Not glamorous, perhaps, but extremely important

Here is a great example of the difference simple improvements in small scale sustainable agriculture can make. It's also a wonderful story of selective seed saving, and how it can make a difference in a few generations locally, without benefit of a research lab and expensive technologies.
https://closeup.oxfamamerica.org/stories/seeds-success

This link came in an Oxfam newsletter.

Meanwhile, I've used a chunk of time this weekend to catch up with following many links on food waste, a current topic of great interest here in Sonoma County. I plan to post some of them with notes and/or reflections during Advent.

What did you do with your Thanksgiving leftovers? How do you plan to prevent or repurpose holiday excess this Advent and Christmas?

Updating the list of web sites

which sorely needed it.

I've added the site for the California Biosafety Alliance.  They are hosting an international conference on "Justice Begins with Seeds" on May 19 and 20, and promoting Food Sovereignty Week May 14-20.

I deleted the broken links, and pulled the links that include searches for local food - Local Harvest and the Meatrix - up to the top.   I learned about two more at the friends of agriculture happy hour on Friday and will be adding them.

In cruising through the links I realized a number of them are keeping up with Farm Bill 2012 developments.   I plan to pull these out and create a separate box for Farm Bill links soon.

And I pulled the site for the Oakland Institute up toward the top of the list since it remains the best source of info on the land grabs in Africa.   OI called my attention to this recent BBC broadcast on the land grab issue:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p00p5qrb

Seasonal news

Seems like news features at this time of year focus on two themes: indigenous peoples of the Americas, and FOOD.

Yesterday's California Report on public radio included a nice little story on seed saving, promoting it among backyard gardeners, descrying its decline in commercial agriculture.

I was mightily impressed by Richmond Grows seed catalog.
http://www.richmondgrows.org/
and it gave me an idea which should have been obvious - take pictures of the produce from which you save seed. I take enough pictures in the garden as it is, but I hadn't thought of it as a way to record selection of, say lettuce, over a series of seasons.

You can listen to the radio story here:
http://www.californiareport.org/archive/R201011191630/b
and link through to their pictures.

This was so much more interesting than another cranberry or pumpkin recipe - not that I have anything against my favorite fall fruit and veg...

Seeding a better future for Haiti

In researching more articles for my fall CALL course on food, faith and sustainability,
I ran across this article on Civil Eats
http://civileats.com/2010/05/17/five-questions/#more-8095
raising five questions about Monsanto's seed donations to Haiti.

Clearly, now more than ever, energy and resources must go into rebuilding Haitian agriculture for sustainability in the long term. Emergency food aid now and food sovereignty for the long term need to be the goals - not another layer of dependency on imported inputs.

What puzzles me is that the Presbyterian church supports the development of a Haitian seed bank, while Catholic Relief and the American Jewish World Service are advocating aid that fosters local solutions. But where is the Episcopal Church? lame on sustainable agriculture issues again?

The GM beat goes on

I just listened to an hour of yesterday's Science Friday on what GMO's can do for world hunger. As the intro said, Golden Rice isn't in any rice bowls yet. What advantages does "biotech" (is that a cleaner or sexier phrase than "genetically modified"?) have over conventional hybridization?

Well, I don't think they answered the question. I appreciated what the spokesperson for the Union of Concerned Scientists said at the beginning of the segment - the quick fix of GMing doesn't work so well for complex traits like drought resistance.

I did not appreciate the fact that every time this guy presented an alternative viewpoint to the Man from Monsanto, Ira Flatow told him to hurry up. The fact is that complex traits, and ecologically and culturally complex situations, require complex answers, not slick talking points.

Several times during the conversation GM cotton's introduction to and use in India was mentioned. I wonder how they could do this with no one - even the anthropolgy professor on the panel - mentioning the many suicides about farmers of GM cotton in India.

Well into the hour, a person preparing a talk on conservation raised a good question, and Glenn Stone, the anthro professor, made some good points, I think. He pointed out that the patenting of seeds makes it very difficult for independent scientists to do the research they would like, the experimental work necessary to test the environmental impact of GM seeds.

He also pointed out that the buying up of seed companies by agrochemical companies has caused seed prices to soar.

One of the things that fascinated me is that at Monsanto and in the institutes and foundations that are playing ball with them, the comparisons of GM crops (biocassava+, I think the new one which will be ready at the end of this decade was called) are to vitamin pills, rather than, as the Concerned Scientists rep pointed out, to agro-ecology. So doing gene transplants to get more iron and calcium and vitamin A or whatever into a staple root crop is better than "supplementation" - but is it better than developing diversified small scale agriculture? No foundation grants for that research.

