Posts by Natasha Chart
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Agriculture's Nitrogen Fix
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Agriculture's Drinking Problem
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The Meat Market's Greenhouse Gas Emissions
School Lunch Momentum of Sorts
Published August 21, 2009 @ 09:47AM PT
The New York Times ran a piece this week on the policy momentum behind giving children healthier school lunch options, which has champions in the White House and the Senate pushing to add $0.70 per lunch to the federal lunch budget. They highlight the work of Sen. Gillibrand (D-NY), who's gone beyond asking only for more to be spent to asking that it be spent better:
... “If you feed a kid chicken nuggets and canned peas and Doritos and canned fruit as a school lunch or you feed him grilled chicken, steamed broccoli and fresh fruits and a whole grain roll, the difference is night and day,” Senator Gillibrand said.
As part of this year’s work on the Child Nutrition Act, Senator Gillibrand is co-sponsoring legislation that would ban trans fat in cafeteria kitchens and give the Department of Agriculture more power to set tougher federal nutrition requirements for the lightly regulated à la carte program in schools. ...
In recent years however, federal reimbursement hasn't kept up with rising costs associated with providing school lunches, meaning that schools are often taking a loss on lousy food.
School lunches also have to vie for student's attention with 'competitive' foods of minimal nutritional value, such as candy bars. If the cafeteria staff get creative, they must face a student body that's been acclimated to lousy fast food, rarely get home cooked meals, and consequently don't recognize even a freshly made blackberry cobbler as food. Student rejection of prepared lunch options puts lunch budgets deeper in the red, pressuring menus to look more like the fast food restaurant menus that form the template of expectation when children think of 'food.'
In short, the foods marketed to children in general, and offered as competitive options in schools in particular, range from the nutritionally destructive to the merely low quality. But they've been engineered to taste good and hit all the right food addiction buttons, so there's that.
Further, as Tom Laskawy writes at Beyond Green, there's a structural impediment in the USDA to offering healthy lunches, and that impediment is a commodity purchase program whose main dumping ground is the nation's captive audience of school children.
These discussions always remind me of a classmate and fairly recent high school graduate, let's call him Joe, from four years back when I returned to college. My mom was a homemaker who cooked from a fairly traditional template that she picked up from her grandmother and most of my acquaintances now are either of the slightly older demographic who were more likely to have similar food choices at home and foodies (both urban and rural) who can be revolted by the mere mention of a McDonald's. Which is to say that turning down blackberry cobbler without a good reason is just strange to me and so I turn to Joe as a reminder that not everyone grew up that way.
Joe had been raised on pizza (cheese or pepperoni only, please), tater tots, fries, hamburgers and iirc, macaroni and cheese. He was afraid of other types of food and wouldn't try them. I remember suggesting a taco at one point, a ground beef taco with lettuce and tomatoes, that I'd wrongly thought was close enough to having a hamburger as to make no particular difference. Well, Joe would have none of it. Tacos were just too strange sounding.
As a kid, I was also rather fond of the hamburgers and cheese pizza served at school. They beat the heck out of mushy, canned green beans, anyway. But having tried other kinds of food, they weren't all I would agree to eat, nor what I'd have always preferred to eat. I'd had options Joe never dreamed of. Options that made our tastes in food mutually incomprehensible, indeed, almost incommensurable, to each other.
Are the values of finding markets for US farm products and feeding children good food equally hard to translate into a common goal? Are good intentions at the federal level going to be consumed by mere price inflation? Are school kids going to be doomed to choosing between canned fruit and a 'fresh' fruit option that consists of the battery acid oranges and mealy apples that even I remember turning my nose up at? (The fresh fruit at school was never as good as what my mom brought home from the grocery store. I never realized how lucky that made me.)
I don't know. But I do know that it's going to take years, if ever, to fix school food. Kids can't vote and their parents often have a hard enough time trying to make sure they're well served educationally and have roofs over their heads to consistently take on the lousy food they're given. Particularly concerned parents often just opt out and do what they can to send their kids to school with a decent lunchbag.
All of which makes this a paramount political problem that transcends any 'consumer choice' response to a gross market failure. And I do mean gross in the literal sense.
(Photo credit: erin.kkr on Flickr.)
Monday Breakfast
Published August 10, 2009 @ 07:40AM PT
Raiding the internet fridge for your intellectual delectation ...
- There's a new documentary on Percy Schmeiser's battle with Monsanto, as noted by Charles Lemos, following the 2008 settlement where Monsanto agreed to pay cleanup costs for contaminating his fields.
- Jill Richardson was here in Philadelphia on her book tour last Thursday, the night I figured out something was really wrong with my foot, then she went to Lancaster, PA for the CSA goodness and then it was on to New York, NY.
- The Northeast's late blight hit Paula Crossfield's rooftop tomato garden, and she took the opportunity to talk about the unique financial problem the disease has posed for small farmers growing specialty crops.
- Sens. Boxer and Baucus are squaring off over who'll get to write the Senate version of the House climate bill, and agricultural, coal and oil interests are expected to have even more say over the results. Keith Good at the FarmPolicy blog leaves little hope in his DC squabble roundup that, in spite of the fact that the military is firmly convinced of the threat climate change poses to national security, that our legislators will actually shape up and give us the change we need.
- So, about meat and climate change ...
... But, what about the methane in all that cattle flatulence? Excess flatulence is also a function of an unnatural diet. If cattle flatulence on a natural grazing diet were a problem, heat would have been trapped a 1000 years ago when, for example, there were 70 million buffalo in North America not to mention innumerable deer, antelope, moose, elk, caribou, and so on all eating vegetation and in turn being eaten by native Americans, wolves, mountain lions, etc. Did the methane from their digestion and the nitrous oxide from their manure cause temperatures to rise then? Or could there be other contributing factors today resulting from industrial agriculture, factors that change natural processes, which are not being taken into account? It has long been known that when grasslands are chemically fertilized their productivity is increased but their plant diversity is diminished.
