Gardening & Food

When current science news is filled with pictures – incredible, beautiful, literally awesome pictures – of planetary bodies 3 billion miles away, it’s easy to forget what’s happening on the soil beneath our own feet.

California’s already experienced almost four years of drought, brutalizing the state’s ability to provide food to the country and the world beyond it. The state’s insatiable thirst, largely due to its high concentration of farms, is leaving its nonagricultural areas high and dry. But that’s not even the half of what our need for a full pantry is doing to the planet.

The “plastic sea,” a massive industrial agriculture area composed of greenhouses in Almeria, Spain, covers more than 45,000 acres.

Ten years ago, a report in National Geographic claimed 40% of the Earth’s land was dedicated to agriculture. That was over half a billion people ago. As the world’s population grows at an alarming rate, more of the planet’s real estate needs to be turned into farmland. While that means more food for everyone, it also means destroying the nature beneath it.

The “plastic sea” employs an estimated 80,000 workers.

In Almería province, Spain, where a massive portion of Europe’s fruits and vegetables are grown, plastic greenhouses stretch across the country like creeping moss, overtaking quiet landscapes with hydroponic megafarms. “They block up dry riverbeds and destroy mountainsides but nobody does anything, however much we complain,” environmentalist Juan Antonio Martínez said about diggers carving terraces in a nearby province, according to the Guardian. “If there is a serious storm, much of this will be washed away.”

There’s evidence linking some of the pesticides used in those greenhouses to cancer and other health complications. 

If findings from a professor in Granada province ring true, some of the chemicals in use have come with increased breast cancer rates among women and testicular issues in boys. But the money to be made from bolstering demand is enough to keep local authorities from coming down too hard on farmers not obeying the rules.

In 2012, it was estimated that the world’s population produced 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage – or the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings.

Where Martínez lives, the greenhouses are mostly run using hydroponic systems, engineered to keep water use low and evenly distributed. In northern Saudi Arabia, however, where water is scarce and large swaths of real estate have been converted to farmland, the dwindling groundwater, originally the key to keeping Saudi Arabia’s wheat industry afloat, forced the country to search for more desperate options.

Irrigation farm fields near Hail, in Saudi Arabia, don’t use hydroponics. But that means huge water demands in the middle of a desert.

With so many farms, the country needs to look elsewhere for water.

With low rainfall and high export demand, livestock farms in California are turning into dust bowls.

A 2013 study from researchers in Kenya, Australia and Austria found that the livestock sector across the planet produces 285 million tons of meat each year – which comes out to about 80 pounds of meat per person. That, of course, implies that the global community puts away a small person’s worth of animal parts every year. In reality, according to the researchers, Americans eat way more than most people in the world. We consume 270 pounds of meat a year on average.

The drought in California makes this usually lush pasture dry as a bone.

But the amount of meat we eat isn’t what’s striking here. First, global livestock produces enough methane – yep, burps, farts and manure – to affect the greenhouse gases affecting the atmosphere. Second, animals, especially big ones, need to eat to be eaten.

According to Time, 1.3 billion tons of grain are polished off by livestock every year. They’re like walking garbage disposals, and when they aren’t able to eat the grass of their pastures, like when their pastures turn into giant dust bowls, they have to turn to imported options. Grain comes from a lot of places. One of the major producers of cattle’s favorite carb is the incredibly thirsty Saudi Arabia.

Thanks to overfishing, some species of fish are caught faster than they can reproduce.

Thanks in no small part to the global appreciation for spicy tuna rolls, the ocean is running dangerously low on bluefin tuna, among other fish, due to overfishing. According to a 2013 report from the, the sushi mainstay’s population has dropped more than 96% in the Northern Pacific Ocean.

A huge percentage of the fish caught are too young to reproduce, making the population drop faster without offspring to buffer the species.

