Photo taken: December 19, 2020 at 10:18AM
A profound statement of consumerism and framing of first world problems.
Tag: agriculture
There’s a deep irony to me that an online journal about farms, agriculture, livestock, and crops doesn’t have any (RSS) feed coverage.
A rag doll in freefall. Matt Griggs was seconds from death, at the whim of a combine beyond his control, pinballing against the interior of the cab. The massive machine, a 35,000 lb. behemoth, was roughly 4’ in the air, at the peak of a bizarre aerial jump that could never qualify for even the most outrageous Dukes of Hazzard script. Dropping back to the ground, the front tires touched down on a narrow, rural Tennessee backroad, catapulting Griggs from the box in an explosion of glass and depositing him in a skidding heap on the blacktop.
Some interesting framing here of community and faith in a bizarre (and potentially avoidable) accident. Nice closing with some safety, but I doubt many read past the opening graphs.
the hand of God ❧
read “statistical mechanics”
Annotated on October 15, 2020 at 08:05AM
Chris Bennett (AG Web)Adam Chappell was a slave to pigweed. In 2009, several years prior to the roller coaster rise and fall of commodity prices, he was on the brink of bankruptcy and facing a go broke or go green proposition. Drowning in a whirlpool of input costs, Chappell cut bait from conventional agriculture and dove headfirst into a bootstrap version of innovative farming. Roughly 10 years later, his operation is transformed, and the 41-year-old grower doesn’t mince words: It was all about the money.
Interesting to read this after hearing the experimental anthropologist Scott Lacy talk about farming technologies in Africa earlier this morning in Anthropology and the Study of Humanity. The African farmers described sounded much more in touch with their needs and their land than the majority of American farmers apparently are. Based on this, it almost sounds like Big AG has been doing to the industry what ride sharing tech companies are trying to do elsewhere, they’re just doing it with different tactics.
Somehow AG Web seems like the sort of journal I ought to check in on occasionally.
Complete reference and source book of edible plants of the world, invaluable to gardeners, cooks, economic botanists, those in the specialty and gourmet foods business. Includes 3,000 species and 7,000 varieties of food plants. More than 1300 catalog sources for seeds, plants and food products are listed. Revised, updated and expanded edition.
Food policy experts weigh in on the possibilities of individual diet choices and sustainable production methods.
Agriculture, forestry, and other types of land use account for 23 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions, according to the IPCC. ❧
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 11:49AM
While there is limited data available that can confidently measure the expansion of the meatless population, societal indicators like the double-digit sales growth of plant-based food options between 2014 and 2017 reflect a growing consumer demand for vegan and vegetarian foods. Still, an analysis by Animal Charity Evaluators found that between 2 and 6 percent of Americans self-identify as vegetarians, and only 1 percent of Americans self-identify as vegetarians and report never consuming meat. ❧
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 11:53AM
“The fundamental problem with climate change is that it’s a collective problem, but it rises out of lots of individual decisions. Society’s challenge is to figure out how we can influence those decisions in a way that generates a more positive collective outcome,” says Keith Wiebe, senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute. ❧
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 11:55AM
Consumer demand is one of four important variables that, when combined, can influence and shape farming practices, according to Festa. The other three are the culture of farming communities, governmental policies, and the economic system that drives farming. ❧
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 11:57AM
Festa argues that this is why organic farming in the U.S. saw a 56 percent increase between 2011 and 2016. ❧
A useful statistic but it needs more context. What is the percentage of organic farming to the overall total of farming?
Fortunately the linked article provides some additional data: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/10/organic-farming-is-on-the-rise-in-the-u-s/
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 12:01PM
There were more than 14,000 certified organic farms in the United States in 2016, a 56% increase from 2011.
Still, organic farming makes up a small share of U.S. farmland overall. There were 5 million certified organic acres of farmland in 2016, representing less than 1% of the 911 million acres of total farmland nationwide. Some states, however, had relatively large shares of organic farmland. Vermont’s 134,000 certified organic acres accounted for 11% of its total 1.25 million farm acres. California, Maine and New York followed in largest shares of organic acreage – in each, certified organic acres made up 4% of total farmland. ❧
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 12:09PM
Certified organic food, according to the Agriculture Department’s definition, must be produced without the use of conventional pesticides, petroleum- or sewage-based fertilizers, herbicides, genetic engineering, antibiotics, growth hormones or irradiation. Certified organic farms must also adhere to certain animal health and welfare standards, not treat land with any prohibited substances for at least three years prior to harvest, and reach a certain threshold for gross annual organic sales. U.S. organic farms that are not certified organic are not included in this analysis. ❧
Annotated on March 07, 2020 at 12:15PM
🎧 Welcome to Farm to Taber! Episode 1: Kestrels & Peanuts | Farm to Taber
Hi everyone! We're excited for Season One! There's a lot happening in agriculture that connects to major issues in labor, manufacturing, and sustainability.
An interesting first episode. I like that she lays out some of her background and where she’s coming from right up front. I do wish she’d given a bit more detail on it however.
