Photo credit: Cedar Sol Hydro Farm

In Northern Michigan, two former school teachers quit teaching school when their son was born six years ago and started a farm using vertically stacked hydroponic units to grow vegetables as Kristine Morris reports for Morning Star Publishing,

Sol Hydro offers sustainable farming in limited space on a clean and attractive plot of land about 10,000 feet square in size (about a quarter of an acre.) Michael and Nichole McHugh grow the equivalent of what conventional in-the-ground agriculture would need six to 10 acres to produce, and they do it using a lot less water and no toxic or synthetic chemicals.

Photo credit: Cedar Sol Hydro Farm

They don’t need large expensive equipment, and can work their farm most of the year without hiring help. There are no weeds, so they don’t need herbicides, and they cause very little strain of any sort on the land and eco-system as most of their land can be left in its natural state.
The couple does it by using a stacked hydroponic system, the Hydro-Stacker Vertical Hydroponic Growing System, invented by Chester Bullock, of Florida. Michael McHugh studied with Bullock and learned how clean, efficient, easy and – above all – sustainable farming could be with hydroponics.
“We were both school teachers before we went into farming,” said Michael. “I taught high school language arts, and Nikki taught fourth grade. But when our son Parker, now 6, was born, we wanted to do something that would allow us to work at home – some kind of family business. We had both worked in greenhouses while in college in Kalamazoo, and thought we would enjoy a greenhouse operation.”

Click to read the rest of the More With Less — Cedar Sol Hydro Farm story. Click to to to Cedar Sol Hydro Farm.

Once again, Alaskan gardeners have proven themselves to be above reproach, no matter what their former Governor does. Last weekend, they broke their own record at the Fourth Annual Nursery Pot Recycling event sponsored by The Alaska Botanical Garden and Alaskans for Litter Prevention and Recycling, along with Anchorage waste hauler, Smurfit Stone. Over 4,600 pounds of those flimsy cell packs and seed flats along with those all too familiar, green, red and black plastic pots were collected and sorted. Given how many cell packs it takes to make a pound, nonetheless add up to 2.6 tons, the number is staggering.
What is more, since this is the fourth year for the event, organizers speculate that this year’s haul is probably mostly from plants and seedlings purchased at the beginning of this year’s gardening season. No wonder there are so many flowers and vegetables on view in SouthCentral, Alaska.
The Alaska Botanical Garden is America’s first fully organic botanical garden and ALPAR promotes litter prevention and recycling and arranges for the long shipment down to Seattle. Both organizations are considering holding the event twice next year.

Graphic credit: CommonGround.ca

Ten years ago, Monsanto tried to convince the world – Europe, in particular –that genetically engineered (GE) crops were needed to ‘feed’ the hungry. At that time, the message was largely greeted with derision as a cynical ploy to sell a product that no one, including people in developing countries, wanted.
Now, the biotech industry is regrouping and re-branding itself, but the PR message looks very familiar. Food and climate change – two urgent global crises – are the context for a second major public relations push for genetic engineering. This time, however, there is an added twist: biofuels and the promise that biotechnology can fuel the world as well as feed it.
This month, the Agricultural Biotechnology Industry Conference (ABIC: September 12-15) “Bridging Biology and Business” kicks off in Saskatoon with a “Flower Power Biodiesel Workshop” aimed at the public. During this conference, we will likely see more media stories about how GE crops are needed to solve the major crises of our time. Conference sponsors include Bayer CropScience, the Saskatchewan Ministry of Agriculture, Genome British Columbia, Novozymes and Ag-West Bio Inc.
The biotech industry is attempting to participate in sounding the alarm over the global food crisis. One of ABIC’s keynote speakers, Julian Cribb, a journalist from Australia, will present a talk entitled “The Coming Famine: risks and solutions for global food security.” (This is also the name of his new book.) Cribb will stress that the urgent “global food security problem” is one of resource scarcity: we are running out of water, farmland and oil and that these and other factors, like the collapse of fisheries and changes in local climates, will all constrain our ability to meet future food needs. He is right, of course, and this is where the biotechnology industry wants to insert itself. No one disagrees that there is a world food crisis so the industry can argue this point without debate and try to take the moral high ground. Controversy arises, however, due to the corporate agenda to sell patented GE technologies as the solution, at a profit.