Bluefin tuna are, by nature, predators. And in the food chain, they keep the ocean balanced, going after schools of smaller fish and keeping them from overrunning the waters. Killing off a predator doesn’t sound too harmful for the environment. But when a top predator is knocked off from overfishing, it can create a butterfly effect, changing the ocean’s composition in ways we can’t know.

Almost all industrial plants function on fossil fuels, like the ones dug up at this oil field in California.

Even though humanity has been getting better about more efficient means of producing food, 85% of U.S. energy still relies on oil, coal and natural gas. But it’s not fueling trucks or tractors. It goes to producing chemicals. Five years ago, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimated nitrogenous fertilizers, used for growing plants, accounted for 352 trillion Btu of natural gas for production. That’s a lot of drilling.

Fruits and vegetables are being grown in huge quantities. But they aren’t all getting eaten.

According to statistics from the United Nations Environment Program, the global community wastes 222 million tons of food annually. That means roughly one third of all the food coming from the Spanish greenhouses, the California livestock farms and everywhere in between doesn’t end up in a stomach. According to National Geographic, an typical family of four in the United States doesn’t use up to 1,160 pounds of the food it buys – averaging $1,484 going to waste every year.

Wasted meat, like the 600 tons a South Korean company had to incinerate, spoils and carries disease to other countries.

U.S. farms have had a few problems with diseased meat getting out to the world’s larger importing markets, not least of all in 2012 when a South Korean retailer had to put the kibosh on all U.S.-imported beef. Before that, a U.S. mad cow disease scare in 2004 led to a severe drop in the country’s then $4.3 billion beef export business, and around the world, importers who didn’t find out about the problem until it was too late had to find ways to dispose of the products. In Incheon, South Korea, that meant incinerating 600 tons (1,200,000 pounds) of raw meat.

Waste doesn’t always stay in its own country. Sometimes it ends up in massive garbage dumps, like this one in Haiti, which is over 200 acres.

Whether from food or otherwise, it’s hard to know how much litter is actually created in the world. On New York City subways, an announcement politely informs riders that 1,443 tons of trash were removed from subway tracks in 2014. In the United States, 220 million tons of waste are generated every year, with over half ending up in landfills. And in 2012, it was estimated that the world’s population produced 2.6 trillion pounds of garbage – or as the put it, the weight of about 7,000 Empire State Buildings.

In places with poor or nonexistent waste management, the garbage gets eaten by animals, which in turn get eaten by people.

Depending on where you live, that 2.6 trillion number might sound high or low. For the people of Port-au-Prince, Haiti, where massive, 200-acre-plus dumps are scavenged for recyclables, it probably sounds right. Same goes for the electric waste dumps in Accra, Ghana, or the waste management program-less towns of Manila. For many people living in the U.S., we don’t have to witness all the waste piling up except on trash day. But it all goes somewhere.

But there are ways to approach agriculture differently for the sake of the planet.

Global moves are being made from different industries to keep us from starving and to learn to eat in less environmentally costly ways. That may be farming in our homes, printing our own food or engineering meat to take the incredible weight of raising cattle off the planet. But just increasing our technology dependence isn’t enough to save a planet ravaged by the people living on it. It’s time to pitch in.

Looks like organic food has gone from a new-age trend to a staple in supermarkets and many American diets. According to a new analysis from the Organic Trade Association (OTA), organic food sales in 2014 jumped 11 percent to $35.9 billion, claiming almost 5 percent of the total food sales in the U.S.

The numbers are a huge spike since the OTA first kept record in 1997, where organic food sales only totaled around $3.4 billion, accounting for less than 1 percent of total food sales.

Fruits and vegetables-the number one selling organic category-raked in $13 billion in sales, a 12 percent increase from the prior year. Organic fruits and vegetables now account for 12 percent of all produce sold in the nation. Organic dairy also jumped 11 percent in sales last year to $5.46 billion, the biggest percentage increase for that category in six years. Organic food has consistently far outshone the three percent growth pace for the total food industry, the OTA said.

