Cultivating a vision to sustain generations -- Don Bustos

Re-published from American Friends Service Committee's Acting in Faith blog. This interview was written by Lucy Duncan, AFSC's Friends Liaison. Learn about AFSC and other Quaker peace and social justice work at www.afsc.org/friends.

The right to grow food and have access to water

Don Bustos in his kitchen at Santa Cruz Farm

Don Bustos (DB): The name of our farm is Santa Cruz Farm, after our church the Santa Cruz Church, and then the Santa Cruz de la Canada Land Grant [in New Mexico]. I still farm the same land my ancestors farmed over 300 years ago and as you walk outside, you'll see the same land, the same crops, and the same methods that my ancestors used. That's the knowledge we pass on to the trainees.

We do incorporate a little new technology that allows us to grow produce year round using nothing but solar energy, like cold frames.

We reconstituted the land grant here several years ago. We have been able to petition the state to acquire some land. The original land grant was 44,600 acres. It started just down the road, went down past the river, then all the way up to the mountains in the Chimayo area where the Santa Cruz reservoir is now.

We've been able to find about 4,600 acres that we lay claim to now as communal land, and we want to expand the land grant, so that eventually we hope the families will be interested in revitalizing the communal land grant, build housing, the whole community can grow their food, have their jobs, feed their kids, and still be a sustainable system.
We're talking about revitalizing the old food system, regenerating that, then allowing it to be sustainable for hundreds of years to come, and not rely on a lot of outside food production.
We still irrigate with our ancient acequia system that was dug hundreds of years ago, ours here is earth dug, it hasn't changed, the only thing that has changed is the pathway of the water itself. We irrigate off the Santa Cruz River; our acequia is called the Santa Cruz acequia. We have a small communal reservoir that the community financed, not the government. It was built in the 1920s.

The Santa Cruz River is a stream about 3 inches deep, about 6 feet wide—that's it. Right now there are 5,600 families that depend on the Santa Cruz River for some kind of production, perhaps not the way we do it, but to continue to grow their food, or orchards, or livestock. We live on the edge of the Sonoran desert. That's why the water is so valuable. When you depend on the amount of water to flow to your farm—to feed your family and your community—you've got to be really careful about how it's used, use it several times, then return it to the river where it charges the aquifer and then starts to create that system again.

We've known that for hundreds of years, so how do we continue that knowledge so future generations know the importance of it—so they can continue to grow their food?

If you grow your food, if you grow your own seeds, you're a free person, you don't become a slave to the food system where you have to work and buy the food at any price that's mandated. To us, it's an empowerment issue. It's a human right to be able to grow our own food, and have access to good water, fairly and equitably.

Our training program is protecting land and water, and we're training people to be business men and women. They choose sustainable agriculture. Our job is to give them the tools, then they make critical decisions that allow them to be successful businesspeople, thereby protecting their land and water.

LD: Successful, but also collaborative...

DB: It's about communal development. How do we aggregate our product, so we can meet the needs of institutional buyers? That means creating cooperatives, or networks, getting people to sit at the table when they sometimes have differences, having those discussions occur, and then figuring out that the best solution is for the community to work together to create a food system that allows the whole community to flourish.

We go in the community and say we don't know everything, but with your help, we'll all learn. Then in three years, AFSC walks, win, lose or draw, it's up to our trainees to take it over and run with it or it's not going to work. You see that transition happening in Albuquerque. At first it's a little rocky, they want us there, but then they say, "How come you're still here?"

LD: This seems to counteract models of scarcity, people don't change their minds theoretically, you
have to experience something else…

DB: People are really asking us to replicate the model, not only in New Mexico. I've been traveling out to Indian country, up in Navajo area, and to the Dine and Hopi. We're trying to figure out how to partner with them. Hopefully we can go to the next stage. We are setting up this model and at some point in the future we can go to the USDA Farm Bill and set up a federal program that will put resources in place for aggregation within underserved communities. We could actually have a piece of legislation that all of us could work to get passed. That won't happen until 2016 or 2020, but we're laying the ground work.

LD:  Sayrah was telling me that people want this program because it is an economic alternative to the military.

DB: In Chapparal they are recruiting very young men and women to become part of the military, but now they see an option in the farming, it may not be as developed as we like, but it holds them over. Now there is an option in northern New Mexico. When I was growing up, the military was the one economic option, now this is another option. New Mexico has a 48 percent drop-out rate from high school. So, what else is there? This is the alternative. This is the alternative or there is no alternative. This is an alternative for formerly incarcerated people, too. There is a lot of impact on a lot of levels.

On returning to organic methods

Don Bustos in his fields at Santa Cruz Farm

LD: At some point you were using pesticides, and you stopped.

DB: That's how our farm moved from conventional growing to certified organic. In the 1960s I was still a young lad, we were still farming naturally.

Then in 1967 an agricultural agent came by and gave my dad a bottle of liquid. I learned later that it was DDT. He mixed it with water. That year we had perfect corn, none of our corn had worms, we had a great crop. So my dad started to use it. That was the late 1960s until I started to take over in the late 70s and mid 80s. There was a period where my dad would use chemical fertilizers and insecticides, all approved by USDA and encouraged to be used.

When my parents got older, I started to farm more, I had a small construction company. I would come on the weekends and help my dad and my mom on the farm, then I took over the farm and started to grow alfalfa. Then I started to go to farmers markets. In the1980s when the economy was real slow, I started to do more farming, I started to grow pumpkins and corn and stuff like that and I was still using Sevin dust. I was growing the best pumpkins in northern New Mexico and for six weeks I would go out and spread the Sevin dust—you put it on the plant for six weeks and it kills all the squash bugs. I'd go to the farmers markets in the morning, then I'd take a little nap, then in the evening I'd go out and do a little dusting.

Then one evening, when my son was a one-year-old infant,  I went out and did my dusting. I came back in and was walking across the floor, and he started to roll after me, and I kind of imagined that dust coming off my pants leg, then him rolling in that dust. It dawned on me, I'm poisoning the bugs out there, I don't need to be poisoning my kids. I got that moment of clarity: that's not going to work. That's when I started to learn to grow organic and moved from a chemical based agricultural system to an organic system. We've been certified organic since the 1980s.

