• You will need to login or register before you can post a message. If you already have an Agriville account login by clicking the login icon on the top right corner of the page. If you are a new user you will need to Register.

Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Rethinking Green

Collapse
X
Collapse
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

    Rethinking Green

    The 100 mile diet ain't all it's cracked up to be.

    http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2318164


    Eat Global, Not Local


    At the annual convention of the North American Farmers' Direct Marketing Association in Calgary a couple of years ago, organizers offered a seminar entitled "The New Classic: Creating an upscale urban farmers' market with down-home country Chutzpah." For years, local farmers' markets weren't anything you'd hazard to call "upscale," but the rise of the local food movement and the best-selling environmental-soul books, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle and The 100-Mile Diet, has made buying locally grown, rather than well-travelled food, as trendy these days among the eco-yuppie crowd as hybrid Lexuses and Baby Planet strollers. "Farmers have been involved with selling local product for decades. What's happening now is that the consumer side is catching on," says Charlie Touchette, executive director of the marketing association.

    In Alberta, farmers' market revenues next year are projected to be roughly twice 2004's take; Vancouver's markets have more than doubled their customers, and revenues, since 2005. Although that "down-home country" marketing is key to making shoppers feel the trendy, earthy vibe, with prices often dramatically higher than supermarkets, the big demographic draw comes from the well-heeled.

    A farmers' market research report by the Cascade Harvest Coalition, a Seattle-based group promoting local food, concluded that one of the big challenges to markets was reaching "mid-level or second-tier" consumers, who, studies showed, stayed away, in large part, because of affordability.

    In part, farmer vendors charge more because they've been suddenly blessed with customers willing to pay more. But locally grown food, in many cases, is also more costly to produce, because Canadian labour and, often, land is worth more than in Brazil or China. Above all, though, local growing conditions for most foods are less productive than elsewhere. Every climate, obviously, has its strengths and weaknesses, and frequently, locally grown food is less efficiently produced than the imported stuff. Accounting for "food miles" -- the key measure used by locavores (local produce eaters) -- tells you how far food travels. It doesn't tell you how much energy -- and greenhouse gas emissions -- went into growing it. When you add that in, and if your aim is to conserve fossil fuels and emissions, the best way is actually to skip the farmers' market and eat global.

    "If you are concerned about the carbon footprint of your diet, focusing on transportation is kind of like worrying about the air pressure in your tires of your car rather than whether you have a fuel-efficient car or not," says James McWilliams, an environmental and agricultural historian at Texas State University, author of Just Food: Where Locavores Get It Wrong and How We Can Truly Eat Responsibly, and a former part-time locavore. "What matters so much more than how far it travels from farm to fork is what kind of methods were used to produce it."

    In fact, farming methods make up so much more of a particular food's carbon footprint, it is remarkable that all those food-mile-counters missed it. A 2008 study published in the academic journal, Environmental Science and Technology by a pair of environmental engineers at Carnegie Mellon University found that just 11% of greenhouse gas emissions related to food come from transportation. Final delivery to the retailer accounted for just 4%. On the other hand, 83% of emissions involved in your lunch today are directly attributable to the food's production.

    What locavores forget, or don't stop to consider, is that calculating the emissions over the entire life-cycle process is far more complex than counting transportation miles. Local producers, for example, often store their fruits and vegetables using refrigeration for several months to stretch into the off-season. Certain climates also demand more CO2-heavy inputs, such as pesticides and fertilizers. And suboptimal growing conditions often mean clearing and farming more land to gain yields. "If you want to preserve wilderness areas, the way to go is modern, intensive farming and international trade," says Pierre Desrochers, a geography professor at the University of Toronto.

    Large-capacity food transportation, he notes, is often extremely fuel-efficient. "A highly efficient container diesel-powered ship can move huge quantities of stuff ... with a tiny, tiny, tiny energy signature." And when producers do export by airfreight, often their carbon footprint is reduced, since often they can slot their deliveries into the excess capacity available in planes that are already headed where they need to go. But in other cases, the oversimplified food miles argument can grossly misjudge the environmental impact: Flowers grown outdoors in Kenya, for instance, weigh very little, and even when delivered by air, they still come out ahead of European-grown blossoms requiring heated greenhouses (13,300 lbs of CO2 per 12,000 cut roses shipped from Kenya to the U.K. vs. 77,000 lbs for Dutch ones). Though greenhouse gas emissions themselves are often not part of the price of food, all the fuel, fertilizer and land clearance responsible for creating them -- all net contributors to greenhouse gas emissions -- are all in there. "In a global market economy, people have the incentive to use resources as efficiently as possible," Prof. Desrochers says. The steeper the price tag on a bag of baby carrots, the more likely their production came at an environmental cost.

