We know that livestock raised at the industrial scale are often fed strange stuff, like antibiotic-laced grain and animal byproducts. But news that poultry and hogs raised in confined operations are fed 17 percent of the wild fish caught each year (seriously) raises eyebrows for other reasons, like the indisputable fact that some fish populations are severly depleted. (The same argument could be made for the nonrenwable rate at which we use topsoil growing grain for animals, but that's another post.)

According to a guest columnist in Grist:

Each year we feed 14 million tons of wild-caught fish (including anchovies, sardines, mackerel, and herring) to pigs and chickens around the globe...Pigs and chickens eat double the amount of fish that Japan consumes annually and six times more seafood than the entire U.S. population eats each year.

Protein is an important part of any diet and often comes at a high premium. Except, perhaps, when derived from a factory farm.

Source: Grist

What do you call farmers who don't use synthetic fertilizers or even organically approved pesticides and also avoid animal-derived products? (This is not the first line of a joke.)

Though still obscure in the farming world, these farmers are called “vegan organic,” or “veganic” (also referred to as “stock-free” farming). Instead of using
fertilizers and byproducts derived from animals (i.e., manure and bone meal), these farmers rely solely on plant-based fertilizers, like "green manures" (composted plant matter).

Sure, when misapplied, manure can transfer harmful bacteria, like salmonella and e. coli, onto food crops. But these contamination events usually occur on industrial-scale conventional farms, not carefully managed organic operations. And livestock has long been heralded as a crucial part of any farm. Yet veganic farming is giving some farmers (and consumers) a peace of mind when it comes to their food.

Two organizations have been created to support this way of farming: the Veganic Agriculture Network and the Vegan Organic Network. There are only about a dozen veganic farms in the U.S., but a commitment to these methods is growing in places like Europe, where many farmers don't have the space to keep animals.

Source: Associated Press

Addiction to the beans of the cacao tree, Theobroma cacao, has been attributed to cultures as ancient as the Mayans and Aztecs, whose leaders guzzled fermentations of them, and used them as currency. Today the cacao tree is responsible for a $13 billion dollar-a-year chocolate industry in the U.S. alone. 

However, in the face of climate change and the spread of diseases, chocolate companies are getting jittery about the strength of their cacao tree stocks. Mars Candy, along with IBM and the USDA, hopes to ensure the survival of at least some mutant form of the cacao tree by plunking out $10M to sequence the entire genome of the plant. Howard Yonashapiro, Chief Plant Scientist for Mars Candy, says the sequenced genome will “allow cacao breeders to much more efficiently introduce desired traits and to produce entirely new lines of cacao plants leading to a vast number of farmer benefits.” 

Cross-posted from EnviroWonk

Florida Governor Charlie Crist said this week that the state will buy the company U.S. Sugar, so that it can shut it down as part of the Everglades restoration project. The sugar industry has been a sweet thorn in the side of environmentalists and state officials for decades, so this is big. It would be like Michigan buying and shutting down the Dow Chemical plant, or Louisiana buying back the oil and gas leases that are hindering its coastal wetlands restoration efforts.

Florida has been buying up land north of Lake Okeechobee and Everglades National Park for years now, but the acquisition of the 187,000 acres south of the lake is paramount to the success of the restoration efforts. Although it's known as the "River of Grass," Everglades only has two sources of water: rain and spillover from the lake. Once the Army Corps of Engineers built the Hoover Dike around the lake, largely to encourage agriculture in the area, the important year-round source of water for the 'glades dried up, with horrifying results. It's hard to imagine wetlands on fire, but that's exactly what happened (and a problem that still continues today).

Sugar cane isn't easily grown in Florida, and the taxpayers have been subsidizing the effort. The Army Corps of Engineers estimates that of the $63 million it spends on flood control in central and south Florida, $52 million goes towards agriculture, and most of that for sugar cane. Also, phosphorous rich fertilizer needs to be applied for the crop to grow.

Although state scientists complained that runoff from plantations was causing eutrophication (i.e. death) of Lake Okeechobee, the federal government had to finally step in to sue the state for allowing damage to federal property (i.e. the Everglades). It took almost two decades for the case to finally be resolved because the sugar industry countered every legal attempt at holding it responsible for its actions with a counter lawsuit.

Wisconsin Specialty Protein, LLC, in Reedsburg, WI, may have an incredibly boring name, but it will be, in fact, the first facility in the nation to process whey from organic goat and sheep cheese.

If you specifically avoid whey in your diet, then you know what it is. The rest of you may just know the nursery rhyme (“Little Miss Mufett, sat on a tuffet eating her curds and whey...” Do they teach that to kids these days?) but whey is also used to make tons of cheeses including ricotta, cottage, swiss and cheddar. It's used as a supplement for babies and it's in a variety of processed foods. Considering all of that, organic whey is a good thing. But that's not all the whey plant has going for it.

The facility itself is green. The only air emission is steam, and it has other elements like heat recovery, passive solar, green space around the building, and rain gardens for storm water management. The facility builders break ground on July 9th.

Need to rationalize your coffee vice? Here’s one more reason to brew that cup (or three) of coffee in the morning. Scientists have found that the aroma of coffee alone changes the activity of genes related to stress caused by sleep deprivation in rats. The report was published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry, and NPR interviewed one of the project’s neuroscientists about the benefits of merely sniffing our morning coffee. Or, as he put it: "coffee aromatherapy."

It appears, then, that you don't have to like the taste of coffee to reap this benefit. If you have a bad night's rest, try stumbling into a coffee shop on your way to work and take some deep breaths. If this theory holds true, you might reduce some of the stress caused by lack of sleep.

But what I found most interesting is that the rats apparently didn't like just any coffee, they preferred Columbian coffee. Who knew?

Source: NPR

Last month San Francisco asked residents to separate out their organic waste for city collection and composting. This fall, Los Angeles will pilot its own food waste recycling system.

Residents of Los Angeles have been dumping over 460 million pounds of food scraps each year. This September, officials will take a modest swipe at this mountain of organic waste by handing out pretty green two-gallon buckets to 8,700 citizens in North Central and South Los Angeles to collect their yard and food waste for composting.

Diversion of the majority of Los Angeles’ food waste is unlikely to happen overnight, though. As a Bureau of Sanitation Manager stated, “We're such a large city. When we implement something, the scale is huge…Is there enough processing capacity currently to handle that avalanche of food waste?” One possible idea is to convert the food waste to methane, as Los Angeles airports are already testing on a small scale.

Via LA Daily News

OK, so we might have a president soon who's friendly toward local food programs. But what are we referring to when talking about laws and regulations that encourage local food production and consumption? What's already on the books?

The National Agriculture Law Center is a place to start. In fact, it recently added Local Food Systems to its list of food law topics. Here you will find a host of definitions, case law, and links to laws and regulations (both at the federal and state level) relevant to local food, like The Farmers' Market Nutrition Programs and the School Nutrition Programs.

And while you're in the Law Center's reading room, you might as well check out the pages dedicated to Sustainable Agriculture, the National Organic Program, Agriculture and Urbanization, Corporate Farming Law, and Biotechnology.