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November 30, 2011
· WWOOFing: Farm life for the fun of it
· Syngenta must defend atrazine in court
· Old chemicals are back in war on weeds
· China unveils new tech for drip irrigation
· Growing crops under the cover of trees
WWOOFing: Farm life for the fun of it
(Los Angeles Times) – World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms is a way to travel, meet people — oh, and learn about organic agriculture. The movement has quietly cultivated a global following.
Kelly Bayer took a vacation from her job in a sleep
laboratory by toiling in a vegetable patch in
The sun beat down on her back as she worked a garden hose over a collection of tomatoes, peppers, carrots and onions that would eventually be consumed on the organic farm.
"I'm kind of interested in farming and sustainable living," Bayer said, before giving away a bit of her real motivation for working on the farm: a quick and cheap way to visit the West Coast.
Bayer, 26, was part of an itinerant crew passing through the
one-acre property that included a nursing student from
They'd found their way to Santa Barbara by way of a movement known as WWOOFing, which stands for World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.
Over the years — largely by word of mouth — WWOOFing has grown into a loose global network that hooks up those willing to work with farmers eager to take them for a few weeks, or even a few months.
Through the WWOOF network, would-be vagabonds find their way
to a farm in
Hundreds of farms are located in the
Some focus on teaching sustainable living; many others have a more casual approach, allowing youths to dabble in artistic pursuits while contributing some work. A few others, including one boasting family-sized yurts as accommodations, have the granola-infused spirituality of a flower child's commune.
Bayer, her short hair still tousled from sleeping under the stars, has traveled to Italy using the WWOOF network and planned to move on to a farm in Washington before returning home to Rochester, N.Y. — and her regular job.
WWOOFing began in the early 1970s
in
A trial weekend of work in
The movement was soon embraced by young adventurers as a cheap way to travel. All they had to pay was their transportation to the farm. Because they only had to work half days during their stays, they had plenty of time to enjoy themselves in a new locale.
The growth of the Internet has unlocked the potential of the
network, providing the adventuresome with a cheap gateway to the world. The
American branch has a small staff, with headquarters in
WWOOFers are encouraged to purchase travel or medical insurance, and many hosts have homeowners insurance that may cover them, but there's an implicit understanding that workers are there at their own risk. Neither the volunteers nor their hosts are subject to background checks, so the organization warns both to check out comments and ratings on the WWOOF website.
Bayer, a technician in a sleep lab, said she first heard
about WWOOFing from a friend right after she finished
school at the
She was interested in living in a more eco-friendly way, as well as experiencing other parts of the world — not as a tourist, but by immersing herself in a new place.
After trying it overseas, Bayer wanted to go stateside,
preferably on the other side of the country. With a friend, she found the farm
in
ArtFarm, owned by Madeline Gordon Jackson, wasn't exactly what Bayer had imagined. It's more like an overgrown backyard.
It's an acre or so of land with vegetables, chickens and two goats (Bella and Taco), situated in a modest neighborhood just off U.S. 101. Bhutanese prayer flags out front wave newcomers in to a maze of brush, fruit trees, ramshackle buildings and off-the-wall art projects, maneuverable by way of dipping under branches and squeezing through narrow corridors carved into the miniature jungle.
Janna Powell, an 18-year-old who began her freshman year at Hampshire College this fall, was taken aback when she arrived last summer at the farm, which was recovering from years of being nearly abandoned.
She saw a blue foam sculpture that included melted doll
heads (
Soon, though, Powell became a believer.
"There's something special," Powell said. "This place has so much potential. It doesn't look like there's much here, but we're rebuilding so quickly."
On a crisp morning, the crew of eight finished breakfast and wandered over to an expansive deck in the center of the yard. One of the volunteers led them through a yoga routine.
Then the work began. Simon Saaid,
21, from
"The more involved you become and the more you put into it, the more you take with you," Mudge said.
Some of the volunteers at
In many ways, matching volunteers and farms is a bit like a blind date.