No other way but equality and community

Agri-Cultura Network Produce

LD: What changes have you witnessed in the communities in which you've worked?

DB: People used to say the model you've created only depends on you. I'd say, "If that's true, then the model's not working."
In Las Cruces, in Chapparal, we're working with a group of immigrant growers. The group we're working with created a little farm in the middle of the desert, with limited water. They have cold frames, they are forming a cooperative, it's mostly women.

Women have really come into the project; we're hearing their voices more and more. They are growing food; they are going to the markets and speaking.

I did a study with Oxfam International which talks about the people that we work with—they get less than 1% of all the federal resources for agriculture, yet we represent 15% of the growers. In that same study, the growth of the farmers that will save agriculture is the immigrant growers.

LD: It seems as though your work is so powerfully practical and empowering. Would you mind talking a bit about the spiritual aspects?

DB: The spiritual is part of everything we do, so we talk about water and we talk about farming. When we plant we do a blessing, "One for the creator, one for the neighbor, and one for everything living,” acknowledging that the creator is all powerful. In the spring the priest blesses the waters, or rather acknowledges that the waters are blessed. That moves the tradition forward. It allows us to go forward and plant our seeds. On our farm we have a bean called a Virgin Mary bean, it's planted on the corners of the farm and it protects the farm from bad weather. We do a dance and acknowledgement. We plant by the moon cycles. That's part of what we teach.

LD: It's really interesting—setting up the systems that are interdependent and communal is empowering and humble all at once. Without the creator, there is nothing.

DB: The farmer trainees Fidel, Joseph, and Jeff were going through our training programs. We'd all work together, we'd go to one farm, we’d establish it, plant the seeds, then go to the next farm. We did the same thing on each farm. Eventually I started noticing that the crops were growing faster at Fidel's farm—I asked him, “what are you doing, are you using Miracle Grow or something?”
He said, “No, we have our dances in our greenhouses before we plant or work in the fields. We ask permission.”

LD: What about Quaker principles or testimonies—I see them as very evident in your work—but what is your sense of their relationship to your work?

DB: I think we work within the Quaker principles. In our program, I don't own the decision alone, we all own decisions, that's why our program is so effective. It's all of us figuring out what the next steps are. The principle of simplicity is a basis for our program—how much do you need to support your family? Community is a part of it, too—we are part of a bigger creation, and we are part of a bigger whole. Acknowledging the creator and the earth and how we all work together is central. We inherently live within the Quaker values. Our program is really based on social change through nonviolence.

LD: It's powerful because when you taste living on that plane of the testimony of equality, of community, you don't want to do it any other way, right?

DB: There is no other way.

Seeds of Freedom film -- review by Jim Kessler

Seeds of Freedom (30 min video) tells the story of seed at the heart of traditional, diversity-rich farming systems across the world, now being transformed into a powerful commodity, used to monopolise the global food system. It shows indigenous farming communities, global experts and activists, Dr Vandana Shiva of Navdanya, Henk Hobbelink of GRAIN, Zac Goldsmith MP (UK Conservative party), Canadian farmer Percy Schmeiser, Kumi Naidoo of Greenpeace International, Gathuru Mburu of the African Biodiversity Network, Liz Hosken of The Gaia Foundation and Caroline Lucas MP (UK Green party). It is co-produced by The Gaia Foundation and the African Biodiversity Network in collaboration with GRAIN, Navdanya International and MELCA Ethiopia [You can also download the Seed Map: Food, Farmers, and Climate Chaos poster created by ETCgroup and USC Canada. - Ed.]

Jim Kessler writes: The Seeds of Freedom film is fantastic.  I will use it to present a different view of agriculture in  my Environmental Biology class this fall. 

When I grew upon an Iowa farm in the 1950s, my Dad harvested and planted his own seed.  My class visits the Grinnell Monsanto plant during the seed corn harvest to help students understand industrial agriculture.  This video will help my students to gain a better perspective on the effect of corporate giants on the food supply.  On another note, I met the Nobel Laureate and Iowa native Norman Borlaug, the moving force behind the Green Revolution, at the high school where I taught a few years ago.  The other Biology teacher that I taught with is Norman Borlaug's great nephew so he invited his Uncle Norm to speak at our school.  Des Moines, Iowa is the home of the International Food Institute and the International Food Prize founded in Borlaug's honor.  Actually some of the prize winners are scientists who help indigenous peoples to improve yields using local cropping systems and locally produced seeds.  I'm very aware of both the positive and negative effects of his life's work.

     My class also visits an organic farm in my neighborhood.  The farmer produces and locally sells meat: free range chickens grown in movable cages, pork, beef, mutton, and goat meat.  They sell excess pork and beef to high end restaurants.  They use rotational grazing to improve the health of their animals and the land.  They move their cattle to anew paddock every few days during the growing season.  Last month Kathy and I bought some whole chickens from our neighbor that had just been killed and processed for freezing.  He calls and we go over to this farm to pick them up.

    I intend to use the Seeds of Freedom video to challenge my students to gain a perspective that is very rare in a state so dominated by industrial agriculture.

Listening to what the land says -- by Ruah Swennerfelt

This is cross-posted from Ruah's research blog transitionvision.wordpress.com. She returned home in late July after visiting Transition Towns in Israel and Europe.

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My flower garden has fruit trees
and tomatoes growing in it.

I so looked forward to coming home and then I returned to a heat wave. I had been complaining that I never got warm enough in Europe and then [in Vermont] had to suffer 97 degree Fahrenheit temperatures during the day and sweltering nights. But the heat wave’s finally broken and I’m reveling in the lush beauty of a Vermont summer. Our garden is producing lots of berries, summer squash, broccoli, peas, onions, potatoes, and tomatoes so far. What a bounty!

The main garden protected from deer.
Several more gardens outside the fence

I’m loving the weeding and harvesting and especially the cooking. Last night at our neighborhood potluck we had a delicious pasta primavera, a salad from a neighbor’s garden greens, home baked bread, great wine, and another neighbor’s blueberries in a fabulous dessert. With great conversions sprinkled in, what more could one ask for? Currently our land is saying, “produce, produce, produce.”

