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kiev4am · 5 years

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The AU that nobody asked for. Really, nobody.

Okay, so (a) this is a terrible idea and I'm a terrible person, but please consider (b) Brexit is legitimately horrifying if you live in the UK and aren't a xenophobic 'rah rah Blitz spirit' wingnut, because if we leave the EU without a trade deal we will have a degree of difficulty importing essentials like fresh food and medicines that has 100% not been honestly evaluated. Supermarkets, hospitals, factories etc. have been stockpiling supplies for months in preparation for a possible no-deal Brexit in six weeks' time and our political leaders are so busy chasing their slim margins of power that they'd rather run the clock down while trumpeting jingoistic slogans than materially protect the country. People are writing unironically in the papers about stockpiling food at home and it scares the crap out of me. So much of the language of Brexit harks back to imperial nostalgia, mythical glory days when Britain supposedly forged ahead and didn't answer to anyone, and I'm already obsessed with a TV show whose major theme is 'people finding out in cruelly short order that Britishness isn't magical and you can't eat patriotism' so, well, here we are: with bitter sincerity and many apologies, I give you the Terror No-Deal Brexit AU. Feel free to skip this if you feel it's too close to the bone. I've split it into three posts to try and spare mobile users some pain - it's loooong because apparently I derived catharsis from this wreck of a concept.

Part 2 | Part 3

Setting: 2 years into a no-deal Brexit. Imports into the UK are subject to catastrophic delays and huge cost increases, which means demand for anything home-produced or home-grown is far in excess of supply. The wealth/quality of life gap hasn't been this stark since the 1800s, and nobody in power is losing sleep over this since most of them are hard-right Tories who've spent their careers fetishising the undeserving-poor Victorian model of society. Almost all the EU citizens who were living here have gotten the Tories' 'hostile environment' message loud and clear and departed, leaving many sectors struggling to survive without that workforce; this especially impacts healthcare, agriculture and local councils. Non-critical clinical and surgical care is almost non-existent, medicines are being rationed (officially only non-essential ones, but there's increasing reportage of insulin, heart drugs etc. being withheld, plus things like anti-depressants and contraceptives are ruled 'non-essential', fun times), waste collection and water purification in cities is compromised, fresh food is a luxury, unrest and rioting is commonplace with typically harsh response by overstretched but well-armed police and security services who've been given the 'state of emergency' nod to use extreme force. Schools are on a three-day week with much depleted class sizes (the research into why those numbers have gone down makes grim Dickensian reading) and many local authorities have introduced water and electricity rationing. There is rhetoric about 'temporary measures' and 'light at the end of the tunnel' and 'Britain once more proud and independent' but the politicians who engineered the mess have all moved to their second homes in Spain and Italy, and in their few carefully curated television appearances the ones who are left speak with ghostly, heartsick cheerfulness. Every local council is effectively on a wartime footing and their offices are like seige towers; with fuel, transport and public safety compromised, people frequently sleep at their workplaces rather than chance their route home every night. There's a sense of everything being one explosion, one riot away from full-blown dystopia; of society hanging in the balance, trying to stay polite and bureaucratic on the very doorstep of anarchy. No-one sleeps well. Everyone who isn't super-rich has nutrition problems and is obsessed, on one level or another, with food.

Erebus House is one of those brutal 1960s office blocks with grandiose names that typically house local government departments; surrounded by the closed shops and boarded-up arcades that once made Barrow city centre a cheerful hive of activity, it is Northwest Council's last remaining administrative hub. From these chilly beige rooms, shuffling in the dead-grey flicker of the last few striplights and guarded by a ragtag division of local police and army, a skeleton staff attempts to maintain law, order and some kind of subsistence for this once-prosperous Middle England town.

John Franklin was the local Tory MP who campaigned vigorously in favour of Brexit and was re-elected comfortably on the strength of his rich, confident visions of independence and national pride. A keen amateur historian specialising in Victorian industry and exploration, he was also among those whose intransigence and hubris propelled the country towards a no-deal Brexit, convinced as he was that home-grown manufacturing and invention would flourish in adversity. Unfortunately, he and his confederates were so sure of this outcome that they never underpinned it with any realistic contingency planning. As the consequences unravelled so did Franklin, succumbing to a heart attack eighteen months in. His widow Jane now channels her grief into fierce party activism, stubbornly insisting that the problems are transitional and that her husband's legacy will be a stable, thriving Northwest county. Driven into town by her personal security staff, Jane Franklin visits Erebus House every fortnight to plead support for her causes and stress the need for 'visible, inspiring' gestures.

Francis Crozier was never a politician. The closest link he ever had to government was his heartfelt but ill-advised attachment to Franklin's niece Sophia - an attachment which has mellowed now into genuine, if wry friendship. An outsider, he always meant his stay in Barrow to be temporary, his job at the council a purposely dull stop-gap until he collected himself and moved on, preferably back to Ireland or to the itinerant sailing life he'd enjoyed so much in his youth. Two things have held him back from this goal: his frequent bouts of debilitating depression, self-medicated with alcohol, and the fact that - against all expectation - he turned out to have an excellent, intuitive grasp of town council management and infighting, combining logistical and bureaucratic shrewdness with an angry compassion that keeps him from walking away even at his most despairing. His bold advocacy and fairness made him well-liked by activists and local grassroots organisations while setting him at odds with Franklin's complacency; their relationship became strained in the run-up to Brexit, then disastrous in its aftermath. On his worst days Francis holds himself responsible for aggravating the stress that led to Franklin's death (his closest staff have offered to bar Jane Franklin from the building, but he doesn't have the heart). On his best days he runs Erebus House like a ship in a squall, holding the shreds of the town's welfare in both shaking fists.

#as all the other brits in the fandom yell at me #i'm so sorry #the terror #francis crozier #this has legit been gnawing at my mind for weeks #brexit is a last dying cough of imperial madness so as a terror au it practically writes itself #i wish it didn't fit so well but it fits like a fingerless glove on a frozen corpse #it's really something to watch your alleged leaders intentionally walking the country towards dystopia #sorry about the politics #terror modern au #terror brexit au #kiev rants #kiev is really worried

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newstechreviews · 4 years

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All cities have gone through the ebb and flow of social distancing and lockdowns, with regulations repealed as cases decline and hurriedly re-imposed when cases return. But few urban residents likely feel as dislocated as those living in Manila. The capital of the Philippines went through a three-month lockdown, starting in mid-March and ending in early June. Then, as residents started to return to work, a spike in cases in early August led the government to reimpose lockdown measures. Yet these measures were repealed merely two weeks later, as the economic pain of shutdown began to take hold—evidenced in a record 45.5% adult unemployment rate.

Manila is just one example of how the economies of megacities—cities with large and growing populations, often exceeding ten million—in developing countries have struggled to protect their residents and keep their economic engines running. It is an indication of the flaws inherent in an economic model focused on rapid and widespread urbanization. Megacities are not the future because they thrive on cheap labor and government policies fuel this abuse. Stagnant rural economies encourage people to move to the cities, hollowing out rural communities and leaving a hole often replaced by an increasingly concentrated and industrialized agricultural system.

Singapore, on the other hand, is a good case study of how even the most modern cities are vulnerable to those who they most rely on, and who they take for granted. In March, Singapore was being hailed as a model for beating the virus. Cases were low and the city remained open—until it was discovered that the virus was running rampant through the city’s migrant worker dormitories.

In cities across the world, migrant worker and minority communities have been hit hardest from the coronavirus. One U.K. report found that those from its ethnic minority community were 50% more likely to die from COVID-19. Data from the United States shows that minority communities, especially Black, Latinx, and Native American communities, see significantly higher rates of cases and deaths.

Photo by CARL DE SOUZA/AFP via Getty Images A girl covers her ears as people disinfect an area at the Babilonia favela, in Rio de Janeiro on April 18, 2020.

These are advanced economies with ample resources (though maybe not the political will to apply them universally). But with the prominent exception of the U.S., today’s COVID-19 hotspots are found throughout the developing world. In Brazil, favelas in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro are organizing their own support networks due to the lack of adequate government infrastructure. Cities in Colombia have seen spiking death rates as medical systems collapse. One recent study in Mumbai’s slums found that over half of slum dwellers had antibodies for SARS-COV-2.

Some commentators have looked at the pandemic and asked whether the time of the “superstar city” is over, as the pandemic makes population density look like a danger rather than an opportunity for productivity gains. They’ve suggested that the pandemic may finally lead to an exodus from cities, as young professionals, fed up with the high cost of living and nightmare commutes, and freed by the shift to remote work, leave for rural communities.

But this idea is focused on advanced economies and, specifically, on the upper and upper-middle classes within them. In growing economies, mass urbanization will remain the focus, as it is still seen as the best, if not the only, vehicle for economic development, moving people from the “unproductive” countryside to the more productive cities. By emptying rural hinterlands with its demand for low-paid workers, this urbanization ultimately leads to more unstable, more damaging, and more unequal economies.

Read more: The Photos Show Life in the Poorest Towns in America

World economic growth in recent history has been centered on a few superstar cities: New York, London, Tokyo, Hong Kong, Paris and more recently Shanghai, for example. London makes up 30% of the UK’s economy, has 13% of its population and is more than eight times as populous as the country’s second largest city, Birmingham. So-called emerging markets have relied upon urbanization to drive growth. Turning rural labor into urban labor was seen as a positive for productivity.

But the pandemic has highlighted the inequality and unsustainability of these cities. A population of urban professionals, with safe and secure lifestyles, is supported by a large and poorly-paid service sector. These people work in the grocery stores, hair salons, restaurants, bars, and gyms, and live in poor neighborhoods or even slums. They deliver food, fix homes, cut hair, dispose waste, keep transport systems running, clean suburbs, look after children, and walk dogs. These underpaid workers have either seen their livelihoods evaporate in recent months, or have been forced to risk their health by providing essential services, because they do not have the choice of the privileged work-from-home crowd. After all, you cannot work from home if your job is keeping the hospitals working or the sewers in operation.

Photo by INDRANIL MUKHERJEE/AFP via Getty Images Residents wait to get themselves checked during a COVID-19 coronavirus screening in the Dharavi slum in Mumbai on August 11, 2020.

Even before the pandemic, these workers tended to live unstable lives. The high-cost of living in megacities forces many of them to live in slums or peripheral communities. The expansion of cities beyond the ability of infrastructure to cope means these communities have lower-quality housing, worse access to education, poor provision of electricity and clean water, bad sanitation, traffic congestion, dead spots for internet and mobile access, and “food deserts.” Worse, urban lifestyles are increasingly oriented around the so-called innovation of the gig economy: service workers now lack even the basic protections afforded to proper employees.

Read more: ‘It’s a Race to the Bottom.’ The Coronavirus Is Cutting Into Gig Worker Incomes as the Newly Jobless Flood Apps

Yet in times of crisis, like the pandemic, these workers are seen as a disposable, redundant or even a threat. Without protections, they are unceremoniously expelled from the city. The lockdowns in India led to a huge and uncontrolled migration of day laborers back to their homes in rural communities—a reaction that almost certainly worsened the spread of the pandemic.

In addition, the massive amount of resources used to power urban economies have significant social and environmental effects on rural communities throughout the world. The effects of urban pollution and waste—from landfills to smog to dirty water—are also disproportionately placed on rural communities. Even when cities are sincere in their efforts to improve their environmental impact, they often ignore the ways they harm the countryside and the free ride they enjoy from the under-priced services of the hinterland.

Photo by Mark Makela/Getty Images An abandoned house is spray painted “Trump!” on August 14, 2016 in Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania. This Northeastern Pennsylvania region has a rich coal mining history, but the majority of nearby coal mines have closed.

This leads to political discontent: a feeling that urban communities benefit from the resources and work of rural communities, while imposing rules and regulations on them. This is part of the background behind political phenomena like Brexit, the Donald Trump presidency and the rise of European populism.

Whether or not pandemic-driven de-urbanization happens on its own, governments should leverage this period to create a balance between urban and rural economies that is sustainable. While the impacts of remote work and other digital technologies are probably not as great as their promoters claim, it is true that they reduce the unique value that density provides and may finally dent the allure of large cities for white-collar workers.

Governments should consider three policies in particular:

Greater investment in rural areas to make them more compelling places to live. This does not just mean utilities, education systems and health care services, but also cultural institutions to help balance the significant soft power major urban centers hold.

Support for small businesses, including protections against competition from larger firms. Rural economies live off small business, but a hollowed-out economy and greater competition from national and global firms run them out of business. A lack of local economic vibrancy encourages people to leave for the city. This replaces small business and the family farm with large-scale industrial agriculture and big companies, which reduces social mobility and industrializes the food-supply chain.

Redistribution of income between urban and rural areas. Governments should funnel public revenues raised from urban areas towards resolving burdens placed on rural areas by cities. And it must also ensure that revenues are directed towards addressing imbalances, whether through building new infrastructure or resolving some of the external costs that are placed on rural communities, such as groundwater contamination or loss of arable land.

Cities will always be useful to national economies, but they have grown into unmanageable Frankensteins. Yes, there really are some things that can only be done in a dense, urban environment but that does not mean turning a blind eye to growing megacities with over five million people. Countries probably don’t need the extreme urbanization we’ve seen over the past few decades, nor should we be strangely resigned to the notion that urbanization is inevitable and a net good. The time has come to rethink whether we should continue to place cities at the heart of our nations, turning them into large parasitic centers which practice economic apartheid.

#Blogger

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cliftonsteen · 4 years

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Why Food Security Is a Coffee Industry Issue

Producers are amongst the most vulnerable members of the coffee supply chain. Many are already contending against inconsistent and insufficient incomes, which is why in times of crisis, food security can become a pressing issue.

If left unchecked, insufficient food security could force coffee farmers to abandon production entirely. Here’s what the implications of this are, and how food security experts recommend addressing the problem.

You may also like Thin Months: Why Are Coffee Producers Going Hungry?

