
		" I heard it through the AgLine"

April 9, 2010

· Urban farms herald green city ‘revolution’

· Monsanto eating a little profit-bragging crow

· Orange corn may reduce childhood blindness

· Marijuana lab fills the bill for self regulation

· Holistic growers connect to Earth’s rhythms

Urban farms herald green city ‘revolution’

(CNN) – As the world's urban population continues to grow at a rapid rate, communities around the world are increasingly turning to "city agriculture" to produce cheap, locally grown fruit and vegetables.

Among skyscrapers and housing estates, previously vacant lots are being used to produce millions of tons of organically grown food that experts say are "greener" and cheaper than commercially grown produce.

But while many countries are in the early stages of their urban agriculture development, China, Japan and Cuba have had successful city farms for decades.

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Cuba's model of environmentally friendly and sustainable urban agriculture has been an inspiration for numerous city projects around the world.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Cuba's supplies of cheap oil suddenly dried up, plunging the country into a severe recession referred to as "the Special Period."

Farming in Cuba until then had relied heavily on oil to drive tractors and other heavy machinery, so there was a fundamental reorganization of food production, leading to a boom in urban organic agriculture.

Today, Cuba's capital Havana, which has a population of just over 2 million, has about 200 city farms that grow lettuce, tomatoes, peppers, sweet potatoes, spinach, herbs and other crops that are sold cheaply in local markets.

Wendy Emmett of the UK-based Cuba Organic Support Group, told CNN: "Cuba has been an inspiration, especially in the U.S. and the UK. They showed us what could be done when there is community will and a political will."

A similar community-based initiative has just been launched in Germany's financial capital Frankfurt. Groups can lease land from start-up company Meine Ernte, which provides tools and even sows the seeds, although the lease holders have to take care of the crops.

Frankfurt-based lawyer Mortem Simm said: "Most people just go to the supermarket and they can buy everything at any time of the year, but this brings us back to nature."

Meine Ernte already has six plots in German cities growing cucumbers, potatoes, carrots and tomatoes.

Natalie Kirchbaumer, co-founder of Meine Ernte, said: "They have to put in one or two hours per week, yes they have to work on the plants a little, but everything is there."

A slightly different model of urban farming is being deployed in parts of Africa, although it is still employing the same philosophy of community cooperation.

In the densely populated slum of Mathare in Nairobi, Kenya, an Italian charity Cooperazione Internazionale (COOPI) is helping communities to grow food in large compost bags, which are designed to provide the maximum output of produce in minimum space.

Its "farm-in-a-sack" project provides poor families with more than 40 seedlings, which can be grown into food in just a few weeks. Each "base" or mini-farm can provide vegetables such as spinach for 150 families, says COOPI.

Claudio Torres, from COOPI, said: "There are two effects. There is the main effect that they really have more food and that's like nutrition and micronutrients. But also, as you can see, this brings together the community."

A third of Africa's population already lives in urban areas, a figure that the World Health Organization expects to grow, so urban agriculture is increasingly seen as a back-up to commercial farming to meet the food requirements of millions of people.

And while North America may not have the food and water shortage problems of some African nations, urban farms are still expanding in major cities such as Vancouver on the west coast of Canada.

Michael Levenston, the executive director of City Farmer, part of Canada's Office of Urban Agriculture, told CNN that there were a number of models being deployed.

"There are people growing stuff in their back gardens and then there are bigger models like the University of British Columbia, which has a market-sized farm in the center of the city selling produce every Saturday at a farmer's market ... that is a very strong and vibrant entity," he said.

The United States has sizeable urban agriculture projects in Atlanta, Chicago, Detroit, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York and Pittsburgh. One U.S. collective of urban farmers says it is has 800 city-based plots that last year produced 150 tonnes of food.

The group Urban Farmers says on its MySpace page: "We locate and secure unused land, space, rooftops and walls for the purpose of bringing people together to plant organic food gardens in low-income urban areas throughout America and abroad."

