2008 August 9. Devastating
Drought Settles on High Plains. By Rebecca
Lindsey, NASA Earth Observatory. Excerpt:
Devastating drought has returned to the
heart of Dust Bowl country. On the High
Plains of northeastern New Mexico, southeastern
Colorado, southwestern Kansas, the Oklahoma
Panhandle, and northern Texas, drought has
been creeping up since fall 2007. By mid-June
2008, the Oklahoma Panhandle and surrounding
areas slid into “exceptional drought,” the
most severe category of drought classified
by the U.S. National Drought Mitigation
Center.
Cimarron County, Oklahoma, the westernmost
county in the state, is “at the epicenter
of the drought,” according to staff
climatologist Gary McManus with the Oklahoma
Climatological Survey (OCS). The land is
occupied by wheat farms, corn fields, and
pasture. It’s an area of periodic
drought; the Dust Bowl years have not yet
faded from living memory.
“The area has been in and out of drought
since the start of the decade. Mostly in,” McManus
said. “But fall of last year was when
it really started to get bad. In some places,
this year has been as dry or even drier
than the Dust Bowl.” As of early August,
the Oklahoma panhandle was experiencing
its driest year (previous 365 days) since
1921, according to OCS calculations. Through
July, year-to-date precipitation in Boise
City, Cimarron’s County Seat, was
only about 4.8 inches, barely half of average
and drier than some years in the 1930s,
the height of the Dust Bowl.
...Viewed from the ground, the situation
is equally discouraging. According to Cherrie
Brown, district conservationist for the
USDA Natural Resources Conservation Service
in Boise City, subsoil moisture is virtually
non-existent. “Any rain that falls
is sapped by evaporation in two or three
days. Four feet down, there is literally
no moisture left in the soil. Recently we
were digging as part of a project to decommission
a county well, and we dug down to a depth
of 7 feet, and there was still no moisture.
Even irrigation can’t offset these
deficits,” she said. As a result,
crops have failed and pasture is severely
degraded....
Summer 2008. Great
Grasslands. Curtis Runyan,
Nature Conservancy Magazine. Excerpt: While
the Amazon rainforest gets much of the attention,
most of the Brazilian land cleared for ranching
and farming is in the Cerrado, a vast stretch
of grasslands and savanna about half the size
of North America's Great Plains. In recent
years more than 50 percent of the region has
been cleared or plowed under; only 2 percent
is protected.
But in one corner of the Cerrado-the 1,400-square-mile
district of Lucas do Rio Verde-The Nature
Conservancy is partnering with the local government
and all 360 major landowners to help ensure
at least 35 percent of their lands are protected
as natural habitat, the amount required by
Brazilian law....
2008 February 29. Transylvania:
Welcome to the Future. By Bruce Stutz,
OnEarth. Excerpt: The steeply rolling hills
of the Transylvanian plateau lie within
the gnarled grasp of the Carpathian Mountains,
which curve down through Central Europe
into the heart of Romania...
"In Transylvania you will see a preindustrial,
self-sufficient agricultural system," Jessica
Douglas-Home, the slim, soft-spoken founder
and chairwoman of the Mihai Eminescu Trust,
assured me when I visited her London office.
Since 1997, the trust, partnering at times
with the United Nations Development Program,
the World Bank, and the European Union (E.U.),
has worked to restore and maintain the region's
ancient villages, homes, churches, and,
especially, agricultural traditions.
The region, Douglas-Home told me, is the
very model of an integrated, sustainable
world that consumes only what it can replenish,
that treads lightly on its environment and
leaves barely a carbon footprint behind. "When
fuel shortages begin to make things bad
for the rest of us," she said, "Transylvania
will hardly have to cough."
With its small common grazing meadows and
forested hilltops, this preindustrial landscape
also holds great reserves of biodiversity,
where rare wildflowers, insects, birds,
reptiles, and amphibians thrive. According
to the E.U., some two-thirds of Europe's
threatened and endangered bird species are
found on such lands...