    Researchers at New Zealand's Lincoln University, for instance, recently studied how their country's lamb exports stacked up against locally grown varieties in England. Instead of simplistically counting only food miles, they accounted for every aspect of the production process: harvesting techniques, fertilizer inputs, storage procedures and transport methods, among other things. Although New Zealand lamb must travel 18,000 kilometeres to arrive at U.K. supermarkets, the country's comparative efficiency of raising the animals more than compensated for the shipping. A ton of New Zealand lamb exported to Britain could be blamed for all of 1,520 lbs of CO2 emissions. British lambs, lacking the same warm, clovered pastures, and so, requiring more truck-delivered feed and heated pens, rated far worse, even though they were produced locally, emitting 6,280 lbs of CO2 per ton.

    When British consumers insist on buying locally grown tomatoes, meanwhile, they're patronizing producers who emit 5,278 lbs of CO2 per ton, produced largely by heated greenhouses, according to a 2005 study by the U.K.'s own Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Spanish tomatoes, by comparison, emit barely a quarter of that amount, the study found, even after shipping to London grocers: just 1,389 lbs of CO2 per ton. Several similar analyses have thrown cold water on the pro-environment argument for all kinds of fruits, vegetables and dairy products.

    Having spent some time mingling in the movement himself, Mr. McWilliams' impression is that many locavores ignore the hard homework of actually calculating their food's environmental impact because, at root, the buy local movement often has as much to do with making a statement as it does with environmentalism, or any other alleged benefits. "What I really do see ... is that buying local is a political act. It's a gesture that, in essence, thumbs its nose at globalization," he says. If left-wing posturing and green-posing is your priority, then stick with your 100-mile diet. Leave it to average consumers, buying the globally sourced groceries at their local, corporate, big-box retailer, to do genuine good for the planet.

    #2
    http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=2310172

    More Corporate Farming


    Feed the world: grow fish in Alberta's badlands


    South of Alberta's Badlands, where rainfall averages are lower than parts of Ethiopia, Nicholas Savidov's self-contained ecosystem has grown literally tons of fish, vegetables and fruit, for years, all with hardly adding any water.

    Since 2001, explains Dr. Savidov, lead plant physiologist and biochemist at this provincial crop diversification lab, he's recycled the same water, over and over, through jumbo vats, throbbing with hundreds of tilapia fish, out to an adjacent water table as big as a small backyard, where grids of aquaponic crops nourish on nutrients from the composted fish waste, and then back to the fish, where it returns clean and oxygenated.

    "Just one square metre," of this operation, he says, "gives you more yield than in one acre of land." The equipment pays for itself from food sales. All it requires is a little power, and fish food.

    The all-in-one food-making contraption could one day feed humans in poor regions where water and potent agricultural materials are not always easy to come by.

    "That's an ideal system for a developing country," Dr. Savidov says, pointing to a refrigerator-sized version he says might cost as little as $1,000. "[It] will produce up to 300 cucumbers a year.... A system like that can supply a family with fresh vegetables and with vitamins and also with protein" from the dozens of fish, he says.

    While Western environmentalists lionize unrefined, organic farms, one of the best ways to protect our environment is by spreading 21st century farming technology and corporate agricultural products. Food production that truly sustains the planet is the very stuff that the eco-priests decry: fish farms, genetically modified foods, and farms relying more, not less, on corporate-made chemicals.

    "Intensive agricultural production is the key," says Patrick Moore, co-founder and former Canadian president of Greenpeace, now chairman of Vancouver-based communications firm Greenspirit Strategies. "It's simple arithmetic: the more food you grow per acre, the less natural world you have to clear to do it."

    The late Norman Borlaug, father of the Green Revolution that modernized farming, ending frequent famines, in India and Asia, illustrated it this way: in 1990, America produced 596 million tons of crops. Had it stuck with 1960 methods of farming, it would have needed 460 million more acres than in 1960, of fertile land. Only, there wasn't 460 million more acres of good-quality land, so it would have been millions more yet, of poorer quality land.