The link to this podcast was broken, and I'm not sure how I finally did download it. Itunes might work better than the NPR site if you care to search for it and listen to it. If you do, try to stick with it - the next to last question from a listener in San Francisco is worth the price of admission - he brought it back to the context of global hunger. I wish the answers from the panel had been as good as the question.

Business vs. Nature

There's an interesting interview with Susan Dworkin on this week's Living On Earth.

It caught my attention when she said, "Business loves monoculture, but nature loves diversity." An interesting bumper sticker, perhaps, for capturing the essence of why diversity in our seed stocks has diminished.

Dworkin has written a book about one of Norman Borlaug's disciples, Bent Skovmand, called Viking in the Wheat Fields. It should be interesting, since Dworkin opposes the patenting of life forms as apparently Skovmand did, but praises the Green Revolution.

I hope the book has a bit more sophisticated science than the interview.

While I'm waiting to get it from the library, I'm going to think about another point Dworkin makes, that we the people have been largely kept in the dark about agriculture issues while a few government bureaucrats and representatives of global corporations make decisions about our food supply. We need more civic discourse about the food system.

This is a point I have been trying to make as one of the "education and communication" stakeholders in our local Food System Alliance. It's not enough to teach the kids through school gardens and reskill the adults in food growing, prep and preservation. We need to have forums on food issues that aren't just limited to the foodies, farmers and nutritionistas.

At Thanksgiving Lutheran on Thursday evening (their lenten series is using the ELCA world hunger prayer calendar) Karen commented on how we should be thankful that we are hearing more about our food system these days, thanks to Michael Pollan's books, popular documentaries, etc. Hear, Hear!

You can find the short Dworkin interview here:
http://www.loe.org/shows/shows.htm?programID=10-P13-00011#feature7

seedy times

I have been thinking about seeds a lot the past few weeks.

First thinking about what seeds I need and ordering them, as well as thinking about what seeds I have on hand. I have saved some seed the last few years, though perhaps not with as much thought and care as I should.

Then there's the challenge of when the early seeds can go in. Very rainy winters like this are pretty difficult. I've been sowing when we get a couple of dry days and will see what happens. The biggest challenge is not seeds, but wanting to put in potatoes this year, when the spot I'd like to use is muddy and needs much improvement - and the break of a dry week, when I could do it, appears not to be happening.

Monday, before the Sonoma County Food System Alliance meeting I went on the brief tour of the gardens at Lynmar Winery. I was mightily impressed by Michael's seed saving and seed improving efforts. I wish I'd had my camera, so I could show you a picture of his shelves of bins - so much accomplished in just his few years of gardening there.

Then yesterday an email arrived from Occidental Arts and Ecology with an invitation to download their publication on seed saving for school gardens. This is a comprehensive 90+ page resource with lots of good background and lesson plans cued to California standards.

I, of course, began to think about how congregations with gardens might use this - first with information on seed saving, and second to provide good science background for lessons for Sunday School and vacation bible schools.

So often we talk about seeds with kids in our churches and leap right to the metaphorical. Just because St. Paul was a lousy botanist doesn't mean we need to be. The very first lesson plan here, "Do seeds need soil to sprout?" made me think about doing the science and then doing the parable of the sower. My favorite lesson, though, which would be a big stretch for Sunday School, was the one on how to read a seed packet - and how to make your own for the seed you've saved.

Download "A Handful of Seeds" here:
http://www.oaec.org/sites/default/files/A-Handful-of-Seeds_0.pdf

seeds of discontent

Harry Eyres, Slow Lane columnist for the Financial Times Life & Arts section, wrote on the weekend of June 13/June 14 2009 an extended review-essay of three new books on seeds - including a biography of Luther Burbank (1849-1926), who while working in a plough factory in Massachusetts found a two-year-old book by Charles Darwin on animal and plant breeding. The result is edible history - hybrids developed by Burbank in his 50 years in Santa Rosa, California, are still commercially important. Tho Monsanto seems to have taken some of his initiatives a bit farther and around a bend ...

An Orchard Invisible: A Natural History of Seeds by Jonathan Silvertown (The University of Chicago Press)

The Garden of Invention: Luther Burbank and the Business of Breeding Plants by Jane S. Smith (The Penguin Press)

Forgotten Fruits: The Stories Behind Britain’s Traditional Fruit and Vegetables by Christopher Stocks (Windmill)


http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b3340af8-56de-11de-9a1c-00144feabdc0.html

%^)

Climate Change Exhibit at AMNH

While in New York City I took a few hours for a mad dash to the American Museum of Natural History to check out their Climate Change exhibit. http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/climatechange/
I have to say it was fairly disappointing from a foodie perspective.

