William and Elias Guerrero play soccer near their family's underground greenhouse in the Bolivian Altiplano. Photo credit: Jason Swensen/Deseret News
Jason Swensen writes on Deseretnews.com,
William Guerrero is building a reputation as a first-rate soccer player here in this remote region of the Bolivia Altiplano some 14,000 feet above sea level.
This is an impoverished area. William will likely never play on an organized team. He may never own a pair of cleats. But the 12-year-old boy can dribble his well-worn ball along the hardened paths of soil outside his home like a veteran.
Young William is strong and looks like he could run forever.
No surprise, said his mother, Bernita Choque. When William’s not at school or outside playing soccer with his many siblings, he’s likely eating something. Over the past year, William and his family have been enjoying a more healthy, balanced diet thanks to an LDS Church-sponsored greenhouse project that is bringing spinach, carrots and other vitamin-rich produce to a region where vegetables are typically scarce.
The people of the Bolivian Altiplano have long existed on a diet of meat and potatoes. The climate here is simply too harsh for traditional farming and reliable plant growth of most types of vegetables. As a result, many people here live in a perpetual state of vitamin starvation.
A popular composting program that picks up organic waste from about 3,300 Denver homes that support environmentally friendly recycling will continue but at a cost of $88 per home this year.
The city’s recycling officials launched the composting program in 2008, thanks to a state grant of $215,000 that included a composting project at Denver International Airport.
Another $185,000 grant from the state that continued the residential composting program in 2009 is set to expire this year.
Rainfall runoff from landills — known as leachate — eventually ends up in aquifers and rivers and brings a cocktail of pharmaceutical drugs with it. Photo credit: D'Arcy Norman Flickr photostream.
It is ironic, that the government and an ever decreasing amount of its supporters, get all ballistic over recreational drugs that people decide and choose to consume but shrug their shoulders over pharmaceutical drugs in everyone’s drinking water. It is just no big deal to them. Clarke Canfield writes in this Associated Press story,
The federal government advises throwing most unused or expired medications into the trash instead of down the drain, but they can end up in the water anyway, a study from Maine suggests.
Tiny amounts of discarded drugs have been found in water at three landfills in the state, confirming suspicions that pharmaceuticals thrown into household trash are ending up in water that drains through waste, according to a survey by the state’s environmental agency that’s one of only a handful to have looked at the presence of drugs in landfills.
That landfill water — known as leachate — eventually ends up in rivers. Most of Maine doesn’t draw its drinking water from rivers where the leachate ends up, but in other states that do, water supplies that come from rivers could potentially be contaminated.
The results of the survey are being made known as lawmakers in Maine consider a bill, among the first of its kind in the nation, that would require drug manufacturers to develop and pay for a program to collect unused prescription and over-the-counter drugs from residents and dispose of them.
Click to read the complete Associated Press story. For a related story from two years ago, click HERE. This is old news though, they have known about drugs in our drinking water for years…
Snow is so deep that vehicles can't even reach the greenhouses. Photo credit: The Pittsburgh Channel (WTAE)
Heavy snows this winter in the northeastern U.S. has damaged greenhouses in several states.
Four greenhouses at Soergel Orchards and Garden Center in Franklin Park, Pa., collapsed under the weight of record snow in early February. The snow is so deep that vehicles cannot even reach the destroyed greenhouses.
Click for more info on the damage. Click for a pictorial slide show of the damage to the greenhouses. Lynchburg Grows, a non-profit corporation which operates 9 greenhouses in Lynchburg, Va., suffered extensive structural damage caused by heavy snow storms in December and January. Snow collapsed the glass roof on several of the houses and caused the support posts to bend. It is estimated the greenhouses lost 2,000 lb. of glass.
The greenhouses, which were built in 1919, were part of a commercial cut rose operation that closed in 1998. No significant renovations have been made to the structures since the business closed.
The organization is currently conducting a capital campaign to raise money to convert one of the greenhouses to an aquaponics facility. The goal of the campaign is $100,000, which will qualify the project for a grant worth an additional $50,000. Click to read another news report on the damage.