In the UK, urban agriculture has not been adopted with the same gusto as other wealthy, densely populated countries such as Japan, although it is growing according to some experts.

Ken Elkes of the Federation of City Farms and Community Gardens, told CNN: "There has been an increase of 190 members in the last two years. But it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to run and maintain a city farm."

And that's where community spirit and a cooperative effort, as embodied by the urban farmers in Cuba, come in.

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Monsanto eating a little profit-bragging crow

(STLtoday.com) – Monsanto shares rallied to a record in November 2007 when executives declared the company would double gross profit in five years.

As recently as January, CEO Hugh Grant and other senior managers insisted they were on track to meet the goal. After all, Monsanto's queue was stocked with promising new seed technologies to help meet a growing demand for food.

But on Wednesday, Grant retreated, saying the company won't meet its 2012 target of gross profit, which is a company's sales less the cost of the goods and services sold.

"Moving away from our original set of goals is difficult for us to accept, but it's the right thing to acknowledge now," he said in a conference call with analysts and investors.

The announcement caps a turbulent past year for Monsanto. The Creve Coeur-based company is the subject of a federal antitrust investigation. It was forced to shed hundreds of jobs and slash prices for its best-selling weed killer because of a glut of generic product from China. And it isn't selling as much of its new biotech corn and soybean seed as expected because some growers have balked at the higher price.

However painful to do, backing off its 2012 profit pledge was the right choice in the long run, analysts said.

"We don't like it when we see companies do unwise things to meet a near-term goal at the expense of long-term growth," said Dan Ortwerth, an analyst at Edward Jones.

Monsanto's lower outlook came as the company reported on Wednesday a 19-percent drop in fiscal second-quarter earnings.

Monsanto's net income — gross profit less all other costs — fell to $887 million, or $1.60, for the quarter ended Feb. 28, versus $1.09 billion, or $1.97, in the same three months a year ago. Sales fell 3.6 percent to $3.89 billion.

Excluding costs related to a corporate restructuring last year, Monsanto's earnings matched the $1.70-a-share average estimate of analysts surveyed by Bloomberg.

Monsanto said full-year profit would be at the low end of the previously announced range of $3.10 to $3.30 a share. The company forecast earnings growth of 13 percent to 17 percent a year beginning in 2011 — a much slower rate than investors had been accustomed to.

The company's stock slid 2 percent on Wednesday to $68.09 on the New York Stock Exchange. That's less than half its all-time high of $142.69 set in June 2008. So far this year, the stock has fallen 17 percent.

The biggest drag on Monsanto's profitability since then has been the decline in its Roundup business.

On Wednesday, Monsanto further cut gross profit projections for its Roundup business to $600 million, from $650 million to $750 million. Only a year ago, the same segment generated $1.8 billion in gross profit.

The reason for the steep drop in Roundup profit: a flood of Chinese-made generic weed killer saturating the U.S. market that forced Monsanto to slash prices.

Just a week ago, the nation's only other glyphosate manufacturer, Ankeny, Iowa-based Albaugh Inc., filed an anti-dumping petition with the U.S. government.

Monsanto faces competitive pressure in the seed business too.

As a result, the company indicated that it would retool its product strategy, a move that will include some price cuts, to drive higher adoption rates for new products.

Monsanto said earlier this year that its new SmartStax corn and Roundup Ready 2 Yield soybeans would be planted on fewer acres than previously forecast.

Ortwerth said the higher-priced offerings met with some resistance among growers at a time of declining crop prices.

"The recession made farmers a bit hesitant to adopt new products," he said.

That became evident to Monsanto executives after "listening sessions" with some 1,200 farmers, Grant said.

"The feedback that I have personally from growers is that if our price points were different, their adoption curves would be different," he said. "When you get told the same thing often enough, it's pretty compelling."

