🌏 In honor of Earth Day 🌍

April 22, 2022 1:15 PM

TABLE is a deep dive into the cutting edge research and debates on how global and local food systems can become sustainable, resilient, and just. Their FEED podcast (transcripts available!) has looked at the commodification and the venture capitalization of food, the vulnerabilities of the global food trade and smallholder farmers. Their explainers (rigorously reviewed) include agroecology, soy & land use change, methane & livestock, and more. TABLE is sponsored by the University of Oxford, the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences and Wageningen University.
posted by spamandkimchi (5 comments total)

I wanted to add this explainer! Why the climate emergency demands food waste regulation

posted by spamandkimchi at 1:57 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

Well I liked this from the first link:

People hold many - sometimes contradictory - values, desires, assumptions and cultural preferences. These influence how they interpret scientific evidence, understand today’s world,

And I loved this:

Geoengineering super low carbon cows
(has a picture of a cow clearly thinking, "what the...")

seems kinda like mifi4food

(know we are in transition and for good reason and result images are not allowed but pretty pony please consider allowing small cow images here)
posted by sammyo at 4:01 PM on April 22, 2022

Thanks for posting spamandkimchi, I know several farmers using agro-ecology, they're as profitable or more than their conventional neighbours (and a lot more resilient - farming has become very dependent on oil, but also many chemicals are also either fossil-fuel FF based (e.g. urea for Nitrogen *), or use FF as a carrier e.g. Roundup, grazon (was 245T) - this all means agrichem prices fluctuate too much for farm planning.

Ag-ecology is not easy though as it challenges the existing state of things; can be difficult to borrow money (many farm banks require use of synthetic fertilizers!), your neighbours will hate you - and some may go further with that; it requires an ecological mind - which takes time to develop as most ag teaching is not holistic - most NZ farmers have at least an undergrad °.

* - Urea has it's own problems as it differs isotopically from other N sources and results in different plant growth, especially weaker cell walls - shortening the life of some agricultural fibres.
posted by unearthed at 4:44 PM on April 22, 2022 [1 favorite]

This is better than normal, but there just seem to be large blind spots as to how much the current food system, which is based on methane production, is based on the power of oil and gas industry, and how much power that holds within in the US farm bill.

The USA still relies, geopolitically, on the ability to ship cheap ass methane grown grain around the world, from its petrochemical plantations.

Given that, how do we dislocate methane from the backbone of North American food production? Why are we still talking about cow farts, when fracking produces a majority of the MAP and DAP from the combination of P mines in Florida, methane fracked in Texas, and both shipped to ChemPlants built on Plantations in Louisiana?

AgChem Production has been a core part of Cancer Alley in the USA since the 50's. CF Industries' two largest plants are in Donaldsonville, LA, and Yazoo City, MS- rural, African American areas without much political representation. They regularly top lists of the worst places to live in the US.

I wish these panels would include people who are struggling to grow food in these toxic areas. There are Black growers struggling to maintain food traditions in the shadow of the soil contamination, toxic air, and dead zones that the plants and mines and oil fields produce.

I imagine we could be talking about a food system that liberates these areas out of poverty and soil contamination caused by AgChem.

inevitably, I start thinking about this, and the historical precedents for agricultural change that come to mind are not the international agreements on the ozone layer, but the German Coast Slave revolt of 1811 and the mass strikes of 'contraband' peoples that came with the Union Army advances in 1862.

Anyway, is there room in these discussions for how to uplift farmers trying to survive the horrors of AgChem? The farmers directly affected?
posted by eustatic at 9:38 AM on April 23, 2022

(irrelevant side note: it seems there are three earth emojis showing the Americas, Europe+Africa, or Asia+Aus. I am mildly disappointed that there isn't a Unicode specification for choosing an arbitrary lat/long to center on.)
posted by kaibutsu at 10:02 AM on April 23, 2022 [1 favorite]