Kipp Nash wanted to farm. Like many young Americans who gravitate toward the vocation of growing food, Nash didn't have the land or resources. After all, he lived in a Boulder, CO, neighborhood. Yet this, surprisingly, turned out to be more of an opportunity than a problem. It started with his own yard (including the front), when he traded his green monoculture for chard, tomatoes, beets, and potatoes. (We're not talking raised garden beds here, he literally farms his entire yard.)

While some neighbors balked at his lawn-gone-cultivated yard, some saw the value and wanted in. So, when Nash wanted to expand and asked his neighbors for their yard space, eight gave him the green light, especially those who don't have time to garden themselves. And there sprang a small farming venture in the middle of suburbia, where Nash now grows and sells a variety of vegetables and herbs through shares purchased by community members. Nash grossed $6,000 last year and hopes to make $15,000 this year by expanding his business.

Check out The Wall Street Journal's two-minute clip on Nash's enterprise.

Goodbye gas-powered lawnmowers. Hello edible landscapes.

Source: The Wall Street Journal

Finally a gastronomic school that is thinking about environment. The University of Gastronomic Studies in Pollenzo, Italy brings together students from all over the world to learn about food and how to maintain biodiversity. The four-year program was developed by the Slow Food Movement and is funded by the Italian government.

Students travel around via bicycle to various farms and food hubs, learning from food giants like Alice Waters, all the way to local cheese makers who live up in the mountains and have keen knowledge about food and environment. The students also learn some animal husbandry, chemistry and botany.

Some of these students along with students from Yale, Stanford and Oxford universities also see the need for disadvantaged farmers – especially young ones – to be a part of the world's sustainable food community. They've started an alliance that would send a delegation of young people interested in food issues to Italy's international gathering, Terra Madre in October.

Source: Sydney Morning Herald

Both the House and Senate have passed the Farm Bill by a veto proof majority. President Bush has threatened a veto for a while now, criticizing the bill for failing to exclude individuals with more than $200,000 in adjusted gross income from receiving subsidy payments (an area where the Bush Administration and sustainable agriculture advocates have found common ground). It sounds as though Bush is still expected to veto the bill.

So, you're wondering which pieces of the Farm Bill an Envirovore should care about, right? Here's your quick and dirty resource guide to the 2008 Farm Bill.

The Sustainable Agriculture Coalition has been a leader on Farm Bill initiatives supporting sustainable agriculture and provides a detailed platform and comprehensive list of priorities on its website. Also check out the National Campaign for Sustainable Agriculture's Federal Sustainable Agriculture Program Primer.

The Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy has published several reports on public health, renewable energy, hunger, and global trade (to name a few) as they relate to the Farm Bill.

As for the blogosphere, some food and farm blogs covering the Farm Bill include: Farmpolicy.com, Blog for Rural America, and the Environmental Working Group's Mulch blog (EWG is the organization that keeps a database of farm subsidy recipients and regularly uncovers unbelievable beneficiaries, like businessmen in New York City).

Remember, the Farm Bill covers all areas food and farming, including nutrition and food stamps, conservation and wildlife habitat. So, check out other groups' sites, like Bread for the World and Natural Resources Defense Council. Chances are your favorite non-profit organization is keeping tabs on this bill.

Industry leaders in agricultural biotechnology are seeking hundreds of patents on crops designed to cope with hot and cold weather in the face of global warming, according to a new report by the ETC Group: "Patenting the Climate Genes...And Capturing the Climate Agenda."

The Washington Post reports:

"The ETC report concludes that biotech giants are hoping to leverage climate change as a way to get into resistant markets, and it warns that the move could undermine public-sector plant-breeding institutions such as those coordinated by the United Nations and the World Bank, which have long made their improved varieties freely available."

ETC's research director, Hope Shand, adds, "When a market is dominated by a handful of large multinational companies, the research agenda gets biased toward proprietary products...Monopoly control of plant genes is a bad idea under any circumstance. During a global food crisis, it is unacceptable and has to be challenged."