Food Insecurity’s Impact on Coffee Producers

According to the United Nations, food security is “hav[ing] physical, social, and economic access to sufficient, safe, and nutritious food that meets [a person’s] food preferences and dietary needs for an active and healthy life.” While there’s the perception that the number of undernourished people has been declining, it’s actually been rising since 2015.

Despite growing food, many producing countries face food insecurity, as many are in developing nations with high poverty and inequality levels. Because of this, it’s estimated that almost half of all smallholder coffee producers live in poverty. While most are located in East Africa, several are in Latin America and Asia.

Coffee producers tend to encounter food insecurity between harvests. Rick Peyser is Senior Relationship Manager at Lutheran World Relief, an international aid organisation. He says “the livelihoods of most small-scale coffee farming families are… dependent upon income from coffee. Many coffee farming families contend with three to eight months of food scarcity every year. This period, [is] known as ‘los meses flacos’ or the ‘thin months’”.

Unexpected crises, such as flooding or 2020’s COVID-19 pandemic can exacerbate matters so that food scarcity becomes a challenge throughout the year. Janice Nadworny is Co-Director of Food4Farmers, an organisation dedicated to overcoming food insecurity in coffee-producing communities. She says farms “simply can’t produce enough coffee to earn an adequate living that covers food costs and other necessities. Governments provide few public services. [The Coronavirus] pandemic will worsen the situation for rural communities, [that are] now being cut off from supplies, and without adequate cash to secure food in areas where prices have already tripled.”

With governments closing borders and ports to imports and exports, a private food supply could ease the virus’s impact until physical and economic restrictions ease. Marcela Pino is the Director of Food4Farmers, and says, “the communities that are able to grow food… aren’t severely affected by closed roads, as this [can] make it impossible for food supplies to be transported to certain towns/rural areas.”

Coffee prices have long been unable to cover coffee production costs, and unpredictable and challenging weather patterns are likely to become more frequent in the future. This makes food security something that should be prioritized, as it will also keep coffee producers invested in coffee production.

What Happens When Coffee Producers Have Food Security?

Food security does more than keep coffee producers fed. As Marcela explains, it can indicate the state of a community’s well being and help identify further issues. Here are some side effects of food insecurity.

Coffee Producers’ Health is Impacted

Food insecurity means that coffee producers go without healthy food, or eat less of it. According to Ralph Merriam, a Lutheran World Relief Honduras Representative, this will result in fewer meals being eaten or the compositions of meals changing to contain less protein.

Food security requires food to be nutritious. Without access to this, Marcela says consumption of unhealthy and processed foods will increase, which can lead to lifestyle-related health issues. She adds that this has led to an increase in diseases in coffee-growing communities, which is made worse by the lack of reliable healthcare.

Poor nutrition can lead to long term issues that can impact quality of life. Janice says that levels of widespread malnutrition, childhood stunting, obesity, diabetes, and heart disease have increased since 2010.

Families Are Affected

When producing communities don’t have food security, everyone suffers. Often it leads to families breaking up, with producers leaving for better paying jobs in other areas. Some end up in debt trying to keep up with food costs, which might mean that there’s no money left over for school fees or other household expenses.

Children growing up under such circumstances might abandon coffee production instead of as a job as it could be seen as a costly endeavour that can’t meet anyone’s needs. It’s something that’s already happening in Rwanda and Kenya.

Metal silos for storing dried beans and corn harvested from San Jeronimo’s Family Gardens

Production Is Abandoned & Coffee Quality Is Reduced

If coffee producers can’t sustain food security, coffee farming may not continue. Ralph says that when lines of credit are exhausted and the funds spent on food, assets that aren’t being used due to the COVID-19 pandemic (or because the harvest season is over) will be sold. When production resumes, farming can’t proceed.

Rick explains that “Farmers will naturally use limited resources to feed their families first before they ‘feed’ coffee plants. When families are hungry, coffee plants also go without needed inputs which results in lower yields, poorer quality, and lower prices. This has left coffee farming families and coffee plants hungry for vital nutrition.”

Others might continue production, but reduce production consistency and quality, as there is no time, capacity or finances to improve it. Ralph says that when farmers aren’t preoccupied with food security, productivity and resilience to pests and diseases can be improved. Better quality beans can be developed that fetch higher prices, which can encourage new buyers to be sought and crops to be diversified.

Why Money Alone Doesn’t Guarantee Food Security

Increased food security benefits producers and the coffee industry. For Rick, the simplest steps to achieving this are paying farmers enough to cover production costs, and supporting programs that help diversify incomes and food sources to increase food security. He says this will help them secure an income that supports a decent living standard, secure nutritious food throughout the year, and invest in coffee production.

It’s important to note that money alone can’t solve the issue and that education and training might be needed. As Marcela explains, “Food security isn’t necessarily a purely financial issue. It can be related to a lack of access to resources… a lack of knowledge of how to grow food, and a lack of education”.

Janice says that without this, the negative habits created by food insecurity might continue. “More income is crucial, but not enough on its own to ensure food security. If there’s no food being grown locally, coffee-farming communities will still rely on unhealthy processed foods being trucked in.”

Equip Coffee Producers to Grow & Sell Food

Helping coffee producers grow their own food is the first step towards helping feed families – but its benefits extend beyond this. This food can be consumed during thin months and sold to markets for additional income. Farmers in a community can cultivate different crops and exchange it amongst each other.

This will decrease reliance on charity and on coffee as a livelihood. It will also empower them to make decisions that benefit local communities – instead of having limited options or resources.

Train Coffee Producers to Improve Farming Practices

For coffee producers to take charge of food security by growing their own food, they’ll need to realise that land can be used for more than coffee production. Marcela says that coffee producers should understand that land can be used for cash crops, growing food, and intercropping.

Some might not have access to the latest recommendations and practices on improving farming. Education and training can introduce climate-smart agricultural and agroforestry practices so that when extreme weather patterns and market price volatility hamper production, other crops can be produced.

Janice adds that agroecological experience will also help improve farm and ecosystem health and progress tracking. It can also encourage the development of an expertise that can be applied to all business dealings.

Nicaraguan coffee producer Juana Valle and her passion fruit plants.

Speaking to just one person can demonstrate the real-world impact that food security can have on lives and communities.

Juana Valle is a Nicaraguan producer who’d been struggling with food insecurity for months. By diversifying her coffee farm and dedicating a hectare to passion fruit production, she doubled her income in 18 months and could employ three people from her community. Her family is now food secure, and she’s using her profits to improve the quality of coffee her farm produces.

This has helped increase Juana’s resilience and helped her break out of a cycle of poverty. By helping others access the same benefits, it will help create a more equal relationship dynamic between producers and other coffee supply chain members, which will create a healthier and more sustainable model that everyone benefits from.

Enjoyed this? Then Read Does Producing Coffee Mean Living in Poverty? Examining The Data

Photo credits: Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Lutheran World Relief, Perfect Daily Grind

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agritecture · 7 years

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This Software Engineer Sold His Company to Start a Vertical Hydroponic Farm in Goa (India)

The below article originally appeared on The Better India and was written by Tanaya Singh. We at Agritecture found ourselves so intrigued, in addition to reposting the story, we interviewed the entrepreneur highlighted in this piece ourselves.

Why are we so intrigued by this story? Simply because India has a huge population and we very rarely see stories about vertical farms there. When we saw photos of such a pristine farm in India - we were curious to know more about the business and the entrepreneur behind it.

Below is our interview with Ajay and below that is the original The Better India piece:

Andrew: Your background is as a software engineer, are you using any software in your farm? Did you develop that software yourself?

Ajay: Yes we are using a fertigation system which is imported. Other than that we have installed timers for lights and AC which is developed by us using raspberry pi.

Andrew: Are you going to continue growing the produce or are you planning to help others start growing themselves now?

Ajay: We are going to mainly focus on helping others to grow themselves. This way we will be able to achieve our goal of growing healthy food, faster. We have already received lot of inquiries to setup similar farms for them, we will be starting those projects from March 2017.

Andrew: What is your favorite part of your new job?

Ajay: I love to see the plants growing and it feels good to help people to grow healthy food.

Andrew: Who are your main customers?

Ajay: We package and sell it to supermarkets and local farmers market.

Andrew: You grow on 150 sq meters, what is the square footage of actual growing space though given that you’re cultivation is stacked?

Ajay: 1000 sq ft growing area.

Andrew: Last question, How many levels high are your grow racks?

Ajay: 6 levels

What follows is the original The Better India piece:

“You are what you eat,” they say. And that’s what Ajay Naik, a Goa-based hydroponic farmer, believes in. After quitting his job and giving up his company, this software engineer decided to help farmers across India learn about hydroponics and the use of technology in agriculture.

“For several years I have been noticing that many farmers’ children prefer to go for an MBA or engineering degree these days instead of taking up farming. This is because agriculture is not always lucrative. But then, not many of us are focusing on the root of the system we live in – that is good quality food. Only when you have healthy food can you have a healthy country,” says Ajay Naik, a Goa-based software engineer-turned hydroponic farmer. In times like these when the younger generation of farmers choose to opt for anything but agriculture, the case of Ajay would seem to be a paradox of sorts. The 32-year-old has turned to hydroponic farming in an attempt to grow quality food because a lot of vegetables and fruits supplied to markets today are grown using harmful chemicals that are detrimental to health.

He believes that the right use of technology can improve a field’s produce but the problem is that Indian farmers are already struggling with finances and are reluctant to take risks “They fear that if their investment in technology does not work out, it may lead to huge losses,” he says. Ajay wants to change the equation by taking technology to as many farmers as he can. And that is where hydroponics comes into the picture.

Hydroponics is the process of growing plants in water with added nutrients without the use of soil.

What attracted Ajay towards this form of agriculture is that it limits the use of chemicals. After initial research he came to know about a person in Pune who has a doctorate in plant nutrition and manages a hydroponic farm. Ajay met him, saw his farms and learned as much as he could.

“It was inspiring and motivated me to start a farm of my own as well. The fact that hydroponics involves technology, like developing a system for automatic circulation of water, controlling the parameters of temperature, humidity, etc. made me like it even more. I have been working in the IT industry for the past 10 years and I understand these things. In fact, it would have been difficult for me to understand traditional forms of agriculture,” he says.

Fully equipped with the required knowledge, Ajay started his farm two months ago in Karaswada, Goa. With a team of six people, he now grows exotic vegetables like lettuce and salad greens using the Nutrient Film Technique (NFT). This is a hydroponic technique in which a shallow stream of water containing nutrients for plant growth circulates past the bare roots of plants in watertight cylindrical tubes also called channels. The water flows from one end and is re-circulated into the system from the other end, thus reducing water consumption by 80% when compared to traditional farming.

Since there is no soil involved in the process, there is no need for pesticides. Ajay has set up his system in a vertical farming model with racks that have seven levels to save space.

He claims that this is Goa’s first vertical hydroponics farm, which occupies an area of 150 square metres. “I grow three tonnes of lettuce every month. The farm is set up in a controlled environment that enables me to grow exotic vegetables all-year-round without being dependent on the weather,” he says. In addition, he is now trying to convince other farmers to adopt this technology. “I have already started showing the technique to farmers in vegetable expositions conducted by the agriculture department in different places in Goa. The department is also keen on collaborating with me so they can take it to more farmers,” he says. Other than this, he sells his produce to local vendors and also in supermarkets. “I am planning to grow bell pepper, cucumber and strawberries too. In the future, I would also like to shift to other hydroponics techniques and increase the produce,” he adds.

Originally from Karnataka, Ajay came to Goa to work with a software company, which he quit in 2011 to start his own enterprise to develop mobile applications.

He then sold his company this year and used his savings to start this farm. He also received help from two investors. While the initial cost of setting up the farm is high, Ajay feels that he will be able to recover it over a period of time with hydroponics farming because of the high turnover.

“Producing food nowadays is becoming a real challenge. With the increasing population, water scarcity, and the ecological impact of transportation, hydroponics is the best choice for commercial as well as home-based farming. Among many advantages, hydroponics allows you to produce more (20 to 30%) high-quality vegetables and fruits, save on water and nutrient consumption, and grow fresh food everywhere – including sterile and unproductive lands, or in big cities and capitals. It helps cutting down on expensive intermediaries and shipping costs,” he concludes.

You can contact Ajay by writing to him at [email protected]

SOURCE

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newstfionline · 4 years

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Nature is a balm (CSM) Some people look for laughter in times of stress. Others seek distraction. But in this time of self-isolation, many are finding respite in nature. Beyond the promise of fresh air and a change of scenery, spending time with nature invites a sense of calm. The rhythms of the natural world serve as reminders that life goes on, even as we humans are consumed by uncertainty, says Patricia Hasbach, a clinical psychotherapist. It is a reminder that the world is greater than us and our stress. Even quick trips outside can bring wide-ranging benefits, says Lisa Nisbet, assistant professor of psychology at Trent University in Ontario. In fact, she says, a few brief moments in nature can help restore focus and concentration. So for folks working from home, a quick walk around the block at lunchtime might make for a more productive afternoon.

As life moves online, the offline fall behind (CSM) As endless social media feeds and YouTube videos emphasize that “We’re all in this together,” a huge swath of the population is finding itself digitally erased from the conversation. Some 42 million Americans, and a quarter of all rural residents, lack access to broadband, according to a February 2020 report from BroadbandNow. Even among those who live in places where broadband is offered, for many, it remains out of reach: Just 41% of households with incomes below $20,000 have broadband at home. As the coronavirus pandemic forces Americans out of their workplaces, classrooms, and social spaces, and into their homes, the internet has become, for many, the only link to society. Amid a steady stream of news stories about teleconferencing, remote learning, and Netflix binging, those without reliable online access are finding themselves shut out.

