Winemakers don't have to list all their ingredients, which seems fine if you think wine is just fermented grapes. The truth is, there are a lot of bizarre things added to wines: grape juice concentrate, acid for structure, and cedar chips to fake the barrel flavor.

These additives aren't necessarily bad for you. But fully labeling wines could provide transparency about who's making more traditional wine and who's using modern methods. Some primary additives like egg whites, fish protein, wheats and gelatin help remove tannins to make wine smoother. These ingredients are strained out of the final product, but minute allergens are still scary.

Right now, Bonny Doon – a winery out of California -- is the only winery listing all ingredients. It's no surprise coming from winemaker Randall Grahm has been revolutionary in adapting screw on wine caps (better for the environment) and who spearheaded some of the first crazy advertisements with his red wine, Le Cigare Volant, or “flying saucer.”

While the FDA requires food to be labeled, wine is regulated by the Treasury Department which doesn't require it. Why? Because alcohol is considered a money-maker, not a nutrient. Still, we ingest it, don't we? And even if those acids aren't bad for you, shouldn't we still get to know what we're sipping on?

Source: The Star Ledger

Small-scale farmers in the Amazon are losing their collective memory, according to a six-year study out of Indiana University Bloomington.

Climate change has derailed once-predictable weather patterns, leaving farmers with little sense of what will hit them next. One of the co-authors of the study says that strangely enough, 50% of these farmers didn't remember the 1997 and 1998 El Nino-induced drought, and if they did it was only when it had “unusual relevance” to their lives.

Part of this memory loss relates to the fact that even weather anomalies don't seem significant in the context of generally erratic weather. But another part is that small-scale farming in the Amazon has become a high-turnover business as young generations move to cities for work rather than carry on the family tradition. This city migration has disrupted collective farm memory where generations used to pass down knowledge about weather patterns.

Collective memory loss combined with lack of technologies to deal with climate change and the lack of data technology to even predict things like another El Nino, compounds farmers' vulnerability in this region.

Source: Science Daily

New Jersey farmers perceive a new threat to their livelihoods, only this time it's not weather or commodity price related.

Governor Jon S. Corzine is planning to eliminate the State Department of Agriculture as part of his "budget-balancing plan," a move that has New Jersey farmers on the defense.

Sure, farmers make up a tiny percentage of the state's workforce (just one half of one percent), but their products are worth almost $1 billion in sales each year. Even so, money isn't at the heart of their argument for keeping a Department of Agriculture. Farmers who bemoan Corzine's move argue that New Jersey farmers deserve appropriate representation in the State House for the same reason behind cutting it: because there are so few of them. And there's no disputing this point.

Perhaps this decision was to be expected given the huge decrease in New Jersey farmers over the years, with only 3,000 farmers currently working 17 percent of the state's land. (There were an additional 30,000 farmers working more than half the state's land in the late 19th century.) Of course, this trend is not unique to New Jersey. Across the nation, farmers are getting older and leaving the land not to young, aspiring farmers, but to existing farmers (and even corporations) seeking to get ever bigger.

Yet eliminating New Jersey's State Department of Agriculture threatens to fuel this disheartening trend further. How can we expect farmers to fight for a strong food and agriculture system if we're not willing to fight for them?

Source: The New York Times

Cross-posted from EnviroWonk

What's green, brown, and powerful? Compost, at least in Boston.

Beantown is planning an urban composting facility that will collect compostable materials, from kitchen scraps to lawn trimmings, bring it to an indoor facility, and use the methane and heat that decomposition produces to create electricity and high-quality fertilizer. Planners forecast that enough electricity to light 1500 homes will be produced by the plant when it goes online, as well as enough heat to run on-site year-round greenhouses and sell excess fertilizer.

So, in exchange for something seemingly worthless -- leaves, banana peels, and apple cores -- Boston gets locally produced food, electricity to help offset the cost of the facility, and a decreased greenhouse footprint, merely by taking advantage of the organic materials, heat and methane that was once wasted.

This is really one of those "so smart, the rest of us feel dumb for not thinking of it" sorts of schemes that we Envirowonks and Envirovores can only hope more cities begin to adopt. How much yard waste, veggie trimmings, spoiled leftovers, and past-expiration food do we all throw away? Perhaps more significantly, how much compostable waste do city parks, supermarkets, farms, packing facilities, restaurants, and the like produce?

It seems to us that there's a lot of energy-rich trash we're throwing away, and we can only applaud Boston for realizing its true value. And maybe, with a little push from the rest of us, we can convince our hometowns to see the wisdom in urban composting plants.

Novice nonprofit CarbonLabels.org has certified its first products that are actually carbon negative – two types of tea from Guayaki, a U.S. company which imports yerba mate, a wildly popular South American tea.

The labeling group says that by drinking Guayaki’s shade-grown tea, you are actually removing carbon from the atmosphere. 573 grams of carbon dioxide, to be exact, per 16 ounce bag. Okay, so it’s only as much as a flea farts in a year, but Guayaki’s interests in rainforest and indigenous community preservation in South America are worthy of note.

Montville, Maine passed an historic ordinance today that bans the cultivation of genetically engineered (GE) crops and requires farmers already growing these crops to phase them out of production within two years.

Before today, California was the only state with a binding local ordinance that restricts growing GE crops. In 2004, Mendocino County passed Measure H and became the first county in the U.S. to ban the production of these crops.

In 2006, Montville passed a resolution that directed the town to set up a committee and draft language for a moratorium on GE crops, the product of which – a three-page ordinance – passed by an overwhelming voice vote this morning.

Proponents of Article 12 say it protects farmers who choose to plant conventional and organic crops from genetic contamination. As Envirovore reported earlier this month, it's increasingly difficult for grain growers to ensure harvests that are 100 percent free of transgenic material.

Local initiatives like Article 12 and Measure H seek to address the shortcomings of federal regulations governing GE crops. (And no state has ever enacted regulations governing GE crops.) Though these initiatives typically cover a relatively small area and population, biotechnology firms have responded aggressively by proposing preemption bills aimed to dissolve local and state control over seeds and plants, effectively undermining democracy and communities' control over public health issues. As of December 2007, preemption bills have passed in 16 states.

Even in the face of vigorous opposition, local initiatives are laudable forces effecting real change at the community level. The local ordinances in California and Maine are valuable starts.

Organic farms' ability to compete with their conventional counterparts has been in the press a lot lately, debunking the dominant argument that organic farming cannot feed the world.

Last week, research published in the Agronomy Journal found that organic systems can produce as much as conventional systems, after the University of Wisconsin-Madison partnered with a consulting firm to examine 21 years of crop data from two sites in Wisconsin. The results show that organic forage crops, like alfalfa, yielded as much or more as conventional systems, and organic grain crops, including corn, soybean, and wheat, produced 90 percent as much as the conventional systems.

Meanwhile, scientists at Montana State University published a press release about an organic wheat plot that yielded 101 bushels per acre, a precedent-setting harvest that proves organic wheat can compete with conventional yields, contrary to their predictions.

And both of these findings follow a widely cited study published last year by University of Michigan researchers, which found that organic farming methods can yield up to three times as much food in developing countries. In developed countries, organic yields were almost equal to conventional systems.

As studies like these continue to give credence to the capacity of organic farms in our food system, it will be increasingly difficult for chemical companies to convince us that their pesticides and synthetic fertilizers are necessary to feed the world.