Organic

Cubans made the most of the break up of the Soviet Union. Losing their source of pesticides and fertilizers, they're growing some of the cleanest produce in the world.

by Robert E. Sullivan - Earth Times News Service

The Cuban revolutionary threat is back. In an innocuous, unmarked building in the Miramar suburb of Havana technicians from Fidel Castro's communist government are training cadres from all over Latin America.

Eventually it's many problems will overcome conventional industrial farming.

by Colin Graham

It is becoming stunningly clear that conventional, chemically based agriculture faces a grim future. Organic farming, on the other hand, seems to have blue skies popping up all over.

Amidst the concrete and skyscrapers of the city sprouts a determined group of folk who are turning backyards, balconies and vacant lots into a green oasis of food. Growing food in the city is not a novel idea, but with concerns about food security, food systems and people wanting to connect with the land – urban agriculture is a “growing” movement. Our Solutions – Urban Food section highlights some of the urban agriculture initiatives and ideas that are playing a role in regreening the urban landscape. This series of articles includes Vancouver’s Urban Farming Census, Sharing Backyards mapping project, youth guerilla gardening, community trust farming, myths about backyard chickens, how to turn lawn into garden

The Rodale Institute’s 23-year comparison of organic and conven­tional cropping systems confirms that organic methods are far more effec­tive at trapping and holding carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas, in the soil as beneficial organic matter.

Launched in 1981, the Farming Systems Trial (FST) is a 12-acre, side-by-side experiment, comparing three agricultural management sys­tems: one conventional, one legume-based organic, and one manure-based organic. In 23 years of continuous recordkeeping, both organic systems have shown an increase in soil car­bon of between 15-28%, while the conventional system has shown no statistically significant increase. For the organic systems, that translates into more than 1000 lbs of captured carbon or about 3670 lbs of CO2 per acre-foot per year, not even count­ing the reductions in CO2 emissions represented by the organic systems’ lower energy requirements.

by Maggie Paquet

Food – along with air, water, and shelter – is a need that all liv­ing organisms share. Growing our own food is one of the behav­iours that sets people apart from the rest of the ani­mals. Earlier in our social evolu­tion, we hunted for it and gathered it from our local environment and moved on. Then, some bright spark (some say it was a woman) discov­ered the secret of seeds. These marvellous lit­tle packets of energy could be saved and sown in greater quantities and in new places, places that often had other amenities favourable for human habitation, like plentiful water.

The need to keep wandering in search of food was no longer imperative.

by Joyce Nelson

With an entire agricultural edifice constructed upon cheap energy, Canada is especially vulnerable, and not just because of rising oil prices - which economist Jeff Rubin (Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller)  recently claimed will reach "record highs" by 2011.

Canada's dominant form of agriculture follows a high input, energy-intensive, export-oriented model of industrial food production that gives little thought to feeding ourselves. According to the Toronto Star (Oct. 12, 2009), "Canada now imports 80 percent of its fruits and vegetables," even though we grow more than 100 varieties of these foods, mostly for export.

Excerpt from Joyce Nelson's WS article, "Eating Our Way Back to the Future: Low Greenhouse Gas Agriculture"

Peak oil may soon give us peak food. As we run out of fossil fuels, food will get increasingly expensive not only to produce, but to import and export. Changes to this system can also be good news, however, since globally, agriculture and our industrial food system account for almost one-third of all greenhouse-gas (GHG) emissions that contribute to climate change. Changing how we farm our food can literally change the fate of the world.

"Low GHG agriculture" places top priority on soil restoration and on soil as a carbon sink. It looks to farming methods that are common practice in organic agriculture and, in some cases, practices that were widely used by Canadian farmers sixty or more years ago.