But the exhibit is reasonably interactive and quite informative from a fossil fuel, CO2 perspective. I was particularly interested in the part about climate change and the oceans, something I think we don't hear enough about. Sometimes all we hear is how people expect the oceans to provide the solution (we've dumped everything else there, why not more CO2?). But ocean acidification is a major problem which will affect many organisms, particularly the calcifying ones, and thus impact some things we enjoy eating, and others which make up their food or substrate. At one point in the exhibit one finds this statement:
"How the ocean will respond to rising CO2 levels is uncertain."

Scary. We know that as well as rising from ice melt, the oceans are getting warmer, too. Most marine organisms have a pretty narrow range of tolerance in the heat-cold dimension. And water expands as it warms, another contribution to flooding and possibly storm generation and intensification.

It's a terrible thing to think that what we haven't done to the oceans with habitat destruction, overfishing, and agricultural run-offs, we will do with increased greenhouse gases.

Since I mentioned agriculture, back to that topic.
Seemed like every time the exhibit descriptions mentioned climate change's impact on agriculture - drought, flood and warming - the proposed solution was genetically engineered seeds. That's where my real disappointment came from. I suppose I could make a case for genetic engineering of seeds for climates that are changing too rapidly for traditional hybridizing methods to work - but only if the artificially introduced genes are from a closely related plant, and not patented by a corporation or other profit making entity. Even then, the danger of backcrossing is real, and with it the driving out of diversity in traditional seed stock and wild relatives. Seems like we should begin now searching folklore and uncommon seed varieties to develop and disseminate seeds with tolerance for a wider range of climatic conditions.

Finally, one more footnote. Farming in the Andes is going to get more challenging as glaciers, a usual source of summer irrigation water, shrink, and there is less of them to melt. I hope somebody is working on those hundreds of varieties of potatoes, searching for varieties that work well in drought.

Book Reviews

I want to give a thumbs up to one book I read a few weeks ago, and a shaky horizontal thumb to two I am trying to read.

The Unnatural History of the Sea by Callum Roberts was a very interesting read for me. Some reviewers seemed to find it tedious, but hey, I'm the person who enjoyed the cetology in Moby Dick. Roberts shows how the decimation of fishing stocks is not just a result of 20th century factory fishing, but of the whole progress of how humans have regarded the sea and its creatures. The extent of habitat destruction from trawling over the last couple of centuries is a real eye opener. But this book isn't just a lament. Roberts offers stories of the sea's resiliency and many suggestions for what might be done. Most are international restrictions of one sort or another, not out and out bans, even on trawling. I took this book back to the library, but I am going to buy a copy when the paperback comes out later this month.

Now for the two I'm having a hard time with. It's not a problem with readability, but with scientific inaccuracy and sloppiness as well as a tendency to screediness. (I hope I've just coined a new word there.) I found myself wondering if people write non-fiction books these days as though they were blogging. Is there creeping blogitis?

One of these books is The End of Food by Paul Roberts. There are lots of interesting bits in this book. But once I find an inaccuracy, or flippant disregard for distinctions, I find it hard to trust other statements from the author. There's a bit early in the book, where Roberts refers to the energy inputs needed to produce a pound of cattle (the ratio is roughly 10:1, plants:flesh) and then says it's about the same for hogs and poultry. Now anybody who has read anything about the challenge of feeding lots of meat to all on the planet knows that is not true. Even the author knows it is not true, as he gives the full information elsewhere. But I find myself losing confidence in an author who is flippant, lazy, or dumbing down.

Another is Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds by Claire Hope Cummings. I was looking forward to reading this after hearing the author on the radio one morning. She apparently lives somewhere near here - Napa County, I think they said - and is a journalist and farmer. Again, there are many interesting things here. But she really isn't clear - or couldn't be bothered to take the time to be clear - about the species concept. She refers to species before GM as having "strong biological boundaries". She writes of "natural genes" being "governed by biological rules". Genes introduced in the lab are still genes, seems to me. And I want to know what these rules are. She reports many cases of crosses and backcrosses of GM crops with wild and weedy relatives, across species, but does not explain how this happens. I really don't think she's got much of a concept of genetics in the flowering plants.

So, even though I was fascinated to learn about the seed bank in Iraq that we destroyed, taking with it a whole history of adaptation and cultivation from one of the places where agriculture began; and even though I appreciated being reminded of all the havoc being wreaked in Hawaii from the agrochemical companies operating there; and even though I liked the caricature of James Watson, whom I have never admired - I don't quite trust this book. I would want to call to the attention of anyone reading it that this is for the most part a tertiary account - the author is summarizing or synthesizing the work of historians and sociologists of science and technology. She is clear in the notes and introduction that she has overgeneralized in places, and that her values do come into play. For this honesty we can all be thankful.

I'm going to keep trying with these latter two books until they are due back at the library. Or I may just read the bibliographies and see if there is anything in them on which I want to follow up. Meanwhile, the Roberts book goes on the book list to the right.