Pollution
More GE Crops, More Pesticides
Published November 20, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
A new report by Charles Benbrook, chief scientist at the Organic Center, says that genetically engineered crops are forcing use of pesticides rapidly upwards.
The report, titled "Impacts of Genetically Engineered Crops on Pesticide Use: The First Thirteen Years" and principally informed by data from the USDA, finds that GE crops have caused an increase in the use of herbicide in the US of 383 million pounds over the 13 years GE crops have been used commercially.
But what about all that talk of GE corn and cotton driving the use of insecticides to celebrated lows? According to the report, the emergence of herbicide-resistant weeds is responsible for the dramatic herbicide upswing, a phenomenon that will not be news to farmers.
"Weed control is now widely acknowledged as a serious management problem within GE cropping systems," the report's preface states. "But skyrocketing herbicide use is news to the public at large, which still harbors the illusion, fed by misleading industry claims and advertising, that biotechnology crops are reducing pesticide use."
Global Warming's Evil Twin: Agricultural Land Use
Published November 06, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The world is stuck on the tracks and there are trains coming in both directions. One headlight represents climate change. The other light is us, a booming global population that needs more and more food every year. One train demands that we preserve our forests, the other that we slash and burn them. One demands that we decrease pollution, the other that we add more and more fossil fuels to our soil.
At least unless we change things -- a lot of things -- very drastically. We are already yanking on the brake of the climate train, though not nearly hard enough. The other train, though, is barreling forward unfettered. Few of us realize the train is being driven by a madman. Few of us realize the massive crisis our global society's inattention to agricultural priorities promises to become unless something is done.
The problem, according to a new essay by Jonathan Foley, professor and director of the Institute on the Environment at the University of Minnesota, is that we will need to double or even triple our agricultural output over the next several decades unless we want a whole heck of a lot of starving people on our hands. But we have to do that without completely destroying our environment.
Brouhaha Over Meat’s Impact on Climate
Published October 29, 2009 @ 06:00AM PT
The discussion of reducing meat consumption as a means of fighting climate change is ruffling some high-profile feathers in several places. This attention is good news for those of us concerned with sustainable food: clearly the message is gaining widespread traction if people in positions of power are up in arms.
UK’s Times newspaper reported a couple days ago that Lord Stern of Brentford, I. G. Patel Professor of Economics and Chair of the Grantham Institute for Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, recommended cutting back on meat intake as an effective method of mitigating climate change.
“Meat is a wasteful use of water and creates a lot of greenhouse gases,” he told the Times. “It puts enormous pressure on the world’s resources. A vegetarian diet is better.”
Not surprisingly, industry leaders and their allies were outraged.
In Response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" Part 2
Published August 28, 2009 @ 02:45PM PT
(This is the second in a two-part response to "The Omnivore's Delusion" article written by Blake Hurst, a self-admitted "industrial" farmer from Missouri, a few weeks back for The Journal of American Enterprise Institute. The first part of my response can be found here.)
To continue my critique of Hurt's article, I'd like to now discuss the way he characterizes the acute need for the continuation of industrial animal agriculture. I purposely chose not to deal with this topic in my first post as I knew it would require its own space and time.
Part of the problem with agriculture today, as Nicholas Kristof points out in his recent New York Times Op-Ed, is that the profession has largely lost its soul over the past several decades as industrial farming practices have taken hold. This is not to say that there aren't any family farming operations in this country--in fact, there are many--but the way that we view the production of food has changed dramatically. There is no place where this is more true than in animal agriculture.
It's quite clear from Hurst's article that he is no animal rights activist. In his view, animals are commodities that are to be raised in a manner that maximizes the financial return for farmers with very little (legitimate) concern paid to the environmental and food safety costs incurred by this kind of production.
This is part of the lost soul of American agriculture. Where once farmers treated animals well in order to ensure a long, healthy and productive life, now many farmers choose to treat their animals as badly as possible while still turning a profit. We have lost respect for the key role animals have played (and always will play) in the history of our agricultural progression.