The effort to preserve these Saxon lands
has become all the more urgent since Romania's
accession to the European Union in January
2007. E.U. regulations designed to standardize
and modernize farming methods, milking and
dairy production, as well as the breeding,
grazing, transport, and slaughter of cattle,
have created difficulties for small farmers
throughout the E.U., but especially in countries
such as Romania, Bulgaria, and Poland, where
subsistence farms number in the millions...
10 October 2007. NEW
FINDING: Organic farming combats global
warming É big time.
The New Farm -- Rodale Institute. By Laura
Sayre. Excerpt:
Data from The Rodale Institute's¨ long-running
comparison of organic and conventional cropping
systems confirms that organic methods are
far more effective at removing the greenhouse
gas, carbon dioxide, from the atmosphere and
fixing it as beneficial organic matter in
the soil.
Kutztown, PA. Discussions of global warming
in the popular press seldom fail to note its
potentially disastrous consequences for agriculture
as we know it: more extreme and unpredictable
weather, coastal flooding, even the loss of
pollen viability for some crop species at
higher temperatures all threaten to push the
usual unpredictability of farming into the
realm of the completely unworkable. But while
these threats are indeed grave--and many farmers
believe they are witnessing such effects already--researchers
at The Rodale Institute¨ have been looking
at the problem from the other direction: what
impact do agricultural practices have on global
warming?
On October 10, The Rodale Institute¨ (TRI),
the Pennsylvania Department of Environmental
Protection (PDEP), and the Pennsylvania Department
of Agriculture (PDA) signed a memorandum of
understanding designed to help answer that
question. Twenty-three years of ongoing research
at The Rodale Institute Experimental Farm
already provides strong evidence that organic
farming helps combat global warming by capturing
atmospheric carbon dioxide and incorporating
it into the soil, whereas conventional farming
exacerbates the greenhouse effect by producing
a net release of carbon into the atmosphere.
Organic Farming -vs- CO2 Fast Facts
If only 10,000 medium sized farms in the U.S.
converted to organic production, they would
store so much carbon in the soil that it would
be equivalent to taking 1,174,400 cars off
the road, or reducing car miles driven by
14.62 billion miles.
Converting the U.S.'s 160 million corn and
soybean acres to organic production would
sequester enough carbon to satisfy 73 percent
of the Kyoto targets for CO2 reduction in
the U.S.
U.S. agriculture as currently practiced emits
a total of 1.5 trillion pounds of CO2 annually
into the atmosphere. Converting all U.S. cropland
to organic would not only wipe out agriculture's
massive emission problem. By eliminating energy-costly
chemical fertilizers, it would actually give
us a net increase in soil carbon of 734 billion
pounds.
5 May 2007. Switch
to organic crops could help poor. By
NICOLE WINFIELD, Associated Press Writer.
Excerpt: ROME
- Organic food has long been considered
a niche market, a luxury for wealthy consumers.
But researchers told a U.N. conference Saturday
that a large-scale shift to organic agriculture
could help fight world hunger while improving
the environment. ...Nadia El-Hage Scialabba,
an FAO official who organized the conference,
pointed to other studies she said indicated
that organic agriculture could produce enough
food per capita to feed the world's current
population. One such study, by the University
of Michigan, found that a global shift to
organic agriculture would yield at least
2,641 kilocalories per person per day, just
under the world's current production of
2,786, and as many as 4,381 kilocalories
per person per day, researchers reported.
...The United Nations defines organic agriculture
as a "holistic" food
system that avoids the use of synthetic
fertilizers and pesticides, minimizes pollution
and optimizes the health of plants, animals
and people. It is commercially practiced
in 120 countries and represented a $40 billion
market last year, Scialabba said. ...FAO
conference is at http://www.fao.org/organicag/ofs/index_en.htm
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