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| Drought isn't the only visible impact of our warming future. Read more >> |
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Hello: The people best able to document current climate change impact on agriculture—farmers and scientific researchers—are speaking up, as are policy makers who grasp the immensity of what is happening. Also coming to the fore are people showing how agriculture can change its approach to battle climate change trends (benefiting everyone, climate-change believers and deniers alike) as it becomes more resilient to the mix of weather extremes growing more common.
Our home page features the evidence of climate change ag impact in South America and the United States, as well as what farmers can do to achieve the best of many uncertain outcomes. See what the nation’s environmental journalists learned from the experts. Read more >>
Building farmers: The Greenhorns, a national network of young people farming and starting to farm, gets a positive review of their "Greenhorn’s Guide to Beginning Farming," and a nod to the bootstrapping, networking, grassroots way they are going about it. Read more >>
Building soil: Policy Intern Genevieve Slocum lays out what she learned when she was a research intern here about planting hairy vetch (a winter-annual legume) way past the local late-summer slot to document farmer cover-crop options when Plan A doesn’t happen. Read more >>
Building knowledge: This update’s news and research items let you know that:
Babies might be healthier eating more dirt as doctors question the hygiene hypothesis and find that contact with common farmstead substances actually seem to build healthy immune systems.
The new president’s energy man says climate change will cripple California crops. The good news is that we’re officially admitting the challenge. The other good news is that support for terrestrial carbon sequestration as a tool to cut greenhouse-gas emissions got new backing from a scientific leader who said that proper grassland management could fight global warming.
Ethanol’s run-up of corn acreage and grain price may be over, just with market forces already at work, even before a new set of more environmentally responsible regulators digests the news that biofuels could be worse than fossil fuels for human health.
Taken together, these fragments show the continuing strength and wisdom of those re-casting agriculture into regenerative, sustainable and organic forms who accept the way things really are. Let us know how you are doing this where you are, and what bad news in the “money economy” you are able to counter with real goods, real services and real value.
Greg Bowman from the Rodale Institute
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