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I teach sustainable food and farming at the University of Massachusetts and try to contribute to my local community without causing too much harm....
Food Policy and Advocacy

United Nations supports small farms

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United Nations urges governments to do more to support small farmers to curb hunger, poverty and climate change

in Geneva
theguardian.com, Wednesday 18 September 2013 17.33 BST

Governments in rich and poor countries alike should renounce their focus on agribusiness and give more support to small-scale, local food production to achieve global food security and tackle climate change, according to a report from Unctad, the UN trade and development body.

The 2013 Trade and Environment Review, calls on governments to “wake up before it is too late” and shift rapidly towards farming models that promote a greater variety of crops, reduced fertiliser use and stronger links between small farms and local consumers.

Persistent rural poverty, global hunger, population growth and environmental concerns must be treated as a collective crisis, argues the report, which criticises the international response to the 2008 food-price crisis for focusing on technical “quick-fixes”.

“Many people talk about energy, transport, etc, but agriculture only comes on to the agenda when there is an acute food-price crisis, or when there are conflicts at the national level over food,” said Ulrich Hoffman, senior trade policy adviser at Unctad. “At the international scene most of the discussion is on technicalities, but the matter we have before us is far more complex.”

The report warns that urgent and far-reaching action is needed before climate change begins to cause big disruptions to agriculture, particularly in vulnerable regions of poorer countries.

It says that while the 2008 crisis helped to reverse the long-term neglect of agriculture and its role in development, the focus has remained on increasing yields through industrial farming.

The report, which includes contributions from 60 international experts – covering topics from food prices and fertiliser use to international land deals and trade rules – demands a paradigm shift to focus efforts on making farming more sustainable and food more affordable through promoting local food production and consumption.

Several of the contributors call for a focus on food sovereignty, a concept introduced more than a decade ago by the international peasants’ movement La Via Campesina. Unlike food security, often defined as ensuring people have enough to eat, food sovereignty focuses on questions of power and control. It puts the needs and interests of those who produce and consume food at the heart of agricultural systems and policies.

The report argues that industrial, monoculture agriculture has failed to provide enough affordable food where it is needed, while the damage caused to the environment is “mounting and unsustainable”. It echoes the work of Nobel prize-winner Amartya Sen in arguing that the real causes of hunger – poverty and the lack of access to good, affordable food – are being overlooked.

Agricultural trade rules must be reformed, it says, to give countries more opportunity to promote policies that encourage local and regional food systems.

The report follows last week’s publication of Unctad’s annual trade and development report, which urged governments to focus more on domestic demand and inter-regional trade and rely less on exports to rich countries to fuel growth.
“Export-led growth is not the only viable development path,” said Nikolai Fuchs, president of the Geneva-based Nexus Foundation and a contributor to the trade and environment report. “We don’t say ‘no trade’, but … trade regimes should secure level playing fields for regional and local products, and allow for local and regional preference schemes, for example in public procurement.

“Highly specialised agriculture does not create enough jobs in rural areas where most of the poor are.” He argued that industrial, export-oriented farming typically offers a few highly skilled and specialised jobs, or low-skill, seasonal and precarious employment.

The report says governments should acknowledge and reward farmers for the work they do to preserve water sources, soil, landscapes and biodiversity.

Hoffman acknowledged it would be difficult to implement the agenda the report was suggesting. “Subsidies are a key hurdle … at a national level but also [in terms of] dealing with subsidies in the context of the WTO [World Trade Organisation],” he said. There must be more scrutiny of agricultural subsidies, he argued, including those that appear to promote environmentally sustainable farming, as there were “ample opportunities for abuse or misuse”.

Farming

Family farms: What if no one wants to carry on the legacy?

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matuzkoBy REBECCA EVERETT @GazetteRebecca

Wednesday, August 28, 2013

“Who’s going to take over the farm?” is a question all family farms face sooner or later.

At the Williamsburg dairy farm where I grew up, the answer is unclear.

My parents built Hemenway Hill Farm from the ground up in 1985 on land that had been in my father’s family since the 1840s. Alan and Teresa Everett were the first Everetts to run a commercial dairy farm there, but past generations had used the land as an orchard and a subsistence farm.

They also raised three independent daughters who decided one by one to pursue careers off the farm. It’s unlikely my twin, Emily, or I will return to take over. But my older sister, Faith Bisbee, and her husband, Donnie Bisbee, keep cows and draft horses in Chesterfield; it’s possible they will play a role in Hemenway Hill Farm’s future.

Some Valley farms are dealing with the same situation as my parents, but there are plenty others that will have no trouble finding a young, energetic son or daughter to take over the family business.

“It’s been my plan since I was in first or second grade,” said Josef Matuszko, 20, who helps run Twin Oaks Farm in Hadley with his parents, Edwin Matuszko and Linda Kingsley.

A family farm is an all-hands-on-deck business, a one-of-a-kind home to raise a family and a rewarding place to work alongside loved ones. Children who grow up there learn lessons about life, death, and hard work at a young age. That’s according to Darryl Williams, who runs Luther Belden Farm in Hatfield with the help of his wife, Lucinda, and their four children — when they’re home, that is.

“It’s a family farm, everyone helps out. Like, you’re not going anywhere until the calves are fed,” Williams said. “And you learn responsibility pretty early on, when your father or mother says you have to check on so-and-so because she might be calving.”

Family dinners are almost always business meetings. You don’t get to leave for a job where you might also get a little space from each other after a disagreement. And forget about having time for family vacations, or even celebrating every birthday, said Edwin Matuszko.

“In 2008 it was Joe’s birthday and we started picking zucchini at 6:30 a.m. — the zucchini had decided to grow like heck — and we were out picking until 7 at night,” Edwin Matuszko said last week at the Stockbridge Road farm. “Then we had to pack it all. We didn’t get in until 9:30 or 10 p.m., so that’s when we celebrated his birthday.”

Long hours, hard work

A fairly common enterprise in the Pioneer Valley, the family farm takes different forms: the centuries-old tobacco farm run by a son from each generation, the potato farm where every employee is a relative, or the new organic farm where young people work at farmers markets alongside their parents.

In a barn at Twin Oaks Farm last week, the Matuszko and Kingsley family was putting the finishing touches on a picking of summer squash. The washed and sorted squash were packed into cardboard boxes and stacked on pallets. As soon as Edwin Matuszko secured a pallet of boxes with plastic wrap, his son scooped up the pallet with a motorized jack and wheeled it into the walk-in cooler.

The farm grows 55 to 60 acres of vegetables, including cabbage, peppers, Indian corn and pumpkins. Most of the produce is sold wholesale through the Pioneer Valley Growers Association, a cooperative the family helped found in South Deerfield in 1978. They also sell a bit to local farmers who want to augment the offerings at their farm stands or at markets.

“This is the present incarnation of Twin Oaks Farm,” Edwin Matuszko, 58, said. “I don’t know what it will be later.” Family farms, he said, have to adapt to the times.

“It might be totally different when I take over. It depends on the market, the weather, everything,” Josef Matuszko said.

Luther Belden Farm has also evolved over the years, Darryl Williams, 53, said. It started as a tobacco and onion farm, morphed into a sheep farm, and has been a dairy farm since the 1960s. Now, the family tends just over 200 cows and farm about 250 acres, mostly to produce hay and corn to feed the cows. Like Matuszko, Williams said he doesn’t know what it will look like in the future.

Standing in the yard at the Depot Road farm last week, Williams looked up to see his son, Jackson, 25, drive a tractor back to its parking spot in the yard. He was supposed to be scooping silage into a dump truck to be sold to another farmer, and he shouldn’t have been finished so soon.

“The hydraulic line blew on it,” Jackson Williams told his father before scooting off to make do with another, smaller tractor.

“It’s a typical day,” Darryl Williams said with a shrug.

He and his wife also have three daughters: Rebecca, 27, who lives in West Springfield, and Martha, 21, and Lenette, 18, both of whom live at home when they are not away at colleges in Kentucky and Idaho. Jackson Williams has a degree in biology from Berea College in Kentucky and a year of experience working on a sheep farm in New Zealand. He has been working at the family farm since he moved back a little over a year ago.

Anyone who is home is automatically a farm hand, Darryl Williams said. His wife Lucinda, who works as acquisitions supervisor for Smith College’s Neilson Library, often devotes her nights and weekends to the farm. “She bales hay, she’s planted corn,” Darryl Williams said.

While growing up, the Williams children knew everyone was expected to help with jobs like feeding calves or haying. There was always a seemingly endless amount of work to do, Jackson Williams said, but it was fun, too.

“When I was a kid, I thought it would be cool to live on a residential street,” he recalled, smiling at his childhood wish. “But I thought, ‘what would I do in my free time, when I’m not in sports or studying?’ There’s so much to do here. A lot of it is work, but a lot of fun goes along with it.”

At Twin Oaks Farm, Josef Matuszko has also been helping out for most of his life.

“I had fun. I did all the normal kid stuff and I also got to play around with some bigger toys,” he said. “I think I learned how to drive a tractor when I was 5 or 6.”

But he admits that there are downsides to farm life, too. While friends at school were going to summer camp, or on family beach trips, he was working, and the family was just too busy for some events or activities other kids did.

“Were there times I wished I could be more like my friends? Yeah,” Josef Matuszko said. “But if I didn’t enjoy this, I wouldn’t be doing it.”

Another thing you need to survive on a family farm is civility, Williams said.

