Carbon Copy

still no free lunch

From Worldwatch Institute:

Farmers today can grow two to three times as much grain, fruit, and vegetables on a plot of land as they could 50 years ago, but the nutritional quality of many crops has declined, according to a new report from The Organic Center, a group based in Boulder, Colorado. “To get our recommended daily allowance of nutrients, we have to eat many more slices of bread today than people had to eat in the past,” notes report author and Worldwatch Institute food expert Brian Halweil. “Less nutrition per calorie consumed affects consumers in much in the same way as monetary inflation; that is, we have more food, but it’s worth less in terms of nutritional value.”

An abundance of nothingness.

Plants cultivated to produce higher yields tend to have less energy for other activities like growing deep roots and generating phytochemicals—health-promoting compounds like antioxidants—the report explains. And conventional farming methods, such as close plant spacing and the application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides, often cause crops to absorb fewer nutrients and have unhealthy root systems and less flavor, and sometimes make them more vulnerable to pests.

Using GM crops pumped up with fertilizers and pesticides to increase yields, without worrying about soil quality, sounds a bit like stuffing ourselves with corn flakes and popping pills to compensate for lack of nutrition. In fact, Kellogg's adds the missing vitamins and minerals for us, so everything's OK, right? Some people think the fertilizer industry is part of a conspiracy hatched by Big Oil. If only it were that simple.

Organic farming methods, on the other hand, use manure or cover crops to provide nutrition to crops, have more balanced mixtures of nutrients, and tend to release the nutrients more slowly, the report explains. According to Benbrook, this means plants “develop more robust root systems that more aggressively absorb nutrients from the soil profile, and produce crops with higher concentrations of valuable nutrients and phytochemicals.” Organic food may have as much as 20 percent higher nutritional content for some minerals, and 30 percent more antioxidants on average, than conventional fare, the report concludes.

The press release doesn't mention water consumption, but it wouldn't surprise me to hear that the weaker root systems of modern methods also require more water than organic farming. Certainly modern farming is heavily dependent on cheap energy and abundant water, both of which are disappearing fast.

opening the sluice gates

Here's a roundup of reports on why we need to be careful about bowing to the knight in shining biofuels. In South Africa, as elsewhere, we have been assured that land used for biofuel feedstock won't displace existing agriculture on arable land, and I have mentioned an example of what seems to be non-disruptive biofuel production. What worries me is this statement from The Guardian:

Around 40% of Europe's agricultural land would be needed to grow biofuel crops to meet the 10% fossil fuel substitution target. That demand on arable land cannot be met in the EU or the US, say the scientists, so is likely to shift the burden on land in developing countries.

Did I say something about climate imperialism? South Africa's biofuels strategy may be an answer to the North's prayers, but God help us in the South. If we're going to open the sluice gates for Europe's liquid fuels, we may need to prepare for a flood.

allotment gardening: more than fresh veggies

In many respects, Riebeek Kasteel is typical of small towns in South Africa: An economy focused on local farming and the nearby cement factory. A single service station and a few small shops. A church that dominates the skyline. And an 'onderdorp' to house the workers well away from the town proper, where they won't bother the retired farmers.

In recent years, this particular town has seen a tourism makeover, with a dramatic increase in shops, restaurants and bed-and-breakfast establishments that cater to visitors from Cape Town and the growing number of city people who have bought property here. The town, along with the rest of the Riebeek Valley, has also seen a rebranding as the olive capital of the Western Cape, and numerous magazine articles have boosted the number of visitors on weekends.

All of this has done little, if anything, to reduce the extreme poverty of the onderdorp. But yesterday, a rainy Saturday, I visited a project that raises hope in a patch of grass next to what was once the Riebeek Kasteel railway station. Every weekend, local children converge on their community garden to plant and tend their vegetables, learn about the environment, and have some lunch.

The garden is an offshoot of a soup kitchen that was started in the winter of 2004. It was intended to supplement food donated by local businesses, but it has grown into something much more for the local community. With a hectare of land, and a tool shed installed just last week, the Riebeek Kasteel Gemeenskapstuin Projek feeds impoverished families, teaches gardening skills, provides a Saturday morning youth group, and inspires families to take pride in their homes and gardens.

As we sheltered from the rain in the new shed, Bridget Doyle (project co-ordinator) spoke about a number of families that have started growing vegetables in their own gardens, and others that have begun transforming muddy yards into more liveable spaces. This cast-off community appears to have little going for it, but it is indeed a community, with hopes and dreams and the ability to pull itself together.

Riebeek Kasteel has a growing drug problem. Tik (crystal meth) has recently emerged, raising concerns in the community. Bridget sees projects like this as an opportunity to strengthen the community and give people the means to fight drug abuse and the ills of poverty. In addition to the practical benefits of growing food, the project can provide children and adults with a sense of purpose and self-worth, and a focus on healthy activities.

