Tag Archives: healthy soil

Pesticides Are Making Children Aggressive

“Pesticides cause a multitude of adverse effects on humans. However, they are especially harmful to children.”

Pesticides cause a multitude of adverse effects on humans. However, they are especially harmful to children. They may have something to do with the mass-shootings in schools all over America because some of them are neurotoxins. This means they affect and damage the central nervous system and the brain – of all animals, including humans.

Warren Porter, professor emeritus of zoology at the University of Wisconsin, conducted experiments with ground water – water drawn from the ground of farms with typical levels of pesticides and fertilizers. He chose farm water contaminated with the insecticide aldicarb, the herbicide atrazine, and nitrogen fertilizer. He tested that mixture on white mice and deer mice.

The concentrations of the fertilizer with each of the pesticides (aldicarb and atrazine) in the ground water were of the order of magnitude the Environmental Protection Agency says the chemicals cause “no unreasonable harm to man and the environment.” In other words, Porter put to the ultimate test the assurances of EPA and the chemical industry about the toxins EPA registers (approves) – that they are safe and farmers may spray on crops Americans eat.

Porter discovered the mixture of common ground water and farm chemicals had detrimental effects on the animals’ nervous, immune, and endocrine systems. The mice became aggressive and had problems with their thyroid hormones. Their immune system was also compromised in its ability to make antibodies against foreign proteins.

Organic food means food without farm sprays, sludge, radiation, and genetic engineering. This healthy food is also political food: helping us to fight pollution and control by the agrochemical-industrial-political complex.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/04/14/pesticides-are-making-children-aggressive

Ride shotgun on this game-changing farm in “One Hundred Thousand Beating Hearts,” streaming now on Salon Premium

Will Harris, a good ol’ boy Georgia rancher, may well be our nation’s best bet for a better, more sustainable future. He’s the subject of a documentary by Peter Byck, “One Hundred Thousand Beating Hearts.”

Tell us one story about the production.

When Will was taking me around the surrounding counties, to see the dying towns, small towns that had a strong agricultural base and that had been shriveling up due to poor economics for the local folks, we were filming along an old mill and rain was impending. I could see the coming squall down the road and it appeared to me to be about four minutes away. At about three minutes [out], when Will finished his answer to one of my questions, I grabbed the camera and tripod, told him we’d better run back to his truck, and as soon as we shut the doors, it started to really come down. He was impressed with my sense to read the rain. That made me feel good.

What’s been your past interest in sustainable animal agriculture?

I look to regenerative agriculture, and AMP [adaptive multi-paddock] grazing in specific, as a potential way to draw down significant amounts of carbon from the air and store it in the soils. Carbon is the currency for healthy soils — and healthy soils produce healthy foods and help farmers to make more food on their land. My experience is filming farmers and ranchers across the U.S., Canada and the UK. These innovative producers of food are my heroes.

General Mills is transitioning 53 square miles of South Dakota farmland to certified organic.

This headline from the smart website newfoodeconomy.org caught our attention: “General Mills is transitioning 53 square miles of South Dakota farmland to certified organic.” That’s 34,000 acres that will be converted to organic by planting a mix of hard red spring wheat (for pasta) hard red winter wheat, dry yellow peas, corn, soybeans, sunflowers and alfalfa. They call it Project Gunsmoke.

“The Gunsmoke project is an opportunity to use our scale to help convert large areas of acreage to organic as one of our tools to create a more stable supply chain,” General Mills said.

In short, demand for organic, or chemical-free, foods is growing exponentially and the major food suppliers can’t keep up.

http://www.stormlake.com/articles/2018/03/21/crops-are-changing

‘Dead zone’ in Gulf of Mexico will take decades to recover from farm pollution

A new study says that even in the ‘unrealistic’ event of a total halt to the flow of agricultural chemicals the damage will persist for 30 years.

The enormous “dead zone” in the Gulf of Mexico will take decades to recover even if the flow of farming chemicals that is causing the damage is completely halted, new research has warned.

Intensive agriculture near the Mississippi has led to fertilizers leeching into the river, and ultimately the Gulf of Mexico, via soils and waterways. This has resulted in a huge oxygen-deprived dead zone in the Gulf that is now at its largest ever extent, covering an area greater than the state of New Jersey.

A new study has found that even if runoff of nitrogen, a fertilizer chemical, was fully stemmed, the Gulf would take about 30 years to recover. Even this scenario is “not only considered unrealistic, but also inherently unsustainable”, researchers stated in the work, published in Science.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/mar/22/dead-zone-gulf-of-mexico-decades-recover-study

Hemp Offers Benefits For The Future

The Polo Hemp Mill in Illinois began operation on November 20, 1943. At that time there were more than 3,200 hemp growers in the state.