“If you don’t get along as a family or you can’t work well together, it’s not going to work,” he said. “I was always blessed that my father and I always got along so well.”

Kingsley, 59, said that most of the time, her family gets along. “We enjoy each other’s company,” she said.

But as with every family, people at times get on one another’s nerves, especially after a long, hot day or a disagreement over how to do something.

“There might be a moment when you’ve got to go wheel harrow,” Edwin Matuszko said with a chuckle, referring to times he’s escaped from a family quarrel under the pretense of doing fieldwork.

“Or go check something in the greenhouse … twice,” Kingsley chimed in.

Another challenge is, unlike a job where you leave the office at the end of the day, you never really get to leave your work behind when you live on the family farm.

“Sometimes, it seems like all we talk about is business,” said Kingsley. She is especially aware of the round-the-clock farm life now, since she retired in February after 34 years working part-time in the Williamsburg Post Office.

“But, it’s also nice to get up, go out the door and you’re right on the job site,” she said.

To farm, or not to farm

At Luther Belden Farm in Hatfield, 13 generations of the same family have tilled the fertile land near the Connecticut River since 1661. In each generation, some siblings may have peeled off to do other work, but at least one stuck around.

Jackson Williams said the question of whether or not he’ll stay to take over the farm is “constantly on my mind.”

“My parents are great, they don’t put any pressure on me, but with the farm going for 13 generations, it kind of puts it on itself,” he said.

After the earlier generations cropped the land, Jackson Williams great-grandfather, Luther Belden, turned it into a sheep farm. In 1959 Belden’s daughter, Mary, married Gordon Williams, another farm kid who had grown up on Mt. Toby Farm in Sunderland. Gordon Williams studied dairy science at California Polytechnic State University, and when the young family came back to the Valley, Belden told them they ought to just build a dairy barn there and join the family business.

Darryl Williams grew up on the farm — primarily a dairy farm then — and couldn’t get the farm life out of his blood. He once thought he wanted to be a teacher and worked in the Amherst schools for one year.

“It was a nice job, but I kind of just wanted to be outside,” he said. “I liked the farm. I was living here at the time and I’d get out of work and come home and work the farm. I realized that was what I really wanted to do.”

Gordon and Mary Williams were active on the farm until a few years ago. “I still consider him a partner,” he said of his father, now 87. “My mother was always the one that fed that calves,” he said of Mary Williams, now 80. “She fed them every morning until about two years ago. She’s earned her rest.”

He said his parents never pressured him at all about staying on the farm.

“My parents had a pretty good philosophy and it’s one we try to keep,” he said. “If they want to come back, wonderful, if not, that’s OK, too.”

And if one of his children wants to take over the farm, they may have to consider changing it significantly, he said. Competition from larger farms out West and the rising cost of doing business has driven dozens of Massachusetts dairy farms out of business in the last decade. In July 2011, two dairy farms in Cummington, Howes Family Farm and Joyner Farm, sold off their herds. Now there are about 150 dairy farms in the state.

“It has to be something you want to, you have to love it,” Darryl Williams said. “And even if you love it, sometimes that’s not enough.”

Jackson Williams said he is interested in the farm, but he’s not ready to decide if he will be a career farmer.

“It’s something to think about: If I don’t take over the farm, I don’t know who of my siblings would. And seeing the farm go out of business is nothing I’m interested in,” he said.

While Twin Oaks Farm isn’t 13 generations old, the Matuszko and Kingsley family is just as interested in keeping the farm in the family.

Edwin Matuszko recalled how his grandfather started the farm, growing potatoes, onions and tobacco on the family land. But his father was injured in World War II and it was too hard for him to do the farm work, he said.

His parents, Edward and Lucy Matuszko, rented the land out to other farmers, so Edwin Matuszko still got to grow up around the farm life. He and Kingsley met when they were both working for the summer on a now defunct North Amherst farm and married in 1976.

None of Edwin Matuszko siblings wanted to work the farm. He worked briefly at Pro-Brush, a toothbrush factory in Florence, before he and Kingsley decided in 1979 to approach his parents about taking over the farm.

They started growing pickling cucumbers and have since diversified and expanded, renting 30 acres nearby in addition to the 30 they have on Stockbridge Road.

Kingsley said she would love to see her son working the land for decades to come.

“As long as that’s what he wants to do,” she said. “I would like to see him succeed in agriculture, and I think he will. He has a lot of years of experience and knowledge.”

If no family member steps up to take over the farm, selling the business is sometimes an option, though it’s more common for the farm operations to shut down and the family to rent or sell the land to other farmers.

In the case of my family, it’s unlikely some fresh face will want to buy the farm and get into dairy farming — a business that is increasingly hard to make a living in, no matter how many 16-hour days you put into it.

While my parents are still hopeful that my sister and her husband will be involved with the farm in the future, they know that might mean making changes to the operation to keep it going.

If nobody takes over the farm, that’s OK, too, Teresa Everett said. She and Alan Everett started the farm because it was the career of their dreams. They never had any expectation of how many generations it would last.

“It’s been the best experience of our lives to be able to have this career, farm on the family land, raise our daughters here and run the farm as a family,” she said.

My parents turn 60 this year and the farm is still going strong, with help from my father’s brother, Glen Everett, and two part-time hired hands.

Meanwhile, my nephew, Carson Bisbee, at 2, is already a true farm kid. I’m sure my sister’s second child, 5-month-old Brooke, will be the same.

So even if the farm doesn’t live on, at least one more generation of farm kids will trot in the barn with muddy boots and hay in their hair, just like my sisters and I did.

Rebecca Everett can be reached at reverett@gazettenet.com.  Original Post.

Education

100 Food Activist Twitter Feeds

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1. Alice Waters – @AliceWaters

The queen of California cuisine, Alice Waters is the Vice President of Slow Food International, founder of the Yale Sustainable Food Project, and owner of acclaimed locavore restaurant, Chez Panisse, in Berkeley, CA.

2. allAfrica.com – @allafrica

The premier news source for African news, allAfrica.com and its Twitter feed are great for information related to development, agriculture, and other news across the 54 countries in Africa.

3. Andrew Zimmern – @andrewzimmern

Zimmern, James Beard Award winner and host of Travel Channel’s Bizarre Foods, has a unique take on the cultural significance of food and its power to bring people together.

4. Andy Bellatti – @andybellatti

Bellatti, a self-described “wonk who loves to call out food industry deception,” offers the perspective of a food activist dietician.

5. Anna Lappe – @annalappe

Lappe has made a name for herself by founding Food Mythbusters, which aims to provide a clearer picture of the food industry and the hazards of fast food. She is behind the hashtag #MomsNotLovinIt – moms, however, certainly love Lappe’s Tweets.

6. Ann Cooper – @chefannc

Cooper promotes cooking from scratch in school cafeterias, emphasizing the link between food, farming, and children’s health.

7. Anthony Bourdain – @Bourdain

Bourdain is famously unabashed in his opinions, but has charmed his Twitter audience in delivering them along with stories of his world travels and his insights on food.

8. Barilla Center for Food & Nutrition (BCFN) – @BarillaCFN

BCFN, an Italian research institute working toward a more sustainable and healthy food system, tweets fascinating facts from the organization’s research, as well as links to many BCFN reports, articles, and projects.

9. Barton Seaver – @bartonseaver

Chef, author, educator, and advocate, Seaver has seen almost every side of the food system. He has a passion for sustainable seafood.

10. Bertini & Glickman (Catherine Bertini and Dan Glickman) – @GlobalAgDev

The official Twitter account for the co-chairs of the Chicago Council’s Global Agricultural Development Initiative tweets information on development policy and food security.

11. Beth Hoffman – @bethfoodtech

Hoffman is a freelance reporter who focuses on food, agriculture, and sustainability. She tweets links to a variety of food articles, offering a bit of skepticism about the food industry.

12. Bettina Elias Siegel – @thelunchtray

Siegel’s Twitter feed not only has great tweets about food issues, but it also organizes over 500 other Twitter feeds into lists like “Kids & Food,” “Anti-Hunger Groups,” “Food Reform & Advocacy,” and “Food Writing.”

13. Bill Telepan – @billtelepan

A Culinary Institute of America-trained chef, Telepan has used his restaurants to highlight sustainability, and also works to reform the New York City school lunch program.

14. Bioneers – @bioneers

Bioneers is a multi-media platform for advancing solutions for a more just and sustainable world. The initiative focus on restorative food systems, and its Twitter feed highlights some of the most interesting solutions to food system reform.

15. Catherine Bertini – @C_A_Bertini

Bertini has an impressive resume in food and agriculture: World Food Prize Laureate, Executive Director of the World Food Programme, and current co-chair of the Chicago Council on Global Affairs’ Global Agriculture Development Initiative. She tweets job opportunities, news, and quotes about the food system.

16. Center for Food Safety – @TrueFoodNow

The Center for Food Safety is dedicated to ending harmful food production technologies and supporting sustainable agriculture.

17. Center for Science in the Public Interest – @CSPI

With a newsletter that reaches almost a million people, CSPI is a strong advocate for food, nutrition, and health policy.

18. Center for Strategic & International Studies Global Food Security Project – @CSISFood

The CSIS Global Food Security Project provides research, analysis, and policy recommendations for improving food security. This Twitter feed links to news stories about advances in agriculture and food security in the developing world.