This year, the project committee hopes to set up an irrigation system, increase the garden's contribution to the soup kitchen, continue training in organic gardening, provide education in life skills and conflict resolution to the youth group, equip the tool shed, plant trees, establish a children's play park, and provide a picnic and braai area by the garden.

To achieve these aims, the Riebeek Kasteel Gemeenskapstuin Projek needs money. As the project meets the requirements of the government's Food Security Programme, the Department of Agriculture provided the new shed, and will contribute funds for fencing, tools and organic gardening training. Other organisations provide support in various ways, but the project has a number of costs that are not fully covered. To make a donation, or to find out other ways to support the project, send me an email and I can put you in touch with the appropriate committee member.

biofuels climbing

The EU has set a target for biofuels to represent 5.75% of fuel used for transportation by 2010, and has now reached 1.8%. Here are some of the reasons to be cautious about biofuels strategies. And in South Africa, where the biofuels strategy relies on the use of genetically modified crops, GM Watch reports that the acreage of GM crops in South Africa is already at 29% of maize and 59% of soyabeans. It is very likely that this will increase, as the government wants biofuels to contribute up to 75 percent of its renewable energy needs by 2013. Here's another useful benefit and risk analysis of biofuels in South Africa, pointing out that there are alternative routes that could minimize the risks.

it's not going to be easy

Dongtan is not the only planned sustainable urban area planned for China. Another one is the village of Huangbaiyu, but this one is puzzling. The rendering of the original scheme shows an interesting concept, but this photo of built houses makes it look more like a standard subdivision. Some aspects of the design may indeed reduce ecological impact, but it's no model development.

The real question though, is why existing villagers are being asked to abandon their existing houses to move into new "sustainable" ones. The linked article points out that the existing villagers live scattered among their agricultural fields. Conventional wisdom may suggest that such low densities are bad as an urban model, but I would have thought that there is some wisdom in living where you work. Improving efficiencies by corralling the villagers and knocking down functional houses will only alienate them from the land. If this approach is more efficient, it is only because the fields will be consolidated and farmed by a bigger enterprise, and the villagers will have to start travelling to jobs elsewhere.

Maybe the mistakes with this village are just a bad pixel on a widescreen TV - though the villagers may have a different view - as the general approach sounds positive.

Update on 30 July 2007: I've just discovered another plan for a zero-carbon, zero-waste city, this one in Abu Dhabi. There's a curious rendering of a "solar tree" something like the fake trees that double as relay stations for cellular networks in South Africa, but this one has solar panels.

city vs farm

In the battle to prevent urban development from continuing its relentless consumption of valuable farmland, planners often rely on establishing a legally defined urban edge and hoping like hell that developers don't jump the fence. Knowing that pressure for urban growth will need an outlet, some delve deeper into strategies to increase densities or allow growth to take place in a few discrete locations outside the main town, or along transport routes or in some other well-defined pattern.

Stellenbosch in South Africa and Cambridge in the UK have taken similar approaches to testing alternatives to see what might be the most sustainable approach in their respective circumstances. Their spatial planning studies are a step in the right direction, because they recognise first that there are a range of options for accommodating growth and second that by considering urban development, transportation and other municipal services together, they can explore the overall impact on sustainability of different growth patterns.

But a limitation of most exercises in limiting sprawl is that they treat urban and rural areas as completely separate, unrelated entities. New Ruralism takes the view that there is a functional relationship between the two, and that this relationship is growing stronger, thanks to a number of converging trends. Increasing demands for fresh, seasonal, organically grown food, as well as recognition of the need to reduce energy inputs for growing and transporting agricultural produce, have resulted in new opportunities for farms on the urban fringes.

It used to be that farmers sold all their produce via central wholesale markets, and their only interaction with consumers was at farm stalls catering to city dwellers on Sunday outings or at a few farmers' markets in the city. Now, with growing demand for food from trusted sources, farmers are increasingly selling direct to the public via weekly boxed deliveries or special retail outlets. (In South Africa, check out urban sprout's ubergreen organic eco directory, listing more than 50 organic farmers, growers and producers in the Western Cape.) This means that smaller, labour-intensive farms can remain viable in areas where they might previously have been forced to close shop in the face of development pressure.