There are many reasons why more consumers are buying organic, including the perception that it’s healthier, more sustainable and has fewer pesticides. As we previously reported, the Rodale Institute found that there is 7 percent pesticide residue in organic foods as opposed to 38 percent in conventional produce.

The industry has not only boomed due to consumer demand, the federal government-which decides which foods can be considered organic-is also spending a lot more money on this sector. As Quartz ′s food and consumer goods reporter Deena Shanker observed, “Mandatory spending on organics under the 2002 U.S. farm bill totaled a measly $20 million, but by 2014, that number had risen to $167.5 million.” Shanker also noted that the number of certified organic farms, ranches and processing facilities in the U.S. have almost tripled to a record 19,474 operations since 2002.

The data also showed that imports of organic corn and soybeans from countries such as Romania and India are booming because while demand for organics grows among U.S. consumers, there remains a “near-total reliance by U.S. farmers on genetically modified corn and soybeans,” according to Bloomberg News.

The U.S. is the top grower of corn and soybeans in the world and yet we are importing these products because about 90 percent of U.S. corn and soybeans are genetically modified, and thus, cannot be certified as organic. As a result, imports to the U.S. of Romanian corn rose to $11.6 million in 2014 from $545,000 the year before and soybean imports from India more than doubled to $73.8 million, according to Bloomberg News.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) is set to propose standards for organic seafood raised in the country this year. Currently, “organic” seafood sold in the country is not approved by the U.S. government. The varieties that are available from menus or the market come from European, Canadian or other countries’ standards or via a private certification company.

 

The U.S. is “trying to play catch-up on organic aquaculture,” Miles McEvoy, who heads up USDA’s organic program, told the Associated Press.

However, designating a fish as “organic” is much more difficult than a piece of fruit, and some environmental organizations have spoken out against the USDA’s proposed move.

“The designation ‘organic’ is directly related to whether the feed an animal has been reared on is organic, whether it has been exposed to chemicals or pesticides and whether it has been genetically altered,” Food & Water Watch said. “Because the food sources and environment of wild fish are completely uncontrolled, they should not be considered organic.”

The farmed fish industry also said they expect that the requirements for fish feed may be so strict as to be financially prohibitive, according to the AP. So it might be some time before you can buy U.S. certified organic seafood from your local fishmonger.

For the fourth year, Strolling of the Heifers, a Vermont-based local food advocacy group, has ranked the 50 states (and DC) in terms of their commitment to local foods. The winners are in for the 2015 Locavore Index: the top four are Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire and Oregon. These states also topped the list in 2014. Massachusetts moved into fifth place (from 11th in 2014). Rounding out the top 10 were Wisconsin, Montana, Hawaii, Rhode Island and Connecticut.

 

The index looks at the number of farmers’ markets, the number of CSAs, the number of food hubs-all compared on a per-capita basis-and the percentage of each state’s school districts with active Farm-to-School programs.This year’s index includes new information from the Census of Agriculture, which “provides a direct measurement of the per-capita dollar value of food products sold directly by farms to consumers through farm stands, farmers’ markets and CSAs,” says Strolling of the Heifers.

The index shows that “the various policies at the national and state levels that encourage local food programs are having measurable results,” says Orly Munzing, founder and executive director of Strolling of the Heifers. “At the Federal level, there’s the Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food program which helps promote farmers markets and provides grants for farm-to-school and farm-to-institution programs. Many states also have active programs to encourage local food consumption, and Vermont’s Farm-to-Plate network is a national leader in this respect. All these programs are good for farmers, good for consumers and they help to build stronger communities.”

Find out how your state ranks:

 

By the year 2050, the Earth’s population will reach more than 9 billion people. With so many mouths to feed, agribusiness giants have argued that genetically modified crops are the answer to global food security as these plants have been spliced and diced to resist herbicides and pesticides and (theoretically) yield more crops.