The CEO said he was still as confident as ever in Monsanto's long-term growth prospects, its $1 billion-a-year R&D efforts and the fundamentals of the global agriculture business. But don't expect any more bold, long-term profit forecasting.

"From the school of hard knocks, I don't think you're going to be seeing us lay out long-term targets," he said. "We're kind of retrenching from that today."

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Orange corn may reduce childhood blindness

(Forbes.com) – Researchers at Purdue University have come up with a novel solution to the world's growing epidemic of blindness among children due to vitamin A deficiency: feed them orange corn.

The researchers have identified a gene in maize that, when manipulated, can toggle the levels of beta-carotene content in corn kernels. Beta-carotene, which is what gives carrots their orange color, is what the human body uses to create vitamin A during digestion.

"We're sort of turbocharging corn with desirable, natural variation to make it darker and more nutritious," said Torbert Rocheford, a professor of agronomy at Purdue who led the study.

Orange corn is already a natural variety popular in South American and Caribbean nations, as well as in northern Italy, where it is often used for polenta. But in Africa and parts of Southeast Asia, where most of the world's vitamin A deficiency occurs, only white or yellow corn is typically produced.

It's a problem with horrific consequences. As many as 500,000 children in the developing world go blind every year because they don't get enough vitamin A, according to the World Health Organization. Even more alarming, half of those children typically die within a year of going blind. If stocks of white or yellow corn could be replaced with orange-colored varieties, it could go a long way toward preventing many of those deaths.

The solution could even be adapted to help fix problems in industrialized Western nations, too. Aside from increased beta-carotene, orange corn can be made rich in the micronutrient zeaxanthin, which makes up 75% of the central macula in human eyes. According to the American Macular Degeneration Foundation, macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness in people over 55, and zeaxanthin can help protect against it.

"It's like a designer gene. We can select one version for the U.S. population to increase zeaxanthin and a different version to increase beta-carotene for the needs of the developing world," says Rocheford.

The only real obstacle to implementing the change to orange corn may come from picky consumers who have grown accustomed to the color of their corn. But Rocheford, who recently returned from a trip to Zambia, where orange corn was readily accepted, thinks the transition could come easily.

Once the health benefits of orange corn are proven to local communities on a tangible level, shifts in taste shouldn't take long. After all, adding more color to the dinner table can be more appetizing, as well as more artful from a culinary perspective.

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Marijuana lab fills the bill for self regulation

(The Sacramento Bee) OAKLAND – The mere existence of the Steep Hill Lab presents a pointed question: How safe is the marijuana provided to hundreds of thousands of medical pot users in California?

The Oakland laboratory, started in 2008 by two former growers, has tested 12,000 pot samples to assure marijuana businesses that their product isn't tainted by dangerous toxic molds or pesticides.

Nearly 50 medical marijuana dispensaries and pot-growing networks contract with the lab, California's most renowned cannabis testing location.

Tens of thousands of dollars in medical marijuana can be rendered useless if samples are found to contain toxins that could trigger respiratory infections, sinusitis or worse.

There is no Food and Drug Administration for marijuana. So the private lab fills a profitable niche in a trade operating without regulatory oversight.

"This is a success story of self-regulation," said Addison DeMoura, Steep Hill Lab's co-founder. "We want people to produce cannabis that they would give to the dearest person they love."

No state rules in California require medical marijuana be tested. While few pot businesses want a rap of toxic weed, no inspection regimen ensures they remove tainted products.

Steep Hill Lab says 3 percent of the pot it tests has unsafe mold levels under general guidelines for herbal products. Eighty-five percent shows traces of mold.

The medical pot community has cause for seeking assurances that the marijuana being peddled is free of toxins that can develop during growing, drying or packaging.

A 2008 guidebook, "The Marijuana Medical Handbook," warns of Aspergillus, a mold that can appear in marijuana and numerous other agricultural products. It can be dangerous for seriously ill people, such as AIDS and cancer patients using pot to treat nausea or other side effects.