    "We would have moved into marginal grazing areas and plowed up things that wouldn't be productive in the long run. We would have had to move into rolling mountainous country and chop down our forests," he once told Reason Magazine. With advances in agriculture, farmers instead doubled output in 30 years, using 25-million fewer acres. Mr. Borlaug, in addition to being credited for saving a billion lives by introducing fertilizers, pesticides, and seed genetics to Latin America and Asia (he won a Nobel peace prize for it,) spared millions of hectares of forests from being razed for farmland.

    At November's UN World Summit on Food Security, economists estimated that the world must double current food output by 2050 to feed a population of 9-billion, many increasingly demanding Western-quality diets.

    For developing countries, using farming methods circa 1860, never mind 1960, this means more than doubling farmland. Antiquated farming methods are the number one factor destroying forests. Sustenance agriculture -- Third World farmers typically farm an acre or less -- caused up to 45% of deforestation between 2000 and 2005. Africa was responsible for 50% of the world's deforestation between 1990 and 2000, compared to Asia's meager 4% contribution.

    "What Borlaug and the Green Revolution did was very positive for the environment, because a lot of land and forest were left untouched," says Per Pinstrup-Andersen, professor of Food, Nutrition and Public Policy at Cornell University. But in Africa, he says, such destruction is worsening, as primitive farming methods, and fertilizer deficiencies, degrade soil of nutrients. "The erosion gets worse, and it's a downward spiral," as farmers abandon exhausted fields for new land, says Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues at the Hudson Institute.

    Both men believe that modern technology already offers the means to sate global appetites now and in 40 years, without devastating oceans or forests. But using it requires ignoring environmental NGOs, and letting the beneficial products of private industry play a bigger role. David Suzuki rhapsodizes about Cuba's "sustainable" archaic ox-ploughed farms, but that country imports 85% of its food.

    An hour or so up the road from Dr. Savidov's laboratories, John Tremblay, president of Alternative Agriculture Technology, breeds shrimp in two huge tanks in a barn in the middle of cattle country. He's just getting started. When he's fully scaled up, he estimates an enclosed shrimp farm on an acre of land will produce 60,000 lbs of food yearly -- a 30 times greater yield than a typical acre of soybeans. "We went from being labelled shrimp farmers to being sustainable food production specialists," Mr. Tremblay says. "If a guy can grow shrimp in Alberta then we can do it almost anywhere."

    Pound for pound, acre for acre, fish farms output more food, with fewer inputs and emissions, than land farms, without ravaging oceans or clearing land. "What most people don't realize is that fish are so much more efficient at converting into food," says Mr. Moore: their cold blood and not having to fight gravity makes seafood emit less than half the greenhouse gases of equivalent amounts of land-based meat.

    Just as man evolved from hunter-gatherer to domesticating livestock, it only makes sense to evolve our seafood cultivation, says Sebastian Belle, president of the Maine Aquaculture Association. Sea conservation groups say bottom-trawling is devastating millions of miles of aquatic ecosystems. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimates over 70% of fish species are either maximally exploited or depleted.

    While wild fishing declines, aquaculture is flourishing; accounting now for 42% of seafood production, it is expected to exceed 50% in the next decade, according to the Worldwatch Institute. But environmental groups are arguably the biggest political obstacles to its expansion, pressuring governments and consumers to resist it by claiming that fish farms are unhealthy or contaminate wild species. No such risks have ever been substantiated, Mr. Moore notes. What's astonishing, he says, is that organizations claiming to care about ocean life are, essentially, pushing to keep us straining sea life, hunting fish, like buffalo, to near extinction, rather than sustainably growing our own.

    Last month, scientists at the Genome Center at St. Louis' Washington University announced a breakthrough with potential to alter the fate of billions: they decoded the genetics of corn.

    Corn, or maize, is the most common crop on the planet. The ability to artificially tinker with its genetics "make it easier to breed new varieties of corn that produce higher yields or are more tolerant to extreme heat, drought, or other conditions," explained the centre's director, Richard Wilson.

    Monsanto is already engineering drought-tolerant breeds. Corn tailor-made for the most challenging growing conditions could bring bumper crops to perennially under-nourished African regions. Only, as things stand, it won't: Genetically modified (GM) crops are not legal most everywhere in Africa.

    If there is anywhere desperate for better crops, it is Africa, where grain yields per acre, according to the Yale Center for the Study of Globalization, are one-fifth that of those in Europe and the United States.