Agriculture's Nitrogen Fix
Published August 19, 2009 @ 01:43PM PT
Everybody involved in mainstream agriculture wants a piece of the glory for increased yields over the last half century, but the share of credit that's left over after irrigation and heterozygous, conventional hybrids goes mainly to a plant nutrient: nitrogen.
In 1918, Dr. Fritz Haber figured out a way to use natural gas and heat do something only bacteria had ever been able to manage, which was to turn inert atmospheric nitrogen into solid nitrogen compounds that are available to the terrestrial food chain. This process, whether performed in a lab or by a bacterium, is referred to as nitrogen fixation.
Atmospheric nitrogen, which exists mainly in the form of N2, is an extremely stable compound, non-reactive in almost all cases. N2 makes up around 70 percent of the atmosphere and acts as an effective fire retardant. If there were much more oxygen gas and much less nitrogen gas in the atmosphere, the entire atmosphere could ignite.
Terrestrial nitrogen, existing in many forms, is one of the most important nutrients available to living beings. It's the backbone of all RNA, DNA and protein. It's referred to in some cases as a limiting nutrient, one that puts a fixed limit to the growth potential of an ecosystem's biomass. It can also be referred to, in agriculture and horticulture as a macronutrient, something necessary in large amounts relative to other trace or micronutrients.
Nitrogen, phosphorus and potassium, and the greatest of these is nitrogen. As they might say.
Though one can have too much of any good thing. For example, the use of synthetic nitrogen fertilizer is likely the culprit in high levels of carcinogenic nitrates in conventionally grown food, as noted by Tom Philpott at Grist. As Philpott also points out, nitrates have also been linked to Alzheimer's, Parkinson's and Type II diabetes.
Animal Confinement Waste
Published August 06, 2009 @ 07:50AM PT
Fun facts from the recent Environmental Impact of Industrial Farm Animal Production (pdf) report issued for the Pew Commission on Industrial Farm Animal Production:
... By any estimate, the total amount of farm animal waste produced annually in the United States is substantial. In its report for the year 2001, the usda estimated the output of manure from farm animals at 920,000 US short tons of dry matter per day (usda ars 2002). This translates to greater than 300 million metric tons of dry mass or more than 660 billion pounds per year. Of this mass, 86% (788,000 tons per day) was projected to stem from animals held in confinement. In contrast, the American Society of Agricultural Engineers provides a higher estimate of 540 million metric tons of dry weight excreta per annum (American Society of Agricultural Engineers, 2005). Lower estimates of 133 million tons of manure per year on a dry weight basis also have been reported recently in the peer-reviewed literature using information contained in usda online databases (Burkholder et al., 2007). Reporting the volume of excreta based on the lifespan of the food animal results again in a different set of data.
Regardless of the exact amount generated, farm animal waste exceeds human sanitary waste production by at least one order of magnitude (Burkholder et al., 2007). Yet in comparison to the lesser amount of human waste, the management and disposal of animal wastes are poorly regulated. This lack of protection may have been without consequence in traditional agriculture, because animal wastes produced by traditional animal husbandry methods in rural locations did not usually present risks to local communities that relied on ecosystem services for attenuating pathogens and absorbing or diluting nutrients. However, similar to large human settlements, improper management of feces from ifap facilities can and does overwhelm natural cleansing processes. ...
It isn't just waste, it's duplicative waste. We manufacture fertilizer (its use has gone up six fold since the 1950s, according to the report) and put it on the fields to grow feed for animals who produce fertilizer that then becomes unmanageable garbage. Oh, but not just a lot of garbage, biohazardous garbage. From elsewhere in the report:
Agriculture's Phosphorus Crunch
Published August 04, 2009 @ 08:16AM PT
From Parke Wilde at the U.S. Food Policy blog, industrial agriculture's much-needed phosphate fertilizer supply is running into trouble as growing demand meets environmental and space constraints on phosphate mining (pictured here.)