"There have been reports of aspergillosis, a lung infection caused by inhalation of spores from the Aspergillus fungus," wrote California marijuana researchers Dale Gieringer and Ed Rosenthal and Washington physician Gregory Carter.

A 1988 study published by the American College of Chest Physicians focused on a pot-smoking leukemia patient in Philadelphia whose death was hastened by an infection caused by moldy marijuana.

Recently, tests on pot that undercover police officers bought from a Los Angeles dispensary revealed an insecticide, bifenthrin, that registered 170 times "tolerable" guidelines set by the Environmental Protection Agency for human food or animal feed.

"You may have no idea what it's been treated with," said Assistant Los Angeles City Attorney Asha Greenberg. Authorities speculated the dispensary sold pot smuggled across the border or grown illicitly.

A new medical pot dispensary ordinance in Los Angeles requires testing for pesticides or "any other regulated contaminants" for foods or drugs.

Dr. Donald Abrams, chief of oncology at San Francisco General Hospital and a researcher in state-funded studies on marijuana's usefulness for chronic pain, said most medical pot in California is safely grown and poses no health risk.

"That whole story of people getting fungal infections from inhaling marijuana is a old wives' tale," he said.

But Abrams said Steep Hill may help establish dosing protocols for marijuana so that users can know how much they should smoke.

The lab tests potency levels for tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), the psychoactive ingredient in marijuana, and for other compounds known for pain-reducing effects.

"This is attempting to standardize a botanical product and let the buyer understand what they are purchasing in this medicine," Abrams said.

DeMoura, a marketing representative and former pot dispensary operator from Stanislaus County, started the lab with David Lampach, a former Wall Street equities trader and marijuana cultivator from Mendocino County.

Lampach operates a gas chromatography machine that separates marijuana compounds for testing and a mass spectrometer that identifies ingredients and potency.

"This is the gold standard for measuring active agents," he said.

Debby Goldsberry, co-founder of the Medical Cannabis Safety Council, a Bay Area group of pot growers, dispensary operators and researchers, said the science of testing marijuana remains limited.

"What Steep Hill has done is push this issue forward," said Goldsberry, whose Berkeley Patients Group marijuana dispensary is also working on a testing regimen.

As a result of tests from Steep Hill, Harborside Health Center, a cannabis club that serves 47,000 medical users at dispensaries in Oakland and San Jose, lists THC levels for each pot strain it provides.

"For the first time in the 3,000-year history of human cannabis consumption," it proclaims in promotional materials, "patients will be provided with a scientific assessment of the safety and potency of products prior to ingesting them."

Steep Hill client Andy Rehm, whose Green Pi kitchen in Berkeley bakes "Big Bang Brownies" for pot users, once turned away a grower whose weed "smelled like butane."

He sent the lab samples when another cultivator dropped off pot for the first time. "Addison (DeMoura) called and said, 'Don't use it' " – it was positive for unsafe mold, Rehm said.

"We're not trying to scare people," said Dr. Janet Weiss, a toxicologist who works with the Steep Hill Lab. "We're saying this industry should join the rest of the world in what food and drugs are required to do. It shouldn't be a buyers beware market."

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Holistic growers connect to Earth’s rhythms

(AP via USNews.com) – SAN JUAN BAUTISTA, Calif.—When vintner Randall Grahm chose the softly sloping hillside and time to plant his new pinot noir vines, he weighed all the things farmers usually consider: drainage, soil quality and weather.

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Then he considered less orthodox factors: the cosmic and seasonal rhythms at play and how they might be harnessed to help the clippings take root.

Grahm, who owns Bonny Doon winery on the Northern California coast, is one of a growing number of farmers in the United States employing a holistic farming philosophy sometimes called "organic-plus." Biodynamic farming views land as a self-contained living organism, encouraging respect for the soil's integrity and eschewing not just chemicals but anything that comes from outside the farm.