19. The Christensen Fund – @ChristensenFund

The Christensen Fund is a private foundation that supports initiatives promoting biodiversity and cultural and environmental sustainability. Its Twitter Feed includes updates from its funded projects and programs, as well as links to news stories that relate to its mission from around the world.

20. Civil Eats – @CivilEats

One of the leading news sources for food politics, Civil Eats confronts major issues in the American food system.

21. The Coalition of Immokalee Workers – @ciw

The Coalition of Immokalee Workers was founded in 1993 and has grown into an internationally recognized organization that advocates for corporate social responsibility and sustainable food. This is a must-follow Twitter feed for those interested in farmworkers’ rights and labor issues.

22. Community for Zero Hunger – @ZHCommunity

The Community for Zero Hunger is a new independent initiative that supports the U.N. Zero Hunger Challenge, and tweets on food security and hunger in the 21st century.

23. Conservation International – @ConservationOrg

Founded in 1987, Conservation International examines the relationship between economic development and conservation. The organization researches issues ranging from climate change to food and water supply.

24. Dan Barber – @DanBarber

Executive chef and owner of Blue Hill at Stone Barns, Barber is an acclaimed writer on food and agriculture and member of the President’s Council on Physical Fitness, Sports, and Nutrition. Barber’s Twitter feed is a glimpse into the mind of one of America’s greatest chefs.

25. David A. Kessler – @DavidAKesslerMD

Kessler, former Food and Drug Administration (FDA) commissioner, is also the author of The End of Overeating. His tweets cover food and agriculture from a health perspective.

26. Department of Agriculture – @USDA

The U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Twitter feed is a great place to get daily information, reports, and facts on agriculture and other food system issues in the United States. The Twitter feed also live-tweets important events.

27. Earth Eats – @eartheats

Part of Indian Public Media, Earth Eats covers news stories on food safety, policy, and sustainable agriculture, and also has a weekly podcast.

28. Eddie Gehman Kohan – @ObamaFoodorama

This fun Twitter feed keeps track of all White House food initiatives and events.

29. Edible Schoolyard – @edibleschoolyrd

Edible Schoolyard is dedicated to incorporating food education and school gardens around the country. It’s hard not to be a fan of the initiative’s mission to provide every student with a free, organic, and nutritious school lunch.

30. Environmental Working Group Toxics Team – @ewgtoxics

Cutting-edge research and advocacy are the defining characteristics of the Environmental Working Group. The EWG Twitter feed gives links to stories on their own research and to other relevant news stories.

31. Farming First – @farmingfirst

Farming First is a coalition of multi-stakeholder organizations that work to promote sustainable agriculture. Tweets are from a variety of sources that highlight sustainable agriculture.

32. Farm Labor Organizing Committee – @SupportFLOC

FLOC was founded in 1967, and grew into an innovative organization that focuses on the problems with large-scale food supply chains. FLOC has also fought to give migrant workers bargaining power in the labor market.

33. Feed the Future – @FeedtheFuture

U.S. government initiative Feed the Future works to develop long-term solutions to food insecurity and undernutrition.

34. FAO Newsroom – @FAOnews

The U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Newsroom is a great source for global food and agriculture news, and for updates on ongoing United Nations projects.

35. Food Chain Workers Alliance – @foodchainworkers

Founded in 2009, the Food Chain Workers Alliance is a coalition of over a dozen organizations fighting for workers’ rights. By forming a coalition, the Alliance is able to work toward a more sustainable food system with a united voice.

36. FoodCorps – @FoodCorps

By placing leaders into underserved communities, FoodCorps is educating the next generation about healthy, nutritious food. Tweets regularly highlight FoodCorps projects, gardens, and volunteers.

37. Food Day – @FoodDay2013

Save the date! October 24th is the culmination of a year’s worth of efforts for a more sustainable food system. The Twitter feed shares information about developments in the food movement and highlights Food Day events.

38. Food and Environment Reporting Network – @FERNnews

In-depth, investigative journalism related to food, agriculture, and environmental health, with stories that are rich, complex, and captivating.

39. Foodimentary – @Foodimentary

Foodimentary boasts a Twitter feed full of fun food facts and quirky news stories.

40. Food MythBusters – @FoodMythBusters

Armed with the hashtag, #MomsNotLovinIt, Food MythBusters dispels myths about the food system and exposes the real story about what we eat. The initiative also tweets about marketing by large food companies, particularly towards children.

41. Food for 9 Billion – @Foodfor9Billion

Food for 9 Billion is a multimedia collaboration that addresses the challenge of feeding nine billion people by the year 2050 with comprehensive articles, videos, and radio stories.

42. FoodRepublic.com – @foodrepublic

Food Republic examines the culture of food through stories and interviews with an international flair. Its Twitter feed links to many thoughtful articles about food.

43. Food & Think – @Food_And_Think

The food blog of Smithsonian Magazine, Food & Think offers a cultural and historical lens through which to look at food and agriculture.

44. Food & Water Watch – @foodandwater

Food & Water Watch focuses on ensuring that all food and water is safe, accessible, and sustainably produced. This initiative works to hold policy-makers accountable and to inform people about issues related to food and water.

45. Frances Moore Lappe – @fmlappe

Author of Diet for a Small Planet and co-founder of the Small Planet Institute, Lappé tweets a wide variety of sustainability- and food-related tweets.

46. Global Development – @GdnDevelopment

The Guardian’s Global Development site has some of the best, in-depth reporting of development issues available on the web, and tweets stories of development from around the globe.

47. Grist – @grist

Grist, the self-described “Beacon in the Smog,” reports on green and environmental issues with a humorous twist.

48. Hans Rosling – @HansRosling

An expert in statistics, Hans Rosling is a professor of global health and co-founder of Gapminder. Rosling is a resource for critical, and sometimes unexpected, information.

49. Heifer International – @heifer

Through gifts of livestock, seeds, and training, Heifer International works to alleviate poverty by providing individuals with the necessary tools to succeed, and regularly tweets about its many projects and success stories.

50. Henry Dimbleby – @Henry_Leon

Founder of Leon Restaurants in the United Kingdom, Henry Dimbleby has turned the traditional definition of fast food on its head. Dimbleby is also the co-author of the School Food Plan, a radical new vision for school food in the United Kingdom.

51. HuffPost Food – @HuffPostFood

The Huffington Post Food Twitter links to quick and easy reads, as well as slideshows, lists, and opinion pieces.

52. HuffPost Green – @HuffPostGreen

The Huffington Post’s Green section has interesting and sometimes entertaining stories on the environment, which it regularly shares on its Twitter feed.

53. The Hunger Project – @HungerProject

Since 1977, The Hunger Project has worked to empower men and women in the developing world to end hunger and poverty through sustainable, grassroots solutions. The Twitter feed provides “up-to-date tweets on issues that matter.”

54. Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy – @IATP

IATP tweets about the intersection of sustainable food, farm, and trade via news stories and the organization’s own articles.

55. International Fund for Agricultural Development – @IFADnews

IFAD works to combat rural poverty, specifically focusing on food security and nutrition. The organization’s tweets highlight projects around the globe and important information related to food security and poverty.

56. Jamie Oliver – @jamieoliver

Oliver is an acclaimed television personality and chef, but is also a serious food activist. His efforts helped overhaul Britain’s school lunch program, and he has continued to advocate for a healthier food system through his foundation.

57. John Besh – @chefjohnbesh

Owner of nine restaurants, Besh is a food icon who is dedicated to preserving the culinary heritage of New Orleans through scholarships and loans to small farmers.

58. Jonathan Bloom – @WastedFood

Bloom is the author of American Wasteland, an insightful book about food waste in America. His blog Wasted Food is another medium for his interest in food waste, and his Twitter feed is a source of plentiful information on food waste.

59. José Andrés – @chefjoseandres

Andrés is the President of ThinkFoodGroup and founder of World Central Kitchen. Not only a critically acclaimed chef, he is a leader in combating global hunger one plate at a time.

60. Jose Garces – @chefjosegarces

Garces is not only a James Beard Award winner, but also the owner of a forty-acre sustainable and organic farm. He tweets many interesting tidbits about food culture, including many beautiful pictures.

61. Kat Kinsman – @kittenwithawhip

Managing editor of CNN’s Eatocracy, Kinsman’s tweets simultaneously convey her commitment to sustainable food and sense of humor.

62. Ken Cook – @EWGPrez

Co-founder and President of the Environmental Working Group, Cook is an important voice on farm policy and chemical use.

63. Kim Severson – @kimseverson

Full of wit and interesting opinions on current events, Severson is the Atlanta Bureau Chief for The New York Times and forming Dining Section writer. She has written extensively on food, including her latest book, Cook Fight.

64. Lavida Locavore – @LocavoreBlog

The Locavore Blog takes a charming and personable approach to local and sustainable agriculture.

65. Let’s Move! – @LetsMove

First Lady Michelle Obama’s initiative is dedicated to raising a healthier generation of kid by combating the obesity epidemic.

66. Marcus Samuelsson – @MarcusCooks

An Ethiopian-born, Swedish-raised, made-in-America chef, Samuelsson doesn’t fit neatly into one box. His flagship restaurant, Red Rooster, is in the heart of Harlem, but reflects Samuelsson’s international background. He is also the founder of FoodRepublic.com, a website that explores the culture of food.

67. Marc Vetri – @marcvetri

Vetri has worked to reform school lunches and educate children about healthy eating in Philadelphia, while also working as a James Beard Award-winning chef. His tweets, offering great bits of information and experience from a sustainable chef, have a Philadelphia focus.