Educational materials and propaganda videos such as “Victory for Hemp” were sponsored by the U.S. government, assuring cultivation would be backed by our military and economy.

Considering this happened 74 years ago this fall, we see the same struggles in the present-day relationship between farmers and industrial hemp in Illinois. This time around, a massive effort is required to establish sustainability and resilience within our agricultural system and the next economy, not the war effort.

Once again, farmers need assurance that hemp is a viable crop for their rotation and that hemp will not only benefit their pocketbooks as a fiber crop, but also is a powerful ally in environmental restoration.

Requiring little water and no fertilizers or pesticides to grow, hemp thrives in marginal soil. It removes chemicals that seep into waterways. It can replace paper products, reducing deforestation that encroaches on fragile ecosystems. And that’s just a start.

The market for hemp products is vast and growing rapidly. It includes durable textiles; strong, ecofriendly building materials; natural cosmetics; petroleum free bio-plastics and biofuels; beneficial, non-psychoactive medicines; and nutrient dense foods.

As a first-generation farmer, and a woman, I am so thrilled to have a future in hemp on my horizon. My devotion to this plant stems from a realization that regenerative agriculture is my only path to an honest living.

I’m Rachel Berry, and that’s my perspective.

http://northernpublicradio.org/post/hemp-offers-benefits-future

California is preparing to defend its waters from Trump order

In its first act to shield California from the Trump administration’s repeal of regulations, the state’s water board has prepared its own rulesprotecting wetlands and other waters.

The proposed new rules, scheduled for a vote by the board this summer, could insulate the state from President Donald Trump’s executive order toroll back the reach of the Clean Water Act. That rollback would strip federal protection from seasonal streambeds, isolated pools and other transitory wetlands, exposing them to damage, pollution or destruction from housing developments, energy companies and farms.

California is preparing to defend its waters from Trump order

Sally and Mike Gale raise grass-fed beef and lambs and grow apple trees on un-irrigated pastureland dependent on rain at Chileno Valley Ranch in Petaluma, CA.

Farming for a Small Planet

How we grow food determines who can eat and who cannot—no matter how much we produce.

People yearn for alternatives to industrial agriculture, but they are worried. They see large-scale operations relying on corporate-supplied chemical inputs as the only high-productivity farming model. Another approach might be kinder to the environment and less risky for consumers, but, they assume, it would not be up to the task of providing all the food needed by our still-growing global population.

Contrary to such assumptions, there is ample evidence that an alternative approach—organic agriculture, or more broadly “agroecology”—is actually the only way to ensure that all people have access to sufficient, healthful food. Inefficiency and ecological destruction are built into the industrial model.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2018/01/12/farming-small-planet

New Report on Radioactive Tap Water Renews Concerns About Trump Nominee

New Report on Radioactive Tap Water Renews Concerns

About Trump Nominee for Top Environmental Role

Critics are challenging Trump’s “outrageous” and “alarming” move to renominate the former head of a Texas environmental agency who has admitted to falsifying reports of radiation levels in drinking water

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2018/01/12/new-report-radioactive-tap-water-renews-concerns-about-trump-nominee-top

AND

http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/43195-embattled-trump-nominee-inadvertently-draws-attention-to-radiation-in-drinking-water

Author Says Soil Is Key To Addressing Effects of Climate Change

In 2013 the United Nations declared Dec. 5 to be World Soil Day, a recognition of the significance of healthy soil in both improving food security and nutrition, and mitigating the effects of climate change, including drought, flood, soil erosion and sea level rise. This year the U.N. held a conference at its New York headquarters on the theme of “caring for the planet starts from the ground.”

Didi Pershouse, founder of the Center for Sustainable Medicine in Thetford and author of The Ecology of Care, and the downloadable PDF which was released online in August, was one of five panelists invited to speak at this year’s conference.

http://www.vnews.com/Soil-expert-Didi-Pershouse-speaks-at-UN-conference-14410464

and

didipershouse.com

WTO Summit to Ignore Price Crisis, Agricultural Dumping

Around the world, chronically low crop prices are keeping farmers from making a living despite record harvests.

Crops are in across the U.S. farm belt, with record harvests filling farmers’ silos with grain and their hearts with pride. Yet persistent and punishingly low prices for those crops leave them no better off for their efforts. Net farm income this year is about half what it was in 2013.

U.S. farmers are not alone. The world is experiencing what Reuters called a “global grain glut,” with many staple food crops filling silos from Brazil to the Ukraine. Crop prices have fallen dramatically, with serious repercussions for farmers, particularly poor farmers in developing countries.

https://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/12/10/wto-summit-ignore-price-crisis-agricultural-dumping-0