Plans to boost food production in Britain and reduce its impact on the environment have been unveiled.

The government's 20-year food strategy includes making land available for people to grow their own food and more healthy cooking courses.

Minister Hilary Benn said shoppers had led the push for free-range eggs and could do the same for sustainable food.

The Tories said ministers "belatedly" recognised the need for food security after a decade of declining production.

Environment Secretary Mr Benn unveiled the government's Food 2030 plan at the Oxford Farming Conference and said a rising population and climate change meant food could not be taken for granted.

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By Gar Smith, Earth Island Journal. Posted December 28, 2009.

There is a 'toilet revolution' taking shape -- and it may be coming just in time.

Upwards of 3 million people die annually from diarrhea, dysentery, and parasitic diseases -- all for the want of clean water. Meanwhile, each year in the water-rich United States, 2.1 billion gallons of the world's most precious liquid are used, not to water thirsty crops or slake parched throats, but to flush human waste from home toilets to municipal sewers. While harvesting rainwater and recycling graywater are fine strategies, it's time to get to the seat of the problem. We need a Toilet Revolution.

As frequently happens, the solution to this modern problem can be found in the recent past -- and the Third World present. Jeff Conant, author of The Community Guide to Environmental Health, has traveled the world in search of the perfect "waterless toilet." He found it in the Mexican town of Tepotzlan, which boasts hundreds of "non-traditional waterless" eco-loos. In the 1980s, Tepotzlan's innovators got a boost when former UNICEF worker Ron Sawyer settled in to help the locals design a new generation of "eco-san" toilets.

While the practice of using human waste as fertilizer is as old as humanity itself, Tepotzlan's eco-sanistas marked an engineering watershed when they found a way to separate feces from urine. A locally designed toilet seat harvests the fluids while allowing the solid wastes to fall into a dry compost toilet. (Not such a strange idea: The human body is designed to send solid and liquid wastes in opposite directions.) One immediate result of separating pee from poo is the elimination of the unpleasant aromas associated with the traditional outhouse.

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Crop scientists have been pushing up corn yields for decades. But the newer strains just can't stand the heat

By Andrew Leonard

A troubling fact about corn: In the United States from 1940-1960, after the introduction of hybrid corn and in the wake of the disastrous Dust Bowl years of 1934 and 1936, corn yields and corn heat tolerance both grew. But since 1960, while yields have continued to grow as new hybrid and genetically modified varieties have been introduced, along with other agricultural innovations, heat tolerance has actually fallen.

Why is this significant? Because after a certain temperature, usually around 86 degrees Fahrenheit, corn yields drop dramatically. And even the most conservative mainstream climate scientist predictions about the effect of global warming include temperature rises that would hammer the corn-growing heartland of the United States.

These insights come from a fascinating new paper, "The Evolution of Heat Tolerance of Corn: Implications for Climate Change" by North Carolina State University's Michael J. Roberts, a professor of Agricultural and Resource Economics, and Wolfram Schlenker, an economist at Columbia University. The researchers take advantage of a 100 years of incredibly detailed information on corn yields and temperature records in Indiana, the third-largest corn-growing state in the U.S.

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By JESS BRAVIN

WASHINGTON -- In her maiden Supreme Court appearance last week, Justice Sonia Sotomayor made a provocative comment that probed the foundations of corporate law.

During arguments in a campaign-finance case, the court's majority conservatives seemed persuaded that corporations have broad First Amendment rights and that recent precedents upholding limits on corporate political spending should be overruled.

But Justice Sotomayor suggested the majority might have it all wrong -- and that instead the court should reconsider the 19th century rulings that first afforded corporations the same rights flesh-and-blood people have.

Judges "created corporations as persons, gave birth to corporations as persons," she said. "There could be an argument made that that was the court's error to start with...[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics."

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How to Turn Your Yard Into a Garden and Your Neighborhood Into a Community
by Heather C. Flores
Foreword by Toby Hemenway

"In a time of so much hopelessness this book reminds us that there really is so much we can do. I encourage everyone seeking peace and well being to dig into this rich loam of information. It will inspire you to grow food not lawns."
—Keith McHenry, Co-founder of the Food Not Bombs movement

Gardening can be a political act. Creativity, fulfillment, connection, revolution—it all begins when we get our hands in the dirt.