The farm is coming to the city, and the opportunity for planners is that the relationship between town and country can be nurtured so that agriculture is supported. The urban boundary shouldn't be ignored, but rather than thinking of it as a dam wall to keep the flood of humanity off productive land, think of it as an interface: a place for economic and social exchange, for sharing knowledge and raising awareness of interdependencies. Cuba learnt some valuable lessons about this relationship when their oil supply dried up, and perhaps our chance is now.

urban farm resources

I'm always on the lookout for urban applications of low-impact technologies. City Farmer in Vancouver has a lot of information related to urban agriculture, with a detailed discussion of their compost toilet and information on irrigation using grey water and rain water. Their composting toilet page also has a link to the Biolytix Waste Treatment System that is available in South Africa, New Zealand and Australia. Biolytix uses an aerobic method to break down toilet waste so that the liquids can be used for irrigation, unlike septic tanks where pathogens thrive.

permaculture and CO2

An interesting take on permaculture. [via WorldChanging]

There are estimates that 70 percent of CO2 emissions into the atmosphere are actually caused through food production, because it's not just the farmer growing the food, it's all the inputs into that. It's all those big corporations. It's all the energy used for making these soluble fertilizers that are killing the soil microflora and breaking down the structure of carbon in the soil. Allen Young's book, "Priority One," says that if we increased the organic matter in soil by 1.6 percent in all our cropping lands, we would sequester all the excess CO2 in the atmosphere.

peak oil forecasts

There's a lot of debate about the phenomenon of peak oil production. The February 2007 Hirsch Report [494 KB PDF file] commissioned by the US Department of Energy provides an update of a February 2005 report summarising a range of forecasts, from those who think the peak has passed to those who think it will never happen. The key point made is that regardless of who you choose to believe, peak oil presents a risk management situation of unprecedented proportions. Consider this from the 2005 report, reiterated in the update:

Mitigation will require an intense effort over decades. This inescapable conclusion is based on the time required to replace vast numbers of liquid fuel consuming vehicles and the time required to build a substantial number of substitute fuel production facilities. Our scenarios analysis shows:

• Waiting until world oil production peaks before taking crash program action would leave the world with a significant liquid fuel deficit for more than two decades.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 10 years before world oil peaking helps considerably but still leaves a liquid fuels shortfall roughly a decade after the time that oil would have peaked.
• Initiating a mitigation crash program 20 years before peaking appears to offer the possibility of avoiding a world liquid fuels shortfall for the forecast period.

Update on 10 June 2007: A couple of people have told me - too late - about a screening in Cape Town of the movie The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil. Damn. Sounds like there are some useful lessons there. Apparently Cuba's organic revolution was born of the need to make do without oil: farm and transport equipment ground to a halt as the oil taps were shut off. And with the loss of Soviet food subsidies and sugar cane markets, they had to get creative. Fast. I am told the country now has a very low carbon footprint as a result. According to the WWF's The Living Planet Report 2006, Cuba is the only country in the world showing sustainable development.

food labels: environmental impact

Food labeling has increased in complexity as the nature of the ingredients has become more difficult to understand, and many people fear that we are losing control over what we are ingesting. When we could no longer pronounce the names of ingredients, we started insisting that all ingredients should be labeled; when we realized that some food can make us fat, we asked for calorie and protein content; when cereals stopped including anything nutritious, we needed to see added vitamins and minerals; when we were told that some fat was good and some was bad, we asked for labelling of transfats; when we found that a lot of our staples were genetically modified, we wanted to know which ones; as we became more aware of allergies, we asked for labeling of known allergens.

These things are all relatively easy to identify and label - although there is plenty of resistance in some quarters - but when it comes to environmental impact, a minefield has opened up as supermarkets start labeling the carbon impact of foods. If the carbon footprint of a grocery item could be definitively quantified as a broad indicator of potential environmental damage (mainly from energy consumed in its production and transportation) then it would help improve consumers' ability to manage their own carbon footprints. Increased awareness should help weed out high-carbon products and encourage consumption of locally produced goods. I'm just not sure how carbon footprints will be standardised in a way that fairly compares different goods from different countries, and is clear enough for the average consumer to understand.

But it gets even more complicated. Carbon is not the only measure of environmental impact. Another hidden impact is the embodied water in foods. Water is exported and imported in the sense that food grown in one country requires water for its growth, so the producing country is selling virtual water to the importing country. One of the big problems with this is that many food producing countries don't have water to spare, and many food importing countries are saving their own water at the expense of others.

Wikipeida goes into more detail on the impacts of embodied water, particularly as related to global trade, noting also that this issue doesn't apply only to food. Those jeans you're wearing represent 10,850 litres of embodied water. Waterwise estimates that of all the water used by the average Briton, 65% is embedded in food, 30% in industrial goods. Out of 3400 litres used by each person every day, only 150 comes from the tap.

I am in favour of finding some way of identifying the impacts of the way food and other goods are produced and transported, but it's going to take some time to figure out how. Embodied water and carbon are the two most all-encompassing measures of environmental impact, but there are others. And what about labour practices and other social impacts? The list goes on.