U.S. Food Supply Chain Shows Strain as Virus Spreads (NYT) The nation’s food supply chain is showing signs of strain, as increasing numbers of workers are falling ill with the coronavirus in meat processing plants, warehouses and grocery stores. The spread of the virus through the food and grocery industry is expected to cause disruptions in production and distribution of certain products like pork, industry executives, labor unions and analysts have warned in recent days. The issues follow nearly a month of stockpiling of food and other essentials by panicked shoppers that have tested supply networks as never before. Industry leaders and observers acknowledge the shortages could increase, but they insist it is more of an inconvenience than a major problem. The food supply remains robust, they say, with hundreds of millions of pounds of meat in cold storage. There is no evidence that the coronavirus can be transmitted through food or its packaging, according to the Department of Agriculture. Still, the illnesses have the potential to cause shortages lasting weeks for a few products, creating further anxiety for Americans already shaken by how difficult it can be to find high-demand staples like flour and eggs.

Cities, counties fear losing out on US virus rescue funding (AP) The $2.2 trillion federal rescue package could fail to deliver badly needed financial aid to thousands of smaller cities and counties where a majority of Americans live, according to documents and interviews with local officials. The coronavirus outbreak has blown holes in the budgets of communities as the costs of battling the outbreak skyrocket and critical sources of revenue like sales and income taxes plummet. The Coronavirus Relief Fund uses a formula based on population to parcel out tens of billions of dollars to the states while allowing local governments with more than 500,000 residents to apply directly to the Treasury Department for cash infusions. But localities below the half-million population threshold are in limbo. Of the nearly 3,100 counties in the United States, 130 have populations of more than 500,000, according to the National Association of Counties. There are 36 cities over the half-million mark, the National League of Cities told President Donald Trump in a letter last week. More than half the country’s population lives in cities, towns and villages of fewer than 50,000 people, the letter noted.

Virus exposes US inequality. Will it spur lasting remedies? (AP) The sick who still go to work because they have no paid leave. Families who face ruin from even a temporary layoff. Front-line workers risking infection as they drive buses, bag takeout meals and mop hospital floors. For years, financial inequality has widened in the United States and elsewhere as wealth and income have become increasingly concentrated among the most affluent while millions struggle to get by. Congress, the Trump administration and the Federal Reserve have mounted the largest financial intervention in history--a full-scale drive that includes mandating sick leave for some, distributing $1,200 checks to individuals, allocating rescue aid to employers and expanding unemployment benefits to try to help America survive the crisis. Yet those measures are only temporary. And the disaster that is igniting what’s likely to be a deep recession also raises the question of what happens once life begins to edge back to normal. Will the U.S. remain an outlier among wealthy countries in providing limited protections for the financially vulnerable? Or will it expand the social safety net, as it did after the Great Depression of the 1930s but largely did not after the Great Recession that ended in 2009?

COVID and prisons (Worldcrunch) “What if I never get to see my family again?,” asks Kenneth Hogan, an inmate at Eastern New York correctional facility in a letter to The Guardian. With precautionary measures such as the suspension of outside visits, a grimmer than usual mood is setting in on the U.S. inmate population. Experts say that prison and jails are particularly ripe for propagation, like “petri dishes for coronavirus,” for inmates and staff alike. In California for instance, CNN reports that the number of infections in the state’s prison facilities grew by more than 700% in just over a week.

Bears are having a ‘party’ in shuttered Yosemite National Park (Washington Post) The global pandemic has been good news for bears in Yosemite National Park, where they are thriving in the absence of tourists, according to park workers. “The bear population has quadrupled,” Dane Peterson, who works at the popular Ahwahnee Hotel inside the park, told the Los Angeles Times on Monday. He and the few other essential workers left in the park have also noticed bobcats and coyotes that usually lurk in the shadows are now boldly prowling around employee housing. The animals have always been there, rangers say. It’s just that they’re finally coming out of hiding. With humans gone, the animals are having “a party,” one ranger explained. And instead of going out of their way to avoid large crowds, they are ambling down roads where it’s usually more common to encounter bumper-to-bumper traffic than wildlife.

Venezuela’s Maduro, Used to Crises, Faces His Toughest One Yet (NYT) Only a month ago, President Nicolás Maduro seemed to be consolidating his autocratic rule. The opposition was fading into irrelevance, international pressure was waning and the country’s devastating economic woes were finally easing, if only a bit. Then, suddenly, a global pandemic shut down what’s left of the economy, the collapse of global oil prices wiped out Venezuela’s main remaining economic lifeline and the United States mounted a determined, new effort to oust Mr. Maduro. The Venezuelan leader now confronts one of the most complex crises of a seven-year rule that has been filled with them. At stake are the lives and livelihoods of millions of people in South America’s poorest nation, who face a seventh consecutive year of economic calamity, a new bout of hyperinflation and the deadly threat of the coronavirus.

European countries slowly begin opening up (Foreign Policy) Spain made its first step in easing lockdown restrictions as it allowed roughly 300,000 non-essential workers to return to work, mostly in the construction and manufacturing sectors. The number of new daily coronavirus cases in Spain has dropped in recent days, and on Monday the country recorded its smallest increase in cases since March 22. It is the beginning of a gradual relaxation of strict lockdown procedures in Europe as well as a test of whether countries have succeeded in flattening their coronavirus curves: In Austria, small shops will reopen today, and in Denmark, schools and childcare centers will reopen on Wednesday. France is not following the trend, as French President Emmanuel Macron announced that schools and shops would remain closed until May 11.

Putin warns Russians to brace for ‘extraordinary measures’ in coronavirus fight (South China Morning Post) President Vladimir Putin on Monday warned officials to brace for “extraordinary” scenarios in the coronavirus pandemic as Moscow tightened its lockdown measures and Russia reported its highest daily infection figures yet. Putin’s warning came as mainland China battled to contain imported cases, especially from neighboring Russia. In a video conference with officials on Monday, Putin said the next weeks would be “decisive” for Russia’s fight against the virus as the situation “is changing practically every day, and unfortunately not for the better.” He told officials that they need to “consider all scenarios for how the situation will develop, even the most complex and extraordinary.”

Ukraine says Chernobyl fire extinguished (Reuters) A huge blaze that tore through forests around the defunct Chernobyl nuclear plant has been put out, Ukrainian officials said on Tuesday, saying hundreds of emergency workers had used planes and helicopters to douse the flames. Environmental activists warned that the fire, near the site of the world’s worst nuclear disaster in 1986, posed a radiation risk.

India extends world’s biggest lockdown (Reuters) India extended a lockdown on its 1.3 billion people until at least May 3 on Tuesday and Prime Minister Narendra Modi said economic sacrifices were needed to save lives as the number of coronavirus cases exceeded 10,000.

Coronavirus Fears Terrify and Impoverish Migrants in the Persian Gulf (NYT) Qatar has locked down tens of thousands of migrant workers in a crowded neighborhood, raising fears it will become a coronavirus hotbed. Companies in Saudi Arabia have told foreign laborers to stay home--then stopped paying them. In Kuwait, an actress said on TV that migrants should be thrown out “into the desert.” The oil-rich monarchies of the Persian Gulf have long relied on armies of low-paid migrant workers from Asia, Africa and elsewhere to do the heavy lifting in their economies, and have faced longstanding criticism from rights groups for treating those laborers poorly. Now, the coronavirus pandemic has made matters worse, as migrants in Gulf States have found themselves locked down in cramped, unsanitary dorms, deprived of income and unable to return home because of travel restrictions. Some are running out of food and money and fear they have no place to turn in societies that often treat them like an expendable underclass.

Libya’s war escalates despite international calls for ‘humanitarian pause’ amid pandemic (NYT) One year after an offensive was launched against the Libyan capital Tripoli, Libya’s war is intensifying, and hundreds of thousands of civilians are besieged amid increased shelling and massive water and electricity cuts. Hospitals are being targeted just as the coronavirus is threatening an already shattered health system. The United Nations, the United States and other countries have pleaded with the warring sides for a “humanitarian pause” to help prevent the spread of the coronavirus. Instead, both sides appear to be determined to take advantage of the international focus on the pandemic and try to gain more territory. After initially agreeing to the “pause,” the warring sides returned to combat within days. The increasing violence is raising alarms within the United Nations and humanitarian agencies. There are now 24 confirmed cases of the novel coronavirus and one death. And Libya’s health system has been decimated by the war.

#headlines #news

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expertfeedly · 4 years

Link

THE PLANNING FUNCTION IN DEVELOPMENT

With domestic savings and foreign exchange both in short supply, the task of increasing average productivity and bringing about the structural changes necessary for continued expansion in output and incomes poses formidable problems of economic management. The specific form and nature of the problem differ from one developing country to another depending on the existing structure of the economy, the relative magnitude of the constraints, the choice of objectives immediate and more distant and the range and force of impulses received by the economy from the outside world.

As more countries have attempted to set explicit objectives and to plan ways and means of attaining them, however, various common difficulties have become apparent. Some relate to the adoption of a development strategy, some have arisen out of organizational problems some from the sheer accumulation of past measures of an ad hoc and sometimes conflicting nature. Others stem from conflicts between short-term needs and longer-term goals and yet others from the bluntness of certain policy instruments, particularly when they are used in an environment that may be sluggish in transmitting economic stimuli.

The two most frequent difficulties encountered by developing countries in the formulation of a development strategy have been the identification of the principal obstacles to economic growth in a manner that is operationally useful, and the method of dealing with, and if necessary circumventing, particularly recalcitrant obstacles.

The need to identify bottlenecks and to appreciate their amenability to corrective action is essential to the determination of priorities and hence to the content and phasing of a development plan. Recent experience has demonstrated how easily bottlenecks may be generated in an economy in which most types of resources are under strain. Lags ripple through the economy, reducing productivity and raising prices, and sometimes cumulating in an extremely disruptive manner.

Not only is the pinpointing of potential bottle-necks an essential preliminary to the determination of priorities for planned development but a constant alert has to be maintained for the emergence of imbalances in the course of the plan. The lags whose probability has been most frequently underestimated by developing countries in the past have been in exports, in domestic food supplies and in the skills required in the course of industrialization. But in varying degree, many of the investments that have tong gestation periods and are not productive until complete hydroelectric plants, railway links, and other infrastructure projects often fall into this category have involved timing problems and awkward choices between leads and lags, both tending in their different ways to lower the efficiency of capital.

Bottle-necks arising from lagging sectors are not equally amenable to the sort of action that Governments are in a position to take, so that plan priorities tend to involve more than decisions about the order and intensity of the measures to effect the desired change. The economy as a whole cannot be made to wait on accomplishments in a recalcitrant sector which may depend on structural alterations requiring considerable time. While a major effort is mounted to bring about the necessary adjustments which in the long run cannot be avoided-arrangements must be made to bypass the problem or at least to minimize its negative effects on the course of development.

To some extent, this can be done by appropriate modifications in the use of available domestic resources, substituting the more plentiful for the scarcer raw material, using labor instead of mechanical equipment, choosing technologies that are best related to existing factor endowment. But many countries have found it more convenient to make good the results of the lag by drawing resources from the rest of the world the hiring of special skills, the encouragement of foreign investment, the importation Of basic food-stuffs have all been reported to for bridging gaps left by lagging domestic sectors. The feasibility of this depends in large measure on the status and performance of the export sector where this is itself a bottleneck, the economy is deprived of one of the most flexible of its development instrumentalities.

The formulation and carrying out of development policies designed to maintain the degree of balance most conducive to growth impose a very heavy strain on government machinery. Plan administration cuts across the traditional departmental structure of the civil service, and to keep normal public services functioning smoothly while changing the focus of operations from the department to the economy as a whole requires a major adjustment in attitude and organization. Even in those countries that have taken development planning most seriously and have set up planning commissions often highly placed and attached to the prime minister's office or its equivalent there have been many difficulties. To some extent, these difficulties have been in priority determination and the choice of policy instruments, but more frequently they have arisen in the implementation of plan decisions, dependent as this has tended to be on ordinary departmental staff preoccupied with routine responsibilities.

The implied emphasis on change and expansion is in some ways the antithesis of bureaucratic attitudes and procedures. It cannot be taken for granted that a department of agriculture is appropriately staffed to carry out the research, experimentation and extension work that agrarian restructuring may require. Nor can an education department, struggling to provide teachers and classrooms to meet the conventional claims of a rapidly growing child population, be expected to gear itself automatically to make the locational and curriculum changes that may be urgently necessary to meet the newly emerging needs for skilled workers and technicians.

There may be no department of transport or of energy, while the department of public works may soon be swamped by the number and variety of projects stemming from the Government's own investment decisions. Control over the relevant activities of provincial and local authorities may be too weak to permit the necessary degree of co-ordination. Even the horizontal links between central government departments traditionally through the treasury may be unsuited to the planning function on an economy-wide basis.

Consistency in their deployment, and partly in the fact that the economy is subject to continuous and changing pressures transmitted from the outside world through export markets, the cost of imports and the flow of capital.

Whatever the difficulties developing countries encounter in organizing the government apparatus to play the role required of it in executing an articulated development plan, the problem of integrating the private sector into the plan so that investment and production decisions are consistent with the stated objectives for the economy as a whole has generally been an even greater challenge. The problems lies partly in the size and range of the private sector (compared with the economic component of the public sector), partly in the fact that the indirect means through which government influence is brought to bear ort private decision making ÿend to be much more effective in preventing and deterring than in encouraging and stimulating, partly in the fact that because the instruments in question are those which the Government has to rely on to manage the economy and maintain its short-term stability.

The extent to which developing countries tend to be exposed to impulses from abroad is implicit in the share of exports in total production. In 1963-1965 the ratio of exports of goods and services to gross domestic product exceeded 23 percent in more than half of the developing countries, and the relative importance of the exports was increasing in more than two-thirds of the countries the ratio had increased in the preceding eight years. The risks of inconsistency among policy measures depend to a considerable extent on the range of instruments at the disposal of the Government. Where, for example, as is the case in many developing countries' government revenue is derived from a small number of taxes, chosen largely on the basis of their administrative feasibility, it is likely to prove too costly to use the tax system flexibly for other purposes.