Bound Brook Farm, not too far from where we live, is owned by friends of ours, Erik Andrus and Erica Hurwitz. Erik and Erica’s dream was to grow wheat, partly to supply Erik’s fledgling bakery and partly to sell in the Champlain valley. Erik started a bread CSA (Community Supported Agricultural farm), selling his excess bread, croissants, and other mouth-watering delights at local farmer’s markets. His goal of a net-zero-energy farm is assisted by the use of horses. What Erik didn’t know about the land he purchase in 2005 was that a good deal of it stays wet and this isn’t good for wheat farming. Pulling up stakes isn’t an option after all the labor to build the house, outdoor wood-fired oven, and other essentials for the bakery. Instead he is learning to adapt in a different way.

Erik is learning that there’s another niche to fill in the Champlain valley, where so many people are focused on eating locally–rice. As he was quoted recently in the Burlington Free Press, “I love bread, and I love beer more than I love a plate of brown rice and a glass of sake – but if my inclination says bread, and the land says rice, I have to listen to what the land says.” And with that said, he’s invested money and time for his first rice harvest this year, hoping to produce 4,000 pounds of the stuff. The rice will be harvested with a horse-drawn reaper binder, and after the drying and threshing, it will be processed with a recently-purchased rice huller Erik ordered from China.

I was so moved by Erik’s statement. Actually, how brilliant is it to truly understand the land where you live, to have a deep sense of place? How often in human history have we not listened to what the land says? Deserts made green for agriculture and cities built where wildlife should have flourished are just two examples of how our incredible human creativity has backfired with unwanted results. What would it be like if we all took the time to observe and listen to the place where we live? It’s one of the basic principle’s of Permaculture. Once you really know your place, observe where the sun shines on the land in all seasons, know the changing temperatures, and observe how the natural world adapts to the place, it’s time to grow your food.

Climate Change Caravan in Bangladesh, Nov-Dec 2011

From the 15th of November to the 4th of December 2011, a climate change caravan will journey across the length of Bangladesh. From Sonarhat in the north to Barisal in the south, the caravan will cover 18 different sub districts in the country to gather together people's stories of climate change, gender and food sovereignty. Organized by Bangladesh Krishok Federation and Bangladesh Kishani Sabha (see the Via Campesina report on BKS workshops in Climate Change and Bangladesh), the caravan is a unique opportunity for people across the world to get a view from below and learn from ordinary Bengalis.

Oct 2010 mass march: photo BKS

Workshops, education programs, and connecting with international solidarity groups are part of the movement across Bangladesh. The country and its people are already experiencing the impacts of climate change: more frequent cyclones, droughts, and rising sea levels.

BKF and BKS appeal to people from various parts of the world to join this caravan. The cost incurred by participants from the northern countries will also be used to support a Bangaldeshi or a South Asian to participate in the Caravan. The deadline for applying is the 24th of August --  info can be found here.

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Thanks to 350.org for this advance notice.

Solving the food crisis -- Josette Sheeran

 
In this 20 minute TED video, Josette Sheeran, the head of the UN's World Food Program, explains why in a world with enough food for everyone, it is used as a weapon of war; and a billion people (1 out of 7) are starving. She proposes a total transformation of food aid -- into food sovereignty.

Nutrition is crucial in the first 1000 days of a child's life. It will never recover from the neural and physical damage due to lack of food. And breastfeeding (by properly fed mothers) could save a baby's  life every 22 seconds.

Sheeran talks about WFP's programs, shifting to improved local food supply rather than imported stocks. Food for Humanity: better nutrition can transform life chances and national earning. School feeding (less than 25 cents day) attracts girls, lowers birthrates and is the "poor man's safety net" -- with local foods. Warehouses for Hope are locally-provided storehouses, assuring food sovereignty and school meals: 500 in Cameroon alone. Digital Food solves the problem of famine amid plenty, by giving penniless people vouchers to buy local food. Purchasing for Progress creates a guaranteed market for small farmers and peasant women; one example, which she urges the G20 to adopt, is Brazil's Zero Hunger Program costing about 5% of GDP. The long term antipoverty benefits far exceed the costs. She hopes there we can soon say, "There was a time when 1/3 of the world's children grew up with brains and bodies stunted. No more. That's history."

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See also her biography; Wikipedia on the World Food Program; UN ReliefWeb humanitarian news and needs, e.g. the current Horn of Africa famine; World Bank's Food Crisis Open Forum (Apr 2011) videos and transcripts; independent NGOs' IPC Food Sovereignty proposals. An analysis in plain language: ETCgroup, Who Will Feed Us? Questions for the Food and Climate Crises (free download, 2009) raises questions about the failure of MDGs, financial speculators, corperate agriculture and distribution, the impact of agrofuels and climate change, and technofixes proposed by Gates, Rockefeller, and Monsanto.

Youth and educational resources: download the videogame Food Force; WFP educational resources and UK youth We Feedback; Oxfam International Youth Partnership's CHANGE initiative; and Taking IT Global networks. See also Minneapolis thinktank IATP (Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy); Food First factsheets and newsletters on the US and international food sovereignty movements; Food Secure Canada; for British sources, UKabc.

Global changes -- indigenous peoples tell their stories

Poodwaddle earth clock: click on graphic for full screen
Indigenous elders tell stories of climate change. United Nations University's Traditional Knowledge Initiative has interviewed natives in Australia, Malawi, Cameroon, Bangladesh, Iran, Papua New Guinea, Tajikistan, Kirghyzstan, Ethiopia, Japan, Panama, Bolivia, Madagascar, Kalimantan, the Russian Altai and the Canadian Arctic. Here are two examples:

Tajik women


Kyrgyz pastoralists


See the previous post, and other videos at UNU Our World 2.0; and UN Foundation videos including Catastrophic Climate Change (7 min 2007) if UNFCCC negotiations fail. The sites Conversations with the Earth, Project Word, SIDS Many Strong Voices, and Indigenous Peoples’ Biocultural Climate Change Assessment Initiative (IPCCA) also have eyewitness stories. Report by the Sami indigenes of Norway.