68. Marion Nestle – @marionnestle

The woman behind Foodpolitics.com, Nestle is an acclaimed author and professor of nutrition, food studies, and public health at New York University.

69. Mark Bittman – @bittman

Time Magazine called him “Twitter’s most-followable food wonk.” Bittman, New York Times columnist and author of How to Cook Everything, is one of the most renowned writers on food and agriculture issues.

70. Michael Pollan – @michaelpollan

Author of The Omnivore’s Dilemma, In Defense of Food, and most recently, Cooked, Pollan is a leading voice for a healthier, more sustainable food system.

71. Michele Simon – @MicheleRSimon

Author of Appetite for Profit, public health lawyer, and the woman behind the website Eat Drink Politics, Simon is a leader in developing food and alcohol policy.

72. Modern Farmer – @ModFarm

The Modern Farmer Twitter feed complements their stylish website and image-laden articles, providing a wide variety of stories about farming in the 21st century.

73. Muhammad Yunus – @Yunus_Centre

2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Muhammad Yunus is the founder of the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh, and tweets stories related to development and anti-poverty efforts.

74. Naomi Starkman – @NaomiStarkman

As co-founder and editor-in-chief of Civil Eats, Starkman’s Twitter feed covers important news about the food system and sustainable agriculture. She is a self-described “farmie, not a foodie.”

75. National Institute of Food and Agriculture – @USDA_NIFA

The NIFA Twitter feed features interesting research and reports related to agriculture in the United States.

76. National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition – @sustainableag

NSAC tweets highlight sustainable family farms and the Coalition’s advocacy work on behalf of family farmers.

77. New York Times Dining & Wine – @nytdining

While The New York Times’ Dining & Wine section is often filled with recipes, it also features important food news.

78. No Kid Hungry – @nokidhungry

No Kid Hungry’s tweets focus on child hunger in the U.S., and the organization’s own efforts to end child hunger. They also regularly recognize their supporters on Twitter.

79. Nourish – @Nourish_Life

Nourish is an educational initiative intended to stimulate meaningful conversations about food and sustainability. Its Twitter feed is an extension of that important dialogue.

80. NPR Food – @NPRFood

The NPR Food Twitter feed is home to the blog, The Salt, as well as all of NPR’s food-related stories. It offers in-depth coverage of a wide range of issues.

81. Oakland Institute – @oak_institute

This think tank’s investigative research delves into complex issues at the intersection of food, trade, and land. Its tweets focus on the successes and failures of projects in developing countries.

82. Olivier De Schutter – @DeSchutterUNSR

As the United Nations Special Rapporteur on the right to food, Olivier De Schutter is at the forefront of food security, and tweets news from the field.

83. ONE – @ONECampaign

The ONE Campaign’s three million members are a united voice for ending extreme poverty. Tweets are of facts, news, and stories of ONE’s advocacy efforts.

84. One Acre Fund – @OneAcreFund

Over 130,000 smallholder farmers in East Africa have been able to double their farm income on each planted acre through the One Acre Fund’s “market in a box.” Tweets focus on smallholder farmers, telling the stories of those impacted by One Acre Fund’s efforts.

85. Oxfam International – @Oxfam

Oxfam International is a collective of 17 organizations fighting poverty worldwide. The organization’s Twitter feed is a powerful testament to Oxfam’s work, and highlights crises around the world.

86. Paula Crossfield – @civileater

Crossfield is a pioneer in food reporting. As managing editor of Civil Eats and the Food and Environment Reporting Network, Crossfield tweets links to insightful articles and news stories.

87. Peter Ladner – @pladner

Ladner, an authority on urban food, is the author of The Urban Food Revolution. His tweets are part foodie, part urban, and 100 percent Canadian.

88. The Pig Idea – @ThePigIdea

The Pig Idea is a campaign to lift the ban on feeding food waste to pigs in the European Union, and regularly tweets about its progress.

89. Raj Patel – @_RajPatel

Author of Stuff and Starved, Patel tweets on a variety of contemporary issues and is currently working on a documentary on the global food system, Generation Food Project.

90. Real Food Challenge – @realfoodnows

The Real Food Challenge aims to harness the power of students to make an impact on the food system, one college campus at a time.

91. Real Food Real Jobs – @RealFoodandJobs

Real Food Real Jobs is at the nexus of workers’ rights and healthy, sustainable food. By simultaneously advocating for whole, fresh, nutritious food and fighting for a living wage for workers in the food industry, Real Food Real Jobs is an innovative food worker’s organization.

92. Rick Bayless – @Rick_Bayless

Chicago-based chef Bayless is not only known for his Mexican cuisine, but also his dedication to Midwestern farmers and his community. Through the Frontera Farmer Foundation and the Frontera Scholarship, Bayless has redefined the role of a chef to include being an active member of the community.

93. Roger Thurow – @RogerThurow

Senior Fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and author of The Last Hunger Season, Thurow tweets about hunger and food security.

94. Rodale Institute – @rodaleinstitute

The Rodale Institute has spent over 60 years researching best practices in organic agriculture, and its Twitter feed shares that research with the public.

95. Sam Fromartz – @fromartz

Fromartz is the co-founder and editor of the Food and Environment Reporting Network. His tweets focus on food issues, often with a slant toward bread, as he is currently working on a book on grains, bakers, and bread.

96. Savory Institute – @SavoryInstitute

The Savory Institute promotes land-restoration through holistic management, strategically using livestock to mimic wild herds, and the organization’s tweets focus on land degradation and restoration.

97. School Food Plan – @SchFoodPlan

With weekly Twitter chats and Q&A sessions, The School Food Plan Twitter feed is an interactive resource on a new food plan for United Kingdom schools.

98. Shamba Shape Up – @shambashapeup

With over 10 million viewers in Africa each week, Shamba Shape Up is a reality show about fixing farms and educating viewers about agriculture.

99. Slow Food USA – @SlowFoodUSA

Slow Food USA is focused on building a better food system through supporting food that is not only good for people, but the planet as well.

100. Small Planet Institute – @SmallPlanetInst

The Small Planet Institute examines the idea of a “Living Democracy,” where citizens work toward incorporating inclusion and fairness into public life. As part of this approach, the Small Planet Institute tweets links to articles related to food and agriculture in the context of its mission.

From: Food Tank’s 118 Best Twitter Feeds

Food Policy and Advocacy

Food Safety Rules: What Farmers – and their Advocates – Need to Know Now

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Reposted from NESAWG

August, 2013 Potluck News

NESAWG is part of a broader team that helps to educate and advocate about sustainable farm and food issues at the national level.  To that end, we bring our northeast regional perspective to the national table.

In the area of food safety, new rules governing food safety need to account for differences among types of farms to be meaningful and effective across the board.  In the northeast, we have a high concentration of IPM and organic farms, and farms serving direct markets like CSAs and farmers markets.  Read below regarding the upcoming rules and what farmers (and consumers) need to know.

__________________________________________________________________________

August is crunch time for farmers in the northeast.  Everything needs weeding, harvesting, reseeding and cover-cropping—and all at once.  Who has time to read 1,200+ pages of food safety rules and regulations?  Brian Snyder, Executive Director of the Pennsylvania Association for Sustainable Agriculture, for one.  And it’s a good thing he does.

The time for deciphering and commenting on the Food Safety Modernization Act’s proposed rules is now, especially since the courts are unlikely to allow any further extensions of the November 17 deadline.  Snyder is doing all he can to inform farmers and their advocates of the issues and urge them to take action.  The stakes couldn’t be higher.

 75 Years in the Making

“This is the first major rewrite of food safety legislation in 75 years,” says Snyder.  “Farmers can count on the fact that these will be the rules that they have to abide by for the rest of their lives, and probably even the next generation or two.”

Read the action steps that Snyder suggests all farmers take now!

Of course, agriculture has changed drastically in the last seven decades.  Our safety standards need to adapt to the complexities of our current global food system.  According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about 48 million people get sick from food-borne diseases each year.  In this summer’s latest outbreak, at least 418 people in 16 states were sickened by contaminated salad mix.  Our food system is so vast and complicated, Snyder says, “They couldn’t even tell us which country the produce was from until weeks after the outbreak.”

Updating decades-old legislation may help enhance tracking and minimize outbreaks.  The risk is that the rules as proposed would have unintended effects on farms that are not typically found to be the source of this type of widespread contamination— those using sustainable or organic growing methods and  distributing via small and direct markets.

 All Farms Great and Small

The tendency in Washington has always been to create rules that are adapted, in one way or another, for large industry—in this case, massive, conventional farms.  Those rules, when applied to sustainable or organic operations, pose serious threats.

“These regulations will be prohibitive in terms of expense and can put a number of farms and facilities that we work with out of business,” says Snyder.

For example, one rule would require that some farmers conduct weekly tests of each and every well used for irrigating crops.  Another mandates that fields fertilized with manure be left fallow for at least nine months.  In places that have cold winters, like the northeast, Snyder notes that a nine-month hiatus is equivalent to taking a field out of production for a full year.  Rules such as these exceed even the organic standards, which have served as many farmers’ benchmark for decades.  “How many farmers, organic or otherwise, have any idea that this going to be the rule if we don’t get it changed?”

An Exemption for Every Rule?