What started in some municipalities and the province of Alberta as a provincial ban on weed and feed fertilizers in 2008, has spread to the whole country of Canada. Effective at the end of 2012 all weed and feed fertilizers will be banned. Some municipalities in Canada have been moving to ban the use of weed-and-feed, but those bylaws weren’t as powerful as province-wide legislation that can actually stop people from buying the product. Now with the ban across Canada, the dangerous practice will be stopped.
Click HERE for the Health Canada explanation of the ban. Top five reasons not to use a weed and feed fertilizer.
Thanks and a tip of the hat to Jeff Lowenfels for the Safe Lawns news lead.
Clare Backman AND Jennifer Lash write in Times Colonist newspaper,
One has to be forward thinking, open-minded and innovative to develop truly sustainable ways of managing natural resources and people’s interaction with nature. This is true for most everything we do in the world and it’s also true when it comes to salmon farming.
In the midst of the debate over salmon farming on British Columbia’s coast, the Coastal Alliance for Aquaculture Reform, which includes the Living Oceans Society, David Suzuki Foundation, Watershed Watch, T. Buck Suzuki Foundation, Georgia Strait Alliance and Marine Harvest Canada, a division of the largest salmon farming company in the world, have been working together to find a path forward.
Together the alliance and Marine Harvest decided to focus efforts in two important areas:
First, to test the environmental and economic sustainability of closed containment technology.
Second, to use improved farm and area-based management to reduce the likelihood that farmed salmon would infect out-migrating juvenile salmon with sea lice in the Broughton Archipelago.
Organic growers, and those who are transitioning acreage to meet organic standards, are eligible for federal money aimed at promoting conservation practices.
The Natural Resources Conservation Service, part of the U.S. Department of Agriculture, has allocated $50 million for the national 2010 Environmental Quality Incentives Program Organic Initiative, according to the Organic Farming Research Foundation, Santa Cruz, Calif.
The deadline to apply is March 12 and those who receive funding are paid 75% of the cost for the organic conservation measures they implement, according to a news release. Beginning, limited resource, and socially disadvantaged producers are paid up to 90%. The program provides up to $20,000 per year with a maximum of $80,000 over six years, according to the release.
Last year, NRCS received 3,000 applications, according to the agency, and approved half of them. The agency is hoping for more applicants this year and has been working to get the message out in all states so that all organic producers and those working to transition to organic have the necessary information to sign-up and begin to utilize conservation on the ground.
Producers can learn more about the initiative and how to apply at the Organic Farming Research Foundation’s web site.
A recently released US Department of Agriculture Organic Production Survey of organic farms nationwide found that less than 1 per cent are organic and that they generate $3.16 billion in sales. The USDA said that it tallied 14,540 organic farms and ranches that were either certified by the USDA or exempt from those rules because their annual sales fell below $5,000.
Organic products are one of the hottest trends in sales in retail stores and farmers markets but compared to conventional agriculture there is almost no comparison. USDA-certified organic farms use just 4.1 million acres of land. In its 2007 agriculture census, the agency counted a total of 2.2 million U.S. farms of all types and sizes using 922 million acres of land.
The USDA conducted its first in-depth survey of organic farming to establish a baseline for tracking the health of the sector, which doesn’t yet produce enough to satisfy all domestic needs. While U.S. consumers are willing to pay a premium price for organic products, some U.S. food companies must import organic products from other countries, most notably Europe.
California is the biggest organic farming state, with 20% of the nation’s operations and $1.15 billion in 2008 organic sales.
Click to read the full USDA Organic Production Survey. Click to read a related USDA report on Marketing US Organic Foods.
Hannah Wallace writes in The New York Times,
About 20 high school students stood behind the butcher counter, staring at a 160-pound piece of meat from a recently slaughtered cow.
“All of our meat comes from local farms, and we get it all whole,” said Tom Mylan, 33, one of three butchers at the Meat Hook, a [...]
Tom Philpott writes on grist.org,
Global acreage of genetically modified crops jumped 12 percent in 2007 — “the second highest increase in global biotech crop area in the last five years,” gushes a report from the pro-GMO International Service for the Acquisition of Agri-biotech Applications (ISAAA).
Farmers planted an additional 30 million acres of GM crops in [...]
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Hydroponics Dictionary
