Dirt! The Movie is a film by Bill Benenson and Gene Rosow and is inspired by William Bryant Logan’s acclaimed book Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. Find out how industrial farming, mining and urban development have led us toward cataclysmic droughts, starvation, floods and climate change. Dirt is a part of everything we eat, drink and breathe. That’s why we should stop treating it like, well, dirt.

Find out more at the film’s website: http://www.dirtthemovie.org/

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Tom Philpott, reports in a five-part series entitled “Is America Fertilizing Disaster?” at Grist.org, that new research is showing that synthetic nitrogen in fertilizer is damaging our agricultural soil. A team of University of Illinois researchers, led by professors Richard Mulvaney, Saeed Khan, and Tim Ellsworth, “argue  that the net effect of synthetic nitrogen use is to reduce soil’s organic matter content. Why? Because, they posit, nitrogen fertilizer stimulates soil microbes, which feast on organic matter. Over time, the impact of this enhanced microbial appetite outweighs the benefits of more crop residues.”

Read more here.

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In America’s heartland, the New York Times reports on the return of a family’s farmland to raising heirloom crops and restoring local agriculture once again. The Travis family succeeded in buying back the land sold by his grandmother to developers. Now they grow unusual varieties of crops and very successfully sell them to restaurants. They are most pleased to bring back white Iroquois corn that was close to extinction and now is their most sought-after crop. An encouraging story to counter the factory farming throughout the U.S.

Read the full story: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/30/magazine/30food-t-000.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

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A White House garden has been a dream of Alice Waters for a long, long time, and finally it is a reality. First Lady Michele Obama, assisted by local school children, broke ground in March for a kitchen garden on the south lawn of the White House.

The garden will produce vegetables to be cooked in the White House kitchen and given to Miriam’s Kitchen, which serves the homeless in Washington, DC. The school children will be involved in the planting and care of the crops. The First Lady also plans to introduce a bee hive.

Read more in the San Francisco Chronicle.

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While the new Obama administration disappointed food safety advocates with his choice of former Iowa governor Tom Vilsack to be Secretary of Agriculture, we all are much happier with his selection of Kathleen Merrigan to be Deputy Secretary of Agriculture. She is an advocate of sustainable and organic agriculture and in her position at Tufts University in Boston, she directed a group of projects designed to stimulate community gardens, develop regional marketing strategies between consumers and local farmers, and promote food and gardening education in local schools.

Hearings on her confirmation earlier this month turned into a debate on organic farming practices, with the ranking Senate Agriculture Committee member, Saxby Chambliss (R-GA), arguing his concern that “in promoting your passion for organic production and sustainable agriculture, you tear down other types of agriculture with different points of view.”

Filed by admin at 11:20 pm under Nutrition, Diet & Food Politics, Sustainable Agriculture & Policy
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I ran across the following essay by Jim Goodman, a 45-cow organic dairy and direct market beef farmer in SW Wisconsin. He notes that, according to the United Nations, there is an adequate world food supply, yet a billion people go hungry every day. Why is this so?

“Clearly, root causes of the food crisis lie in politics, problems with food distribution, poverty and a failure of the industrial food system to deliver its promises,” he writes. We need a new policy. Jim argues for a farmer controlled consumer-oriented food system. He argues for a “sensible food policy; less grain for animals, more home and community gardens, farmer owned grain reserves, energy policy that does not use food for fuel and an end to food price speculation. That is a ‘Change we can believe in.’”

A farm activist, Jim Goodman serves on the policy advisory boards for the Center for Food Safety and the Organic Consumers Association, and is board president of the Midwest Organic Services Association. You may read the entire essay here.

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In an op-ed for the New York Times, Wes Jackson, a plant geneticist, and farmer and writer Wendell Berry argue, “We need a national agricultural policy that is based upon ecological principles. We need a 50-year farm bill that addresses forthrightly the problems of soil loss and degradation, toxic pollution, fossil-fuel dependency and the destruction of rural communities.”

They point out that soil erosion is an important issue that we all should carry and worry about: “Soil that is used and abused … is as nonrenewable as (and far more valuable than) oil. Unlike oil, it has no technological substitute — and no powerful friends in the halls of government,” they write. They argue that our current ways of growing food and otherwise conducting agriculture are not sustainable. They write, “the industrialization of agriculture has added pollution by toxic chemicals, now universally present in our farmlands and streams. … Industrial agricultural has made our food supply entirely dependent on fossil fuels and, by substituting technological “solutions” for human work and care, has virtually destroyed the cultures of husbandry (imperfect as they may have been) once indigenous to family farms and farming neighborhoods.

Read the entire essay.

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Abe Collins is a Vermont farmer who practices good grass farming. He also believes in carbon sequestration, defined as “one of the most promising ways for reducing the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere … and is likely be essential if the world is to stabilize atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases at acceptable levels.” [U.S. DOE definition] A recent article about Abe Collins in Ode Magazine sums up many things about meat production and carbon sequestering.  Abe will be a featured speaker at the North American Devon Association conference October 18. Don’t miss a chance to hear this pioneer of the 21^st century.

Down and Dirty in June 2008 Ode Magazine: How carbon farming, the practise of putting CO2 back into the soil, can help fight global warming.

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by Ridge Shinn

I mention an interesting article in the July 31, 2008 issue of the New York Times, explaining China and India’s interest in being”food secure.” The article goes on to report:

China allied itself with Indian negotiators in insisting on safeguard rules for agriculture, and sought to require that developing countries be allowed to impose prohibitively high tariffs on food imports from affluent countries to halt increases in imports that might put farmers in poor countries out of business.

U.S. policy still subsidizes enormous crop production for export while neglecting our own “food security” or producing adequate amounts of food close to the population centers and in a system that is accessible to consumers.

Read the article.

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