Food Not Lawns combines practical wisdom on ecological design and community-building with a fresh, green perspective on an age-old subject. Activist and urban gardener Heather Flores shares her nine-step permaculture design to help farmsteaders and city dwellers alike build fertile soil, promote biodiversity, and increase natural habitat in their own "paradise gardens."

But Food Not Lawns doesn't begin and end in the seed bed. This joyful permaculture lifestyle manual inspires readers to apply the principles of the paradise garden—simplicity, resourcefulness, creativity, mindfulness, and community—to all aspects of life. Plant "guerilla gardens" in barren intersections and medians; organize community meals; start a street theater troupe or host a local art swap; free your kitchen from refrigeration and enjoy truly fresh, nourishing foods from your own plot of land; work with children to create garden play spaces.

Flores cares passionately about the damaged state of our environment and the ills of our throwaway society. In Food Not Lawns, she shows us how to reclaim the earth one garden at a time.

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Farming is a global business these days — what happens on the far side of the world often impacts what farmers in the Southeast plant and how they market their crops.

Farming is also a local business and how the public perceives agriculture goes a long way toward influencing state and federal elected officials, who make the laws that govern agriculture. For the most part our elected officials don’t really understand what farming is all about and don’t have unified voice to explain it to them.

Food safety is a big public issue, yet the estimated 6-7 million tons of potentially toxic municipal waste that goes on farm land each year is not a public issue — at least not yet.

In Virginia, for example, there are about 8.5 million acres of farmland, but only 55,000 acres are treated with biosolids, a legal, but euphemistic term for municipal sludge.

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[While the jury is still out as to whether the necessary changes can be brought about successfully within the capitalist model, at least the sentiment about what is worthy of so-called 'investment' (sic) is pointing in the right direction. - Christian]

by Woody Tasch
Foreword by Slow Food Founder Carlo Petrini

Review published in the May/June 2009 issue of Orion magazine

THE AMERICAN ECONOMY was built not for stability, but rather for appetite and yearning. The corporation, the money system—our basic institutions are rootless, placeless, and encoded solely for financial gain. Every new dollar that enters the economy comes laden with interest, which becomes a silent taskmaster that drives the machinery at an ever more frantic pace.

As Woody Tasch points out in his new book, the financial system is out of sync with the natural system. The algorithms of finance are oblivious to what the rhythms of nature can support, and the relentless quest for yield is exhausting the substrate of the entire system. “As financial time contracts,” Tasch asks, “how can we maintain a healthy relation with natural time?”

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By Dale Keiger

Ellen Silbergeld, Eng '72 (PhD), recalls that she did not want to go to the seminar. She was a professor of epidemiology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in 1999 when her department's chairman needed an audience for the seminar's presenter, a candidate for a faculty position. Silbergeld recalls the chairman saying, "Please, just sit in the room. You can come to lunch." So she sat in the room, and something caught her attention. The seminar was on hospital-acquired infections, but the presenter mentioned in passing that some drug-resistant infections came from food. That seemed odd. Silbergeld knew you could pick up Salmonella from, say, tainted chicken salad. But how would that Salmonella have become resistant to antibiotics? She turned to a colleague and asked. Because, he said, factory chicken farms routinely feed antibiotics to their flocks, to accelerate growth, and the drugs generate resistance.

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Welcome to Agriburbia™!

Growing Sustainable Communities by the Bushel!

Innovative neighborhoods, fresh food, healthy living... that's Agriburbia™!

In todays climate of soaring gas prices, international conflicts, and food scares there are highly profitable emerging opportunities in sustainable land development. Agriburbia™ incorporates the current set of sustainable practices such as alternative energy, natural storm water management, and pedestrian focus and adds a new element that is the re-integration of food production directly within the living environment. Agriburbia™ aims to do this by focusing on agriculture as the centerpiece of both new and existing communities.

New Agriburbia Development

The Farmstead at Granite Quarry, NC

Read what Dean Barbara K. Rimer of the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health had to say regarding her recent tour of North Carolina CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations).

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