The provision of tax incentives to encourage industrial investment, for example-may involve a serious loss of revenue, at least in the short run. The raising of customs duties to provide protection for a domestic activity may mean the sacrifice of needed government income. Even more awkward is the problem of taxing exports the needs of the Government for revenue and of the economy for foreign exchange tend to be in direct conflict, and tax incentives to promote exports may involve heavy budgetary sacrifices. Price policies may be similarly torn between incompatible objectives in many instances the desire to hold down the cost of living for urban consumers has stood in the way of pricing schedules calculated to stimulate the production of the goods or services in question.

The task of ensuring the consistent deployment of all policy instruments is often complicated by a certain duality in objectives. Even when priorities are carefully determined in the context of a five-year development plan, they may prove difficult to sustain in the face of shorter-term claims, particularly when these arise in critical areas. A harvest failure or a major decline in the world market price of a leading export product may so affect the country's economic balance that measures are required that may not be in line with plan objectives. Few developing countries have the necessary reserves to permit adjustment to strong and unfavorable shorter-term impulses without significant disruption to longer-term policies.

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dallasareaopinion · 5 years

Text

Old problems, new solutions?

This idea has bounced around in my head all day like a hot pinball machine, racking up points the ball going everywhere, yet at the end of the day, I am back where I started. I think?

Seriously though, something caused my brain to run around in hundreds of tangents and I cannot remember where I started, yet at the time it was important.

I hope to narrow it down for you.

Here are the problems: Wall Street, trash and pollution, jobs, education, and so how does all this tie together?

I vaguely remember thinking earlier it would be like taking all the trash out of the ocean. Which to me is a goal we should reach. I do not remember what made me think about the trash in the ocean, but I got started thinking about why is it so hard to get people to make cleaning up our environment a priority, then the obvious hit me. There is no money in it. Duh

People talk about recycling, yet even that never gets real traction. And the recycling companies struggle to make money. I do not know the logistics of it, but let’s work on that.

Or do we need to make money from it? And this is where the Wall Street problem comes in. Instead of trying to have a for profit company that has to answer to stockholders that expect ever increasing sales, why not accept that not all companies are growth companies, some can survive without constantly trying to please Wall Street’s insatiable greed.

The key is structuring the expectations carefully and structuring what the goal of the company can be.

So instead of always trying to “grow”, instead create a dividend generating company so it has public investment and allows for income only. If you know securities you have probably have heard of preferred stock. Imagine a company with something similar, no common stock. There are no earnings structured by the stock price. Everything is based on annual earnings.

Now this would not work for most corporations especially those that sell products. The difference is you aren’t selling a product and you are doing the public a favor. And this is not specifically for recycling companies, that is just one example.

Sticking to that example though, recycling companies receive contracts from both companies and governments to clean areas, or a combination of general recycling and clean ups. The company earns x amount of dollars and the profit is sent to the investors in dividend income. Outside of capital expenditures to meet new demands or invest in better technology, the majority of the net profit is paid out.

You do have the problem of possible fluctuating income based on the contracts, yet this is a bit of a public private partnership. And to carry this further, here is an extreme example.

Coal is a dying industry, no matter how hard people try to revive it. And has it dies people are losing jobs. And coal is dirty, not just in air pollution, but what it has done to the environment where it is mined. And who has benefited the most from this, the corporations who ran the mines. And this is extreme and the coal industry won’t like it, but the government can exchange the cost of cleaning up the environment, retraining some of the workers to how it needs to be cleaned up and letting investors come in and create a company that not only cleans up the environment, but also restores either farmland or forests or brand new planned developments to invigorate the local economy and environment. The cost to the coal companies can be either they hand the land back to the government or they pay a direct fee. The government collects the fees and pays the new company or the government pays the new company through bonds and taxes then once the clean up is completed they sell the land to the newly created economy, ie forestry, farms, or new development.

And here is the kicker, the company that does this has planned end. Once the project is completed the company can be broken up or shut down and all the assets sold to finalize the payoff to the investors so they can go invest elsewhere.

The government isn’t in the business of cleaning up and finds the resources outside of raising taxes or it invests in the land and recoups their investment to offset future taxes. Once the environment is cleaned up then there is less taxes needed going forward.

And there are other companies along the same lines. And these are supply chain companies, manufacturing companies, and others. We need to go back to the business of products that can be recycled, like glass bottles, we have aluminum cans, but they are forced to perform under Wall Street pressure, and other items like real cloth instead of “synthetic” fabrics which are really plastic. The exact same companies that make plastic can switch gears and go back to products that either decompose like paper or can be recycled. THe difference is the producers are also the recyclers and this part of the business helps to offset costs, but they are not bound by Wall Street growth factors. Some may and some probably could, but overall a secondary industry that maintains a status quo of that gives you a predictable business model.

Recessions might have some effect on income, but recessions would only have muted effect. Jobs would not be as drastically affected if you knew you could adjust the dividend temporarily, or always have the dividend underpaid a small amount and the company actually has a savings account to adjust for moderate fluctuations in income so investors can rely on their plans.

We receive a secondary gain because the same jobs that rely on plastic production get switched over to the recycle industry and we have less reliance on oil. Will the oil industries be upset, yeah but who cares. They can invest in the new production just as much as the rest of us. People are always pro free market when it benefits them, take away something and they whine just like everyone else.

The trend will eventually be away from oil as it was with coal over time. They can stay relevant by investing their current profits into new ventures. Don’t believe me, research what T. Boone Pickens is doing.

And we can use the same principle to clean the ocean or wherever. Industries that benefit from the use of the ocean pay a fee to the companies responsible for cleaning and recycling what they collect. Governments can create treaties to facilitate their fee schedule.

Basically it is a temporary tax to do business that has a built in reduction as time goes on. The more the clean up is successful the less there will be in the future. There may be a smaller version of the company as time goes on, but that is good. The fees become smaller for the companies etc...and jobs can transfer to the very industries that paid the fees as they now have more potential growth as habitats and environments come back. And this “tax” or fee is applied to the companies that receive the most benefit instead of being part of larger taxes whole citizenry face that if run by governments never goes away.

Businesses can be structured where success in completing the project is where managers and employees receive bonuses, not stock price. Many of these projects will go on for decades and some of the businesses will become part of our lives. The investments won’t pay the like the growth in Apple or Amazon stock, but the investors will know that. And these will be great investments for pension plans, trusts, retirees, as similar to bonds they generate income.

So how are the original issues resolved, plus some other benefits.

Wall Street’s influenced is reduced so the certain businesses can operate solely on their core plan.

Clean up helps the environment, and as people look for new ways to address different scenarios new technology develops so businesses develop to fill this need.

Taxes can be reduced as we can switch the responsibility of EPA super clean ups to these companies. The fees are paid by the corporations who created the problem, hence some government interaction will be needed to enforce, but the overall burden doesn’t fall on the general populace.

Stable industries help communities develop so local tax bases can spend money on what is important to the community such as better schools. Retraining to help people in dying industries make the switch can encompass more than just job specific training. The need for new technologies offer new opportunities for research and development which requires more people attending higher education.

Consumers are not affected over the long term as the switch from plastics to products that either decompose on their own or more recyclable products come back into everyday use.

So you go back to paper, glass, continue use of aluminum, cotton and wool clothing, (agriculture) etc.. these businesses still exist today, you just expand them to replace all the plastic currently being used. It may not bring a net job gain, but you should not lose jobs either. Over time you might get the gain as some of these industries will become more localized by their nature, especially the clothing changes. And since these products will either be used for other products or products direct to the consumer they have the opportunity to be more traditional corporations closer to what we had in the 50’s and 60’s with just more automation and technology.

To some people this is pie in the sky thinking, when actually it is basic common sense. This won’t happen overnight, but we could begin right away. The big key is changing the mindset and millennials today already have some of this mindset.

And this has looped through my brain in many shapes forms and fashions today, so it is hard to come back and write it down. I hope you get the jist of it and gives you some food for thought. The examples aren’t as succinct as I would like, but if I try to rehash it all, it becomes even more jumbled.

Cheers

This idea has bounced around in my head all day like a hot pinball machine, racking up points the ball going everywhere, yet at the end of the day I am back where I started. I think?

Seriously though, something caused my brain to run around in hundreds of tangents and I cannot remember where I started, yet at the time it was important.

I hope to narrow it down for you.

Here are the problems: Wall Street, trash and pollution, jobs, education, and so how does all this tie together?

People talk about recycling, yet even that never gets real traction. And the recycling companies struggle to make money. I do not know the logistics of it, but let’s work on that.

Or do we need to make money from it? And this is where the Wall Street problem comes in. Instead of trying to have a for-profit company that has to answer to stockholders that expect ever increasing sales, why not accept that not all companies are growth companies, some can survive without constantly trying to please Wall Street’s insatiable greed.

The key is structuring the expectations carefully and structuring what the goal of the company can be.

So instead of always trying to “grow”, instead create a dividend-generating company so it has public investment and allows for income only. If you know securities you have probably have heard of preferred stock. Imagine a company with something similar, no common stock. There are no earnings structured by the stock price. Everything is based on annual earnings.

Now, this would not work for most corporations especially those that sell products. The difference is you aren’t selling a product and you are doing the public a favor. And this is not specifically for recycling companies, that is just one example.

Sticking to that example though, recycling companies receive contracts from both companies and governments to clean areas or a combination of general recycling and cleanups. The company earns x amount of dollars and the profit is sent to the investors in dividend income. Outside of capital expenditures to meet new demands or invest in better technology, the majority of the net profit is paid out.

You do have the problem of possible fluctuating income based on the contracts, yet this is a bit of a public private partnership. And to carry this further, here is an extreme example.

So how are the original issues resolved, plus some other benefits.

Wall Street’s influenced is reduced so the certain businesses can operate solely on their core plan.

Clean up helps the environment, and as people look for new ways to address different scenarios new technology develops so businesses develop to fill this need.

Consumers are not affected over the long term as the switch from plastics to products that either decompose on their own or more recyclable products come back into everyday use.

Cheers

0 notes

kellyp72 · 5 years

Text

Why Growing a Food Garden Is More Important Than Ever

(images from pexels.com and Green and Prosperous)

The industrial food system, sometimes referred to as industrial agriculture, or “big ag,” refers to the current system of commercial food production, which relies heavily on synthetic chemical fertilizers and pesticides. This system developed during World War II, when militaries relied on chemical weapons to fuel their war machines. After the war, the leftover chemicals began to be used in agricultural applications, enabling farmers to go from self-sufficiency to major commercial growth in a relatively short span of time. However, the technologies that enabled farming to go big also brought changes that are currently threatening the livelihood and health of farming families, their workers, the environment, and each one of us.

In other words, the food you eat is nowadays being produced in ways that are often detrimental to your health and the health of this planet. This is just one reason why more people are beginning to grow at least some of their own food at home, or in a community garden plot.

Are family farms really family-friendly?

Although 98% of the food sold in the United States is being grown on “family farms,” the difference between “family farm” and “corporate farm” (or “factory farm”) is a lot fuzzier than it used to be. According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, a “family farm” is “any farm organized as a sole proprietorship, partnership, or family corporation.” As long as a family owns (and presumably operates) the majority share in that farm, it’s considered a “family farm.” This means that a family farm can range from small, “retirement farms” generating a few thousand dollars a year in gross revenue, to large-scale farms that gross millions of dollars each year.

Some industrial growers exploit our ignorance of the differences between the average consumer’s image of family farms and the reality of farming today to detract from the ways in which the industrial approach to farming, the dominant system of food production in the US today, is increasingly unsustainable. At the same time, most farm families are not to blame: they are caught up in an unfair and exploitative system that favors the biggest players and rewards bad behavior. Many family farms are locked into contracts with corporations that control what they grow, how they grow it, how much of it they can grow, and how much they can sell it for. Farmers are forced to take loans for seed, equipment, fertilizers, and other goods and must often pay inflated prices for these items. Their profit margins are increasingly smaller, meaning it’s harder than ever to make a living as a farmer. They face a number of additional mind-boggling challenges that ultimately make you wonder: why the hell would anyone want to be a farmer these days?

Farm families have a tough road that has only been getting tougher

The stories of 5 farm families featured in the History Channel series “American Farm” provides some answers to this question. It tells the stories of these families’ struggles to maintain their farms against a seemingly relentless onslaught of misfortunes: crushing debt, equipment malfunctions, the formidable forces of Mother Nature, uncooperative, sick, or distressed livestock, and back-breaking work from pre-dawn until after dusk that never lets up. The series rotates among the 5 families, drawing viewers into their lives and teaching us all something about what it really means to be a farmer today.

Here are my 3 takeaways from the series:

1. Farmers have what you might call “true grit”. They are tough, no-nonsense, and possess a strength of character that few other people have.

2. Farming is hard as hell, and I would not want to be a farmer for my living.

3. The way that farming is done in this country is not sustainable in the long run. Heck, it may not even be sustainable in the short run.

Why You Should Care about Farming Practices

There are a lot of things about farming that need to change if we are aiming to create a system of food production that is more cost-effective, healthy, and sustainable. Before I get to the question of how growing your own garden can help change the current unsustainable direction of industrial agriculture, let me get to a few of the reasons “why,” as in “why things need to change, and why you should care”:

Because current industrial agriculture practices mean that the food that is grown or raised for your consumption may not be that good for you. In fact, it may make you sick. There’s a lot I could say here, but I’ll highlight only a few of the most egregious practices: a) monocropping and duocropping, practices in which farmers grow the same crop (or two) on the same parcel of land, year after year, deplete the soil of nutrients, which means that the crops being grown in that soil have a lot fewer vitamins and minerals in them than they should; b) market share is increasingly concentrated among a small number of firms, which leads to less competitive pricing and the exploitation of migrant farmworkers (whose cheap labor undercuts small and medium farmers); and c) farmers are raising (and slaughtering) an excessive number of livestock, which is forced to live in inhumane conditions that no one who cares for another living being should consider acceptable. The list goes on…

Because farm workers aren’t the only ones whose health is suffering from the overuse of pesticides on food crops. Herbicides and pesticides used in agriculture are associated with acute poisoning (this is more likely to happen to farm workers) as well as long-term chronic illness (which affects the average consumer). Children and pregnant or breastfeeding women are especially vulnerable to the effects of pesticide exposure, much of which happens through residue in the food we eat. Compared to adults, children take in more air, water and food relative to their body weight, which increases their exposure to pesticides. Pesticide exposure in children has been linked in many clinical studies around the world with neurodevelopmental disorders like ADHD, obesity, and diabetes, and pesticides are known to cause brain damage in fetuses. Aside from this, agricultural pesticide drift contaminates children’s playgrounds, which is especially alarming considering that children can absorb pesticides through their skin from grass and wood, both of which are abundant in many playgrounds.