There is an exception to every rule, and much has been made about the exemptions written into the proposed FSMA regulations.  Many northeast farmers are being lulled into believing that exceptions for smaller farms apply to them.  In reality, cautions Snyder, “Those exemptions have limits that are more variable than they think.”

For example, the FDA’s proposed produce rule exempts any farmer selling less than $25,000 worth of product from compliance with some of the procedures.  A dairy farmer who plants an acre of vegetables to sell at a local market—hoping to clear enough to fix the milking machine—may assume she’s exempt.  However, the FDA doesn’t just count sales of produce toward that $25,000 limit, but everything sold on the farm for either human or animal consumption, including the milk sales that constitute her main income.  For most farms in this situation, Snyder observes, “They are going to be well over $25,000 before they plant their first zucchini.”

Another much-touted exemption is similarly limited: a farm with annual sales under $500,000 is exempt, but only if it earns at least 50% of its income through direct sales in the same state or within 275 miles of that farm.  Misleading information about these exemptions abound.  Snyder believes that the lobbyists who stand to gain if these rules are approved unimpeded are circulating much of it.  “That is the reason why every farmer really needs to pay attention,” he says, “There are trap doors in these exemptions that may not be immediately clear.”

 Farmers: Act Now!

Read Snyder’s suggestions for actions farmers and their advocates can take right now.

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For more ideas, videos and challenges, please join my Facebook Group; Just Food Now.   And also check out more World.edu posts. You also may be interested in the 15-credit Certificate, the 2-year Associate of Sciences degrees or the 4-year B.S. Sustainable Food and Farming major in the University of Massachusetts Stockbridge School of Agriculture.

Food Policy and Advocacy

Eating grass fed beef is good for the planet

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grassfedbeef
Published: Saturday, Jul. 6, 2013 – Sacramento Bee

Eating meat is bad for the planet, right? That hamburger you’re contemplating for lunch comes from a cow that, most likely, was raised within the industrial agriculture system. Which means it was fed huge amounts of corn that was grown with the help of petroleum, the carbon-based substance that has helped drive Earth’s climate to the breaking point. In industrial agriculture, petroleum is not only burned to power tractors and other machinery used to plant, harvest, and process corn – it’s also a key ingredient in the fertilizer employed to maximize yields.

Eating beef is particularly environmentally damaging: Cows are less efficient than chickens or pigs at converting corn (or other feed) into body weight, so they consume more of it than other livestock do. As a result, the industrial agriculture system employs 55 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce 1 calorie of beef. Meanwhile, livestock production is responsible for much of the carbon footprint of global agriculture, which accounts for at least 25 percent of humanity’s annual greenhouse gas emissions, according to the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization.

Despite its large carbon footprint, the agricultural sector is invariably overlooked in climate policy discussions. The latest example: In his 50-minute speech on climate change last week, President Barack Obama did not even mention agriculture except for a half-sentence reference to how farmers will have to adapt to more extreme weather.

Perhaps no one has been more influential in popularizing the environmental critique of industrial agriculture than Michael Pollan. His 2006 best-seller, “The Omnivore’s Dilemma,” revealed how corporate profits, misguided government policies and an emphasis on convenience have given Americans food that is cheap but alarmingly unhealthy for those who eat it, not to mention the soil, air and water relied upon to produce it.

These days, however, Pollan is delivering a deeper yet more upbeat message, one he shared in an interview while promoting his new book, “Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation.” (Disclosure: Pollan and I have been friendly colleagues since we met at Harper’s in the early 1990s, when he was executive editor.) Now, instead of just exposing the faults of the industrial agricultural system, Pollan is suggesting radical new ways to make agriculture work for both people and the planet.

Technology is central to Pollan’s vision, but, he says, “We have to think about what technology means. Does it only mean hardware and intellectual property? If we limit it to those two definitions, we’re going to leave out a lot of the most interesting technologies out there, such as methods for managing the soil and growing food that vastly increase agricultural productivity and sequester carbon but don’t offer something you can put into a box.” And why call even seemingly old-school methods “technology”? Because, he says, “technology has so much glamour in our culture, and people only want to pay for technology.”

With the right kind of technology, Pollan believes that eating meat can actually be good for the planet. That’s right: Raising livestock, if done properly, can reduce global warming. That’s just one element of a paradigm shift that Pollan and other experts, including Dennis Garrity, the former director general of the World Agroforestry Center in Nairobi, Kenya, and Hans Herren of the Millennium Institute in Washington, D.C., are promoting. They believe that new agricultural methods wouldn’t just reduce the volume of heat-trapping gases – they would also, and more importantly, draw down the total amount of those gases that are already in the atmosphere.

“Depending on how you farm, your farm is either sequestering or releasing carbon,” Pollan says. Currently, the vast majority of farms, in the United States and around the world, are releasing carbon – mainly through fertilizer and fossil fuel applications but also by plowing before planting. “As soon as you plow, you’re releasing carbon,” Pollan says, because exposing soil allows the carbon stored there to escape into the atmosphere.

One method of avoiding carbon release is no-till farming: Instead of plowing, a tractor inserts seeds into the ground with a small drill, leaving the earth basically undisturbed. But in addition to minimizing the release of carbon, a reformed agriculture system could also sequester carbon, extracting it from the atmosphere and storing it – especially in soil but also in plants – so it can’t contribute to climate change.

Sequestering carbon is a form of geoengineering, a term that covers a range of human interventions in the climate system aimed at limiting global warming. It’s a field that is attracting growing attention as climate change accelerates in the face of continued political inaction. Last month, the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere passed 400 parts per million, its highest level since the Pliocene Epoch 2.6 million years ago (when a warmer planet boasted sea levels 30 feet higher than today’s – high enough to submerge most of the world’s coastal capitals). Meanwhile, human activities, from driving gas-guzzlers to burning coal to leveling forests, are increasing this 400 ppm by roughly 2 ppm a year.

The case for geoengineering begins with the recognition that the most widely discussed “solutions” to global warming – such as riding a bike rather than driving a car and making electricity from wind rather than natural gas – address only the 2 ppm part of the problem while leaving the 400 ppm part untouched. To be sure, reducing the 2 ppm of annual emissions growth is absolutely necessary – it just doesn’t go far enough. At 400 ppm, global warming is already contributing to a mounting litany of record-breaking weather. In the last year, the United States alone has suffered its hottest summer on record, its worst drought in 50 years, and the largest Atlantic hurricane on record, Superstorm Sandy. Globally, the list of climate-related extreme weather events is much longer.

What’s more, even if annual emissions of greenhouse gases drop to zero, global temperatures will keep rising and climate impacts keep intensifying for decades to come, thanks to the inertia of the climate system. The only way to possibly reduce impacts in the years ahead is to address what is fundamentally driving them: the 400 ppm of CO2 currently in the atmosphere.

According to Pollan, photosynthesis is “the best geoengineering method we have.” It’s also a markedly different method than most of the geoengineering schemes thus far under discussion – like erecting giant mirrors in space or spraying vast amounts of aerosols into the stratosphere to block the sun’s energy from reaching Earth. Whether any of these sci-fi ideas would actually work is, to put it mildly, uncertain – not to mention the potential detrimental effects they could have.

By contrast, we are sure that photosynthesis works. Indeed, it’s only a slight exaggeration to say that photosynthesis is a major reason we humans can survive on this planet: Plants inhale CO2 and turn it into food for us, even as they exhale the oxygen we need to breathe.

What does all this have to do with eating meat? Here’s where Pollan gets positively excited. “Most of the sequestering takes place underground,” he begins.

“When you have a grassland, the plants living there convert the sun’s energy into leaf and root in roughly equal amounts. When the ruminant – e.g., a cow – comes along and grazes that grassland, it trims the height of the grass from, say, 3 feet tall to 3 inches tall. The plant responds to this change by seeking a new equilibrium: it kills off an amount of root mass equal to the amount of leaf and stem lost to grazing. The discarded root mass is then set upon by the nematodes, earthworms and other underground organisms, and they turn the carbon in the roots into soil. This is how all of the soil on earth has been created: from the bottom up, not the top down.”

The upshot, both for global climate policy and individual dietary choices, is that meat eating carries a big carbon footprint only when the meat comes from industrial agriculture. “If you’re eating grassland meat,” Pollan says, “your carbon footprint is light and possibly even negative.”

Some, but not all, of Pollan’s analysis here resembles the holistic management of grasslands advocated by Allan Savory, a biologist from Zimbabwe whose TED talk earlier this year provoked widespread interest. Savory has his critics, though, including James McWilliams, a historian at Texas State University, who wrote in Slate that the most comprehensive scholarly analyses of holistic grazing found that it did not improve plant growth or, by implication, carbon sequestration.

For his part, Pollan emphasizes that switching from corn-fed to properly grazed cows brings other benefits as well. Sequestering carbon improves the soil’s fertility and water retentiveness, thus raising food yields and resilience to drought and floods alike. Says Pollan: “I’m a believer in geoengineering of a very specific kind: when it is based on bio-mimicry” – that is, it imitates nature.

Pollan calls this approach “open source carbon sequestration.” He emphasizes that more research is needed to understand how best to apply it, but he is bullish on the prospects. Using photosynthesis and reformed grazing practices to extract atmospheric carbon and store it underground “gets us out of one of the worst aspects of environmental thinking – the zero-sum idea that we can’t feed ourselves and save the planet at the same time,” Pollan says. “It also raises our spirits about the challenges ahead, which is not a small thing.”