"Not all farms are created equally," said Jess
Sullivan, 24, a graduate student at UC San Diego who runs a one-acre WWOOF farm
with her boyfriend in southeastern
In recent months, they have been flooded with applications. She has received as many as 110 in one month alone; she takes only about three volunteers at a time.
She said applicants fall into several categories. The confused — those who have finished college and are avoiding figuring out what to do with their lives; the wanderers — the ones who blithely travel the world with a hunger for exploration; and the ambitious — those who are hooked on the trend of community farming, with a genuine interest in agriculture.
A wide range of them have passed through the
Essentially they're asking: "What's something I can do that's outdoors, allows me to travel and to meet people?" said Tinkle, 25.
At
Danielle Strom, 23, Bayer's traveling partner and a student
at the Rochester Institute of Technology in
The workers gathered around a picnic table for the lunch they had just earned: grilled chicken slathered in barbecue sauce, potato salad and fruit.
They shared stories about where they came from and laughed at what they'd been through so far. They also recounted the progress they'd made.
Still, so much was left to be done.
But Mudge shrugged. "That's what tomorrow's for."
Syngenta must defend atrazine in court
(TheTelegraph.com) ST. LOUIS — Lawyers for Korein Tillery of St. Louis said Monday they are pleased with a ruling by a federal judge that will prompt a Swiss company to take responsibility for defending itself in a class action lawsuit involving the weed killer atrazine.
The parent company is called Syngenta AG, and the American subsidiary is Syngenta Crop Protection Inc.
Attorney Stephen Tillery
successfully argued that the Swiss parent company must answer the firm’s
allegations in U.S. District Court in
The plaintiffs are claiming compensation for the expense of removing atrazine from public water supplies.
There is a similar but separate lawsuit pending in
The outcome of the federal case may or may not affect the outcome of the state case, but a settlement could come about including both cases.
In the federal case, the parent company argued it does not have to show up in court because it is merely a passive holding company of the atrazine maker.
The judge ruled otherwise.
"The evidence shows that SAG (the Swiss parent) exercises an unusually high degree of control over and, in fact, dominates SCPI (the subsidiary), despite multiple layers of corporate ownership between them," U.S. District Judge J. Phil Gilbert wrote in his order.
The ruling means that SAG now must actively defend the lawsuit filed by Korein Tillery and Baron and Budd of Dallas on behalf of 22 public water providers from six Midwestern states.
The suit alleges that SAG and SCPI consciously chose to reap considerable profit by continuing to sell atrazine in the United States, even while knowing that the weed-killer’s chemical properties made it certain to contaminate the water sources that water providers use to supply drinking water to the American public.
The suit seeks to recover the substantial costs of removing atrazine from drinking water before delivery to customers. It also seeks a declaration that SAG and SCPI will be legally responsible for reimbursing water providers for the future costs associated with atrazine removal.
"We included SAG in the lawsuit because it was Syngenta’s Swiss-based management that made the important
decisions that ultimately injured our clients," Tillery
said. "Judge Gilbert’s ruling vindicates our position that the upper
management of foreign companies that earn billions of dollars in the
Old chemicals are back in war on weeds
(stltoday.com) – As farmers wage war on a worsening weed problem, they are being forced to enlist the aid of chemicals they once virtually abandoned.
Since 1996, Monsanto's Roundup weed-killing system has become the dominant approach in agriculture, changing the way American farmers grow commodity crops. In the past several years, though, American farmers have increasingly reported that glyphosate, the key ingredient in Roundup, isn't killing weeds. So once-popular chemicals such as "2, 4-D" and "dicamba" again have been called to duty.
"It's really ironic that in this day and age of genetic engineering we're going back to a herbicide from the 1940s," said Dean Riechers, an associate professor of weed physiology at the University of Illinois, referring to the chemical "2, 4-D." "It's the oldest herbicide we have, and it's going to become really popular again."
The ineffectiveness of glyphosate has left companies scrambling to come up with other options, but some farmers and environmentalists are concerned about health and environmental risks.