Because pollution from fertilizer runoff contaminates drinking water supplies. Although most contamination occurs at low concentrations, exposure happens on a daily basis. Although federal environmental agencies around the world monitor and test drinking water for contaminants, the list of contaminants they test for is limited. Considering that thousands of new chemicals are being produced every year in the United States alone, many of which are used in agricultural applications, and that we don’t know the health effects of most of these chemicals, it’s safe to say that some of them are potentially devastating to human health.

In California, which grows a major portion of the nation’s food in the US, in multiple sites in the Great Lakes region, which are major water supplies for the US and Canada, and in Quebec, a 2017 study by the nonprofit organization Environmental Working Group found drinking water supplies for over 7.6 million families in the U.S. alone to be contaminated with glyphosate (the main ingredient in the herbicide Roundup), atrazine (an herbicide banned in Europe but widely used in the US on crops like corn and sugarcane, and on turf in golf courses and residential lawns), and neonicotinoids (a family of pesticides that are chemically related to nicotine, which are believed to be less toxic to mammals and birds than they are to insects and other invertebrates). The health effects of pesticide contamination of drinking water vary with the type of pesticide and amount present, but they have been linked in clinical studies with a number of health problems ranging from increased risk of cancer to nervous system disorders and endocrine system dysfunctions.

And if you think that you can avoid pesticides by simply buying organic, think again. Not only do organic farmers use pesticides (mostly plant-based, but also some synthetics are allowed for use in organic farming), there is less research on the health and environmental effects of organic pesticides, but what we do know is that some of them are also harmful to wildlife populations, and a few are also harmful to human health.

How Can Growing a Food Garden Help?

There is a lot of ground that can’t be covered in the space of this post, so I’ll focus on just 3 ways in which growing at least some of your own food can help mitigate some of the problems with industrial agriculture I’ve outlined above. It’s important to mention that these 3 points are only true if you are using sustainable, environmentally sound growing practices:

It reduces the amount of pesticides and other pollutants

Planting perennial food crops in rotation, (perennials seem to be able to withstand the effects of climate change better than annuals), constructing terraced gardens and grassed waterways, and contour farming (plowing and planting across or perpendicular to slopes, especially those that are prone to soil erosion) are all effective techniques that help prevent the erosion of soil and lessen the effects of stormwater runoff, which brings pesticides, fertilizers, and pollutants flowing over the land and into bodies of water.

It gives you a much wider, more nutrient-dense variety of food choices

Often, commercial growers develop new varieties of fruits and vegetables based purely on their ability to grow fast and large, offer high yields, resist pests, and withstand the physical rigors of shipping. While there is still a heated debate over the benefits of eating locally sourced food over food that has been transported over many miles, it doesn’t take a clinical study to show you that the flavor of freshly-picked foods is much better than the flavor of food that has been sitting around a while. Often, when commercial growers pick produce for shipping, they do so before the food is fully ripe or before it has had time to develop its full spectrum of nutrients. Moreover, many modern varieties of fruits and vegetables offer fewer nutrients than varieties did decades ago. This is largely because of soil depletion: modern industrial agricultural practices have stripped an increasing amount of nutrients from the soil in which our food grows. You can control both the flavor and the nutrient density of the produce you eat by growing at least some of it in your own garden, picking at the peak of ripeness and nutrition, and eating right away.

It helps filter out air pollution

The latest update to the World Health Organization’s Urban Ambient Air Pollution Database notes that there has been a rise in urban air pollution in cities around the globe. The poorest residents are being hit the hardest and this pollution has come with an increase in associated health risks like asthma, heart disease, lung cancer, and various respiratory ailments. As a natural part of the process of photosynthesis (converting sunlight to energy), plants absorb carbon dioxide and emit oxygen. But certain plants also have more specialized abilities to combat pollution. For instance, the roots of some plants contain bacteria that have the ability to break down contaminants in the soil, or trap them in their fibers (as in the case of heavy metals that these bacteria can’t absorb). Green plants also capture particulate matter as the wind brings it into contact with sticky plant leaf surfaces. One added benefit of plants (including edible walls, green roofs, and trees) is that they help relieve the “urban heat island effect,” cooling cities in hot weather, lowering the demand for air conditioning, and reducing the production of greenhouse gas emissions associated with air conditioning devices.

You’ll eat more fruits and vegetables, which can offset health problems

The USDA recommends at least 5 servings of fruits and vegetables each day, but most Americans consume much less than that. Growing your own garden makes it more likely that you’ll consume more of these foods, and as is universally agreed, a diet that is mostly plant-based is better for your health and the health of the environment. Eating a diet rich in fruits and vegetables is important for lowering blood pressure, eliminating chronic inflammation, and reducing your risk of contracting associated end-stage diseases like heart disease and stroke, as well as promoting weight loss. The low glycemic loads of vegetables and (many) fruits also prevent blood sugar spikes that lead to hunger. Studies have also shown that some vegetables and fruits (like tomatos) may reduce your risk of contracting certain cancers (such as prostate cancer).

These are just a few of the reasons it’s important to become more informed about the food you consume. Growing at least some of it yourself has many benefits for you, your family, your community, and even beyond.

Want to find out more about growing your own food?

Click the link to listen to the free lectures in Unit 1 of the online course, “Container Garden Like a Pro.”

#food gardening #urban gardening #sustainable agriculture

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treeyo · 5 years

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Response to Carolien via this article:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0006320718313636

Insects are the basis of the food chain for so much. Birds for example are one of the many creatures that thrive off of them, well certain types thats for sure but even predatory birds that eat larger forms of life depend on bugs to build the food chain blocks. In the states we all know the story of DDT and Bald Eagles, ironically the very symbol of our nation. I am sure you get that so here is the philosophical point.

Des Cartes. This french philosopher said man is separate from nature, mind and body are separate. Cartesian Dualism is in fact the cause of this separation that allows people to read such a thing and then not act. People stopped seeing in patterns and only have a rational worldview. Essentially this is the missing link in the new age spiritual realm and a message i really wish to hit home with in my next education pursuits of an online PDC/ subsricption.

Rene Des Cartes

For example with cows, yes they are a mammal with specific caloric needs and health needs, yet rely tremendously on the symbiosis of their gut bacteria and protozoa. So we began to grow corn and soy and other row crops to meet their caloric needs to gain weight quickly. It had the repercussions of disease but science had already sorted that out with antibiotics, steroids, growth hormones, vaccines, and all those great advancements rationally took care of the other side of the equation of them feeding on foods they shouldn’t be eating evolutionarily. We have stepped into the roles of gods and left behind simply being stewards of his/ their creation. The monotheistic world religions are very materialistic and dominate a worldview perpetuated by Des Cartes. Spirituality now is viewed in materialism rather than wholism. This is why Constatine crushed the pagan religions because they were holistic thinkers bent on cooperation not competition.

Same happened with plants and fertilizers after the war. Yes fertilizers make incredible plant growth but then disease and pests proliferate. So yes, science had already developed nerve toxins for war such as organophosphates and started to spray crops when the plagues came. Its nerve poison. And we spray it all the time throughout the whole world. Agent orange was one of them and Vietnam soldiers are still degrading and dying from this awful poisoning beset by their governments. And people ask why is there so many mental health problems, our nervous system and endocrine system is now plagued with the very poisons that were meant to free us from starvation.

In the states 90% of the population lives in cities. Politicians are clueless on agriculture. But they make the policy. Its a business reinforced by the need for GDP infusion based on competition. We are not collaboratively meeting the needs of a growing population and an environmental catastrophe. Mankind reads such an article and responds with no action. gross wealth inequality is one of the reasons why because organic and local is more expensive theoretically. But our tax monies go towards subsidies of industrial agriculture which costs so the prices of those foods remain cheap. Imagine buying your fertilizer in a bag vs making your own compost, rich in life. Its chemistry vs biology. Its GDP vs self sufficiency or local economy. Its the global reticulation of materials and energy that makes the rich richer. The billionaire class is no different than the feudal lords and kings of the past. Because so many live in the city, the countryside is raped. Insects lose habitat because of it and are dwindling in large part to pesticides and poisoned manures. War against nature and war in humanity is mainly about capitalism vs other ideologies. They want a bigger market for more GDP. Its that simple. And meanwhile in the cities the majority of people struggle to meet ends meat. Their purchases are based on simple mathematical equations of price of food not holistic health perspective. Humans also stopped educating themselves about nature known also as environmental literacy. You maybe able to read a book or do algebra but can you identify five trees? Simply knowing what trees you are walking by, what birds you hear calling, and what fish are jumping is a good beginning to reconnecting. Educate yourselves for gods sake! People are clueless that their fertilizing of their lawns, their buying of doritos, their yoga pant purchases, their netfilx and chilling are killing this planet. And no one is perfect, surely not me.

hot compost turning, author having fun while teaching the technique as well! Portugal, Escola Da Terra PDC, 2011

Thomas Malthus was also an important philosopher that I studied in University twenty years ago. He said that human population can only grow based on food supply. Its a simple ecological proposition. So humanity took that and created shit tons of food yet empty on real nutrition hence the diseases of today like diabetes. Its a nutritional deficiency. Neo Malthusians state that we will always find new technologies to circumvent the feedback loops of nature and our population growth then is essentially infinite. Its madness. We rape and pillage our natural resources for a made up set of laws around economy. Capitalism is driving humanity to extinction, the ultimate form of death. Because yes we all die at some point, and many of us pass our DNA to the next generation. But there will come a point in time when our DNA is so fried from all the poison that viable human beings are no longer possible, MAD MAX STYLE.

Yet a burgeoning movement of people growing foods alternatively exists. So will the people of today support those farmers, those land regenerators, those providers of insect refuge and habitat? That is the fundamental question of humanity. We are hell bent on watching netflix not nature, we are hellbent on purchasing from Amazon not local artisans, we are hell bent on entertaining ourselves with hollywood rather than interacting with nature. And no i do not mean simply going for a walk in the park, i refer to actively stewarding pieces of land. We are an evolving species and our path towards technological and artificial intelligence is usurping our connection to nature. It is our gods given right to be, not just to do. We can in fact roll this tide into regeneration. It takes courage, tenacity, patience, pattern thinking, material knowledge, and many other virtues that society has indeed forgotten. It maybe cooperation more than anything else.

Nina showing off the newly built insect hotel at Terra Alta, 2016

Gil, our friend at Treasure Lake, preparing to move one of his hives to the lake, KY 2018

Arvid scything at Sekier, Slovakia for hay storage

Tom planting one of the chestnuts on newly terraced zone 3 zone, Treasure Lake, 2018

lots of shovels and picks in this class swale digging project, Cincinnati, OH 2009

Students working on Schematic design with shifting cards

So for me it indeed doesn’t affect much cause all the days of my life are hellbent on giving back to a planet that gives me life. I shall dwell in the house of the lord forever. Stewardship.

thank you for this question. hugs

Insect Decline Blog: A letter back to a Student who asked about this vital topic Response to Carolien via this article: Insects are the basis of the food chain for so much.

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nancygduarteus · 5 years

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America’s Ugliest Apples and Carrots Have Ignited a Food War

Do you know what baby carrots actually are?

For me, the baby-carrot jig was up a couple years ago. I’m not sure what I’d believed about them previously: Were they actual babies? Were they a “baby” breed of small adult carrots? I certainly hadn’t understood them to be carrot nuggets, whittled out of big, ugly carrots that many people wouldn’t buy in their natural state.

I’ve never lived in a world that wanted me to think about how the carrots got made. Since the early 1980s, scores of smaller American agricultural companies have been driven out of business or gobbled up by Big-Ag conglomerates. That I hadn’t thought much about my little carrots meant the system had worked as intended for the type of consumer I am (affluent, urban) and helped obscure the leviathan of the American food-supply chain, which includes everything from commercial growers and processors like Dole and Kraft Heinz down to local farmers’ markets and food banks.

But as shoppers change, so must the systems that serve them. Younger, socially conscious Americans and their concerns about sustainability have turned some unflattering attention toward the food industry. One of the most popularly cited problems is the amount of produce that goes entirely unconsumed in the developed world. By some estimations, it’s more than half. To combat that, a new class of for-profit start-ups has emerged: ugly-produce boxes. Companies like Misfits Market, Imperfect Produce, and Hungry Harvest aim to fill the logistical gaps and provide new markets for growers by buying up farmers’ “ugly” or excess produce and shipping it directly to your doorstep, often by subscription. They’re the rescue dogs of vegetation.

If successful, ugly-produce companies could help with the vanishingly thin margins faced by smaller-scale growers and expand access to fresh food. But not everyone is buying it: Food-justice advocates argue that profit-based solutions are unequipped to do battle against food inequality, and that even well-meaning companies could do real harm to community organizations. Depending on who you ask, ugly produce is either the salvation or destruction of America’s food system. The reality of its potential impact might be a little more complicated, with start-ups profiting from the food system’s structural problems while also providing real, material good for working-class people.

It seems as though “ugly” produce companies didn’t anticipate the criticism they’ve received. On a fundamental level, some researchers question whether Americans’ understanding of food waste as a crisis actually reflects the problem at hand. Last week on Twitter, the crop scientist Sarah Taber wrote a long thread arguing that ugly produce isn’t the problem or solution. “The food system is a hot mess but using ugly produce is one thing it’s actually really good at,” she says in the thread. In her estimation, my carrot nuggets are proof of concept: Odd produce might not go to Whole Foods, but much of it still does go to stores that serve working-class people, or gets sent to processors who turn it into salsa or apple juice. (Taber did not return a request for comment.)