• To read previous articles in the “Views on Food” series, go to www.sacbee.com/CAfood Mark Hertsgaard has written about climate change for outlets including The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time and The Nation. A fellow of the New America Foundation, he has authored six books, including “HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth.”

© Copyright The Sacramento Bee. All rights reserved.

Read more here: http://www.sacbee.com/2013/07/06/5547890/viewpoints-why-overlook-agriculture.html?goback=%2Egde_2612649_member_257641615#storylink=cpy

Business

Downtown Amherst storefront eyed for local products

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By DEBRA SCHERBAN  – July 4, 2013 – Daily Hampshire Gazette

AMHERST — Organizers of a local products marketplace in the works for about a year have found a downtown storefront, are seeking members and could be open for business on North Pleasant Street this fall.

souperbowlRepresentatives of the All Things Local Store, an indoor farmers market featuring produce and wares from local growers and craftspeople, are negotiating with the owners of the SouperBowl restaurant at 104 North Pleasant St. to take over the equipment of that business, which has closed. If those talks succeed, they will sign a lease Aug. 1 with property owner Barry Roberts and could open by October, said Tina Clarke, a member of the working group planning the market.

“It will be like an old-fashioned marketplace,” Clarke said. The project is based on Local Roots Market and Cafe in Wooster, Ohio, which Clarke said she discovered during a training she was conducting in that area.

Become a Member of All Things Local Coop Here

SouperBowl co-owner Shiang Sobieski said if the sale goes through, SouperBowl will not reopen in Amherst. The restaurant, which specialized in soups and chili, has a sign on the door indicating it is closed for the summer. She declined to comment further while the deal is pending.

Meanwhile, the working committee of the All Things Local Store has been holding house parties and conducting an online campaign at its website, www.AllThingsLocalStore.com. Its goal is to sign up 300 members and raise $15,000 by July 31, which will cover two months’ rent, Clarke said. The fee is $50 per household.

Becky Reed, owner of One More Gambol Farm, and Bernard Brennan, owner of Amethyst Farm, stand near Reed's garden at her farm in Amherst Tuesday. They are two of seven members of the incorporating board of directors for the All Things Local Store planned for downtown Amherst. JERREY ROBERTS
Becky Reed, owner of One More Gambol Farm, and Bernard Brennan, owner of Amethyst Farm, stand near Reed’s garden at her farm in Amherst Tuesday. They are two of seven members of the incorporating board of directors for the All Things Local Store planned for downtown Amherst.
JERREY ROBERTS

John M. Gerber, a professor of the Stockbridge School of Agriculture at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, who is working with the group, said the first gathering last week resulted in 35 memberships. Another membership party was held Tuesday at 7 p.m. at One More Gambol Farm, 483 Montague Road, Amherst.

In addition, Clarke said there are about seven membership parties in the planning stages. She estimates 200 people are ready to sign up. “People are so excited about this,” she said.

The working group, which consists of local farmers and businesspeople, grew out of Transition Amherst, a community group focused on climate change, rising energy prices and economic instability. The seven members of the group are Clarke, a certified transition trainer; Jeremy Barker-Plotkin, co-owner of Simple Gifts Farm; Bernard Brennan, owner of Amethyst Farm; Robin Luberoff, an attorney; William McGinnis, an information systems and business strategy consultant; John Thibbits, project manager at Atkins Farms Country Market; and John R. White, a community organizer with food cooperative management experience.

Clarke said these seven will form the initial board of directors until a permanent board is elected.

The All Things Local Store aims to provide space for vendors who would be charged 20 percent by the market that will go toward paying rent and utilities, Clarke said. The farmers will get to keep 80 percent of their sales, she said. The idea is to eventually offer events such as “Meet the Producer” nights, cooking demonstrations, parties, lectures and use of the commercial kitchen for canning parties and other activities, according to the website.

All Things Local differs from a worker-run collective, she said, which is also in the planning stages in Amherst.

Called Amherst Community Market, that group is committed to setting up a full-service grocery store similar to River Valley Market in Northampton, Clark said. Initially, the thinking was the two groups could join forces, she said, but they realized their goals differed.

“In our case, each producer decides the price, sales, etc.,” she said. The overhead is low. “This will be a downtown marketplace that can compete with the big chains like Walmart and Whole Foods.”

Some of the local producers who have already signed on to participate are Simple Gifts Farm, Milk & Honey Herbs, Amethyst Farm, Backyard Bakery, Book and Plow Farm, RealPickles, Swartz Family Farm, King Creek Farm and Queens Greens.

Clarke said the group hopes to sign up 1,200 members to cover all the market’s costs.

As for opening day? “We’re shooting for Oct. 1, maybe sooner. We’re optimistic,” she said.

ATLposter

Source URL:http://www.gazettenet.com/businessmoney/7250796-95/downtown-storefront-eyed-for-local-products-marketplace-in-amherst

Food Policy and Advocacy

Suggested reading…..

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13 Books on the Food System That Could Save the Environment
By Food Tank: The Food Think Tank

LINK: http://foodtank.org/news/2013/06/thirteen-books-on-the-food-system-that-could-save-the-environment

Changing the ways consumers purchase, eat, and discard food is important for creating a more sustainable food system. Check out these books that identify and explain the problems in the food system—and how to make changes.

1. Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation by Michael Pollan

Michael Pollan takes back the “single most important thing [to] do as a family to improve our health and well-being”: cooking. A poetic exploration of the beauty and simplicity of preparing food, this book will help readers get off the couch and into the kitchen.

2. VB6: Eat Vegan Before 6:00 to Lose Weight and Restore Your Health . . . for Good by Mark Bittman

Mark Bittman delves into the benefits – to the environment, to personal health, and to the economy – of reducing meat consumption. Without forbidding or condemning meat, this is a great book for the environmentally-conscious omnivore.

3. Bet the Farm: How Food Stopped Being Food by Frederick Kaufman

Bet the Farm starts with an unnerving statistic: in 2008, “farmers produced more grain than ever, enough to feed twice as many people as were on Earth. In the same year… a billion people went hungry.” Kaufman delves into the problems with our food system and uncovers the financial underpinnings that motivate this dysfunctional system.

4. Foodopoly: The Battle Over the Future of Food and Farming in America by Wenonah Hauter

A farmer from Virginia and an advocate for healthy eating, Hauter explores the “corporate, scientific, industrial, and political” aspects of our food system in an effort to understand the problems with mainstream production and distribution systems, and how to fix them in order to incorporate healthy, mindful eating.

5. Behind the Kitchen Door by Saru Jayaraman

Exploring the food system from a different angle, Jayaraman points to the deeply troubling labor practices that exist in the food industry. With personal stories and interviews, Jayaraman unveils the low wages and grueling positions that farm and kitchen workers endure.

6. The Last Hunger Season: A Year In An African Farm Community On The Brink Of Change by Roger Thurow

Thurow spent a year with four women smallholder farmers in western Kenya to document their struggles in supporting and feeding themselves and their families. He evaluates the extent to which the work of initiatives like the One Acre Fund can help these farmers pull themselves up and defeat hunger and poverty.

7. American Wasteland: How America Throws Away Nearly Half Its Food (And What We Can Do About It) by Jonathan Bloom

Focusing on food waste in the United States, this book takes the issue beyond big farms and corporations to a very personal level. A great introduction to the ways that our own actions are impacting the food system, and what we can do about it.

8. The Urban Food Revolution: Changing the Way We Feed Cities by Peter Ladner

According to the World Health Organization, more than half of the world’s population now lives in cities. The Urban Food Revolution looks at the ways in which urban food systems need to change in order to become healthier and more sustainable

9. Diet for a Hot Planet: The Climate Crisis at the End of Your Fork and What You Can Do About It by Anna Lappe

Anna Lappe’s Diet for a Hot Planet outlines the ways in which the current food system contributes to climate change, the barriers to a true reform, and what consumers can do to provoke change.

10. WASTE: Uncovering the Global Food Scandal by Tristram Stuart

Uncovering waste in production and processing, the role of supermarkets in passing on wastefulness to suppliers and consumers, and consumers’ wasteful practices at home, Stuart’s book explores the many pathways of waste that exist in our food system. Even better, his book provides examples of countries where the food system is working, and offers tips on reducing and reusing our food.

11. The Backyard Homestead: Produce all the food you need on just a quarter acre! edited by Carleen Madigan

The Backyard Homestead tells would-be farmers how to farm on just a quarter of an acre.

12. The Perfect Protein: The Fish Lover’s Guide to Saving the Oceans and Feeding the World by Andy Sharpless

Sharpless argues that seafood will be the best source of sustainable protein for a rapidly growing global population. And he highlights the importance of protecting the health and biodiversity of wild fish populations.

13. The Essential Urban Farmer by Novella Carpenter and Willow Rosenthal

For those without a backyard, the Essential Urban Farmer is the essential tutorial to begin growing food in cities.

Education

Sustainability grows as a major in the Pioneer Valley

By MADELEINE LIST – Gazette Contributing Writer – Tuesday, June 4, 2013

For students in western Massachusetts, green is the new black.

Majors and certificates in different areas of sustainability are becoming increasingly popular at local colleges. Some are creating entire new programs to meet the rising demand.

In the fall, Greenfield Community College plans to introduce a program called SAGE, for Sustainable Agriculture and Green Energy — a collaboration of existing energy-efficiency and farm and food systems programs at the college, said Peter Rosnick, the college dean.