"There's a big push to come up with something new, and it's necessary," said Steve Smith, director of agriculture for Red Gold, an Indiana-based tomato grower and processor. "Monsanto did a terrible job with (stewardship of) glyphosate. They said: That's the only thing you need, on soybeans, on corn. It was cheap and easy, and that's all anyone used."
Smith, who testified in Congress, warning against 2, 4-D and its related weed killer, dicamba, is launching a nationwide campaign against the industry's efforts. His company, he claims, lost $1 million in revenue because of dicamba contamination.
"It's an entire fiasco," Smith said. "But now that it's here, we have to figure out how to fix it."
The industry is counting on that fix.
"The glyphosate system revolutionized agriculture," said Kenda Resler-Friend, of Dow AgroSciences, a Monsanto competitor. "But anything that's been used that much, it puts a lot of pressure on it."
Dow AgroSciences, based in
"Our crystal ball was looking pretty clear," Resler-Friend said, noting that the company predicted problems with glyphosate and has been working on its new system for eight years.
Creve Coeur-based Monsanto is working with chemical giant BASF, makers of dicamba, on a dicamba-glyphosate system that will debut "mid-decade," in soybeans, then in cotton, followed by corn, the company said.
"They've got quite a bit of expertise," said Matt Helms, who is heading up the dicamba efforts for Monsanto, referring to BASF. "Jointly, we're working on different types of formulations, on next-generation formulations that will be even better."
In addition to the joint Monsanto-BASF effort and the Dow AgroSciences project, Bayer, Syngenta and DuPont are all working on new herbicide resistant seeds, too.
FUTURE CONCERNS
One problem, critics say, is that glyphosate was so effective that the industry stopped researching other chemicals, and now has few new chemicals in the pipeline. That will mean, they say, that farmers will increasingly use these new cocktails containing old, somewhat problematic chemicals.
"Conservative estimates of adoption would result in
significant increase in herbicide use in soybean and cotton; disturbingly,
through the use of older higher-use-rate herbicides," said David
Mortensen, a weed ecologist with
That, some worry, will mean that weeds will rapidly develop resistance to these new cocktails, too.
"These crops will have the same problems," said Bill Freese, of the Washington-based Center for Food Safety, a group critical of the biotechnology industry. "Then we'll have other herbicide-resistant crops, and they'll be resistant to four, five, six herbicides."
Critics also point to environmental concerns. Dicamba and 2, 4-D have a tendency to "drift" into neighboring fields, damaging nearby crops. "Some growers bought (Roundup Ready) crops to protect themselves against Roundup drift," Freese said. "Many will likely do the same with dicamba-resistant crops. This means paying more for pricey seeds even if you don't want to use that trait. Not fair."
The industry, however, says the new cocktails won't have the old problems.
"I wouldn't say dicamba has any greater risk to volatility or drift than any other chemistry," said Nevin McDougall, of BASF's crop protection division. "...We're working with Monsanto to develop best management practices to ensure that when growers use it for the first time, they're using the proper nozzles, ensuring applications are done with minimal wind speed and overall environmental conditions are favorable for on-target applications."
Dow AgroSciences says its developers are working to minimize problems with 2, 4-D. "This is a different 2, 4-D," Resler-Friend said.
As the new blends hit the market in coming years, the industry and researchers are keeping their fingers crossed that resistance won't be the problem it became with glyphosate.
"I'm hoping we can learn a lesson from what happened
with glyphosate,"
China
(Dawn.com) – BEIJING: New filtering technology has allowed water from the sandy Yellow River to bring life to west China’s arid farms, paving the way for the system’s use to become widespread.
The Gansu Provincial Bureau of Science and Technology said
in
The local authority’s appraisement makes way for the roll-out of the technology and makes way for China’s sandy ground water to be used for drip irrigation, which otherwise should use clean underground water.
He said farmers in west
However, by installing sand-separating settings to drip-lines, the ground water can be filtered before free-flowing to the pipelines.