Eco-farming in Bolivia

This interview by Franz Chávez first appeared in Inter Press Service and Foodforethought.

Bolivian altiplano: photo courtesy Destination 360

LA PAZ, Apr 3 , 2010 (IPS) - The gradual loss of traditional farming practices that preserve the land has pushed into extreme poverty small farmers in Bolivia who 20 years ago were producing surplus produce to sell at market and now are barely able to feed themselves.

This was the conclusion reached by agricultural engineer Wilfredo Quiroz, who is working on follow-up and evaluation in the Management of Natural Resources in the Chaco and High Valley Regions Project (PROMARENA), a Ministry for Development Planning programme that receives support from the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD).

The project, which operates with a 14.9 million dollar fund, including 12 million from IFAD and 1.1 million from the national treasury, is aimed at reducing poverty and boosting food security in rural areas.

photo erepublik.com

In an interview with IPS, Quiroz discusses the work undertaken in the Chaco, a sparsely populated flat area of scrubland and thorny trees in the southeastern corner of Bolivia; the Valles Altos (High Valleys); and semi-tropical areas in the departments (provinces) of La Paz in the west and Chuquisaca and Tarija in the southeast, where support is provided to 247,000 peasant farmers in areas considered poor and extremely poor.

When impoverished areas in the departments of Santa Cruz in the east and the central Cochabamba are incorporated into the project, the total number of municipalities benefiting will increase from 26 to 56, and the number of communities to 900.

Q: What is the difference between the work of PROMARENA and that of other programmes that assist poor farmers?

A: We respect the decisions of local residents, who draw up 'maps' that describe the productive activities they carried out 20 years ago, as well as the present and the future as they see it.

In the past, they say, they had more food - enough to feed themselves, and to sell and store food. Although they lacked education and health care, they had enough food.

For the future, they imagine having sheds and barns for raising pigs, with troughs, corrals, sources of water and irrigation systems.

Q: What is their economic situation, compared to the past?

A: Instead of seeing things improve, they have been further impoverished, and their food production capacity is not what it was 30 years ago.

In past decades, they had water in abundance. But now they talk about water sources that have dried up as a result of deforestation in highlands areas where they used to take care of the land and vegetation was preserved and kept safe from livestock.

The need to expand grazing areas to the spots where water sources are located, the degradation of soil, landslides and climate change ended up damaging that source of life.

Q: And how have the lives of local families changed?

A: The damage to the environment has hurt the productive activities of families and reduced the quantity of food produced, and in the poorest regions only older adults and children are left, because young people have left the villages and gone to the cities.

Ten years ago, according to figures from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), the families produced 80 percent of their food. But now they only produce 60 percent of what they need.

Q: Can you provide an example of old traditions that used to preserve natural conditions in farming areas?

A: In Charazani, a remote Andean village 272 km northwest of La Paz, the local community used to protect a mountain covered with grasslands. The straw was harvested at a certain time of year solely to thatch the local huts.

Charazani: photo Wikipedia

But shepherds stopped respecting that custom and began to use the area for grazing, which exhausted the grasslands, affected the water sources, and forced local residents to start buying corrugated sheet metal to roof their houses.

Another practice that has been lost is the custom of leaving a portion of land to lie fallow for eight years, to allow it to recover its fertility so it can be farmed again.

Q: And what effect does the poor road network have in impoverished rural areas?

A: Unlike in the hot plains of the department of Santa Cruz, where the roads are drivable, in the Andean highlands, communities are widely spread out and some are not even connected to roads.

Farmers have to carry their produce on their shoulders on walks of up to 10 hours, and although their production costs may be low, the distance and lack of roads drives up the final price, pricing them out of the big markets.

Q: Is there a formula for confronting their isolation and the lack of effective state policies for addressing the problems facing peasant families?

A: There are no macro-level policies for improving the living conditions of small farmers. The actions that have been undertaken are isolated and are focused on medium-scale farmers, and only in some cases do they involve subsidies to support low-income peasant farmers.

PROMARENA allows the beneficiaries to choose between projects involving soil conservation, livestock-raising, and the care of vegetation and water sources, with the idea of preserving natural resources and generating business opportunities.

The support includes technical advice for developing the projects. Later, the communities are invited to present their projects and products in a contest that grants a cash prize that is symbolic, because the overall value of the project is huge.

For example, a project in which a large number of families took part in restoring pre-colonial farming terraces and recuperating productive areas won a prize, as well as recognition from their local communities and municipal governments.

In PROMARENA, people learn from the experience of local residents and that know-how is then extended. The freedom enjoyed by the beneficiaries makes this project different from traditional technology transfer models.

Pig City -- by Jamblichus

This post by Jamblichus is reprinted with his permission. Modestly hiding behind his nom de clavier, the British blogger tries "To point out and record the abuse of power by corporations, politicos, police and anyone else who has it coming. To give big-ups to academics, poets, musicians, activists and any other souls who have something interesting and unusual to say... [And to write about] civil liberties, the politics of the Korean peninsula, genetic engineering, religion and rationality, the environment in any sense of that word, poetry that makes your brain sizzle and music that makes your ears sting. " We recommend his blog.

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MVRDV's Pig City proposal (details below)

Pork is the most widely eaten meat in the world, accounting for about 38 percent of meat production worldwide. And you know what? There’s good reason for that, all you vegetarian puritans out there: it’s downright delicious.

Smoky bacon, crispy Lincolnshire sausages, pork and pineapple stir fry, Korean Samgyeopsal barbecue… God, I’m dribbling on my keyboard already, is it lunch time yet?

Sadly for fans of the full English Breakfast and other craven carnivores like myself, industrial pig farming itself is a much less pretty thing to behold than the aforementioned dishes.

Rife with sickening dereliction of animal welfare, hugely polluting and frankly unsustainable, something has to change. Fast. For pork consumption is booming.

According to the USDA’s Foreign Agricultural Service, nearly 100 million metric tons of pork were consumed worldwide in 2006 alone and it’s been climbing since then as increasing urbanization and disposable income lead to a rapid rise in pork consumption in developing nations across the world.