Click to read the rest of the Greenwashing Biotech story.

Photo credit: terren in Virginia's Flickr Photostream

In the future, an apple a day may send you to a doctor since the frankenfreaks of genetic modification  have cracked the DNA code of the apple, opening up the the development of GMO apples. The BBC reports,

A team of 86 global scientists have sequenced the genetic code of the Golden Delicious apple for the first time.
The DNA breakthrough could result in new and improved apple varieties which are more resistant to disease.
Scientists from 20 institutions took two years to unravel the code – the largest plant genome uncovered to date.

Click to read the rest of the GMO Apples In The Future As DNA Code Is Cracked By Geneticists story.

Wheat may be the next crop that is dominated by genetically modified seed. Photo credit: United States Dept. of Agriculture via Wikimedia Commons

Scientists at the University of Liverpool have decoded the genome of wheat – the largest genome to be sequenced to date – to help crop breeders increase the yield of British wheat varieties.
Wheat production world-wide is under threat from climate change and an increase in demand from a growing human population. Liverpool scientists, in collaboration with the University of Bristol and the John Innes Centre, have sequenced the entire wheat genome and will make the DNA data available to crop breeders to help them select key agricultural traits for breeding.

Writer Sam Brand cheerleads the new discovery in this piece in Tonic.com,

There’s a new hope for the 1 billion people who go to sleep hungry every night. On Friday, a team of British scientists announced they had cracked the genome of wheat, the third most-produced cereal in the world after corn and rice, opening the door for the creation of more productive and nutritious varieties.
“The information we have collected will be invaluable in tackling the problem of global food shortage,” University of Liverpool Professor Neil Hall said in a press release.
Five times longer than the human genome, which was fully sequenced 10 years ago, the wheat genome is the latest of the world’s big crops to be cracked. Rice was fully sequenced in 2005, corn in 2009 and soybeans earlier this year.
The particular variety cracked by the British team is one called Chinese Spring. Its sequence, which will be made available to the public at The EMBL Genetic Database, will be used by scientists across the globe to better understand the crop and determine how to improve it.

Click to read the rest of the Wishful Thinking: Frankenwheat To Feed The World story.

Stanjamal Bobo, Theresa Hogan, and Thundor McDonald, participants in the Boots & Saddle Riding Ranch Youth Center & Academy Summer Farming Program in Pembroke Township, Illinois. Photo credit: ChicagoReader.com

The sun beat down on the vegetable stand on 115th Street, across from St. John Missionary Baptist Church in far south Roseland. Fresh cantaloupes, yams, and tomatoes baked in the 90-degree heat. Three volunteers, organized by church leader Donnell Williams, waited patiently for customers behind the table, sipping ice water. Sweat beaded on Williams’s forehead, but a smile never left his face. “It’s a small start, but you’ve got to start somewhere,” said Williams, 31. One of his helpers—actually, his mom—retreated to the car to listen to Rainbow/PUSH in the comfort of the air-conditioning.
This spring Williams signed up his church with the black farmers’ market program run by Reverend Al Sampson of Fernwood United Methodist Church, on 101st Street in Roseland. Sampson’s grand idea is to bring soul food grown by black people to black people in Chicago. Much of it comes from farm cooperatives in Arkansas and Mississippi, and a smaller amount from the African-American farming community of Hopkins Park in Kankakee County, Illinois.
I stood with Williams for 90 minutes, in which time only two customers showed up. One of them was a close friend who picked up $5 worth of vegetables. The shortage of shoppers wasn’t because of stiff competition: Roseland is frequently cited as one of the city’s most notorious “food deserts.” Such places are not strictly without food—chips, candy, and greasy fried food are abundant. But the nearest supermarket to St. John is almost three miles away.
“We have fast-food places that’s detrimental to our health,” said Beverly Williams, Donnell’s mother. “But in this particular neighborhood, I don’t think there’s any fresh market at all. It’s difficult because it’s so easy to get the fast food.”
Reverend Sampson has been organizing farmers’ markets across the south side for 32 years, since long before the term food desert entered the vernacular. He started in 1978 with just one, at Fernwood United Methodist, a few years after he took over as pastor, and he’s managed about five a year since then. In April, Sampson announced he was making a much bigger push. His goal: 20 markets, one for each of the 20 traditionally black wards of Chicago. “It will be the largest mobilization of black farmers’ food in the history of this town,” Sampson told a gathering of community organizers.