    As Western harvests improve, Africa's are shrinking: the World Resources Institute reported in 2006 that, per capita, African farms produced 19% less in 2005 than in 1970. Where the typical farmer devotes at least 90% of her small plot of land to simply feeding her family, the growth in Africa's population, expected to nearly double by 2050 to 1.7-billion, will, without modern, high-yield agriculture techniques, mean vast wilderness lost to crude farms.

    With access to engineered seeds, fertilizer and pesticides, the Center for Global Food Issues calculates Africa can produce twice the food as it does now. Yet, so degraded is that region's soil that the UN's Institute for Natural Resources predicts that using current methods, there could be only enough arable land by 2025 to grow food sufficient for 25% of Africans.

    The West shoulders blame for this fiasco. Left-wing groups launched campaigns against the Green Revolution, opposing everything from its synthetic, commercial pesticides and fertilizers to the cultural cleansing of native farming traditions. Mr. Borlaug's nervous sponsors, the Rockefeller Foundation, the Ford Foundation and the World Bank, cancelled his African project funding.

    Until the mid-1990s, some African governments were preparing to introduce the same genetically modified, pest-resistant, high-yield crops Americans and Canadians were adopting, when, again, environmental NGOs interfered, campaigning against what they branded Frankenfoods.

    "Fifteen years after the first genetically-modified food has been commercialized and eaten in the United States, there isn't a single person that has been sick. There is not a single person that has died. There's been no environmental catastrophes," Mr. Pinstrup-Andersen says.

    Still, the European Union's bans on GM imports, and Africa's reliance on EU aid, makes it too economically risky for most African nations to try GM -- a sin of the well-fed West against the starving that Robert Paarlberg calls "an imperialism of rich tastes." He is the author of Starved for Science: How Biotechnology is Being Kept out of Africa.

    Redirecting Africa from a dustbowl destiny to one of limited deforestation and increasing food output is no simple affair. When Mr. Borlaug finally located funding from Japanese benefactors to try his advances in sub-Saharan Africa -- work that continues with the help of the Bill and Melinda Gates, and the Howard Buffet Foundations -- he found ways to double yields, but only in developed areas: lack of transportation and irrigation in Sub-Saharan Africa added unique complications. The cost of transporting a tonne of goods one kilometre in Africa averages as much US$0.14, compared to a $0.03 average in other developing regions, the Infrastructure Consortium for Africa reported in November. It concluded that US$50-billion annual spending on road, water and power is necessary over the next decade to bring Sub-Saharan Africa into the 21st century - still cheaper than the Copenhagen climate treaty's estimated cost to participating nations, which now tops US$300-billion a year.

    Western funds, or loans, to deliver modern farming methods and materials to slash-and-burn regions is not only more likely to dramatically cut atmospheric carbon levels and preserve vital ecosystems than empty international emission pledges, it has actually been proven to work. If eco-conscious Westerners won't redirect money from untested global cap-and-trade schemes and "green" funds to stop the spread of destructive farming, at the very least the West can push to reverse the bans we prompted on the GM crops that must be part of the solution. While we're at it, we can shut down campaigns against chemically intensive agriculture and fish farms. And if, in the process, we end up not just helping the planet, but saving millions of lives, even better.

    Comment


      #3
      Interesting - maybe you have just stumbled on a use for the all the pig barns that are going to be sitting idle.

      The infrastructure is there - buildings, lagoons for waste - just add tanks and water.

      Comment


        #4
        It's possible. Someone else I know thought of the same thing a couple of years ago. He didn't try it but figured why not.

        Comment


          #5
          I think there is some colonies already doing just that.

          Comment


            #6
            NEWS FLASH Conventional farming as we know it, has become obsolete. Let's take this fish farm, to another level and grow say, hi quality grass. It's win/win, huge demand South of the border. Hydroponics kin be cheap, only overhead some lectricity, bulbs, a coupla space blakits and voila huge profit, no tax, a laid back life that we all seek and would enjoy. Currently though ya gotta hide it from the man, cause he'll seized it, smash it, hall it away, persecute yous, and git ya a larg finee or jail, if'n ya don't cease and desist growin this cash bonaza... There I said, it if'n we all do it at once, just lik speedin they can't/won't cathus all, da think.......

            Comment

            • Reply to this Thread
            • Return to Topic List
            Working...