Archive for the 'Agriculture' Category

TED Talks: Dan Barber

Published by Taylor on April 26, 2009 in Agriculture, Animals, Business, Food, Sustainability and TED Talks. Comments

This is the first of an ongoing series in which we highlight particularly fascinating talks from some of the world’s most innovative thinkers.  These videos are featured courtesy of a Creative Commons license; for more on the TED conference (Technology, Entertainment, and Design), click here.

Dan Barber is a chef and restauranteur who visited a truly amazing farm in Spain that raises geese for fois gras in a shockingly humane and natural way.  The portrait Barber paints of the Spanish farmer is remarkable, and the amount of care that goes into raising these animals stands in astounding contrast to commercially-produced fois gras, beef, pork, poultry, corn, or soy.  It’s neat to watch a clear lover of food discuss a revelation about the production of ingredients and what it means to learn from nature.

You can also download this video to iTunes (MP4 file) by clicking here (”Save Link As” on Windows).

We’d love to hear your reactions in the comments.  In particular, I’m curious to know: is this destined to remain an inspirational micro-scale anecdote, or are there lessons in this story that could meaningfully impact our food systems at large?

Competition Needed Among “Climate Ready” Crops [Guest Post]

Published by a Guest on May 13, 2008 in Agriculture, Business, Environment and Science. Comments

It’s a pleasure for us to publish this thoughtful guest post written by “Marriott” — good friend, good neighbor, and good ol’ fashioned lover of Freedom.

What if I said that you could plant corn any time of year, in any climate condition, and still harvest the same succulent vegetable that many of us grew up eating every summer? What if you could do this for any vegetable? During my morning commute I read an article in the Washington Post that discussed how this may be a possibility for the future of farming. (I urge you to read the Post article)

Although there are many issues to discuss with this idea, my focus will deal with the corporate side of things and the future of this potentially lucrative industry. Feel free to debate the usage of these seeds, their methods, or anything else that hits a nerve with this issue.

Geneticists and scientists working for major bio-tech and agricultural development firms have been working on developing “Climate Ready” crops. The basic idea is that through genetically altered seeds, these scientists can create crops that are drought, heat, flooding resistant. They are basically “Global-Warming Proofing” our crops. And with the recent sticker shock at grocery stores throughout the country, this appears as a welcome opportunity to help the impending food crisis.

The problem with this recent technology is patent monopolization. From the article:

Three companies – BASF of Germany, Syngenta of Switzerland and Monsanto of St. Louis – have filed applications to control nearly two-thirds of the climate-related gene families submitted to patent offices worldwide.

The nature of these patents is even more troubling as corporations are able to eliminate competition. In one such case a corporation is applying for a patent to use one gene, and in the language of the patent the corporation effectively bans other corporations from using the same gene in any other “Climate Ready” seed.

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Pork Across the Pond and Here at Home

Published by Taylor on April 10, 2008 in Agriculture, Animals, Business, Cooking, Environment, Health and Sustainability. Comments

hogsLast night’s winner on Top Chef served grilled shrimp with a pickled chili salad and miso smoked bacon.  The dish looked delicious, and who can blame the judges for going with the clear winner: bacon.  What self-respecting meat eater doesn’t love the salty, crispy stuff?  On a recent episode of Iron Chef America, Cat Cora referred to maple and brown sugar bacon as “pig candy,” which I find both hilarious and a little disgusting.  Regardless, one thing is clear: many of us freaking love bacon.

Here’s the bad news: Smithfield Farms, the world’s largest hog producer (based, regrettably, in my home state of North Carolina) is responsible for true environmental injustice in rural communities in NC and IA…and now they’re expanding to Europe.  Grist reports (emphasis mine):

In the 1990s, Smithfield perfected the meat industry’s infamous “vertical integration” strategy that it’s now unveiling in Eastern Europe. In an old-school meat market, packers bought livestock from independent farmers. But starting in the early ’90s in the United States, dominant meat packers began to raise vast numbers of their own animals, stuffing them into concentrated animal feedlot operations (CAFOs).

In doing so, they put independent farmers in direct competition with [Smithfield's] own livestock operations — a game that the meat packer usually wins. Farms go out of business in droves, unable to sustain themselves on the low prices offered by the packers; survivors scale up, mimicking the packers’ intensive techniques. That is, they CAFOize, using debt to erect large confinement buildings into which they stuff thousands of hogs. Most of them essentially cede their independence, working under contracts wherein the packers supply the feed and the hogs.

The trends now playing out in Poland has already flattened small farmers in Iowa and North Carolina. When Smithfield first bulled its way into Poland in 1999, after buying an old state-run processing plant, it declared its intention to make Poland “the Iowa of Europe.”

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Sustainable Diets [Guest Post]

Published by a Guest on February 3, 2008 in Agriculture, Cooking, Environment and Sustainability. Comments

It is my great pleasure to introduce our first guest blogger, good friend Bruce. He has been a loyal reader of Tropophilia from the very beginning, and asked us if he could contribute some of his own thoughts. Enjoy, and thanks Bruce!

Like many who have recently graduated college, I like to think of myself as a master of frugality – raiding the free bagel stash at work, going an extra two days without doing laundry so that I won’t use up as many quarters in the long run, et cetera. One of my ways to save money is to not eat out so often and to buy cheaper varieties of food at the grocery. I still eat well (I do like to cook), but I have always bought non-organic milk, meat, and produce. While I’m at the store, the bottom line has been all that mattered.

But recently I’ve come home from the store and thought of the implications of this economic behavior. I, like most Americans I assume, really have no idea where my food comes from, how it is produced, and who produced it. And when cost is the only consideration, that ignorance is not really a problem. But what about the hidden cost of a lot of that food? As Field Mahoney points out in a Slate column, even organic food, free of pesticides and produced by those romantic small farms, can come from thousands of miles away and will contribute to the burning of a lot of fossil fuels before arriving in the grocery store. In his book, Deep Economy, Bill McKibben states that “growing and distributing a pound of frozen peas required 10 times as much energy as the peas contained.” That’s a lot of excess CO2.

So my first question is this: should we, as conscientious consumers, consider local production of food as not only a choice we should make, but as a workable and feasible alternative to today’s food production system?

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