However, a new analysis from the Environmental Working Group (EWG) slams this conventional agribusiness argument-and recommends much more sustainable solutions to feed the world.

The report, Feeding the World Without GMOs, argues that genetically engineered crops (also known as GE or GMOs) have not significantly improved the yields of crops such as corn and soy. Emily Cassidy, an EWG research analyst who authored the report, found that in the last 20 years, yields of both GE corn and soy have been no different from traditionally bred corn and soy grown in western Europe, where GE crops are banned. Additionally, a recent case study in Africa found that crops that were crossbred for drought tolerance using traditional techniques improved yields 30 percent more than GE varieties, she wrote.

The report also said that in the two decades that GE crops have been a mainstay in conventional agriculture, they “have not substantially improved global food security” and have instead increased the use of toxic herbicides and led to herbicide-resistant ” superweeds.” (FYI: superweeds have spread to more than 60 million acres of U.S. farmland, wreaking environmental and economic havoc along the way).

She pointed out that while corn and soybeans take up the vast majority (about 80 percent) of global land devoted to growing GE crops, they are not even used to feed people but instead as animal feed or fuel.

Unfortunately, this practice is unlikely to change in light of increased consumption of meat around the world, as well as U.S. biofuel policy requiring production of millions of gallons of corn ethanol to blend into gasoline, Cassidy observed. “Seed companies’ investment in improving the yields of GMOs in already high-yielding areas does little to improve food security; it mainly helps line the pockets of seed and chemical companies and producers of corn ethanol,” she said. “The world’s resources would be better spent focusing on strategies to actually increase food supplies and access to basic resources for the poor, small farmers who need it most.”

Gary Hirshberg, chairman of Just Label It, an organization advocating for federal labeling of GMO foods that also provided funding for the EWG report added, “Biotech companies and their customers in chemical agriculture have been attempting to sell the benefits of GMOs for two decades. Between exaggerated claims about feeding the world and a dramatic escalation in the use of toxic pesticides, it is no wonder consumers are increasingly skeptical.”

Fortunately, as Cassidy noted, there are ways out of this mess that will not only produce enough food for the world’s burgeoning population but will also make minimal impacts on our environment. It comes down to four main approaches:

• Smarter use of fertilizers: Fertilizer should be used in places with nutrient-poor soils where it would have the greatest impact, instead of over-fertilizing industrial-scale farms. This switch could increase global production of major cereals by 30 percent, the report said.
• A dramatic shift in biofuels policy: A World Resources Institute analysis found that by 2050, biofuels mandates could consume the equivalent of 29 percent of all calories currently produced on the world’s croplands. According to the report, reversing course on food-based biofuels policies could alleviate the need to double the global calorie supply.
• A significant reduction in food waste: By weight, a third of all food grown around the world-accounting for a quarter of calories-goes uneaten, according to the United Nations’ Food and Agriculture Organization. Food gets tossed before it reaches the market, much less anyone’s plate. So in theory, by eliminating all food waste in fields, grocery stores and at home would increase the global calorie supply by 33 percent, the report noted.
• A better diet: Meat production currently uses up three-quarters of all agricultural land, and on average, it takes about 10 calories of animal feed to produce just one calorie of meat. This suggests that a shift from grain-fed beef to a diet emphasizing chicken or grass-fed beef could reduce the amount of land devoted to growing animal feed such as corn and soy (Beef also stands far above the production of other livestock for its negative environmental impact).

Cassidy concluded that investment in genetic engineering is no substitute for solving the real causes of food insecurity and poverty, such as improving access to basic resources and infrastructure in developing countries.

“The alternative strategies of smarter resource use, improving the livelihoods of small farmers, reducing food waste and changing diets could double calorie availability and reduce the environmental burden of food production, all without relying on GE foods,” she wrote.

We wonder what Bill Nye thinks about this?