🎧 Episode 43: Losing Ground (Seeing White, extra) | Scene on Radio
For Eddie Wise, owning a hog farm was a lifelong dream. In middle age, he and his wife, Dorothy, finally got a farm of their own. But they say that over the next twenty-five years, the U.S. government discriminated against them because of their race, and finally drove them off the land. Their story, by John Biewen, was produced in collaboration with Reveal.
It’s heartbreaking to hear the individual stories of those who were discriminated against. It’s even worse to consider the thousands of others whose stories aren’t told.
History cannot tell us the origin of wheat
Jean-Henri Fabre (Librairie Ch. Delagrave (1913), page 242)History celebrates the battlefields whereon we meet our death, but scorns to speak of the ploughed fields whereby we thrive; it knows the names of king's bastards, but cannot tell us the origin of wheat. That is the way of human folly.
An aphorism which should be more broadly known, particularly as fearmongers begin to attack the public going into election cycles. I thought I’d make an ironic motivational poster out of it.
Hat tip: Jeremy Cherfas’s excellent Eat This Podcast
Photo credit: poppy in wheat field flickr photo by Grey World shared under a Creative Commons (BY) license
👓 Certification schemes are holding back true sustainability, says report | Food Navigator
Many certification schemes are blocking true sustainability by watering down standards in order to get stakeholders on board and even providing 'green cover' for firms that are destroying the environment, according to a report.
I’ve always suspected things in this area weren’t great, but I didn’t know it was likely this horrific.
👓 Climate Change Is Messing With Your Dinner | Bloomberg
The future of food looks like lots of lobsters, Polish chardonnay and California coffee.
This is a difficult story to tell, though the timelapse imagery here is relatively useful. If one had some extra money lying around, it certainly indicates which crops one could be shorting in the markets over the next few decades.
I can imagine Jeremy Cherfas doing something interesting and more personalizing with this type of story via his fantastic interviews on Eat This Podcast.
h/t Jorge Spinoza
👓 Marijuana goes mainstream by Jeremy Cherfas
Jeremy Cherfas (jeremycherfas.net)Legalized marijuana is going the way of all agricultural commodities in the United States, and that shouldn't be a surprise. A really interesting analysis by 538 reveals that the price of pot has dropped for grower and dope fiend alike, and with big money at stake -- $6.7 billion this past year and $20 billion the dream for 2021 -- big money is very interested.
Jeremy has some great insight in looking at marijuana as a simple staple crop. It would be interesting to view this as a simple agriculture problem and compare the economics of it for the first several years to other crops like soybean and sorghum. I’m relatively sure of where things will end up, I’m just curious how they differ until things reach scale. This is a particularly interesting economics problem because it provides an experiment that isn’t an easy one to recreate at these scales for how often does a mass consumable crop get discovered?
🎧 Feding people is easy | Eat This Podcast
“Plenty of plants, not much meat and maximum variety.”
The best advice for a good diet I’ve ever heard. It’s a maxim devised by Colin Tudge, long before anything similar you may have heard from more recent writers. Tudge, more than anyone else I know, has consistently championed the idea that meat ought to be seen in a supporting role, rather than as the main attraction, a garnish, if you will.
Tudge has been thinking and writing about agriculture and food systems for a long time, and we’ve been friends for a long time too. In fact, it’s fair to say that knowing Colin has influenced my own thoughts about food and farming quite a bit. As far as Colin is concerned, we’ve been going about farming in completely the wrong way for the past 100 years or so. Instead of asking how can we grow more food, more cheaply, he thinks we should focus on what we need – good, wholesome food that doesn’t destroy the earth – and then ask how we can provide that for everybody.
He’s expanded and built on those ideas in many books since Future Cook (Future Food in the US), which contained that pithy dietary advice and which was published in 1980. And rather than reform or revolution, neither of which will do the job he thinks needs to be done, he advocates for a renaissance in real farming.
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🎧 Rethinking the folk history of American agriculture: Earl Butz is not the central villain of the piece | Eat This Podcast
Remember Farm Aid, which launched in 1985? A lot of people do, and they tend to date the farm crisis in America to the 1980s, triggered by Earl Butz and his crazy love for fencerow to fencerow, get big or get out, industrial agriculture. And of course, land consolidation is inevitable, because if you’re going to invest in all that capital equipment to make your farm more efficient, you’re bound to buy up the smaller farmers who weren’t so savvy. Those “facts,” however, are anything but. They’re myths, on which much of the current criticism of American farm policy is built. There are others, too, and they’re all skillfully eviscerated by Nate Rosenberg and Bryce Wilson Stucki in a recent paper.
One villain or two?
And here’s another thing. That first Farm Aid concert apparently raised $9 million. You could presumably help a lot of poor old dirt farmers with that kind of cash. But Farm Aid wasn’t actually about poor old dirt farmers, it was about people like Willie Nelson. He lost $800,000 the year before Farm Aid. Nine million dollars doesn’t go too far when individual people are losing that kind of money.
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An interesting often untold story of agriculture, race, and economics in the United States.