Archive for the ‘Climate Change’ Category
Seattle Grows Supper
Seattle Grows Supper on Friday, June 3, brought together a dynamic gathering of more than 30 chefs, farmers, food wholesalers, writers, nutritionists and others working on a community-based food system. The dinner was convened by the Seattle Tilth Advocacy Group, people who are farmers, food planners, processors and food justice advocates working to nimbly develop a more resilient Seattle.
As people made their way from table to table in a World Café-style potluck dinner, ideas bubbled up, were quickly reviewed, and refined.
Some fun, unique, and important ideas emerged from Seattle Grows Supper:
- Create an on-line Farmville-style game called “Farm Bill”
- Put recipes in CSA boxes that chefs develop unique to each neighborhood
- Provide spaces at farmers’ markets for very very local producers
- Permit farm stands in very small places, parking lots, corner stores
- Focus on mothers as change agents: Snacks, school meals, family dinners, are family-values issues we can all support
- Pay attention to the commons, particularly be aware of privatizing water rights
- Find stories and learn clear language that speaks across many cultures: food as medicine
- Develop achievable food system metrics and goals. Seattle can set a goal to grow and process 30% of what its people eat in the next five years — and we can compost 90% of our food waste!
People left the three-hour dinner “hungry for more”. Another Seattle Grows Supper over the summer seems likely. Stay tuned!
A Frosty Spring
At least the chickens are still laying!
I woke up this morning and looked out to see frost liming the roof of the garage. Usually our last frost date is April 15th but it looks like La Nina is going strong. According to Kiro this is the coldest spring on record. How is your garden holding up? My peas are sparse, the beets haven’t emerged and the flowering fruit trees have almost no bees.
I built a small greenhouse over the weekend on the south side of the house in hopes of clearing out some of the starts filling up our tiny kitchen; tender basil and tomatoes – will they survive?
Winona LaDuke Promotes Native Crop Diversity
This is Ivan, a member of the White Earth Anishinaabeg people, holding a Lakota squash. Lakota squash are one of the foods Winona LaDuke spoke about February 3, 2011 at a John and Jesse Danz Lecture at the University of Washington.
LaDuke, who may be best known as the VP Green Party running mate of Ralph Nader in 2000, is a Harvard-trained rural development economist in northern Minnesota. She’s been actively promoting schemes to address climate change, peak oil, and local resilience: wind farms, solar panels, and most relevant to Urban Farm Hub, preserving seed genetic diversity.
Which gets us back to that Lakota squash Ivan is holding. LaDuke favors this species because it is drought tolerant, high in anti-oxidants, tastes good, and most significantly, stores unrefrigerated for six to eight months.
LaDuke has led the charge to protect wild rice and other crops from depredations of genetic modifications through her non-profit Honor the Earth. “Seeds are our history. We used to grow a lot of food here people,” LaDuke said.
These days LaDuke focuses on crops that are adaptable in the face of climate change. “It’s not just growing locally, it’s what you choose to grow.” Like that squash.
Corn species – Blue Island Flint, beautiful Seneca Pink Lady Flour, Pawnee Eagle – are selected by LaDuke for resistance to the frost and heavy winds we are starting to see our increasingly unstable climate. “Change is inevitable. It’s a question of who controls the change. We need to plan our change with moral outrage and hope.”
LaDuke began and ended her talk with blessings and some sage advice: “We need to pray hard, savor the wins, and tell the stories. These aren’t the stories you are going to see in People magazine, but stories about us that we are longing to hear.”
Green Roofs Industry Embraces Urban Ag
Living Architecture Monitor–a magazine that advocates for green roofs–has dedicated its current issue to innovative urban agriculture policies and projects.
Included are articles on designing the edible building envelope, Seattle’s recently adopted urban ag policies, Brooklyn’s Eagle Street Rooftop Farm, rooftop pollinating in New York City, the economic valuation of rooftop farming, and macro-scale food production in Toronto.
Also of note is the 8th Annual Green Roof and Wall Conference being held in Vancouver, BC from November 30-December 3. The conference is featuring a half-day workshop titled, ‘Introduction to Rooftop Urban Agriculture,’ where folks can learn about multiple approaches to growing food on rooftops through design and maintenance principles. Course topics will include:
- Design Principles
- Economic Models
- Regulatory Issues
- Case Studies
To view conference details, visit CitiesAlive.