The vast majority of American produce does indeed make it to a packinghouse for processing and distribution, but farmers point out that efficiency varies wildly depending on what kind of producer you are. According to David Earle, the business manager for the farm collective Tuscarora Organic Growers Cooperative, in Pennsylvania, around 20 percent of the produce from his organization’s small growers doesn’t meet stringent grocery-store or restaurant standards. “If they don’t sell because we don’t have an outlet and we have too much product, they’d likely just go bad,” he says.

Dana Gunders, a food-sustainability researcher who wrote the Natural Resources Defense Council’s 2012 report on food waste, says that Tuscarora’s problem is not unique for growers of its size. “You wind up with a situation at times where it actually does not make financial sense to harvest the product,” she says. Tuscarora has started distributing its excess produce through the ugly-produce-box company Misfits Market, and Earle says it’s been a boon to the business. “It’s good for us. It’s good for the farmer who’s not getting nothing for the product,” he says. “Misfits Market gave us an outlet to move these products and not just feed them to the cows.”

Other farmers are less enthusiastic. Terra Organics, based in Washington, shut down at the end of last year, and its owners cited the emergence of ugly-produce companies as among the reasons it was going out of business. In an interview with The New Republic, Imperfect Produce, the start-up that serves Terra Organics’ former community, conceded that it works with industrial-scale producers like Dole to source food, which critics say can make these start-ups an ally of exactly the food system that creates waste and hunger in the first place. If affluent consumers can feel as if they’re making ethical purchases while enjoying the savings and convenience of wonky vegetables delivered from commercial producers, they might be less likely to buy from local producers and cooperatives.

“People have been struggling for a couple decades now to bring their food system under local control,” says Eric Holt-Giménez, the executive director of the food-justice organization Food First. “There’s no indication [the ugly-produce movement] helps to do that at all.” Holt-Giménez questions whether it would even be possible to run an ugly-produce business with the kind of ethical standards that would benefit the greater good. “They’ve got to grow, as start-ups. They can’t change that,” he says. “They can’t think about a shared, more cooperative, more collective business model with communities.”

Misfits Market, at least, seems intent on trying to do things the right way. Abhi Ramesh, the company’s founder and CEO, says that his company doesn’t work with Big Ag and instead targets local, organic producers for its purchasing. Misfits gives them access to a network they can use not just to sell more produce, but also to reach consumers who might not otherwise have access to their food. According to a 2009 report by the United States Department of Agriculture, more than 20 million Americans live in food deserts, which means they lack meaningful access to affordable, high-quality, fresh foods; the disparity disproportionately affects black and Latino populations. “The reasons those people don’t have access today is because it’s not cost-effective to service them,” Ramesh says. “So our big challenge from a business perspective is how we figure out a way to service them in an economically feasible way.”

Critics often dismiss sentiments like this as sly, do-gooder marketing. Most ugly-produce companies deliver only to select zip codes in major urban areas, which is yet another barrier to the historically deprived. “It’s assumed people who end up buying these boxes are wealthier people who want to feel good about saving the environment,” Ramesh acknowledges. But he says that the majority of his company’s customers don’t fit that stereotype, largely because it services every zip code in the states in which it operates. “They’re older, they’re on fixed incomes,” Ramesh says of Misfit’s customers. “They may not be on food stamps, but they end up falling into a socioeconomic bucket where they need access to affordable produce.” Ramesh says the company is also looking into ways to accept federal SNAP benefits, which help the lowest-income Americans afford fresh foods. (Misfits Market doesn’t publicly release sales data, including consumer demographics.)

Some food-justice advocates encourage ugly-produce start-ups to go even further. In December, Phat Beets Produce, an Oakland-based organization that provides community-supported affordable produce, released a petition with a set of demands for an ugly-produce competitor, Imperfect Produce. Phat Beets, which did not respond to a request for comment, wants the company and those like it to provide in-person payment and pickup options to serve people without access to banking services, coordinate free deliveries to food-justice organizations and food banks, and limit grower partnerships to those who comply with farm-worker labor standards.

Meanwhile, other community food organizations have found it possible to work productively with ugly-food companies, despite worries that their success means diverting food away from people in need. Kait Bowdler, the director of sustainability for Philabundance, Philadelphia’s largest community food bank, says the two start-ups that service the area haven’t created any issues for her organization. “We have bigger problems we should be worried about,” Bowdler says. Philabundance hasn’t seen any drop-off in donations from growers since Misfits Market and Hungry Harvest became popular in the city. And normalizing the consumption of less-than-pristine produce can help alleviate the shame that some people feel when they need to get food from the bank, Bowdler says. “You can’t imagine how many different strategies we’ve had to talk about to make it clear to people that we’re recovering and rescuing food, not feeding people waste.”

Where Philabundance has seen recent donation shortages is from grocery stores. Bowdler credits that in part to stores’ expanding prepared-foods selections, which appeal to younger shoppers and allow retailers to reuse produce internally once it can no longer be sold in its original form. According to Gunder, the food-sustainability researcher, that dynamic is also connected to America’s food-waste problem, but it comes on the opposite end of the system. “Fruits and vegetables are the most wasted products in people’s homes,” she says. Based on her research, that’s where most waste happens overall.

Between kitchen-skill loss among younger Americans and the ever-dwindling opportunity to spend time preparing food, Millennials just don’t cook very much, even if they intend to. As a result, a lot of food goes uneaten for reasons that sales-based start-ups can’t touch. At least in the immediate future, that could present a bigger obstacle to feeding the poor than a disruption from ugly-produce boxes.

Moreover, just because ugly-produce start-ups aren’t doing all of the good doesn’t mean they can’t do some of it. Maybe both things are true: These businesses, if well run, can serve genuine needs for farmers and consumers that current agribusiness can’t. They’re also trying to retrofit a for-profit solution onto a supply chain that’s classist, racist, and opposed to the integrity of community-based food systems. The only real, long-term answer to those problems might be to rebuild the American food system as a whole. But maybe venture capital can be used to feed some people in the meantime.

from Health News And Updates https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/01/ugly-produce-startups-food-waste/581182/?utm_source=feed

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ionecoffman · 5 years

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America’s Ugliest Apples and Carrots Have Ignited a Food War

Do you know what baby carrots actually are?

Article source here:The Atlantic

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mreugenehalsey · 6 years

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Disease & Deforestation: The Cost of Coffee in Madagascar

In Madagascar, coffee is the fuel that powers everyone through their day – but it comes at a cost.

This island, which lies off the Mozambique coast, is one of the poorest countries in the world, despite being rich in biodiversity. The majority of people here live in poverty and their lifestyle is interwoven with the country’s coffee culture. So, too, is their health.

Among the lush greenery and exotic animals, I discovered a disturbing backstory to Madagascar’s coffee industry. Read on to discover the true cost of this nation’s love of coffee.

You may also like The Daily Life of Madagascar’s Coffee Vendors

For young and old, rich and poor, coffee is a national pastime. Credit: Nicole Motteux

The Dangerous Life of a Coffee Vendor

Coffee is a major agricultural crop and source of income for thousands of people in Madagascar. From bean to bag, the coffee industry is an important employer each step of the way. This is because coffee is an ever-present part of life in Madagascar. About 80% of the total production of coffee is consumed within the country. Robusta accounts for the vast bulk of current output.

Every stage of coffee production and sale in Madagascar is arduous and poorly paid. But it is the small-scale coffee vendors who face the most difficulties and dangers.

During my travels, I met numerous coffee vendors who spend their days crouching over small fires to roast and prepare coffee. The constant exposure to smoke leads to the deep penetration of small particulate matter, carbon monoxide, and other harmful carcinogens into their lungs.

In their homes and workplaces down narrow alleys, and in improvised street cafés, I learned about traditional Malagasy coffee.

Mrs Moratsara roasts beans in a cloud of smoke. Credit: Nicole Motteux

Coffee roasters like Mrs Nirina Moratsara spend most of their day beside a wood fire or charcoal stove. “From sunrise to sunset, I roast coffee, heat coffee, and I cook,” she says.

Her eyes are red and teary as she roasts a pot of green beans over an open wood fire. As one of thousands of street coffee vendors in a competitive marketplace, she knows that getting the perfect roast is vital to making enough money to survive.

“The fire’s heat affects the flavour,” Nirina explains. She prevents the outside of the bean roasting more quickly than the inside by carefully stirring and lifting the pan from the coals. She blinks and waves aside the thick smoke.

Beside Nirina is her six-year-old daughter, Nora, who rubs her eyes constantly. Only two of Nirina’s six children are in school. The others help with the coffee business.

Learn more in Zimbabwean Coffee: Rising from the Ashes

Many young Malagasy girls are withdrawn from school to work in family businesses. Credit: Nicole Motteux

One of The Poorest Countries in The World

Madagascar has long struggled with poor governance, most recently resulting from a violent uprising in 2009. Since then, successive failed governments have contributed to economic decline and destruction of natural resources.

The United Nations’ Human Development Index rated Madagascar an extremely low 161 out of 189 countries in 2017. This puts the nation among the poorest countries in the world. Almost 80% of the population lives on less than US $1.90 per day, including hundreds of thousands of street coffee vendors.

Half of Madagascar’s children under five suffer from stunted growth from poor nutrition. Like Nirina’s children, many are unschooled.

There’s no shortage of hot coffee in Madagascar. Credit: Nicole Motteux

It is this poverty that forces people to live off the land. According to the World Bank, the majority of Madagascar’s 24.8 million people gather wood from forests for their cooking and heating fuel. Most of the rest use charcoal or buy wood.

Only 2% of the population has access to clean fuel and stoves and ovens for cooking. Only 16% of households have access to electricity. This dependence on wood and charcoal seriously impacts quality of life and degrades the environment.

You may also like This Is How Much It Costs to Produce Coffee Across Latin America

Collecting and preparing firewood is an everyday task. Credit: Nicole Motteux

The impact of 99% of households using charcoal and wood is huge. More than 60% of rural households in Madagascar cook indoors. This means that the majority of kitchens have unhealthy concentrations of air pollution.

Small particulate matter in the smoke penetrates deep into the body, triggering chronic diseases such as asthma, heart attacks, bronchitis, and other respiratory problems. Household air pollution is considered the third-biggest cause of ill health in Madagascar, behind malnutrition and poor sanitation.

Coffee roasters like Nirina spend most of their day beside a wood fire or charcoal stove. Credit: Nicole Motteux

A Coffee Vendor’s Daily Risks

Each time Nirina makes coffee, she tends to a fire for an hour to boil the water. On Sundays and public holidays, she does this three times, making up to 8 litres of coffee.

She is fortunate to be able to roast her green coffee beans on a fire outside of her home. Other vendors use poorly ventilated kitchens thick with smoke. Some hunt for spots behind buildings or in narrow corridors – anywhere out of the wind.

Coffee vending provides a small income but it comes at a real cost. Nirina tells me of her headaches and chest pain. She wishes she could make enough money to send all her children to school.

Women spend hours each day cooking over open flames, exposing them to a higher risk of life-threatening health concerns. Credit: Nicole Motteux

Every afternoon, Nirina and her children collect firewood. They are lucky to have a reliable supply nearby. Others have to walk very long distances to access free firewood and the task is often dangerous. Harassment is common, and rape is not unheard of.

Women tend to be disproportionately affected by health concerns here. Cooking is usually the responsibility of women or children, and vendors are more likely to be women. As a result, they are exposed to more chronic and life-threatening diseases.

Before dawn the next day, Nirina packs up her supplies and travels to her usual roadside corner in the business district. She uses a charcoal stove to brew her coffee. “I like charcoal more than wood. The smoke is less. I can carry it, don’t have to chop charcoal, and it’s dry,” she tells me.

“My charcoal cooker broke. I now use my neighbour’s one. It is very heavy and fragile. Every day I have to collect the cooker and give it back. I cannot afford to buy a new one. It is 16,000 Ariary [about US $5]. I make 20,000 Ariary gross income each day and from that I have to buy green bean coffee and ingredients for sale tomorrow as well as food for my family.”

Charcoal stoves don’t generally emit as many particles as wood-fuelled stoves, but they still produce a lot of carbon monoxide.

Brewed coffee is safer than water contaminated with raw sewage and other organic wastes. Credit: Nicole Motteux

A Life-Saving Service

Malagasies start their day with a cup of coffee and a fried rice cake. It’s a daily tradition that’s affordable even for the most disadvantaged people. For some, it may be the only meal of the day.

Basic comforts are a challenge in Madagascar, thanks to limited electricity and running water. It is the fourth worst country in Africa for access to safe drinking water. For many, buying a coffee from a street vendor is the safest option.

Coffee and street food warm and fill the body and saves on fuel for cooking breakfast at home. Credit: Nicole Motteux

Other Environmental Hazards

Poverty has caused other environmental hazards in Madagascar. Traffic jams of old and poorly maintained vehicles create further air pollution. Standing at their roadside stalls, thousands of coffee vendors are exposed to toxic fumes each day.

Madagascar’s old cars are a serious contributor to poor air quality, especially in the city. Credit: Nicole Motteux

Huge amounts of the country’s original forest have been lost in recent years. Global Forest Watch reports that from 2001 to 2017, Madagascar lost 3.27 Mha of tree cover, equivalent to a 19% decrease since 2000.

Deforestation is due, in part, to replacing forests with coffee fields. The country has lost about 80% of its original forests and the primary forest now covers only about 12% of the country. The consequent erosion and soil degradation have further impacted the ecosystem.

Lavaka of Ankarokaroka’s moon-like landscape is the result of massive erosion. Credit: Nicole Motteux

In the central highlands, the evidence of soil erosion and run-off is devastating. When grassland is burned for agriculture and trees are cut for fuel, the sandy earth collapses. The result is dramatic canyons. Sediment is then washed downhill during the rainy season. The red sand carried by water blocks drinking water and irrigation canals.

