agricultural practices.

All of the bees tested showed at least 1 pesticide and pollen averaged 6 pesticides with as many as 31 in a sample.

Honeycomb may contain pesticides applied years ago.

Scientists do not know that these chemicals have anything to do with colony collapse disorder, but scientists have concluded that these pesticides are definitely stressors. Penn State's Dr. Maryann Frazier say, "Pesticides alone have not shown they are the cause of CCD. We believe that it is a combination of a variety of factors, possibly including mites, viruses and pesticides."

While beekeepers will have a difficult time controlling pesticide exposure outside the hive, the Penn State researchers tested a method using gamma radiation for reducing the chemical load in beeswax and they found that irradiation broke down about 50% of the acaricides, pesticides that kill mites.

Read all the details at the Environment News Service.

The survey's preliminary findings suggest agritourism can indeed be a profitable supplement to a farm or ranch business. Agricultural tourism allows travelers a chance to visit working farms and ranches and can include experiences such as picking their own fruit, visiting a petting zoo, touring a vineyard, buying fresh produce or riding horses. Small farms made up more than two-thirds of the farms that reported offering agritourism.

"We are excited to find that agritourism really seems to work for a lot of small farms," said Penny Leff, statewide agritourism coordinator for the UC Small Farm Program. "Our results also show that agritourism is primarily local. More than 85 percent of reported visitors were from California."

Most agritourism operators who responded to the survey reported their agritourism businesses generated some profit. A majority said they are planning to expand or diversify their agritourism offerings over the next five years. In addition, 22 percent of agritourism operators reported more than $100,000 in agritourism receipts for 2008.

The survey was conducted by a group of researchers from University of California Cooperative Extension and the UC Small Farm Program, with funding from the California Communities Program. Researchers first mailed questionnaires in January to nearly 2,000 potential agritourism operators in every California county.

"Eating Local" and Sustainable Food Production in the San Francisco Foodshed

Local food is distinguished not only by where it originates, but also by who produces it and how. The question is being asked, "Could the City of San Francisco feed itself with local food from farms and ranches within 100 miles of the Golden Gate?"

Agriculture within the San Francisco Bay area "foodshed," as defined for a 2008 study, produces 20 million tons of food annually, compared with annual food consumption of 935,000 tons in San Francisco and 5.9 million tons in the Bay Area as a whole.

More than 80 different commodities are represented, only a few of which are not produced in enough abundance to satisfy the demands of the City and Bay Area: eggs, citrus fruit, wheat, corn, pork and potatoes. Many other commodities are available only seasonally, even though northern California has a long growing season.

Most of what is produced in the San Francisco foodshed study area comes from the Central Valley and the Salinas Valley. Only 18% of the farmland in the 10 million acre study area is irrigated cropland, but it is responsible for 3/4 of total agricultural production by dollar value. This land is increasingly threatened by urban development. Already, 12% of the foodshed study area is already developed and new development is consuming farmland at the rate of an acre for every 9.7 residents.

If this continues, 800,000 more acres of farmland will be lost by 2050.

 

The American Farmland Trust is about more than farms. These folks are concerned about the food supply for everyone -- from rural areas to big cities.

An elaborate food distribution system has beveloped between producers and consumer that has matured into delivering inexpensive, standardized food products. But times are changing because of organic food trends, and scares about contaminated foods from afar. The US food system is evolving in the direction of delivering the "story behind the food" in response to growing consumer demand. But it has a long way to go.

Food that is identifiable as "local," including food that is organically or "sustainably" produced, is a very small fraction of both total regional agricultural production (0.5 percent) and of total U.S. retail sales (2.8 percent). This sustainable sector of the food system is growing rapidly.

Despite the challenges of locating locally grown foods for families and local restaurants and institutions such as schools, there are significant opportunities to increase "eating locally" in San Francisco and the Bay Area. The local food movement in the region has as much momentum as anywhere in the country. Strong Farmers Coops, Farmers Markets, and Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) operations make it almost convenient!

Many public and private institutions (such as schools and hospitals) are now seeking to source food locally. As the fossil fuel era wanes, fresh, local food may gain an advantage in the marketplace over food that is processed and shipped long distances.

Read more about the growing local food trend in the San Francisco Foodshed Report.

The same generic lure can attract three species of mealybugs, which would cut costs for growers by allowing them to deploy a single pheromone trap rather than three.
 
The only scouting tool nurseries currently use for mealybugs is labor-intensive visual inspection of crops. Mealybugs are cryptic pests that conceal themselves in cracks and crevices of plant material. Without careful and regular sampling, mealybugs can reach economically damaging levels before growers realize plant-material infestation has occurred.
 