It’s worth considering what this entails at the point of production: a brief insight into industrial pig farming courtesy of a story written for Rolling Stone a few years back”

Smithfield Foods, the largest and most profitable pork processor in the world, killed 27 million hogs last year. That’s a number worth considering…
… Smithfield’s holding ponds — the company calls them lagoons — cover as much as 120,000 square feet. The area around a single slaughterhouse can contain hundreds of lagoons, some of which run thirty feet deep. The liquid in them is not brown. The interactions between the bacteria and blood and afterbirths and stillborn piglets and urine and excrement and chemicals and drugs turn the lagoons pink.
Even light rains can cause lagoons to overflow; major floods have transformed entire counties into pig-shit bayous. To alleviate swelling lagoons, workers sometimes pump the shit out of them and spray the waste on surrounding fields, which results in what the industry daintily refers to as “overapplication.” This can turn hundreds of acres — thousands of football fields — into shallow mud puddles of pig shit. Tree branches drip with pig shit.
Some pig-farm lagoons have polyethylene liners, which can be punctured by rocks in the ground, allowing shit to seep beneath the liners and spread and ferment. Gases from the fermentation can inflate the liner like a hot-air balloon and rise in an expanding, accelerating bubble, forcing thousands of tons of feces out of the lagoon in all directions.
The lagoons themselves are so viscous and venomous that if someone falls in it is foolish to try to save him. A few years ago, a truck driver in Oklahoma was transferring pig shit to a lagoon when he and his truck went over the side. It took almost three weeks to recover his body. In another instance, a worker who was repairing a lagoon in Michigan was overcome by the fumes and fell in. His fifteen-year-old nephew dived in to save him but was overcome, the worker’s cousin went in to save the teenager but was overcome, the worker’s older brother dived in to save them but was overcome, and then the worker’s father dived in. They all died in pig shit.

There is moral in here somewhere isn’t there? Live by the pig, die by the pig perhaps… Facetiousness aside, although nobody experts a pig slaughterhouse to be the Elysian fields, the facts stand that keeping piggy wiggies in teeny weeny cages, pumping them full of antibiotics and growth hormones and using loads of land to do this all is neither an edifying spectacle nor good for human, hog or planet.

Which brings me, finally, to the point: there may be a solution other than opting for nuts and raisins, which I am in fact (half-heartedly) considering. And it is an elevated one. A well-regarded Dutch architectural firm, MDRDV, has spent four years creating a plan to build seventy six high-rise towers to house pigs. Here’s the Wiki:

In Pig City MVRDV proposes a novel way of accommodating the population of 15 million pigs that share the Netherlands with 15 million human inhabitants.
The prototype is an 80 meter high tower. Each level is divided into animal friendly farm areas… The biogas generated by the pigs’ waste is collected as a clean energy source; fish farms inside the towers provide animal food and help reduce transport. Precious countryside is liberated from the polluting bio-industry.

The proposal (which came to my attention after reading around this New York Times article on vertical/urban farming) was made several years back and apparently caused a real outcry in the Netherlands, where it was seen in no small part as an indictment of industrial farming and our consumption patterns rather than a genuine proposal. The Dutch Archined website summed it up thusly:

Why spend four years on this supposedly unfeasible project? Is Pig City an indictment of the bio-industry? Is this radical proposal and powerful visual presentation meant to inject life into a tiresome discussion?
Seen for what it is, Pig City is a cartoon-like representation of today’s situation and, unlike the secret bio-industry, makes no attempt to gloss over the consequences of our pattern of consumption. The presentation, for that matter, is so lifelike that many read it as a realistic alternative. And no doubt MVRDV would be the first to take on the job should it prove feasible.

It strikes me after looking at it more closely that MVRDV may also have been making a point about the failure of the government to provide nearly that level of eco-friendly architecture to humans, let alone pigs. There are many layers to this idea, all provocative in the best of ways. Food for Thought once more… For more on the debate and urban farming, check out The Vertical Farm Project. Until then, here’s some vegetarian recipes! Bon Appetit.

"The Living Skyscraper: Farming the Urban Skyline" by Blake Kurasek

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Jamblichus takes his name from the 3rd c. philosopher who refused to separate soul from body, an early exponent of panentheism. Read Arturo Vasquez on the historical Iamblichus.
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See also Evan Bromfield's research on urban vertical projects.

Five ways to make a killing on the environment -- and the alternatives

Doomsday Seed Vault on the remote Arctic island of Svalbard
administered by GCGTrust

1. Monopoly rights on seeds
BASF, Monsanto, Bayer, Syngenta, Dupont and biotech partners have filed 532 patent documents (a total of 55 patent families) on so-called “climate ready” genes. Farming communities in the global South – those who have contributed least to global greenhouse emissions – are among the most threatened. The top 10 multinationals have cornered the seed market, use climate change to argue that any other choice will "starve" millions, lobby governments and WTO to make their monopoly legal, and enforce it over farmers' rights. See the ETC study Patenting the Climate Genes, Quaker International Affairs Programme (QIAP) book The Future Control of Food, the Schmeiser lawsuit, and the Doomsday Vault.

2. Land grabs for agrofuels
Joan Baxter's book Dust from Our Eyes gives examples from Mali. She worked for two decades in Africa. See our previous post about land grabs in the Third World, the secret World Bank report on how financial speculation drove up food prices, UN and Jubilee analysis of the food crisis and its threat to MDGs.

3. Rogue fleets fishing to extinction, to benefit banks
See Boris Worm's warning in a previous post, and Callum Roberts book Unnatural History of the Sea.

4. Slice-and-dice derivatives trading in pollution permits
Derivatives caused the 2008 financial meltdown that was bailed out with our grandchildren's earnings; now OTC speculators want to repeat the bubble. In 2008 the Financial Times reported carbon trading doubling, but warned that 140 of 170 carbon offsets were "poor quality". Recently traders have sliced-and-diced these. See our previous post: climate justice vs the carbon casino, updated in the recent FOE study Dangerous Obsession, and Mark Schapiro, "Conning the Climate", Harpers Feb 2010. In 2009 China threw the risk back on derivatives traders, but in 2010 in the US, they are still refusing Federal Reserve regulation.