American Farmland Trust Expanding Environmental Markets for Farmers
The Pacific Northwest is anticipating significant growth in the years ahead, most of which is likely to occur in areas of environmental sensitivity.
Environmental markets (also referred to as ecosystem service markets) represent a way for growing communities to offset or mitigate for the unavoidable impacts of growth and development at the lowest reasonable cost. At the same time, they can provide supplemental income for our farmers and ranchers, improving their economic viability, and providing the funding necessary for them to protect their land and remain in agriculture.
American Farmland Trust’s Pacific Northwest Office is engaged in a broad effort to develop and improve the ability for farmers to access a wide variety of existing and emerging Environmental markets. These include carbon sequestration, water quality trading, wetland mitigation, wildlife habitat mitigation, renewable energy, water transactions, flood mitigation, and more.
They hope to make as many different kinds of conservation market opportunities as possible available across the broad spectrum of agriculture so that selling environmental services becomes a meaningful part of the everyday business of agriculture.
Join them this evening in Tumwater for their last evening workshop to help explain how to use these markets—either as a way to earn extra income or as a new source of funding for land stewardship projects. The workshops are designed for farmers and ranchers, conservation district staff and supervisors, NRCS personnel, Extension staff, land stewardship professionals and anyone else who is interested.
In addition to the workshops, American Farmland Trust has developed a Guide to Environmental Markets for Farmers and Ranchers.
More information about the project and the guide is available at: www.farmland.org/environmentalmarkets.
Crop Yield and Carbon Footprint at Interbay P-Patch
From Ray Schutte here is some interesting information on Interbay P-Patch crop yields and climate footprint.
Many of us garden year round here in Seattle. At the Interbay P-Patch where
I garden we calculate the average annual yield to be 3.25 lbs per square
foot. Averages are impacted by the crops that are produced. This average was
calculated based on a survey of gardeners and their harvests.
You might be interested in a climate footprint calculation we did as well for a city
grant:To calculate the CO2 emissions from a gallon of fuel, the carbon emissions are multiplied by the ratio of the molecular weight of CO2 (m.w. 44) to the molecular weight of carbon (m.w.12): 44/12. CO2 emissions from a gallon of gasoline = 2,421 grams x 0.99 x (44/12) = 8,788 grams = 8.8 kg/gallon = 19.4 pounds/gallon
CO2 emissions from a gallon of diesel = 2,778 grams x 0.99 x (44/12) =
10,084 grams = 10.1 kg/gallon = 22.2 pounds/gallon
. Emissions per gallon of gasoline = 0.0097 tons of CO2
. Emissions per gallon of desiel = 0.111 tons of CO2
. Average gardener’s single- or double-occupancy vehicle trips to and from garden to harvest = 10 miles per week
. Average gardener’s fuel economy = 22 miles per gallon
. Average commercial transport fuel economy = 7 miles per gallon
. Interbay P-Patch produces an estimated 10 tons of fresh organic
produce every summer.
. Average number of trips gardeners make to the patch to harvest: 1
per week for 34 weeks; 340 miles/season/ gardener
. Number of gardeners: 120
. Number of Interbay gardener miles driven: 40,800
. Average food miles: 1500 miles per ton, or 150,000 milesInterbay gardener emissions = 17.98 tons of CO2
Equivalent food miles emissions = 237.85 tons of CO2
Annual reduction in cardon footprint = 219.87 tons of CO2
Ray Schutte believes in the quote by Nikki Giovanni that “Life is a Good Idea”. He is also the president of the P-Patch Trust, Advocate for Community Gardens in Seattle at www.ppatchtrust.org
Saving Seeds to Adapt to Climate Change
“The land is in the air,” speaker Cary Fowler quoted from a 4,000 year old Egyptian tomb inscription of someone who died in times of drought and starvation. In this sixth lecture of the UW series “Food: Eating Your Environment,” Fowler shared compelling accounts of failure to respond to evidence of life-threatening environmental changes in his talk called “Feeling the Heat: Food and Famine in a Finite World.” Vikings trying to settle in Greenland shared their final meal of their cattle’s hooves before starving in the cooling climate, and the primary cause of paralysis in India continues to be the consumption of the legume Lathyris that is both drought and flood tolerant, but also contains a neurotoxin. Fowler asserts “People should not have to choose between starvation and paralysis.”
