Food & agriculture

The problem of excessive phosphorus loading is affecting water bodies in all parts of the world, including Lake Winnipeg, which is the tenth largest lake in the world by surface area, and among the most heavily loaded with phosphorus of the world’s great lakes. ... While our total global phosphorus reserves remain unknown, statistics on deposits found in recent decades indicate that more phosphate is being extracted than discovered. Although dwindling rock phosphate reserves may challenge our industrial model of agriculture, it will also stimulate innovation and create new economic opportunities for capturing and recycling phosphorus back onto agricultural lands.

The net energy of pre-industrial agriculture, taken as a whole energy-gathering system, must have been low, with EROEI probably on the order of 1.1-1.6 depending on place and time.

-Bees in the City? New York May Let the Hives Come Out of Hiding
-Produce to the People: Collaborating for Food Access
-Is Goat the New Cow? Why American Foodies and Environmentalists Are Reviving the Old-World Staple
-Ankeny forum to examine agricultural concentration
-New York rolls veggie carts into food deserts; can other cities follow?
-How guerrilla gardening took root
-New report reveals the environmental and social impact of the 'livestock revolution'
-'I'm not a slave, I just can't speak English' – life in the meat industry

-Outer Ring Suburbs and the Permanent Foreclosure
-Designing Cities for People: Farming in the City
-Cleveland’s Comeback
-The secret mall gardens of Cleveland
-10 Land-Use Strategies to Create Socially Just, Multiracial Cities

A year ago, my business partner, Caitlyn Galloway, and I started Little City Gardens. We grow salad greens, braising greens, and culinary herbs in the heart of San Francisco, which we sell to a restaurant, caterers, and individual subscribers. Little City Gardens is a lot of things: a market-garden, a small business struggling to succeed, and an experiment in the viability of urban micro-farming. We started the business with a desire to apply ourselves to the redesign of our local foodshed.

The best kept dirty little secret of country life is flies. House flies, horse flies, deer flies, all kinds of flies. In cities and suburbs, flies are not as bothersome which is a good reason for the fainthearted to stay in town where they only have to put up with air full of mosquitoes and carbon monoxide.

-The Case Against Biofuels: Probing Ethanol’s Hidden Costs
-Big Oil Behind Yet Another Biofuels Research Paper
-Harrabin's Notes: Battle over biofuel strategy

These fish and shellfish are delicious, healthful, and can be eaten with a clean conscience. Still, there's something missing in my line-up in recent years, and my customers and I miss it terribly: local, wild salmon. Not long ago, Chinook salmon pulled from our cold, clean offshore waters, constituted up to 50 percent of my business. Today: zilch, nothing. That's because there hasn't been a commercial salmon season in California and Oregon for the last two years.

The National Intelligence Council has released a report on the expected effects of climate change to the Caribbean region. This 21 page report is entitled Mexico, The Caribbean and Central America: The Impact of Climate Change to 2030: Geopolitical Implications (NIC Conference Report, Jan. 2010). The report is authored by a team of private researchers under the Global Climate Change Research Program contract with the CIA’s Office of the Chief Scientist.

-After Smart Grids, Smart Sewage?
-A real bottler
-Lexicon of Change: The Rise of Transition Culture

Vertical farming has become a popular idea, but what is mostly forgotten is that the energy required for the operation and construction of vertical farms largely negates the ecological advantages. This also applies to small-scale systems, like those of Philips (a concept) or Inka Biospheric Solutions (a product).

"Coming after You" means both your legacy of non-biodegradable plastics and that they are out to kill you. Now that the hilarious double entendre is out of the way, we can go on to our patient heroines. The nurturing, brave journalists about to be presented are patient as heroines and they succor untold numbers of unknown patients suffering from plastic-caused diseases.

- The Femivore’s dilemma
- Sharon Astyk: Poultry is a feminist issue?
- Global hunt for phosphates is on
- Vandana Shiva: Water wisdom