5. Industrial agriculture, feedlots and fish farms (breeding grounds for superbugs)
See this 2010 scientist's blog on superbugs updating the New Yorker 2008 investigative report. Feedlots have been accused of fostering flu viruses. Fish farms have spread viruses worldwide, despite years of warning, which -- typically -- BC lobbyists and governments have denied.

6. Tarsands and the "security" of the US empire: blood for oil
Canadian ecojustice groups raised questions of the tarsands' true cost years ago, to denials from Alberta and federal governments. Pipelines and projects are now being quadrupled despite warnings by ethical analysts that environmental damage is being hidden from investors. Federal studies long kept secret show woodland caribou being driven to extinction. Alberta's Parkland Institute shows US strategy calls for further involvement in wars to protect oil supply. Examples are the Afghanistan war, its connection with US pipelines, and Pentagon geopolitical studies (2006, 2007, 2008). Already the world's biggest oil consumer, in 2007 the US military reported that its new tactics (supposed to protect "security of supply") require four times as much oil per soldier as in the Gulf War of 1991.

Hopeful alternatives
1. a list of ecojustice goals from Climate Justice Now!
2. New Economics Foundation, Other Worlds are Possible: Human progress in an age of climate change (Dec 2009) with 28 case studies from around the world.
3. British Quakers' Sep 2009 Zero Growth conference: summary, conference powerpoints and mp3 sound recordings; queries and readings for a one-hour workshop.

Why they grind up baby chicks and farmers - Dailykos

The industrial model has been imposed on agriculture in recent decades. Live animals are mere "inputs". As this story shows, the family farmer is becoming an indebted serf (just like 19th c. fishermen and factory workers who were trapped by the company store: the "pluckme" or "tommy").
The system, created by giant agribusiness corporations ("integrated" monopolies) backed by banks, is sustained by government regulations, hired researchers, and political lobbyists. Those who question it are accused of being against cheap food, jobs and family farmers.

*****

Article by Jill Anderson from 10 Sep 2009 DailyKos:

A new video surfaced in the past week or so, one featuring baby male chicks being ground up alive. They were hatched to lay eggs, except males don't lay eggs. So the 50 or so percent of female chicks grow up and live for about a year in miserable conditions, laying eggs. The males' lifespans are much shorter.

Naturally, it's provoked quite a reaction by those who are outraged and sickened by the video. Industry, of course, has their own take on it. My first reaction is to talk to farmers who raise chickens to ask for their opinions on it. Many have also asked me, "Why don't they raise the male baby chicks for meat?" Ohhhh, long answer.

How They Raise Meat Birds
Meat birds (broilers) and egg laying chickens lead totally different lives, although neither are pleasant. You can see a more detailed account on the chicken industry at the link, but in brief, a company like Tyson, Perdue, or Sanderson ("integrators") contracts with individual "growers" (factory farmers) to raise the birds. The integrator provides the feed, the chicks, the meds, and the transportation. They own the birds, they write all the rules, and they tell the grower every detail of how they must raise the birds in order to keep their contracts.

The growers own the risk, the debt, the manure, and the dead birds. It's a rotten deal. I spoke to a friend who grew up on one of these farms in Missouri during the 1990's. He said they made about $14k per year in income and when they sold the place they were $100k in debt. His family's contracts lasted one year each. In order to get a new contract each year, his family might be asked to pay for expensive upgrades to their broiler houses - in his case, a new ventilation system. He told me they keep you in a cycle of debt.

The broilers tend to be a breed called the Cornish Cross, which Michael Pollan calls the most efficient way to turn corn into breast meat. A farmer on my site told me it takes 2 months to raise a Cornish Cross to the size needed for slaughter. Remember that - it's important. There will be a test later.

Also, chickens are standardized such that they can be slaughtered via machine. They are killed at the rate of 180+ per minute, mostly by a machine, because the birds are all the same size and shape more or less. There's a person there who is supposed to kill the birds that the machine misses, although they don't have 100% accuracy, so some birds enter the next phase of processing while still alive and conscious. It ain't pretty. Currently, the Humane Slaughter Act exempts poultry.

How About the Egg Laying Birds?
The birds who lay the eggs are a different breed - the White Leghorn. If you were to raise a White Leghorn to slaughter weight, it would take 4-6 months. That's 2-3 times as much time as it takes to raise a Cornish Cross. THAT is why they don't raise the male chicks for meat. Instead, they grind 'em up.

About 95% of females go into battery cages to lay eggs (about 5% of the U.S. market is cage-free). You can see a picture of these here. Several European countries have outlawed these cages and the entire EU is phasing them out by 2012. The birds have about as much space as a piece of 8x11 paper and they cannot spread their wings or engage in natural behaviors like dust bathing.

Because chickens have a "pecking order" and will peck other chickens to death, the birds are debeaked - the tips of their beaks are cut off. When chickens are raised with more space and less stress, they are far less likely to peck one another. It's entirely possible to raise birds for eggs without debeaking them, but that would require keeping them in humane conditions.

The egg-laying birds live for about a year. According to the Humane Society:

Once their productivity wanes, typically after 1-2 years, the hens are "depopulated," and many experience broken bones as they are removed from the cages. The birds are either killed by gassing on the farm or after long-distance transport to a slaughter plant, where they experience further stress and trauma associated with shackling, electrical water-bath stunning, and throat-cutting. Throughout the commercial egg industry, the welfare of birds is severely impaired.

Why They Grind Up Male Chicks
As you can see here, it's a simple question of profitability. Is it cheaper to raise male birds up for meat and sell them, or to grind them up? It's cheapest to grind them up. They don't grow fast enough to provide maximum profitability to the industry. Here's what a farmer on my blog had to say about this practice:

Personally I think it's incumbent on us as livestock keepers and people responsible for the support of the breeder industry, to treat and handle our animals with respect, they deserve it, they feed us, clothe us, put a roof over our heads, give us money to go on vacation, etc. They do so by giving up their lives at our request, on our schedule. We should be thankful for that and not forget who is supporting us.

That's why I'm more horrified at the debeaking machine, cage layer farms, confinement hog farms, etc. than I am at the auger, at least that's a quick death. Personally, I see those cockerels being killed as day olds more as incredibly wasteful of a life than anything else...