Click to read the rest of the From Farm to Food Desert story.

Brian and Courtney Foley are raising 16 water buffalo, with two more expected in the fall. After moving to a 62-acre preserved farm they purchased earlier this summer, they hope to expand their herd. The buffalo milk will be used for mozzarella cheese production. Photo credit: NJHerald.com

Brian and Courtney Foley are a new breed of dairy farmer, staking their future on a new breed of bovine — at least to New Jersey.
The Foleys are raising water buffalo, whose high-butterfat milk is ideal for making a gourmet mozzarella cheese known in Italy as “mozzarella di bufala.” Although common in other parts of the world, water buffalo are a rarity in New Jersey.
“We knew we needed to differentiate ourselves with something that’s very recognizable and marketable,” Courtney Foley said about their decision to look beyond traditional dairy cows.
The Foleys have slowly built their water buffalo herd through purchase and breeding since acquiring their first cow in 2005. Two calves were born late July, bringing their herd to 16, and two more are expected in the fall.
With the steadily growing herd, pastures are getting crowded at the Foley’s seven-acre Meadow Breeze Farm. Luckily, the water buffalo will soon be moving to a roomier home: a 62-acre preserved farm that the Foleys bought from New Jersey Conservation Foundation earlier this summer. The property is about two miles from their current farm.
New Jersey Conservation Foundation acquired the former Sigler family farm off Cemetery Hill Road in 2008 to preserve it for agriculture. After permanently deed-restricting the property for farmland, the foundation put it on the market.
The Foleys turned out to be the perfect buyers.

Click to read the rest of the New Jersey Farm Where The Water Buffalo Roam story.

Gil Carandang: Full-time farmer, Fulbright scholar, and passionate advocate for empowering farmers to harness the indigenous life of the soil right on their farms. Photo credit: RodaleInstitute.org

Like a cut-rate magician, Philippine farmer and scientist Gil Carandang teaches farmers how to use cheap vodka, generic brown sugar, milk, rice and local soil to harness local microorganisms as invisible workhorses on their farms.
Who wouldn’t be suspicious? Right from the get-go this workshop is promising cure-all concoctions that bring new life to everything they touch. The potions work in ways that are difficult to explain and impossible to actually see. The man conducting the affair is fast-talking and charismatic—he even lives in a far-off land. The whole thing smells like snake oil.
Here’s the catch: Gil Carandang, this crafty man from the Philippines, is not trying to sell us anything. In fact, he wants us to buy as little as possible—that’s the point of this seminar. The lesson that’s officially on the agenda is the same as the event’s formal title: “Cultivating Beneficial Indigenous Microorganisms.” But what’s really being taught here, the true objective, is the empowerment of farmers.
By learning how to cultivate microorganisms, growers become able to meet their needs with what exists on the farm and can stop buying amendments from chemical companies (purveyors who, some might argue, are the real peddlers in modern farming). The technology was born of ingenuity, but it has spread by financial necessity, primarily among farmers in developing countries for whom agricultural chemicals are painfully expensive.
“This technology can reduce your costs by 30 to 50%,” Carandang says. “It sounds amazing, but that’s the percent most farmers spend on pesticides and fertilizer. On my farm, we have only two medicines: Lacto bacillus and ginger-garlic extract. We make both ourselves.”

Click to read the rest of the Using The Ordinary To Cultivate The Mysterious Power Of Beneficial Indigenous Microorganisms story.