Madagascar’s rivers run red due to deforestation, desertification, habitat loss, and soil erosion. Credit: Nicole Motteux

The once densely forested mountains are now bare, thanks to firewood, slash-and-burn agriculture, and overgrazing by zebu cattle. The humped cattle are central to rural life, but short-sighted farming techniques have destroyed the landscape.

Overgrazing by Zebu cattle is just one cause of serious land degradation in Madagascar. Credit: Nicole Motteux

A Cleaner, Healthier Future?

Madagascar needs clean and sustainable sources of energy to reduce the country’s long-term health and environmental concerns. Energy-efficient cookstoves are one small innovation that can make a big difference.

A woman cooks on an energy efficient cookstove. Credit: Association pour le Développement de l’Energie Solaire Suisse – Madagascar (ADES)

ADES is a Swiss energy development organisation that has been working in Madagascar for 18 years. It builds market-based partnerships with local companies to produce energy-efficient cookstoves.

The organisation works closely with governments and businesses to educate the Malagasy people about energy-efficient cooking methods, ventilation, and sustainable livelihoods. It has an ambitious goal of 60% less energy use in Madagascar by 2050. ADES has sold over 170,000 cookstoves and has a sustainable, local production line in place.

Other organisations and initiatives are encouraging energy efficiency. The government has launched a rural electrification plan that includes implementation of solar panels. It aims to double the rate of Madagascar’s rural electrification by 2020.

Clean energy is slowly arriving in rural Madagascar. Credit: Nicole Motteux

The future health of Madagascar’s small-scale coffee industry and its wider population is uncertain. Indoor and outdoor pollution inhibit economic growth and exacerbate poverty. Yet, I left Madagascar feeling some hope for a cleaner coffee future. I left Nirina with a clean cookstove of her own, knowing that this small gesture would have a huge benefit to her financial and physical health.

Enjoyed this? Check out Could Zimbabwean Coffee Once Again Be On Specialty Menus?

Written by Nicole Motteux with input by Lilani Goonesena and image editing by Angie Lázaro. With thanks to interpreter and guide Mr Harry Rakotosalam. Feature image: Nicole Motteux

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jakehglover · 6 years

Text

The Zombie Chicken Business

By Dr. Mercola

In the U.S., a Sunday chicken dinner is as all-American as apple pie, but this dietary mainstay is an example of one of the biggest problems facing the food supply: the growing market concentration.

Unless you happened to purchase your chicken at a local farm, farmers market or food co-op, and can attest that it was raised on pasture, the way many people think their chicken is raised, it likely came from a major player in the industry, like Perdue or Tyson.

Tyson claims to be “one of the leading supporters of American agriculture,”1 for instance, but it’s not because they’re out in the field tending to their flocks. Instead, it contracts with more than 4,000 so-called “independent” farmers, who are tasked with raising the birds according to the parent company’s strict demands.

In fact, almost all chicken farmers (more than 97 percent) work under the thumb of a giant producer,2 who controls their pay, their farming and ultimately their fate. In many rural areas, there’s only one (or may two) big chicken companies in town, and they have no choice but to enter into exclusive contracts that, for many, saddle them with debt and little recourse if the relationship sours.

Most US Chicken Comes From ‘Zombie’ Farmers

U.S. chicken farmers are forced to work like zombies, whose every move is controlled by their puppet master, Big Chicken. “They … act like a lord with serfs, or a landowner with sharecroppers,” The Atlantic wrote of the poultry giants.3

It starts out with farmers taking out loans in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and often more than $1 million, to build a house for their chickens. They contract with one of the big poultry players, who then sends them their chicks, which the farmers raise for market according to the company’s rules.

The corporation then takes care of slaughtering the chickens, packaging the meat and selling it to consumers, who are none the wiser that their farmer middleman may have only been paid 5 to 6 cents per pound of meat. The farmers have very little say in how the chickens are raised. Jonathan Buttram, president of the Alabama Contract Poultry Growers Association, told The Atlantic that in these contract relationships:4

“The company has 99-and-a-half percent control over the grower … I’ll list what they tell you: what time to pick up the chickens, what time to run the feed, what time to turn the lights off and on, every move that you make. Then, they say we’re not an employee — we are employees, but they won’t let us have any kind of benefits or insurance.”

Farmers struggle with low pay, lack of autonomy and no job security. In 2001, former chicken farmer Alton Terry contracted with Tyson Foods to raise chickens, after taking out a $500,000 loan to build houses for the chickens. After a couple of years, Tyson told Terry to purchase more equipment, to which he refused, and the next year he believes the company gave him sick chicks, then canceled his contract.

With no other chicken companies in town, Terry couldn’t find another customer to buy his chickens, essentially putting him out of business.

“Terry sued Tyson in 2008, alleging the company canceled his contract because he rallied farmers in the area to lodge complaints about the company with their congressional representatives and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),” The Guardian reported. “[H]e said Tyson mistreated him with tactics such as weighing his birds incorrectly while not allowing him to watch the weigh-in, a violation of USDA rules.”5

Yet, Terry lost the case because he wasn’t able to show that Tyson had harmed the entire poultry industry, forcing him to pay the poultry giant’s legal fees and eventually declare bankruptcy, losing everything he had.

Tournament-Style Pay System Pits Farmers Against Each Other

At one time, there were 1.6 million independent farms in the U.S. Today, there are about 25,000 contract farms that raise most U.S. poultry, with many of them raising upward of a half-million birds annually.6

There are many downfalls to raising chickens this way, not the least of which is seeing the chickens living in inhumane, filthy conditions. “They pack these chickens in these houses so tight,” Buttram said. “It's nasty. It is hard to see.”7

Talk of committing suicide is par for the course for farmers facing high levels of debt with little hope of a way out. Part of the problem is that the farmers are paid using a tournament-style system that may deduct money from their paycheck based on others’ performance.

Tyson calls it a “performance-based incentive system that rewards poultry farmers who effectively convert the feed we provide into weight gain in the birds they raise.” Yet, part of the payment formula includes “the performance of their flock compared to those raised by other contract growers.”8 As the USDA explains it:9

“Contract fees are rarely a fixed amount per pound delivered; instead, fees are based on a grower’s relative performance compared to other growers who deliver chickens to the poultry company at the same time.

This method is sometimes called a tournament method of determining pay because, like a professional golf or tennis tournament, a participant’s earnings do not depend on absolute performance, but on performance compared to other tournament competitors.

Fees are determined in the following way. The integrator measures the average cost of the inputs that the integrator provided to growers for chickens delivered to the processing plant in a week — the total value of feed, chicks and veterinary services provided to growers divided by the total weight of chickens delivered that week. The company develops this calculation for each grower.

Each grower is then paid a base fee, and those growers whose costs are lower than the average for all growers receive a premium over the base fee; those whose costs exceed the average for all growers receive a deduction from the base. The amount of the premium or deduction reflects the size of the cost difference.”

Farmers Risk It All While Big Chicken Maintains Power and Control

Imagine being promised that you can make a good living raising chickens, taking out $1 million in loans to get started, then being told your wages have been reduced because your neighbor raised his chickens at a lower cost.

If you complain, it could backfire, as many contract farmers claim they’ve been retaliated against for doing so, punished by not getting shipments of new chicks, getting sick chicks or having their contracts canceled.

“These companies go into economically depressed areas and tell you you’re going to make a lot of money growing chickens,” Barbara Patterson, government relations director for the National Farmers Union (NFU) told Civil Eats. “What they don’t tell you is that you’ll be indebted for the rest of your life, at their mercy for as long as they have you.”10 As mentioned, suicide is sometimes viewed as the only way out. Buttram continued to The Atlantic:11

“Back a few months ago, a grower called me and said he was going to kill his broiler manager and kill himself …

I never thought that I would have to be talking people out of committing suicide or committing murder. It shouldn't be that an entity can coerce you into committing suicide when you have put everything on the line — your mortgage, your farm — and the company has nothing invested in it but a few chickens.”

At the farmers’ expense, poultry giants are able to get rich by selling cheap chicken to Americans. As noted by the Cornucopia Institute,12 the price of chicken has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, becoming the cheapest meat available in the U.S. As a result, consumption has doubled since 1970.

Seeing how chicken is supposed to be a healthy source of high-quality nutrition, the fact that it has become so affordable might seem to be a great benefit. But there's a major flaw in this equation. As it turns out, it's virtually impossible to mass-produce clean, safe, optimally nutritious foods at rock-bottom prices, and this has been true since the beginning of “industrialized farming.”

In their report, “The Hidden Cost of Cheap Chicken,” the Cornucopia Institute pointed out three primary issues with the CAFO chicken that accounts for 99 percent of poultry sold in U.S. grocery stores:13

• Ethics — Chickens are intelligent and deserving of access to the outdoors where they can express their natural behaviors.

Sadly, in CAFOS, “The National Chicken Council, the trade association for the U.S. chicken industry, issues Animal Welfare Guidelines that indicate a stocking density of 96 square inches for a bird of average market weight — that’s about the size of a standard sheet of American 8.5-inch by 11-inch typing paper …

They are unable to move without pushing through other birds, unable to stretch their wings at will, or to get away from more dominant, aggressive birds.”

• Environment — CAFOs are notorious polluters of the land, air and water, with problems reported across the U.S. The report noted:

“ … [former] Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson was threatening to sue Arkansas poultry producers, including Tyson Foods, saying that waste from the companies’ operations is destroying Oklahoma lakes and streams, especially in the northeast corner of the state.”

• Human Health — The spread of infectious disease and antibiotic-resistant superbugs is a fact of life at CAFOs. In 2015, a bird flu outbreak among U.S. poultry led to the destruction of millions of chickens and turkeys in three states (Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa) before spreading elsewhere in the U.S.

Even though there were supposed safeguards in place to contain deadly disease outbreaks from spreading, poultry veterinarians noted that those strategies failed, as the bird flu managed to spread across 14 states in five months.

Eating Big Chicken’s Birds Could Be Making You Sick

We haven’t even touched on another of the big issues facing contract farming, which is the fact that the chickens’ growing conditions contribute to the spread of disease.

One study by the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) found that chicken samples gathered at the end of production after having been cut into parts, as you would purchase in the grocery store, had an astonishing positive rate of 26.2 percent contamination with salmonella.14

What’s more, it’s recently been suggested that urinary tract infections (UTIs) may be a foodborne illness caused by eating chicken contaminated with certain strains of E. coli.

In fact, in a study led by Lance Price, a professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, it’s suggested that “People are definitely picking up those infections from poultry” and “We have to open up our heads and acknowledge that foodborne infections aren’t just diarrhea and/or vomiting; they can be UTIs, too.”15

It’s not the chicken that’s the problem, but the way it’s being raised, at the behest of the poultry giants. In addition to contamination with pathogenic bacteria, CAFO chicken also pales in comparison to pasture-raised chicken in nutrition. Pasture-raised chickens have been found to be higher in vitamins D3 and E and have an average omega-3 to -6 ratio of 1-to-5, compared to a much less healthy CAFO value of 1-to-15.16

There’s a Better Way to Raise Chicken

youtube

Many farmers who enter into contracts with agrigiants do so with good intentions of raising food and supporting their families, only to get burned by the veritable hand that feeds them. What many of them are not aware of is that there are better ways to raise chickens — for the planet, for health and even for profits.

Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, an innovator in the field of regenerative agriculture, has developed an ingenious system that has the potential to transform the way food is grown. According to Haslett-Marroquin, regenerative agriculture needs to be centered around livestock like chickens in order to be optimized.

Haslett-Marroquin's program has generated a system that has regenerative impact both on the ecology and the economy, meaning it restores the ecology that produces food, and the economic flows necessary for that food to be economically sustainable and resilient.

It also addresses the social conditions of food production in the U.S (and elsewhere), which is important considering the fact that farmworkers are typically poorly paid immigrants.

The chickens are completely free-range, with access to grasses and sprouts as they are rotated between paddocks. This system significantly reduces the amount of labor involved as compared with other ideas out there.

Further, in a poultry-centered regenerative system, tall grasses and trees protect the birds from predators instead of cages — in addition to optimizing soil temperature and moisture content, extracting excess nutrients that the chickens deposit, bringing up valuable minerals from below the soil surface and being a high-value perennial crop.

Opposite of CAFOs, these poultry-centered systems are regenerating the land instead of destroying it, raising chickens humanely instead of cruelly and producing nutritionally superior, not inferior, food.