The thing that really floors me is that the industry absolutely doesn't understand why the general public gets upset at seeing these videos. People in the public, I'm sure, looks at videos like these and say to themselves "If I were to do this to puppies and kittens I'd go to prison, be fined, and be prohibited from ever owning an animal again". Actually if you were caught treating a horse or a cow this way and you weren't licensed as a business, you'd probably be treated the same. And yet, a company like Hi-Line is not only not fined, etc. but are applauded as an efficient business by industry and government. By God, they're just "Feeding the world".

The only thing that Hi-Line is doing wrong, by industry standards and government regulation, as far as animal husbandry and cruelty goes, is letting some of those chicks go through the sanitizer and leaving some to die on the factory floor.

What You Can Do Politically
The big battleground right now is Ohio. Huge surprise, right? Same as with the freakin' Presidential elections. They are the #2 egg producing state and the Humane Society is trying to ban battery cages. Big Ag has decided to play offense and they have a ballot initiative on this year's ballot. It's called Issue 2 and it would establish an industry-dominated board to decide animal welfare issues. Standing with the Humane Society against Issue 2 are the Ohio Farmers Union, the Ohio Environmental Stewardship Alliance, and the Ohio Sierra Club.

What You Can Do At Home
The best thing you can do is to get some chickens for your backyard! This is a growing trend, as they are fun pets, they eat bugs and kitchen scraps, they produce a high quality fertilizer (manure), and they lay eggs. I wrote up a post about backyard chickens for folks who are just starting out, but there are numerous websites, books, and magazines on the topic with far more information than I can provide.

If getting your own chickens is a little too extreme for you, check out a site like eatwellguide.org or localharvest.org to find a humane source of eggs near you. Otherwise, cage-free eggs or free-range eggs from the store might be your best bet. Even if they aren't ideal, they are still better than the alternative. And if you find those eggs expensive, you might wish to just plain old decrease your egg consumption. Check out vegan recipes to find ways to cook without eggs (even if you don't plan to go vegan).

*****

NY Times report 4 Oct 09 "Woman's shattered life..." shows even worse problems in the beef industry due to profiteering, corporate lobbying, and lax government inspection.

See also Wikipedia on corporate farming, contract farming, industrial agriculture, US Center for Food Safety's publication Corporate Lies (2002); Jill Anderson's blog La Vida Locavore and Toronto Food Policy Council's Foodforethought.net; the 90 min documentaries Our Daily Bread (Germany 2005) and Food Inc. (USA 2009).

Biochar - by Joanna Santa Barbara

Joanna Santa Barbara is a peace and ecological activist living in Atamai, a sustainable village in New Zealand which incorporates many of the recommended practices, including biochar and organic gardening. See her Atamai blog and Transition Aotearoa (TransitionTowns NZ). Her article first appeared in Peace Magazine 25.2 (Apr-June 2009)
*****
James Lovelock, remarkable for his just-in-time discovery of the ozone hole, and then for his fruitful Gaia hypothesis (that the Earth is a complex interacting system which self-regulates to preserve life), was recently interviewed on mitigation of climate change.[1] At nearly 90, he pulls no punches. It is too late to contain carbon emissions, he says. Trying to sequester carbon dioxide in underground caverns is a waste of time, and there is little to be hoped for from alternatives to fossil fuel energy.

There is one way we could save ourselves and that is through the massive burial of charcoal. It would mean farmers turning all their agricultural waste -- which contains carbon that the plants have spent the summer sequestering -- into non-biodegradable charcoal, and burying it in the soil. Then you can start shifting really hefty quantities of carbon out of the system and pull the CO₂ down quite fast.

What? And we've been agonizing over fossil fuel emissions, carbon tax, alternative energy and so on? We just have to bury charcoal? Let's examine this proposal, beginning with the carbon cycle.

Carbon cycle

Two of the greenhouses gases threatening the health of the biosphere as they accumulate in the atmosphere are carbon molecules - carbon dioxide and methane. Methane is 25 times as potent as carbon dioxide in its global warming action. The third main component of greenhouse gases is nitrous oxide (8% and 298 times as potent), which we will discuss later. Carbon in various forms resides in the deep layers of the earth; in the surface, biologically active soil; in the ocean, both deep and shallow levels; in the layer of plant and animal material on the surface of the earth; and in the atmosphere.

In the deep layers of the earth and of the ocean, there is little movement of carbon, except when humans unearth it as fossil fuels and send it into the atmosphere. Between the atmosphere and the shallow ocean, the soil and the living beings of the biosphere, there is continual exchange of carbon.

This is the carbon cycle. Our problem is that human activity has altered the carbon cycle in ways that have increased atmospheric carbon. Carbon dioxide and methane, together with water vapor and nitrous oxide, act to trap radiant sun energy near the Earth's surface. This is causing climate change.

Human impact on carbon cycle

The human activity contributing to this change is:

• Burning fossil fuels, sending carbon into the atmosphere
• Deforestation (reduction of volume of trees whose living matter holds a large amount of carbon stable for tens or hundreds of years)
• Exposure of bare soil, leading to soil carbon returning to the atmosphere faster. Tilling the soil speeds up this process.
• Grazing of millions of domestic animals, most of whom produce large quantities of methane due to their mode of digestion. Soil degradation with loss of carbon also occurs.

It looks as if our modes of growing food, feed for animals, fuel, and fibre are part of the problem. It's not only burning fossil fuels. Our forestry and agricultural methods need to be part of the solution. Stopping deforestation, returning land to ecosystem restoration, "no till" agriculture, new methods of grazing and animal management that mitigate the worst greenhouse gas effects, and especially organic methods of food production are important parts of problem-solving. These will all keep more carbon in the soil and in living organisms and less in the atmosphere.

