Tag: Sustainability

September 22, 2010 Disaster Preparedness, General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

The Eat Local Challenge draws awareness to Hawaii’s food system and sustainability issues

By Joleen Oshiro

If your idea of “eat local” is a paper plate buckling with hamburger steak, two scoops rice, mac salad and extra gravy, reconsider the term.

In this era of sustainability, “eat local” carries the weight of conscience, referring to consumption of locally grown and produced food. By that definition, there are few plate lunches to be found.

So what replaces them? And why?

ON THE NET:
» www.kanuhawaii.org

There are many places to start and many perspectives to consider. For Hawaii farmers, the issue lies in their struggle to stay viable while we import more than 75 percent of our food, sending more than $3 billion out of state each year. For consumers, it’s about knowing where their food comes from, how it was grown, how nutritious it is. For the state, the concern is over food security. If a catastrophic disaster hits the isles and disables airports and harbors, how will everyone get fed, and for how long?

When it’s laid out this way, it’s clear that beefing up the local food supply is in order. But shifting the situation requires tackling some big issues, one of which is changing consumer habits – not an easy thing.

But here’s one way to start: Kanu Hawaii’s Eat Local Challenge, in which regular folks attempt to eat local for a week, beginning Sunday.

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September 15, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Sequencing of cacao genome will help US chocolate industry, subsistence farmers – ScienceNewsline

U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) scientists and their partners have announced the preliminary release of the sequenced genome of the cacao tree, an achievement that will help sustain the supply of high-quality cocoa to the $17 billion U.S. chocolate industry and protect the livelihoods of small farmers around the world by speeding up development, through traditional breeding techniques, of trees better equipped to resist the droughts, diseases and pests that threaten this vital agricultural crop.

The effort is the result of a partnership between USDA’s Agricultural Research Service (ARS); Mars, Inc., of McLean, Va., one of the world’s largest manufacturers of chocolate-related products; scientists at IBM’s Thomas J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown , N.Y.; and researchers from the Clemson University Genomics Institute, the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology, Washington State University, Indiana University, the National Center for Genome Resources, and PIPRA (Public Intellectual Property Resource for Agriculture) at the University of California-Davis.

Team leaders from USDA included molecular biologist David Kuhn and geneticist Raymond Schnell, both at the ARS Subtropical Horticulture Research Station in Miami, Fla., and ARS computational biologist Brian Scheffler at the Jamie Whitten Delta States Research Center in Stoneville, Miss. ARS is the principal intramural scientific research agency of USDA. This research supports the USDA priority of promoting international food security, and USDA’s commitment to agricultural sustainability.

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August 22, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Garden teachers cultivate new ideas

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A single harvest of corn yielded many lessons for Sacred Hearts School students last week.

After picking hybrid Indian corn from the school garden, the students were counting kernels that came in yellow, blue, dark brown and a rainbow of other colors.

“Today we were doing math with corn. Corn math,” science enrichment teacher Ed Mahoney said Thursday.

The lessons also involved a discussion of genetics, the history of corn used by Native Americans as well as a taste test of their bounty – without the greasy additives found on movie theater popcorn.

Mahoney and three other Maui teachers were able to learn more about how to use school gardens in their daily curriculum, and shared ideas with other teachers from schools with garden programs, at the 3rd annual Summer School Garden Teacher Conference, supported by The Kohala Center, in Waimea on the Big Island in July.

Mahoney was joined by Kathy Becklin of Kihei Elementary School, Lisa Daily of Haiku Elementary School and Craig Eckert of Montessori School of Maui. The four were selected for the conference by Lehn Huff, University of Hawaii Maui College Sustainable Living Institute of Maui interim director.

SLIM was established by the college and Maui Land & Pineapple Co. as a center for gathering information, generating new knowledge, developing applications and validating appropriate technologies for eco-effectiveness and sustainable living.

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August 11, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Farmers protest BT eggplant testing

BAGUIO CITY — Farmers groups have protested the field testing of genetically modified (GM) eggplants in the Philippines.

Known as the Philippine Fruit and Shoot Borer (FSB) resistant eggplants (Bt brinjal) or Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) eggplant, the Department of Agriculture has started multi-location field testing prior to commercialization. This is an eggplant that was embedded with Bacillus thuringiensis to make it resistant to the fruit and shoot borers.