A recent study in the journal Rangelands (Vol. 31, #1, pp. 45 - 49) documents how that the diminished diversity from sowing only two or three grasses and legumes in modern pastures results in diminished availability of numerous secondary nutritional compounds, for example tannins from the minor pasture forbs, which are known to greatly reduce methane emissions. Could not the artificial fertilization of pastures greatly increase the NO2 from manure? Might not the increased phosphorus, nowhere near as abundant in natural systems, have modified digestibility? I am sure that future research will document other contributing factors of industrial agricultural practices on animal emissions. The fact is clear. It is not the livestock; it is the way they are raised. ...
Administrative Note
Published August 09, 2009 @ 12:24AM PT
Hey folks,
Sorry to leave you hanging lately. I broke my foot last week right after I got back and after years and years of no insurance (and the fact that it didn't actually hurt as much as a migraine) I'd half convinced myself that it was just a sprain. Until the end of this last week, when more of my foot was covered by spreading bruises than not and it became clear that it needed to be x-rayed and properly seen to.
It's hard to even sit up for long, the swelling and bruising get worse when it isn't elevated. (Don't get me started on how bad it is getting downstairs from the 3rd floor.) Also, there's the prescription pain medication. As you can imagine, this situation isn't good for my computer use or focus.
Steph Larsen has written many times in this space about the need for universal healthcare in order to preserve farming as a viable small business. A lot of independent contractors and small business owners, or people who would like to be small business owners, know the truth of it. I broke my 5th metatarsal, the most commonly broken bone in the body, and I can right now barely do a job that involves typing from my home. This could mean the end of some people's entrepreneurial dreams, or the loss of a part time job with little security that supported a small business, like a farm. And many farmers do have second jobs to support their farming, both for the extra income and if possible, for even more valuable health coverage.
I'm lucky to have recently married into health coverage, but if it isn't retroactive to our wedding day, this one injury is likely to wipe out most of our recently acquired financial cushion. We were a little slow with the paperwork, being kind of busy and all.
Anyway, I hope I'll be back making a nuisance of myself again soon. But extensive reading and research, or even a lot of typing, are just not happening right now. Sorry.
cheers,
n
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:
Senate Cuts Animal ID Funding By Half
Published August 05, 2009 @ 02:05PM PT
Woohoo! I get to say nice things about the Senate!
I'm pleased to report that my usual causticity can be suspended for the duration of this post to applaud the Senate's unanimous consent vote to cut funding for the National Animal ID System. Go, Senate!
Jill Richardson at LaVidaLocavore has reposted the press release by R-CALF USA, the Ranchers-Cattlemen Action Legal Fund, United Stockgrowers of America, and I think that the most salient point in the entire debate is encapsulated in this paragraph of their statement, here:
3) No food safety benefits. NAIS will not prevent food borne illnesses from e. coli or salmonella, because the contamination occurs at the slaughterhouse, while NAIS tracking ends at the time of slaughter. Thus, NAIS will neither prevent the contamination nor increase the government's ability to track contaminated meat back to its source. In addition, NAIS will hurt efforts to develop safer, decentralized local food systems. ...
If the program fails in its main, stated goal, if it is in fact structured such that failure is inevitable, what are we spending all this money for? As a liberal, progressive, believer in the possibility of government to do good, I have a deep and abiding interest in money given to the government not being wasted. When it's wasted, it creates an instant opportunity cost against something good and useful being done with that money.
Of the money that remains in the program, the Senate directives limit its use to rule-making activities, and on that front, I have a suggestion: lay the groundwork to institute premise ID, instead of animal ID.
I was talking a couple months ago with Margaret Krome, my former internship supervisor and policy program director at the Michael Fields Agricultural Institute, about how NAIS implementation has gone in Wisconsin. She said that at this point, they've just done premise registration, which sidesteps many of the concerns raised directly by Amish communities and does actually provide a public health benefit.
Krome explained that when there were animal disease outbreaks, the premise registry let public health officials target their notification efforts to the right people. This registration simply lets officials know that there are livestock on the property and what type. That's actually useful to know should there be an outbreak of hoof and mouth disease, scabies, or what have you. It also isn't burdensome to farmers, needing to be neither expensive nor time-consuming. See? Useful.
Anyway, cheers again to the Senate for showing such good sense. It seems in short supply these days.(Photo credit: kimberlyfaye on Flickr.)
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.
Organic Complications
Published August 03, 2009 @ 12:03PM PT
So, there was a very narrowly focused literature review put out by Britain's pro-GMO Food Standards Agency that was widely reported to claim that there weren't any health benefits from organic food.
It shouldn't be a surprise that the FSA's theory of pesticide is "don't worry, be happy", as Geoffrey Lean of the Telegraph notes, and indeed the report completely ignores the potential health benefits of lower pesticide exposure. As Lean says in closing;
... It reminds me of a minister who used to complain that there was a "myth" that pesticides were "toxic". What, I asked him, would be the use of one that wasn't? Answer came there none.
Worse, the review seems to have excluded studies indicating a greater nutrient density in organic foods. Other nutrient differences reported are probably a result of the fact that conventional agriculture destroys and degrades soil, in a number of ways, and food managed solely for high yields in dying soil doesn't appear to be as good for you as food grown in healthier soil.
Has it, however, been proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that there are nutritional differences between conventional and organic foods over and above the products of our chemical warfare industry? Some evidence suggests that's the case, but as many have pointed out, the body of research to date is minimal. So if the claim that organics are more nutritious (as opposed to less contaminated) needs more support, the claim that they aren't is on even thinner ice.