“The reason why there is so much interest in both of these programs is because (students) want to find solutions for climate change, they want to find solutions around energy and heating homes and finding means of transportation past oil,” he said.

“There is also a recognition that we need to be more self-reliant. If you are concerned about climate change, if you are concerned about the state of our environment, we need to figure out how to produce our own food,” he said.

pullcarrotEnergy efficiency and farm and food systems are both degree programs at GCC that are more related than one might think, said Abrah Dresdale, coordinator of the farm and food systems program.

“The global industrial agriculture system is the No. 1 consumer of fossil fuels, expending more carbon than any other industry, including war,” she said. “There’s a huge implication on our food availability and the whole way the system works, from the machinery used on the farm, to the plastic used in the packaging to the transportation of the food thousands of miles.”

SAGE will be the first program of its kind at GCC, and will provide opportunities not only for students, but for faculty and kindergarten through Grade 12 educators to learn ways Continue reading Sustainability grows as a major in the Pioneer Valley →

Food Policy and Advocacy

Breeding the Nutrition Out of Our Food

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By JO ROBINSON  in the NY Times, May 26, 2013

WE like the idea that food can be the answer to our ills, that if we eat nutritious foods we won’t need medicine or supplements. We have valued this notion for a long, long time. The Greek physician Hippocrates proclaimed nearly 2,500 years ago: “Let food be thy medicine and medicine be thy food.” Today, medical experts concur. If we heap our plates with fresh fruits and vegetables, they tell us, we will come closer to optimum health.

cornThis health directive needs to be revised. If we want to get maximum health benefits from fruits and vegetables, we must choose the right varieties. Studies published within the past 15 years show that much of our produce is relatively low in phytonutrients, which are the compounds with the potential to reduce the risk of four of our modern scourges: cancer, cardiovascular disease, diabetes and dementia. The loss of these beneficial nutrients did not begin 50 or 100 years ago, as many assume. Unwittingly, we have been stripping phytonutrients from our diet since we stopped foraging for wild plants some 10,000 years ago and became farmers.

These insights have been made possible by new technology that has allowed researchers to compare the phytonutrient content of wild plants with the produce in our supermarkets. The results are startling.

Wild dandelions, once a springtime treat for Native Americans, have seven times more phytonutrients than spinach, which we consider a “superfood.” A purple potato native to Peru has 28 times more cancer-fighting anthocyanins than common russet potatoes. One species of apple has a staggering 100 times more phytonutrients than the Golden Delicious displayed in our supermarkets.

weakgreensWere the people who foraged for these wild foods healthier than we are today? They did not live nearly as long as we do, but growing evidence suggests that they were much less likely to die from degenerative diseases, even the minority who lived 70 years and more. The primary cause of death for most adults, according to anthropologists, was injury and infections.

Each fruit and vegetable in our stores has a unique history of nutrient loss, I’ve discovered, but there are two common themes. Throughout the ages, our farming ancestors have chosen the least bitter plants to grow in their gardens. It is now known that many of the most beneficial phytonutrients have a bitter, sour or astringent taste. Second, early farmers favored plants that were relatively low in fiber and high in sugar, starch and oil. These energy-dense plants were pleasurable to eat and provided the calories needed to fuel a strenuous lifestyle. The more palatable our fruits and vegetables became, however, the less advantageous they were for our health.

The sweet corn that we serve at summer dinners illustrates both of these trends. The wild ancestor of our present-day corn is a grassy plant called teosinte. It is hard to see the family resemblance. Teosinte is a bushy plant with short spikes of grain instead of ears, and each spike has only 5 to 12 kernels. The kernels are encased in shells so dense you’d need a hammer to crack them open. Once you extract the kernels, you wonder why you bothered. The dry tidbit of food is a lot of starch and little sugar. Teosinte has 10 times more protein than the corn we eat today, but it was not soft or sweet enough to tempt our ancestors.

Over several thousand years, teosinte underwent several spontaneous mutations. Nature’s rewriting of the genome freed the kernels of their cases and turned a spike of grain into a cob with kernels of many colors. Our ancestors decided that this transformed corn was tasty enough to plant in their gardens. By the 1400s, corn was central to the diet of people living throughout Mexico and the Americas.

weakcornWhen European colonists first arrived in North America, they came upon what they called “Indian corn.” John Winthrop Jr., governor of the colony of Connecticut in the mid-1600s, observed that American Indians grew “corne with great variety of colours,” citing “red, yellow, blew, olive colour, and greenish, and some very black and some of intermediate degrees.” A few centuries later, we would learn that black, red and blue corn is rich in anthocyanins. Anthocyanins have the potential to fight cancer, calm inflammation, lower cholesterol and blood pressure, protect the aging brain, and reduce the risk of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular disease.

EUROPEAN settlers were content with this colorful corn until the summer of 1779 when they found something more delectable — a yellow variety with sweeter and more tender kernels. This unusual variety came to light that year after George Washington ordered a scorched-earth campaign against Iroquois tribes. While the militia was destroying the food caches of the Iroquois and burning their crops, soldiers came across a field of extra-sweet yellow corn. According to one account, a lieutenant named Richard Bagnal took home some seeds to share with others. Our old-fashioned sweet corn is a direct descendant of these spoils of war.

Up until this time, nature had been the primary change agent in remaking corn. Farmers began to play a more active role in the 19th century. In 1836, Noyes Darling, a onetime mayor of New Haven, and a gentleman farmer, was the first to use scientific methods to breed a new variety of corn. His goal was to create a sweet, all-white variety that was “fit for boiling” by mid-July.

He succeeded, noting with pride that he had rid sweet corn of “the disadvantage of being yellow.”

The disadvantage of being yellow, we now know, had been an advantage to human health. Corn with deep yellow kernels, including the yellow corn available in our grocery stores, has nearly 60 times more beta-carotene than white corn, valuable because it turns to Vitamin A in the body, which helps vision and the immune system.

SUPERSWEET corn, which now outsells all other kinds of corn, was born in a cloud of radiation. Beginning in the 1920s, geneticists exposed corn seeds to radiation to learn more about the normal arrangement of plant genes. They mutated the seeds by exposing them to X-rays, toxic compounds, cobalt radiation and then, in the 1940s, to blasts of atomic radiation. All the kernels were stored in a seed bank and made available for research.

In 1959, a geneticist named John Laughnan was studying a handful of mutant kernels and popped a few into his mouth. (The corn was no longer radioactive.) He was startled by their intense sweetness. Lab tests showed that they were up to 10 times sweeter than ordinary sweet corn. A blast of radiation had turned the corn into a sugar factory!

Mr. Laughnan was not a plant breeder, but he realized at once that this mutant corn would revolutionize the sweet corn industry. He became an entrepreneur overnight and spent years developing commercial varieties of supersweet corn. His first hybrids began to be sold in 1961. This appears to be the first genetically modified food to enter the United States food supply, an event that has received scant attention.

Within one generation, the new extra sugary varieties eclipsed old-fashioned sweet corn in the marketplace. Build a sweeter fruit or vegetable — by any means — and we will come. Today, most of the fresh corn in our supermarkets is extra-sweet, and all of it can be traced back to the radiation experiments. The kernels are either white, pale yellow, or a combination of the two. The sweetest varieties approach 40 percent sugar, bringing new meaning to the words “candy corn.” Only a handful of farmers in the United States specialize in multicolored Indian corn, and it is generally sold for seasonal decorations, not food.

We’ve reduced the nutrients and increased the sugar and starch content of hundreds of other fruits and vegetables. How can we begin to recoup the losses?

Here are some suggestions to get you started. Select corn with deep yellow kernels. To recapture the lost anthocyanins and beta-carotene, cook with blue, red or purple cornmeal, which is available in some supermarkets and on the Internet. Make a stack of blue cornmeal pancakes for Sunday breakfast and top with maple syrup.

weakpotoatIn the lettuce section, look for arugula. Arugula, also called salad rocket, is very similar to its wild ancestor. Some varieties were domesticated as recently as the 1970s, thousands of years after most fruits and vegetables had come under our sway. The greens are rich in cancer-fighting compounds called glucosinolates and higher in antioxidant activity than many green lettuces.

Scallions, or green onions, are jewels of nutrition hiding in plain sight. They resemble wild onions and are just as good for you. Remarkably, they have more than five times more phytonutrients than many common onions do. The green portions of scallions are more nutritious than the white bulbs, so use the entire plant. Herbs are wild plants incognito. We’ve long valued them for their intense flavors and aroma, which is why they’ve not been given a flavor makeover. Because we’ve left them well enough alone, their phytonutrient content has remained intact.

Experiment with using large quantities of mild-tasting fresh herbs. Add one cup of mixed chopped Italian parsley and basil to a pound of ground grass-fed beef or poultry to make “herb-burgers.” Herbs bring back missing phytonutrients and a touch of wild flavor as well.

The United States Department of Agriculture exerts far more effort developing disease-resistant fruits and vegetables than creating new varieties to enhance the disease resistance of consumers. In fact, I’ve interviewed U.S.D.A. plant breeders who have spent a decade or more developing a new variety of pear or carrot without once measuring its nutritional content.

We can’t increase the health benefits of our produce if we don’t know which nutrients it contains. Ultimately, we need more than an admonition to eat a greater quantity of fruits and vegetables: we need more fruits and vegetables that have the nutrients we require for optimum health.

weakcarrots————————————————————————————————————————–

Jo Robinson is the author of the forthcoming book “Eating on the Wild Side: The Missing Link to Optimum Health.”