During the past two years, University of California, Riverside, researchers, including graduate student Rebeccah Waterworth, who is studying with UC Riverside entomologist Jocelyn Millar, has worked in several nurseries in Riverside and San Diego counties, deploying pheromone-baited traps to detect and follow citrus, longtailed and obscure mealybug populations.
 
"Fortunately our experiments determined that there is no major interference among these pheromones so a combination lure containing the pheromones of all three mealybug species can be used," Waterworth said.
 
The synthetic pheromone lures are deployed in sticky traps, where male mealybugs are then captured and counted. Some of the practical questions involved in developing pheromones for trapping mealybugs include the dose and longevity of the pheromone lures and how to monitor the seasonality of field populations of the three species.
 
Waterworth's results show longtailed mealybugs have clearly seasonal trends in their activity with populations increasing October through early spring and falling to low levels during the hotter summer months.
 
"The major peak in activity during the cooler winter months was counterintuitive, because most other insect pests show declines in their activity through fall and winter," Millar said. "The seasonality of this species is also apparent in other crops at this production location."
 
In addition, researchers are assessing the reproductive biology of the three mealybug species to determine whether pheromone-based control measures, such as mating disruption, are likely to be successful. They examined whether females can reproduce asexually as well as sexually, the number of times both males and females can mate, and details of their reproductive behaviors that might have implications for the use of pheromones for monitoring or controlling these insects.
 
"With citrus mealybug, we found that males and females can mate multiple times, as long as matings occur rapidly," Millar said. "However, one day after mating the first time, females become unreceptive to further mating attempts, suggesting that materials transferred to the female during mating have triggered changes in the female's physiology. Similar studies are in progress with the other two mealybug species."
 
The UC Integrated Pest Management Competitive Grants Program funded this study.

Remember the little fruit stands that used to be the norm along suburban and rural roads?  I grew us shopping at our neighbors' farm stands...and even sold homegrown dill and apples in our own miniature version as a rural version of a kids' lemonaide stand.  Can you imagine the sparse customers for dill? :-)  But we actually had a few regular customers who needed dill for their pickle canning...and it gave  me my first taste of agricultural marketing!

California is a big state...an agricultural state and a state with millions of potential "local shoppers".  Now we just need to understand WHY that is important.   My husband and I were discussing the news I read this morning about a man from Croatia flying to New York to buy clothes because they are such a bargain right now!!!!!  What?!?  Croatia -- that war ravaged country that is trying to recover -- they are flying to New York City -- one of the most expensive US cities in which to live?  What's changing this drastically?

One word.  We've lost our local manufacturing // and agriculture.

That's why shopping at local farm stands, local farmers markets and insisting that your grocery store carry locally grown produce rather than imports is important. 

Barbara Steinberg recently wrote about how she's trying hard to buy local...and how it's not always easy!

I really took it to heart when learning about the whole "farm to table" philosophy, which promotes buying produce that's been grown within 100 miles of home.  Let me tell you something...it's tough.  But I try. And failing that, I tell myself, "It must at least have been grown in California." When that doesn't work...at the very least, it should be grown in the U.S.  How hard could that be? Well, sometimes really, really hard. Why? Because labeling is so misleading and even with produce you to read the fine print.  Haas California avocados are a great example. You see them everywhere.  But many times, those buttery fruits are grown in Chile. CaliforniaInsier.typepad.com

Buy   There are great farm, wine, and harvest trails throughout the state.

Barbara includes a wonderful list of FARM TRAILS in California on her blog.  I hope that if you live in California, or are coming to visit this summer, you'll support our local California farmers ... and treat yourself to the succulent, fresh, tasty products of our all-American soil!  Barbara's list of FARM TRAILS is worth exploring!

The Organic Center has researched a new method to quickly and cost-effectively track changes in soil quality brought about by the transition to organic farming.

Alan Franzluebbers, Ph.D. and Richard Haney, Ph.D., two leading soil scientists working for the Agricultural Research Service, the research arm of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, wrote The Organic Center's Critical Issue Report (CIR 2006.2), "Assessing Soil Quality in Organic Agriculture." The full report is available for free at: http://www.organic-center.org/science.environment.php.

The report explains why better tools are needed to manage the transition of soils when farming methods change from chemical-based to organic.

"How we manage soil and how the soil responds to this management are critical issues facing the long-term success of our society," says Alan Franzluebbers, ecologist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service in Watkinsville, Georgia and co-author of the report. The proposed minimum-data-set (MDS) approach for assessing soil quality is composed of routine chemical and biological assays that can be carried out in most soil testing laboratories for a collective cost of less than $100 per sample.

In 2007, The Organic Center plans to begin a national survey of soil quality on conventional, transitional and organic acreage. The Center's project will apply, test and refine the MDS approach, and integrate the measures into an index of soil quality.