The company has seen the facility applied on 35,000 hectares
of farmland in
The company has received orders from 11 Chinese provinces and regions for the patented drip-line facilities.
An official with the
Growing crops under the cover of trees
(The
New York Times)
Beneath the trees are layers of crops: shrubs like buffalo berries and raspberries, edible flowers like day lilies, vines like grapes and hops, and medicinal plants, including yarrow and arnica.
For the Floras, the garden is more than a source of food for personal use and sale. Ms. Flora, an environmental consultant and former supervisor for the United States Forest Service, is hoping it serves as a demonstration project to spur the growth of agroforestry -- the science of incorporating trees into traditional agriculture.
The extensive tree canopy and the use of native plants, she says, make the garden more resilient in the face of a changing climate, needing less water, no chemical fertilizers and few, if any, pesticides. "It's far more sustainable" than conventional agriculture, she said.
The idea is to harness the ecological services that trees
provide. "Agroforestry is not converting farms
to forest," said Andy Mason, director of the Forest Service's
The Department of Agriculture, the Forest Service's parent agency, began an initiative this year to encourage agroforestry.
Depending on the species, trees make all sorts of contributions to agriculture, experts say. Trees in a shelter belt reduce wind and water erosion. Some trees serve as fertilizers -- they take in nitrogen from the atmosphere, or pump it from deep underground and, when they drop their leaves, make it available upon decomposition.
Trees planted along streams can take up and scrub out polluted farm runoff. They increase species diversity by providing habitat, and some of those species are friendly to farmers -- bees and butterflies that help pollinate crops, for example. (One study showed that 66 species of birds benefit from windbreaks on farms.) Trees can keep a field cooler and more moist.
Some research also shows that cattle farmers can improve their income by introducing trees, both by selling timber and by cooling cows in the shade.
And trees in general help the environment by absorbing greenhouse gases and by cleaning up polluted water -- countering some of the effects of large-scale agriculture.
"The biggest problem with food production is
environmental degradation," said Gene Garrett, an emeritus professor of
forestry and former director of the Center for Agroforestry
at the
Properly placed belts of trees and other vegetation along streams can filter out 95 percent of the soil sediment that washes off farm fields, studies show, and up to 80 percent of phosphate and nitrogen that runs off.
While the idea of farming with trees is being reborn in the
"For example, they taste the soil and say, 'We need a few more chickens in here' " for fertilizer.
Elsewhere, "working" trees are being used to
replenish eroded or desert landscapes. A program in
There are several approaches to agroforestry.
Grazing livestock under a canopy of trees is called silvo-pasture,
for instance. In alley cropping, an ancient technique that is becoming more
common in the
Agroforestry operations are also helping raise specialty crops. Nicola MacPherson raises timber in the Ozarks, and grows shiitake and oyster mushrooms on the waste branches; she is also establishing a truffle orchard. Then there are forest gardens like the one the Floras are creating.
Agroforestry is not just as simple as sticking trees in the ground -- it can be a sophisticated form of management. "The key to a lot of systems is how they manage shade and light," Dr. Belsky said. In one common system -- teak trees over vegetable crops -- as the over-story closes, limiting light, "the types of crops below change."
Here in
They have had their share of learning experiences. Bees left their hives and never came back; the Floras had to pollinate their fruit trees by hand, with paintbrushes. One October, trees were killed by a snowstorm and bitter cold. And there are rodents.
"Gophers do a lot of damage," Ms. Flora said. "They eat tree roots, carrots and potatoes." Her Yorkshire terrier, Rocky, has been the best remedy so far.
The soil is nutrient-poor, but a forest garden turns marginal soil into much more fertile ground. As the needles and leaves fall and animal waste collects, nutrients increase over time.
One major hurdle to widespread adoption of agroforestry, though, might be conventional thinking about trees.
"Families spent generations removing trees to practice agriculture, and we're up against that," said Dr. Garrett, the emeritus professor here. "We have to stress that if you don't put them in the way, you can use working trees to benefit agriculture."
End Transmission