Original Post

Farming, Food Policy and Advocacy

Old MacDonald had a farm – and then the neighbors sued

1 Comment

pill

by Scott Pitman and Michael Pill

Published in Massachusetts Lawyers Weekly: May 16th, 2013

Growing up in Iowa, and now living in the fertile Pioneer Valley of western Massachusetts, co-author Michael Pill appreciates the American Farmland Trust bumper sticker: “No Farms No Food.”

John Gerber, professor of sustainable food and farming at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, says one reason he has a big garden, raises chickens, collects honey from his backyard bee hive, and harvests greens throughout the winter in an unheated greenhouse is “the reality of our current global situation, which in my mind includes the ‘perfect storm’ of climate change, peak oil and economic downturn.”  Gerber believes there is a need for more community and family-level self-sufficiency in the face of “this global crisis.”

Most of us depend on supermarkets with only a few days’ inventory replenished by petroleum-fueled trucks that deliver food from hundreds or even thousands of miles away. It is a complex, fragile system that we take for granted.

So who’s right in attorney Gerald Nissenbaum’s ongoing legal battle with Ingaldsby Farm, next door to his home in Boxford? The latest chapter in the conflict was summarized in Lawyers Weekly (“Lawyer loses latest round in bout with neighboring farm,” April 1).

To survive in an age of large-scale industrial food production, the family farm at issue advertises “[f]resh produce, frozen fresh foods and baked goods. Kids can feed rabbits, goats, pigs, sheep and chickens, play on a large wooden train, watch a puppet show, or just play in the large sand box.”

The Boxford battle turns on the limits of the protection afforded to farm stands under G.L.c. 40A, §3, which grants a zoning exemption (numbers in brackets added to aid in parsing statutory language) to:

“[F]acilities for the sale of produce, wine and dairy products, provided that either

[1] [a] during the months of June, July, August and September of each year or

[b] during the harvest season of the primary crop raised on land of the owner or lessee,

25 per cent of such products for sale, based on either gross sales dollars or volume have been produced by the owner or lessee of the land on which the facility is located, or

[2] [a] at least 25 per cent of such products for sale, based on either gross annual sales or annual volume, have been produced by the owner or lessee of the land on which the facility is located and

[b] at least an additional 50 per cent of such products for sale, based upon either gross annual sales or annual volume, have been produced in Massachusetts on land other than that on which the facility is located, used for the primary purpose of commercial agriculture, aquaculture, silviculture, horticulture, floriculture or viticulture, whether by the owner or lessee of the land on which the facility is located or by another … .”

Chapter 1128, §1A defines “farming,” “agriculture” and “farmer” as follows (numbers in brackets added to aid in parsing statutory language):

“‘Farming’ or ‘agriculture’ shall include farming in all of its branches and

[1] the cultivation and tillage of the soil,

[2] dairying,

[3] the production, cultivation, growing and harvesting of any agricultural, aquacultural, floricultural or horticultural commodities,

[4] the growing and harvesting of forest products upon forest land,

[5] the raising of livestock including horses,

[6] the keeping of horses as a commercial enterprise,

[7] the keeping and raising of poultry, swine, cattle and other domesticated animals used for food purposes, bees, fur-bearing animals, and

[8] any forestry or lumbering operations, performed by a farmer, who is hereby defined as one engaged in

[a] agriculture or farming as herein defined, or

[b] on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations, including preparations for market, delivery to storage or to market or to carriers for transportation to market.”

Based on that definition, G.L.c. 40A, §3 provides that municipalities cannot through zoning “prohibit, unreasonably regulate, or require a special permit for the use of land … for the primary purpose of commercial agriculture, aquaculture, silviculture, horticulture, floriculture or viticulture … .”

Where agriculture is permitted by local zoning, this statutory exemption applies to parcels of any size. In areas “not zoned for agriculture, aquaculture, silviculture, horticulture, floriculture or viticulture,” the exemption applies “to parcels of 5 acres or more or to parcels 2 acres or more if the sale of products produced from the agriculture, aquaculture, silviculture, horticulture, floriculture or viticulture use on the parcel annually generates at least $1,000 per acre based on gross sales dollars … .”

The Ingaldsby Farm owners chose pumpkins as their path to farm-stand exemption heaven (see [1][b] in G.L.c. 40A, §3 above), while neighbor Nissenbaum contends that apples should be deemed the primary crop, with rather different consequences.

The multi-year fight continues. Given the foregoing and the following, the ground is fertile for battle. Oranges, anyone?

A raft of other legislative and regulatory provisions make challenging farms and farm stands a daunting proposition. For example, G.L.c. 111 includes provisions protecting farming operations from local boards of health, beginning with the following definition in G.L.c. 111, §1:

“‘Farming’ or ‘agriculture,’ farming in all of its branches and cultivation and tillage of the soil, dairying, the production, cultivation, growing and harvesting of any agricultural, aquacultural, floricultural or horticultural commodities, the growing and harvesting of forest products upon forest land, the raising of livestock including horses, the keeping of horses as a commercial enterprise, the keeping and raising of poultry, swine, cattle and other domesticated animals used for food purposes, bees, fur-bearing animals, and any practices, including any forestry or lumbering operations, performed by a farmer, who is hereby defined as one engaged in agricultural of farming as herein defined, or on a farm as an incident to or in conjunction with such farming operations, including preparations for market, delivery to storage or to market or to carriers for transportation to market.”

Chapter 111, §125A includes a provision “that the odor from the normal maintenance of livestock or the spreading of manure upon agricultural and horticultural or farming lands, or noise from livestock or farm equipment used in normal, generally acceptable farming procedures or from plowing or cultivation operations upon agricultural and horticultural or farming lands shall not be deemed to constitute a nuisance.”

Legislation providing for abatement of private nuisances grants immunity to farming operations (as defined by G.L.c. 128, §1A) in these words:

“No action in nuisance may be maintained against any person or entity resulting from the operation of a farm or any ancillary or related activities thereof, if said operation is an ordinary aspect of said farming operation or ancillary or related activity; provided, however, that said farm shall have been in operation for more than one year. This section shall not apply if the nuisance is determined to exist as the result of negligent conduct or actions inconsistent with generally accepted agricultural practices.”

If a local board of health nevertheless determines under G.L.c. 111, §125A that “a farm or the operation thereof constitutes a nuisance,” that statute requires written notice which can be appealed within 10 days to the local District Court. If an appeal is filed, “the operation of said order shall be suspended, pending the order of the court.”

If that weren’t enough, agricultural activities are also exempt from the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act and Regulations (G.L.c. 131, §40 and 310 C.M.R. 10.00). The definition of “Agriculture” in 310 C.M.R. 10.04 authorizes and defines “[n]ormal maintenance of land in agricultural use” that does not require an order of conditions from the local conservation commission.

Under 310 C.M.R. 10.04, “land in agricultural use” within a wetland or buffer zone must be “primarily and presently used in producing or raising one of more of the following agricultural commodities for commercial purposes”:

“1. animals, including but not limited to livestock, poultry, and bees;

  1. 2. fruits, vegetables, berries, nuts, maple sap and other foods for human consumption;
  2. 3. feed, seed, forage, tobacco, flowers, sod, nursery or greenhouse products, and ornamental plants or shrubs; and
  3. 4. forest products on land maintained in forest use … .”

The exemption is lost if agricultural use lapses for more than “five consecutive years,” unless the inactivity is under a U.S. Department of Agriculture contract or the land is used for “forestry purposes.” Id.

That becomes an issue when land allowed to lie fallow for more than five years is brought back into agricultural production. If hay has been cut to keep fields from returning to forest, one can argue to the local conservation commission that the haying constitutes “agricultural use.”

The wetlands exemption for agricultural use is reviewed in detail in “Farming in Wetland Resources Areas: A Guide to Agriculture and the Massachusetts Wetlands Protection Act (January 1996) (mass.gov/dep/water/laws/farman.pdf) by the state departments of Environmental Management (now Conservation & Natural Resources), Environmental Protection, and Food and Agriculture (now Agricultural Resources).

The Massachusetts Endangered Species Act grants similar protection, defining “land in agricultural use,” G.L.c. 131A, §1, to include the following activities:

“[R]aising animals … for the purpose of selling such animals or a product derived from such animals in the regular course of business … raising fruits, vegetables, berries, nuts and other foods for human consumption, feed for animals, tobacco, flowers, sod, trees, nursery or greenhouse products and ornamental plants and shrubs for the purpose of selling such products in the regular course of business; or when primarily and directly used in raising forest products … .”

Definitions and exemptions in the Endangered Species Act Regulations, 321 C.M.R. 10.02 and 10.14(1), are similar to those in the Wetlands Protection Act Regulations, 310 C.M.R. 10.04.

The bottom line is that attorney Nissenbaum, and others who may not want a farm next door, have an uphill battle in the face of the extensive legal protection for farming in Massachusetts. Perhaps next time we won’t get to compare apples to pumpkins. We’ll miss that.

Scott Pitman practices at the Law Offices of William V. Hovey in Boston. Michael Pill is a lawyer at Green, Miles, Lipton in Northampton.

Complete URL: http://masslawyersweekly.com/2013/05/16/old-macdonald-had-a-farm-and-then-the-neighbors-sued/

Reprinted with permission of the authors.