Fertilizer-hungry industrial crops need vast amounts of phosphorus, and it has increasingly come from mineral phosphates that need to be mined at great financial and environmental cost. It used to come from well-managed animal manure, but even this is applied in excess in certain areas. All around, phosphates applied to fields are further ruining the planet's water supply:
Even more highly concentrated in farm runoff than pesticide residues are plant nutrients, such as nitrogen and phosphorus.
... In the [federal government's 1998 National Water Quality Assessment], phosphorus levels exceeded suggested EPA standards in 80 percent of stream samples. High phosphorus levels promote the growth of nuisanceplants and algae, which can kill fish and other aquatic life by reducing levels of dissolved oxygen in streams. These algal blooms can also damage municipal water systems. ...
- The Fatal Harvest Reader: The Tragedy of Industrial Agriculture, edited by Andrew Kimbrell, in the Water section, by Mark Briscoe
And as we're mining phosphorus that's then often ending up in rivers because the stripped-down agricultural ecosystems created by industrial farming can't take it up, we're wasting much of the phosphorus in existing manure sources. Animals eat plants, plants eat us and our waste; it worked for a good long time. Then, as Michael Pollan says, we turned a perfectly good solution into a set of problems:
... I asked the feedlot manager why they didn't just spray the liquefied manure on neighboring farms. The farmers don't want it, he explained. The nitrogen and phosphorus levels are so high that spraying the crops would kill them. He didn't say that feedlot wastes also contain heavy metals and hormone residues, persistent chemicals that end up in waterways downstream, where scientists have found fish and amphibians exhibiting abnormal sex characteristics. CAFOs like Poky transform what at the proper scale would be a precious source of fertility - cow manure - into toxic waste. ...
- The Omnivore's Dilemma, by Michael Pollan
In fact, there are indications that the application of properly composted manure feeds a soil ecosystem that retains more phosphorus and produces less nutrient-contaminated runoff. That's not only good for what grows in a given patch of soil, but a sensible way to retain valuable and finite nutrients.
It could well be that the world is already past peak phosphorus, but "[f]ortunately, phosphorus - unlike oil - can be recycled. Responses to a phosphorus peak include re-creating a cycle of nutrients, for example, returning animal (including human) manure to cultivated soil as Asian people have done in the not-so-distant past [4]." Collected food waste can also be composted to return its store of phosphorus to the soil and prevent dispersion away from agricultural ecosystems.
Even if phosphorus doesn't peak until 2030, as David A. Vaccari pointed out in Scientific American, we're now dispersing this critical nutrient much faster than natural land ecosystems would:
... Land ecosystems use and reuse phosphorus in local cycles an average of 46 times. The mineral then, through weathering and runoff, makes its way into the ocean, where marine organisms may recycle it some 800 times before it passes into sediments. Over tens of millions of years tectonic uplift may return it to dry land.
Harvesting breaks up the cycle because it removes phosphorus from the land. In prescientific agriculture, when human and animal waste served as fertilizers, nutrients went back into the soil at roughly the rate they had been withdrawn. But our modern society separates food production and consumption, which limits our ability to return nutrients to the land. Instead we use them once and then flush them away. ...
Industrial agriculture's lack of responsiveness to this critical problem is basically nothing and to no great shock.
An agriculture that recycled nutrients wouldn't need as much, if any, of their synthetic or mined fertilizers. An agriculture that was adapted to local conditions wouldn't want their needy, greedy crop varieties, nor would it raise huge monocrop deserts to feed the industrial food processing beast. A sustainable agriculture would not be pouring into our rivers and oceans one of life's critical limiting nutrients at a rate far faster than it can be recovered to the land.
That sustainable agriculture, it wouldn't be run by the same people who profit from industrial agriculture today. So even if it kills us, the world's agribusiness companies and agribusiness-friendly governments are going to hold onto the current stupidity as long as they can get away with it. Because they just don't give a damn about anything besides concentrating profits, and power, in the hands of the few.