Biotech firms learned early on that they needed exclusive ownership and rights over their products to ensure market power. (The top 10 seed companies control almost 60 percent of the global seed market.) These companies capitalize off current patent law to maintain profit and control over markets, and ultimately, farmers. Only, the effects reach further than patent numbers on seed bags and royalty fees to the company. Seeds tie farmers to the land, to their livelihood, and this relationship is altered when seeds are owned by the manufacturer even after money is exchanged, even after the seed is sown.

Yemen is experiencing an outbreak of the “screw worm” fly which eats away at the flesh of livestock. The flies lay eggs in open wounds of animals, and the resulting maggots consume the animal until it eventually dies.

Besides being brutal to animals, it's a huge threat to the livelihoods of farmers who have depended on rearing livestock for generations. This is especially the case because farmers in Yemen often only own the livestock -- not the land -- and so those farmers' complete investment evaporates when livestock are killed.

So far, there are 20,000 cases of screw worm in Yemen, mostly in sheep and goats. Some groups like the UN's Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) and the Arab Organization for Agricultural Development are looking into ways to combat the fly. One solution is to use the screw worm flies against themselves by sterilizing male screw worms flies and releasing them.

The Yemen screw worm is the “old world” fly. The “new world” species of screw worm caused $100 million per year worth of damage to American livestock in the 1950s and 1960s. Both types are the most devastating parasite for livestock.

Sources: Science Daily and New Scientist

CBS Evening News ran an excellent story yesterday on the pervasiveness of genetically engineered food in American pantries and focused on the absence of labeling. The clip is above, the full text is here.

In this news clip, Marion Nestle, a former FDA advisor and author of What to Eat (also a terrific blog), explains that industries fought hard to keep GMOs from being labeled because they feared nobody would buy them. This makes sense, of course, especially in light of a new CBS poll that found nearly 90 percent of consumers would like GMO ingredients to be labeled. "Yet the U.S. Congress has never even held a vote on the issue, to give shoppers the opportunity to exercise their most basic right -- to make a choice," CBS's Armen Keteyian says.

And at the end of the day, that's the central issue of this debate: providing consumers choice, regardless of our government's approval of GMOs. Thank you, CBS. It's investigative reporting like this that makes GMO ingredients a bit less hidden.

After some intensive dumpster diving in the name of science, researchers in the UK have calculated that the country wastes 6.7 million tonnes (nearly 7.5 million tons) of food a year.

Scientists at the government-funded Waste and Resources Action Programme (WRAP) analyzed the types of food wasted, right down to the 1.3 millionth unopened yogurt container, to conclude that the production, transportation, refrigeration and disposal of this food equated to 18 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions (equivalent to 20% of all UK auto emissions.)

WRAP is currently focusing on research that not only extends the shelf life of food (ugh), but also on encouraging local governments to create food recycling programs, and is considering methane-capture systems for wasted food.

Chief Executive of WRAP, Liz Goodwin, stated that all 580,000 residents of Cambridgeshire could be provided with energy from methane capture from just 60% of the wasted food – which would also keep millions of tons of greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere.

Minister for the Environment Joan Ruddock suggested that keeping refrigerators at the ideal temperature of 5 degrees Celsius would also extend the life of any perishables by 25%. Of course, she also made the common-sense observation that, “We can stop scraping over a million tones of food straight off our plates by cooking only we can eat, better planning meals, and thinking about portions sizes.”

For more on wasted food, and how you can reduce your own contributions to this, check out Jonathan Bloom's thoughtful site Wasted Food.

Via CleanTech

Most banana plantations are an environmental nightmare. The trees are showered with chemicals for pest and weed control and they often grow in monocultures on land where biologically diverse rainforests once stood, mostly in Central and South America.

In Costa Rica, one university, the EARTH University, is taking a lead on earth-friendly banana research and production. Though not completely organic by U.S. standards, EARTH supplies exclusively to the Whole Foods Market chain in the U.S. and U.K. These "green" bananas make up a small percentage of the 2 million tons exported from the country each year, but the sales are hugely important to EARTH, providing 7 percent of its revenue, which pays the tuition of many students who simply can't afford to enroll without assistance.

Bananas aren't the only product leaving the university's plantation. More conventional banana plantations are using EARTH's sustainable practices. As many as 40 percent of production areas in Central and South America and even Asia have adopted techniques developed at the university.