As Executive Director of the Global Crop Diversity Trust, Fowler is morally driven by climate change evidence to take steps to adapt to warmer temperatures, higher extremes and longer intervals of warmer temperatures. With $9 million in funding from Norway, Fowler worked through the Trust to excavate the Svalbard Global Seed Bank into the side of a mountain in the Svalbard Islands north of the Norwegian mainland. Over 600,000 unique crop varieties are saved at -4 degrees Celsius under the permafrost.
Seed banks in Iraq, Afghanistan, Rwanda and Burundi have been destroyed in war or civil strife. Other seed banks are vulnerable to extreme weather events, with significant loss of biodiversity and even extinction of some seed varieties.
To be able to adapt to changing climate, the Global Crop Diversity Trust is saving seeds from around the world, so that plant breeders of the future will have as many options as possible for adapting crops to feed global populations.
Karen Holt Luetjen has explored food system topics through her work for UW Center for Public Health Nutrition, WSU Extension and Seattle Tilth. She is currently coordinating a December conference on Cultivating Regional Food Security: http://depts.washington.edu/uwbg/news/food-security/
Food Waste Nation
Ok, be prepared, this article is not uplifting or inspiring; it’s downright depressing. How many of you have science experiments lurking in your fridge? I know I’ve got a few. From the New York Times read on.
How much food does your family waste?
A lot, if you are typical. By most estimates, a quarter to half of all food produced in the United States goes uneaten — left in fields, spoiled in transport, thrown out at the grocery store, scraped into the garbage or forgotten until it spoils.
A study in Tompkins County, N.Y., showed that 40 percent of food waste occurred in the home. Another study, by the Cornell University Food and Brand Lab, found that 93 percent of respondents acknowledged buying foods they never used.
And worries about food safety prompt many of us to throw away perfectly good food. In a study at Oregon State University, consumers were shown three samples of iceberg lettuce, two of them with varying degrees of light brown on the edges and at the base. Although all three were edible, and the brown edges easily cut away, 40 percent of respondents said they would serve only the pristine lettuce. More…
Innovations in Urban Ag from Sony’s Open Planet Ideas
How can technology help mitigate environmental degradation? Check out Sony’s Open Planet Ideas to find out. I especially liked the idea about vertical ag.
The Problem! By the year 2050, nearly 80% of the earth’s population will reside in urban centers. Applying the most conservative estimates to current demographic trends, the human population will increase by about 3 billion people during the interim. An estimated 109 hectares of new land per person (about 20% more land than is represented by the country of Brazil) will be needed to grow enough food to feed them, if traditional farming practices continue as they are practiced today. At present, throughout the world, over 80% of the land that is suitable for raising crops is in use (sources: FAO and NASA). Historically, some 15% of that has been laid waste by poor management practices. What can be done to avoid this impending disaster? More…
An Energy Ravenous Beast
From Grist, here’s another thought-provoking article on energy usage in our food system. Next time I reach for my beloved food processor, I am going to think twice.
In his recent The New York Times op-ed, “Math Lessons for Locavores” — debated at length in our “Food Fight” feature — Stephen Budiansky shows that transportation and “modern” (i.e., highly mechanized and chemical-intesnsive) farming make up relatively small parts of industrial food’s energy footprint. Consumers in their kitchens, in Budiansky’s view, are the real energy guzzlers — so locavores should stop worrying and learn to love industrial food.
Those points are addressed broadly by a recent article in Amber Waves, the publication of the USDA’s Economic Research service. On page 13 of this lucidly written report, we find that in 2002, U.S. households used nearly 4 quadrillion BTUs of energy in the kitchen, more than any other sector of the food system. By contrast, transportation — think of the vast fleet of trucks that ferries the food we eat cross-country, to supermarket chains and eateries — consumed about 0.6 quadrillion BTUs. And agriculture, with its gas-dependent combines and other machines and fossil fuel-sucking fertilizers and pesticides, used just 2.1 quadrillion BTUs. More…
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