The people of India where the Bt brinjal originated were successful in pressuring their government to issue a moratorium for the commercialization of Bt-eggplant. A French scientific study slammed the commercialization of Bt brinjal, heating up the controversy over the biotech crop’s safety. Maharashtra Hybrid Seeds Company Ltd (Mahyco) developed the genetically modified eggplant. Mahyco is the Indian partner of US biotech giant Monsanto.

A study team led by Caen University professor Gilles-Eric Seralini of the Committee for Independent Research and Information on Genetic Engineering has not only branded Bt brinjal “unsafe for human consumption” but also raised serious doubts on safety data presented by developers Mahyco to the government.

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July 26, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Botanical Gardens Are Turning Away From Flowers

For the last quarter century, the Cleveland Botanical Garden went all out for its biennial Flower Show, the largest outdoor garden show in North America. With themed gardens harking back to the Roman empire, or an 18th-century English estate, the event would draw 25,000 to 30,000 visitors.

But in 2009, the Flower Show was postponed and then abandoned when the botanical garden could not find sponsors. This year, the garden has different plans. From Sept. 24 to 26, it is inaugurating the ‘RIPE! Food & Garden Festival,’ which celebrates the trend of locally grown food — and is supported in part by the Cleveland Clinic and Heinen’s, a supermarket chain.

‘The Flower Show may come back someday, but it’s not where people are these days,’ says Natalie Ronayne, the garden’s executive director. ‘Food is an easier sell.’

So it is across the country. Botanical gardens are experiencing an identity crisis, with chrysanthemum contests, horticultural lectures and garden-club ladies, once their main constituency, going the way of manual lawn mowers. Among the long-term factors diminishing their traditional appeal are fewer women at home and less interest in flower-gardening among younger fickle, multitasking generations.

Forced to rethink and rebrand, gardens are appealing to visitors’ interests in nature, sustainability, cooking, health, family and the arts. Some are emphasizing their social role, erecting model green buildings, promoting wellness and staying open at night so people can mingle over cocktails like the Pollinator (green tea liqueur, soda water and Sprite). A few are even inviting in dogs (and their walkers) free or, as in Cleveland, with a canine admission charge ($2).

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May 6, 2010 General Ag News and Notes Post a Comment

Invasion of the Superweeds – We Knew It Was Coming – NYTimes.com

We Knew It Was Coming

Michael Pollan, a contributing writer for The Times Magazine and the Knight Professor of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, is the author, most recently, of ”Food Rules: An Eater’s Manual.”

What a surprise! Roundup-resistant weeds have shown up in fields that have been doused with Roundup! Shocking!

Genetically modified crops are not, as Monsanto suggests, a shiny new paradigm.

Actually, the surprise would have been if these weeds didn’t show up — the only thing in doubt was the timing. The theory of natural selection predicts that resistance will appear whenever you attempt to eradicate a pest or a bacteria using such a heavy-handed approach. And in fact the rise of Roundup resistant weeds was predicted by Marion Nestle in her 2003 book “Safe Food” and by the Union of Concerned Scientists. At the time, Monsanto rejected such predictions as “hypothetical.”

A few lessons may be drawn from this story:

1. A product like Roundup Ready soy is not, as Monsanto likes to claim, “sustainable.” Like any such industrial approach to an agronomic problem — like any pesticide or herbicide — this one is only temporary, and destroys the conditions on which it depends. Lucky for Monsanto, the effectiveness of Roundup lasted almost exactly as long as its patent protection.

2. Genetically modified crops are not, as Monsanto suggests, a shiny new paradigm. This is the same-old pesticide treadmill, in which the farmer gets hooked on a chemical fix that needs to be upgraded every few years as it loses its effectiveness.

3. Monocultures are inherently precarious. The very success of Roundup Ready crops have been their undoing, since so many acres were planted with the same seed, and doused with the same chemical, resistance came quickly. Resilience, and long-term sustainability, comes from diversifying fields, not planting them all to the same kind of seed.

Invasion of the Superweeds – Room for Debate Blog – NYTimes.com