If you choose to eat chicken, finding a local grass fed farmer raising chickens on pasture is the safest, and healthiest, route to go, and you can also feel good that you’re supporting a farmer making a fair living — not being beholden to, and bankrupt by, corporate giants.

from HealthyLife via Jake Glover on Inoreader http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2018/09/18/zombie-chicken-business.aspx

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sherristockman · 6 years

Link

The Zombie Chicken Business Dr. Mercola By Dr. Mercola In the U.S., a Sunday chicken dinner is as all-American as apple pie, but this dietary mainstay is an example of one of the biggest problems facing the food supply: the growing market concentration. Unless you happened to purchase your chicken at a local farm, farmers market or food co-op, and can attest that it was raised on pasture, the way many people think their chicken is raised, it likely came from a major player in the industry, like Perdue or Tyson. Tyson claims to be “one of the leading supporters of American agriculture,”1 for instance, but it’s not because they’re out in the field tending to their flocks. Instead, it contracts with more than 4,000 so-called “independent” farmers, who are tasked with raising the birds according to the parent company’s strict demands. In fact, almost all chicken farmers (more than 97 percent) work under the thumb of a giant producer,2 who controls their pay, their farming and ultimately their fate. In many rural areas, there’s only one (or may two) big chicken companies in town, and they have no choice but to enter into exclusive contracts that, for many, saddle them with debt and little recourse if the relationship sours. Most US Chicken Comes From ‘Zombie’ Farmers U.S. chicken farmers are forced to work like zombies, whose every move is controlled by their puppet master, Big Chicken. “They … act like a lord with serfs, or a landowner with sharecroppers,” The Atlantic wrote of the poultry giants.3 It starts out with farmers taking out loans in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and often more than $1 million, to build a house for their chickens. They contract with one of the big poultry players, who then sends them their chicks, which the farmers raise for market according to the company’s rules. The corporation then takes care of slaughtering the chickens, packaging the meat and selling it to consumers, who are none the wiser that their farmer middleman may have only been paid 5 to 6 cents per pound of meat. The farmers have very little say in how the chickens are raised. Jonathan Buttram, president of the Alabama Contract Poultry Growers Association, told The Atlantic that in these contract relationships:4 “The company has 99-and-a-half percent control over the grower … I’ll list what they tell you: what time to pick up the chickens, what time to run the feed, what time to turn the lights off and on, every move that you make. Then, they say we’re not an employee — we are employees, but they won’t let us have any kind of benefits or insurance.” Farmers struggle with low pay, lack of autonomy and no job security. In 2001, former chicken farmer Alton Terry contracted with Tyson Foods to raise chickens, after taking out a $500,000 loan to build houses for the chickens. After a couple of years, Tyson told Terry to purchase more equipment, to which he refused, and the next year he believes the company gave him sick chicks, then canceled his contract. With no other chicken companies in town, Terry couldn’t find another customer to buy his chickens, essentially putting him out of business. “Terry sued Tyson in 2008, alleging the company canceled his contract because he rallied farmers in the area to lodge complaints about the company with their congressional representatives and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA),” The Guardian reported. “[H]e said Tyson mistreated him with tactics such as weighing his birds incorrectly while not allowing him to watch the weigh-in, a violation of USDA rules.”5 Yet, Terry lost the case because he wasn’t able to show that Tyson had harmed the entire poultry industry, forcing him to pay the poultry giant’s legal fees and eventually declare bankruptcy, losing everything he had. Tournament-Style Pay System Pits Farmers Against Each Other At one time, there were 1.6 million independent farms in the U.S. Today, there are about 25,000 contract farms that raise most U.S. poultry, with many of them raising upward of a half-million birds annually.6 There are many downfalls to raising chickens this way, not the least of which is seeing the chickens living in inhumane, filthy conditions. “They pack these chickens in these houses so tight,” Buttram said. “It's nasty. It is hard to see.”7 Talk of committing suicide is par for the course for farmers facing high levels of debt with little hope of a way out. Part of the problem is that the farmers are paid using a tournament-style system that may deduct money from their paycheck based on others’ performance. Tyson calls it a “performance-based incentive system that rewards poultry farmers who effectively convert the feed we provide into weight gain in the birds they raise.” Yet, part of the payment formula includes “the performance of their flock compared to those raised by other contract growers.”8 As the USDA explains it:9 “Contract fees are rarely a fixed amount per pound delivered; instead, fees are based on a grower’s relative performance compared to other growers who deliver chickens to the poultry company at the same time. This method is sometimes called a tournament method of determining pay because, like a professional golf or tennis tournament, a participant’s earnings do not depend on absolute performance, but on performance compared to other tournament competitors. Fees are determined in the following way. The integrator measures the average cost of the inputs that the integrator provided to growers for chickens delivered to the processing plant in a week — the total value of feed, chicks and veterinary services provided to growers divided by the total weight of chickens delivered that week. The company develops this calculation for each grower. Each grower is then paid a base fee, and those growers whose costs are lower than the average for all growers receive a premium over the base fee; those whose costs exceed the average for all growers receive a deduction from the base. The amount of the premium or deduction reflects the size of the cost difference.” Farmers Risk It All While Big Chicken Maintains Power and Control Imagine being promised that you can make a good living raising chickens, taking out $1 million in loans to get started, then being told your wages have been reduced because your neighbor raised his chickens at a lower cost. If you complain, it could backfire, as many contract farmers claim they’ve been retaliated against for doing so, punished by not getting shipments of new chicks, getting sick chicks or having their contracts canceled. “These companies go into economically depressed areas and tell you you’re going to make a lot of money growing chickens,” Barbara Patterson, government relations director for the National Farmers Union (NFU) told Civil Eats. “What they don’t tell you is that you’ll be indebted for the rest of your life, at their mercy for as long as they have you.”10 As mentioned, suicide is sometimes viewed as the only way out. Buttram continued to The Atlantic:11 “Back a few months ago, a grower called me and said he was going to kill his broiler manager and kill himself … I never thought that I would have to be talking people out of committing suicide or committing murder. It shouldn't be that an entity can coerce you into committing suicide when you have put everything on the line — your mortgage, your farm — and the company has nothing invested in it but a few chickens.” At the farmers’ expense, poultry giants are able to get rich by selling cheap chicken to Americans. As noted by the Cornucopia Institute,12 the price of chicken has dropped dramatically over the past few decades, becoming the cheapest meat available in the U.S. As a result, consumption has doubled since 1970. Seeing how chicken is supposed to be a healthy source of high-quality nutrition, the fact that it has become so affordable might seem to be a great benefit. But there's a major flaw in this equation. As it turns out, it's virtually impossible to mass-produce clean, safe, optimally nutritious foods at rock-bottom prices, and this has been true since the beginning of “industrialized farming.” In their report, “The Hidden Cost of Cheap Chicken,” the Cornucopia Institute pointed out three primary issues with the CAFO chicken that accounts for 99 percent of poultry sold in U.S. grocery stores:13 • Ethics — Chickens are intelligent and deserving of access to the outdoors where they can express their natural behaviors. Sadly, in CAFOS, “The National Chicken Council, the trade association for the U.S. chicken industry, issues Animal Welfare Guidelines that indicate a stocking density of 96 square inches for a bird of average market weight — that’s about the size of a standard sheet of American 8.5-inch by 11-inch typing paper … They are unable to move without pushing through other birds, unable to stretch their wings at will, or to get away from more dominant, aggressive birds.” • Environment — CAFOs are notorious polluters of the land, air and water, with problems reported across the U.S. The report noted: “ … [former] Oklahoma Attorney General Drew Edmondson was threatening to sue Arkansas poultry producers, including Tyson Foods, saying that waste from the companies’ operations is destroying Oklahoma lakes and streams, especially in the northeast corner of the state.” • Human Health — The spread of infectious disease and antibiotic-resistant superbugs is a fact of life at CAFOs. In 2015, a bird flu outbreak among U.S. poultry led to the destruction of millions of chickens and turkeys in three states (Minnesota, Wisconsin and Iowa) before spreading elsewhere in the U.S. Even though there were supposed safeguards in place to contain deadly disease outbreaks from spreading, poultry veterinarians noted that those strategies failed, as the bird flu managed to spread across 14 states in five months. Eating Big Chicken’s Birds Could Be Making You Sick We haven’t even touched on another of the big issues facing contract farming, which is the fact that the chickens’ growing conditions contribute to the spread of disease. One study by the USDA Agricultural Research Service (ARS) found that chicken samples gathered at the end of production after having been cut into parts, as you would purchase in the grocery store, had an astonishing positive rate of 26.2 percent contamination with salmonella.14 What’s more, it’s recently been suggested that urinary tract infections (UTIs) may be a foodborne illness caused by eating chicken contaminated with certain strains of E. coli. In fact, in a study led by Lance Price, a professor at George Washington University’s Milken Institute School of Public Health, it’s suggested that “People are definitely picking up those infections from poultry” and “We have to open up our heads and acknowledge that foodborne infections aren’t just diarrhea and/or vomiting; they can be UTIs, too.”15 It’s not the chicken that’s the problem, but the way it’s being raised, at the behest of the poultry giants. In addition to contamination with pathogenic bacteria, CAFO chicken also pales in comparison to pasture-raised chicken in nutrition. Pasture-raised chickens have been found to be higher in vitamins D3 and E and have an average omega-3 to -6 ratio of 1-to-5, compared to a much less healthy CAFO value of 1-to-15.16 There’s a Better Way to Raise Chicken Many farmers who enter into contracts with agrigiants do so with good intentions of raising food and supporting their families, only to get burned by the veritable hand that feeds them. What many of them are not aware of is that there are better ways to raise chickens — for the planet, for health and even for profits. Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin, an innovator in the field of regenerative agriculture, has developed an ingenious system that has the potential to transform the way food is grown. According to Haslett-Marroquin, regenerative agriculture needs to be centered around livestock like chickens in order to be optimized. Haslett-Marroquin's program has generated a system that has regenerative impact both on the ecology and the economy, meaning it restores the ecology that produces food, and the economic flows necessary for that food to be economically sustainable and resilient. It also addresses the social conditions of food production in the U.S (and elsewhere), which is important considering the fact that farmworkers are typically poorly paid immigrants. The chickens are completely free-range, with access to grasses and sprouts as they are rotated between paddocks. This system significantly reduces the amount of labor involved as compared with other ideas out there. Further, in a poultry-centered regenerative system, tall grasses and trees protect the birds from predators instead of cages — in addition to optimizing soil temperature and moisture content, extracting excess nutrients that the chickens deposit, bringing up valuable minerals from below the soil surface and being a high-value perennial crop. Opposite of CAFOs, these poultry-centered systems are regenerating the land instead of destroying it, raising chickens humanely instead of cruelly and producing nutritionally superior, not inferior, food. If you choose to eat chicken, finding a local grass fed farmer raising chickens on pasture is the safest, and healthiest, route to go, and you can also feel good that you’re supporting a farmer making a fair living — not being beholden to, and bankrupt by, corporate giants.

#VitalityPath

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jasonheart1 · 6 years

Text

Dry conditions make life on Colo. ranches hard

ELIZABETH-- Cattle ranchers in Colorado are struggling to make ends meet after a particularly dry year in the state.

“This is one of the worst droughts that we’ve seen in my lifetime,” said Retta Bruegger, a regional specialist in range management for Colorado State University.

At least 65 percent of the state is experiencing an extreme drought. Because of that, some ranchers are being forced to make tough decisions, including selling their cows sooner than they normally would and at lower weights. That means the ranchers are making less money per cow than they normally would.

Even before the drought, prices for cows this year were expected to be lower because of the way the market is moving, Bruegger said.

Along with dry conditions and less grass available for the cattle, hay prices are also on the rise.

“Hay costs right now we’re probably 25 to 30 percent higher than they were last year at this time,” said James Steuter, the manager of the Lone Star Ranch in Elizabeth.

The Lone Star Ranch is a full blood Wagyu beef and seedstock operation that sells direct to consumers. Steuter says the drought started in the winter for the ranch since there was very little snowfall and that stunted the grass growth in the spring.

The dry conditions continued into the spring and summer, with June’s rain totals looking more like August’s for the ranch.

“No rain equates to no growth in the grass and no grass is no food for the cows,” Steuter said.

Because of this, he’s been switching up the way his cattle graze, moving the cows between pastures with more frequency to give the grass a chance to grow back.

“You can plan for drought but it’s going to impact your operation regardless,” Steuter said. “Everybody is adjusting to the conditions that they are dealt.”

The drought is particularly difficult for grass-finished operations because the cows receive nearly double the input of grass than a typical cow-calf operation.

“Input costs increase. We can’t stock as many cows on the ranch as we typically do in a normal year,” Steuter said. “For us it means we will have a less beef available to sell to the consumer and that absolutely impacts our bottom line.”

It’s causing some ranchers to get rid of more of their stock than they normally would, selling off mother cows and calves that they can’t afford to feed.

“This is just a really challenging situation for people right now,” Bruegger said. “People are faced with multiple bad decisions that they might be selecting between.”

Along with the drought and higher hay prices, wildfires have scorched thousands of acres of land and have also impacted some cattle operations in the state.

This month, Colorado State University hosted a workshop for ranchers to talk about ways to overcome the various hurdles they are currently facing.

Veterinary experts spoke about alternative forms of feed for the cattle that may be cheaper, business professors were available to talk about strategically selling off livestock and which livestock to sell off and other experts were available to talk about wildfire mitigation and preparation.

Even some botany experts were on hand to talk about how grass changes in a drought.

“You can see issues with nitrate consolidation in plants, which can actually poison livestock and can be a fatal condition. That’s associated with drought conditions,” Bruegger said.

All of this was an attempt to help small ranchers survive a particularly rough year.

In July, the U.S. Department of Agriculture announced a $12 billion aid package to help struggling farmers and ranchers across the country. It came on the heels of China announcing additional tariffs to beef products.

China imposed a 25 percent tariff on hundreds of American-made products, including beef.

“I know tariffs are never good for supply and demand,” Steuter said. “Approximately 15 percent of U.S. beef is exported, primarily to Asian markets.”

Because of the tariffs, beef is stockpiling here in the U.S. Steuter said.

The Lone Star Ranch doesn’t send its meat abroad; however it is competing with big beef operations that are now keeping more meat in the U.S. because of those tariffs, and that can be bad for the little ranches.

“The beef business is a tough business even a good year,” Steuter said. “It’s tough to sell beef at higher price when people have it available to them at the supermarket.”

Despite all of the hardships, Steuter doubts that consumers will notice much of an impact on the cost of their beef at the supermarket.

“But for people like us who are selling direct to the consumer, there is a huge impact,” Steuter said.

Still, the drought, hay prices, wildfires and tariffs could all affect beef operations for years to come.

“Due to the drought, we will see that loss in beef production over the next 23 or four years because it takes so long to finish these cows on grass,” Steuter said.

It’s calving season at the ranch, 37 cows are about to give birth. But Steuter says the calves will start their lives struggling to gain weight.

“You start seeing lower weight in the calves because are not getting the milk they normally get,” he said.

The mother cows are already losing weight as well and Steuter expects that it will be more difficult to breed them again next season because of it.

“When they have been struggling through the summer, struggling through the fall, they’ve got calves and they’re getting beat down, it’s tough to get them to sometimes to breed back because they’re lacking in nutrition,” he said.

Still, he’s managing the ranch conservatively just in case Colorado experiences another dry winter and he says Lone Star Ranch is ready to weather whatever conditions they are handed. And, he encouraged people to buy local to support the state’s beef business.

“We are relying on the local community to be buying our product,” Steuter said.

from Local News https://www.thedenverchannel.com/news/local-news/colorado-beef-industry-struggling-with-drought-wildfires-and-tariffs

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