It developed in Austria in the 1920s in reaction to the growing use of synthetic fertilizers. Fertility in Grahm's vineyard comes from cover crops that return nutrients to the soil and manure from goats roaming the landscape.

But biodynamic farming also includes elements that might make even die-hard organic devotees recoil — consulting a calendar on the phases of the moon and the alignment of planets, and using soil preparations made with manure that's been stored in cow horns, buried for a season, then mixed with water and sprayed on the land.

Grahm, 57, is used to the eye-rolling that happens right around the mention of "cow horns." But he says people who care about the quality of their food and what goes into it should be interested in biodynamic agriculture.

"It's not just that it doesn't have toxins and it won't kill you," he said. "It's actually better for you. It lasts longer on the shelf; it tastes better."

Demeter, the organization that certifies growers as biodynamic, has 150 members in the United States who have completed or are working on the three-year transition from conventional agriculture.

Although the number is small, the membership has grown by 20 percent a year for the past four years. Biodynamic farmers often seek organic certification as well.

Grahm began following biodynamic principles about nine years ago after working with farmers in France. His vineyard was certified in 2007.

Winemakers are on the forefront of the movement in the U.S., Grahm said, in part because biodynamic farming fosters the expression of terroir — the "sense of place" a particular geography bestows on a certain grape.

"You don't deform the character of the environment," Grahm said. "You respect it. And you can taste that difference. I don't know why it works, but it works."

Other biodynamic winemakers in California include Grgich Hills Estate, Benziger Family Winery and Fetzer Vineyards.

Philosopher Rudolf Steiner laid out the principles of biodynamic farming after farmers approached him with a problem: Newfangled chemicals helped them produce more and kept down pests, but seemed to sap the vitality of vegetables and livestock.

Steiner's answer became the checklist Demeter uses in its evaluations.

"People use words like 'voodoo' and 'witchcraft.' ... The truth is, it's your great grandfather's farming. It's preindustrial," said Elizabeth Candelario, Demeter's marketing director. "Steiner's answer to them was we have to go back to the time before farms started to be viewed as factories."

Gena Nonini, 46, a third-generation San Joaquin Valley farmer who grows citrus, vegetables and grapes, is comfortable talking about some of the elements considered most esoteric by conventional farmers.

The moon, planets and sun all exert an influence on the earth, some of it in ways that can be measured, such as gravity and the ebb and flow of tides, she said. Why shouldn't they also affect the sprouting of a seed or the ripening of fruit?

"I see the farm as a symphony, and the farmer as a conductor," Nonini said. "The universe writes the music."

As for the soil preparations — made with manure buried in cow horns, ground up crystals and other unusual elements — they're just a way to gently prod plants in the direction they need to go, much like homeopathic remedies, she explained.

Still, she conceded it might be hard for some farmers to become comfortable stuffing yarrow flowers in deer bladders after a lifetime of spraying chemicals purchased by the gallon.

"It can be difficult to wrap your head around it," Nonini said. "The way I see it, it spoke to my heart first."

Two-hundred miles north, a growing number of San Francisco foodies are buying into the philosophy — or at least its results.

Mark Ellenbogen, bar manager for the well-regarded restaurant Slanted Door, uses biodynamic citrus in his drinks and features biodynamic wines on his list.

"I just see a depth of flavor that I don't see in any other product," he said. "It's hard to describe. It just tastes really good: the complexity, the intensity of flavor."

Most U.S. grocers and distributors don't carry biodynamic foods because the farms are still too small and too few to supply enough produce to meet their needs, said Bu Nygrens, purchasing manager at Veritable Vegetable, the country's original organic produce distributor.

It's also easier to sell the biodynamic philosophy with wine — a packaged good with a label that can tell a story — than with a vegetable such as broccoli, she said. But that may change as consumers think more about consuming organic, local, seasonal food — ideas important in biodynamics.

"We're trying to get people to think of things totally differently," Nygrens said, "and that's just going to take a while."

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