"Farmers and scientists have recognized for decades that well-managed organic systems improve soil quality," says Chuck Benbrook, Ph.D., and chief scientist of The Organic Center. "But better tools and solid data are needed to quantify these benefits and identify the best strategies to maximize them."

The degradation of soil quality continues in the United States as a result of erosion, the compaction of soils, leaching of nutrients, and loss of soil structure and biodiversity.

Organic farming methods have great potential to reverse these losses by increasing soil organic matter content, building the pools of nutrients cycling within soils, and enhancing soil microbial communities. The Organic Center's work on soil quality seeks to accomplish two goals.

First, development of practical tools for farmers, crop consultants, extension specialists, and agronomists to use in the field in mapping the course for cost-effective transitions from conventional production to organic management. New tools are needed to determine how quickly a soil can be transitioned, how resilient the soil is likely to be during the transition process, and how soils and crop yields are likely to respond to key organic farming practices and inputs. Soil microbial activity, in particular, can offer a benchmark for transitioning from conventional to organic farming systems.

"There is a need to provide farmers with a soil test tool to guide a cost-effective transition," says Richard Haney, soil chemist with the USDA-Agricultural Research Service in Temple, Texas. "Microorganisms are very sensitive to changes in the soil and we can take advantage of this fact by tracking the impact our management practices have on soil microbes."


The Organic Center's second goal is to develop methods to quantify the benefits to farmers, rural communities, and the nation from improvements in soil quality possible through organic management. Key benefits that will follow expansion of organic production, and which need to be quantified, include: increased efficiency of nitrogen use; less reliance on purchased sources of nutrients; reduced runoff and leaching of nutrients and pesticides, and hence improved water quality; more stable crop yields; and higher returns to farm labor and management.

The Organic Center's next Critical Issue Report focusing on soil quality will be released in the spring, 2007. It will address the potential of organic farming systems to increase the efficiency of nitrogen use in corn production in the Midwest.

The Organic Center is a 501 (c) (3) organization founded in 2002 to present and provide peer-reviewed scientific evidence on how organic products benefit human and environmental health. The Organic Center's research and educational efforts are funded through individuals, foundations, businesses and government programs.

For information about The Organic Center, its current programs and scientific reports visit www.organic-center.org.

Driving pesticide risks downward is important because, according to pediatrician Alan Greene, M.D., chairman of The Organic Center's board of directors, "Recent science has established strong links between exposure to pesticides at critical stages of prenatal development and throughout childhood, and heightened risk of pre-term, underweight babies, developmental abnormalities impacting the brain and nervous system, as well as diabetes and cancer."

"Yes, with surprising frequency, all Americans, including infants and children, are exposed to pesticides via their diet and drinking water," added Dr. Benbrook.

In fact, Dr. Benbrook noted, recent USDA pesticide residue and food consumption surveys show that most people consume three to four residues daily just through fruits and vegetables.

"Accounting for residues in conventional milk, tap water and other foods, the average American exposes him or herself to ten to 13 pesticide residues daily," Dr. Benbrook added.

The frequency of multiple pesticide residues in conventional produce contributes significantly to each person's daily dose. Multiple residues are eight-times more likely in conventional produce than in organic produce. Reasons why include:

• A conventional spinach sample in 2006 testing was found to have nine residues, a kale sample had 10, and a raisin sample contained 11;
• Almost half the conventional peach samples in 2006 contained five or more residues;
• Conventional sweet bell peppers top the multiple-residue chart, with two samples containing 12 pesticides in 2003 testing; and,
• More than one-third of conventional fruit and vegetable samples in 2006 contained multiple residues.

Converting Nation's Produce Farms to Organic, Coupled with Buying Organic Imported Produce, Would Reduce Pesticide Risks by 97%

The Organic Center bases its 97 percent risk reduction estimate upon a "Dietary Risk Index" (DRI), developed by the EPA's Office of Inspector General (OIG). The EPA-OIG used the index in a 2006 appraisal of the impacts of the 1996 Food Quality Protection Act (FQPA) on pesticide dietary risks.

The Organic Center applied the same DRI to estimate the changes that would occur in risk levels if all produce were grown using organic methods. The Organic Center concluded that a 100 percent reduction in risk is unattainable because of the widespread use of pesticides on conventional farms, and the movement of pesticides in the air and water onto organic farm fields.

"While it will take years to convert most American fruit and vegetable farms to organic methods, the process is well underway and accelerating fast, especially in the Western U.S.," Dr. Benbrook noted. Already, organic produce accounts for nearly ten percent of retail sales of fresh fruits and vegetables. Several major fresh produce grower-shippers have recently announced aggressive timetables to convert all or most of their fruit and vegetable acreage to organic, assuming consumer demand continues to grow.

The report points out that a substantial reduction in pesticide exposure will remove, or markedly lesson, an important risk factor for several serious public health problems.

SOURCE: www.organic-center.org