But Lovelock and others suggest we can go much further in restoring carbon cycle proportions (between soil, living organisms and atmosphere) that support life as we know it. The idea is to turn agricultural waste, which otherwise would decay and release carbon to the atmosphere, into charcoal, which is highly concentrated carbon, and bury it. Carbon in this form is relatively non-biodegradable, and remains stable for thousands of years. It would be the equivalent of returning to the earth some of the carbon we've mined and put in the atmosphere.

illustration courtesy of EHP online

Biochar

This form of carbon is called "biochar." It is made by burning organic (mainly plant) material at a low temperature with little oxygen. Pre-Columbian Amazonians made biochar by burning plant material in pits covered with earth. They then mixed it with compost and soil to create what European colonists called "terra preta," or dark earth. They were not attempting to reduce greenhouse gases, so why did they do this?

Biochar has numerous benign properties the Amazonians made use of: it increases availability of soil nutrients, thus reducing the need for fertilizer and increasing productivity; it helps retain water; it reduces deforestation, because by converting from "slash and burn" to "slash and char," soil fertility remains satisfactory in a given site for much longer. And, it turns out, it decreases emissions of methane and nitrous oxide, the other greenhouse gases. In modern kilns, the manufacture of biochar can produce both oil and gas used for energy purposes. Several different technologies are under trial in low income countries to power cooking stoves and ovens, as well as to enrich soil. One type uses gas from the making of biochar to power cooking stoves. Another type uses small household stoves to both make biochar and cook food.[2] These endeavors may increase human health by reducing indoor smoke from inefficient open wood fires.

Beyond soil enrichment needs, can carbon be buried in the earth at a scale that would make a difference to atmospheric carbon? According to Sara Scherr and Sajal Sthapit in the 2009 State of the World Report,[3]

"There is a global production potential of 594 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent in biochar per year, simply by using waste materials such as forest and milling residues, rice husks, groundnut shells, and urban waste. Far more could be generated by planting and converting trees..."

Advocates calculate that if biochar additions were applied at this rate on just 10 percent of the world's cropland (about 150 million hectares), this method could store 29 billion tons of CO₂-equivalent, offsetting nearly all the emissions from fossil fuel burning.

Four cautions must be borne in mind: firstly that making biochar on this scale by modern methods would require enormous investment in kilns in all agricultural areas of the globe. Considering the many co-benefits, including poverty alleviation, this could be considered an excellent investment. There are many current projects running on exactly these assumptions (see sidebar boxes). One new idea is to use big microwave ovens. If biochar were made by the ancient methods, some of its benefits would be retained, but the potential for energy generation would be lost.

The second caution is that continued soil fertility depends on nutrients being returned to the soil that would be burned in biochar production. There is current research aiming to understand what proportions of plant material can be turned to biochar without incurring deficiencies. The New Zealand government has funded two professorships in biochar, one to pursue its behavior in soil, and one to study the process of turning plant material to biochar. The long-term soil fertility effects of modern biochar are not yet known.

Thirdly, the dynamics of charcoal-humus mix are not well understood. A ten-year experiment with buried carbon in boreal forests showed more rapid decomposition of humus and release of below-ground carbon in carbon dioxide, thus partially offsetting the benefits of biochar as a long-term carbon sink.[5] In addition, it is not yet clear that modern biochar remains as stable as Amazonian biochar.

Fourthly, to produce enough biomass to make a difference to atmospheric carbon may mean land use conversion, for example, forest clearing in order to plant "energy crops."

Clearing of forests or grasslands to make way for energy crop monoculture results in large quantities of emissions, reduces future sink capacity and causes further collapse of ecosystems and the biodiversity on which we depend for climate regulation. As widespread freshwater shortages are predicted, the regulation of rainfall by healthy forests and soils becomes increasingly critical, and the allotment of water for irrigation of energy crops more unsustainable.[6]

In addition, such land conversion may displace indigenous people from so-called "marginal lands."

Biochar has some prestigious supporters. Besides Lovelock, Tim Flannery, Professor of Earth Sciences at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia and author of The Weathermakers said,

"Biochar may represent the single most important initiative for humanity's environmental future."[7]

Atamai: Joanna's home is at centre left (click to enlarge)

Nitrous Oxide and the Nitrogen cycle

Now we must return to the third greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide. It is nearly 300 times as potent in climate change effects as carbon dioxide but is present in smaller quantities. Fossil fuel burning has resulted in a 6 or 7-fold increase in oxides of nitrogen (including nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere. Other increases have been caused by manufactured agricultural fertilizers (a major effect), burning plant material, and cattle management methods. Nitrous oxide not only acts as a greenhouse gas, but affects human health in two other ways. It depletes the ozone layer (thus causing skin cancer) in the upper atmosphere, and in the lowest layer of the atmosphere, it increases ozone concentrations (thus contributing to respiratory illness.) This is a pretty bad actor. How do we respond?

Getting nitrous oxide out of the atmosphere

We need to stop burning fossil fuels and stop making artificial nitrogen fertilizers. Once again, organic horticulture practices come to the rescue. They greatly cut fossil fuel use in growing food, and entirely eliminate artificial fertilizer use. Biochar production would replace the high oxygen burning of plant material which sends nitrous oxide into the atmosphere.

Implications for the ordinary worried citizen:

• Stop using fossil fuels and keep on with political advocacy in this area.
• Buy organic food. It could be proposed that the health of the planet is a much more important reason to do this than individual health benefits. Better still, grow your own and add biochar to your soil.
• Stop eating meat, or choose meat, such as chicken, whose production causes less greenhouse gas emissions.
• Cut back on dairy products.
• Support forest protection and restoration, locally and in other countries.
• Support small-scale biochar projects where you can find them.[8]

Although burying biochar as a climate change mitigation project seems both closer to natural processes than other "geo-engineering" proposals, and has more long-term evidence behind it, there are still many unanswered questions about its sustainability. We need to watch closely as this knowledge emerges and to apply what is useful as soon as possible. The time is short. Let's hope the knowledge emerges soon.

Case studies

In Egypt, over 20 million tonnes of rice straw are burned annually after the harvest, contributing to air pollution. The ash residue increases soil salinity, decreasing fertility. Researchers from the University of Mansura in Egypt and the University of Copenhagen are working on a rice straw gasifier which will produce fuel gas (syngas) and biochar. The gas will power flatbread baking ovens, and the biochar will be returned to the fields to increase soil fertility and water retention. This project will involve five villages.

The Mongolian Biochar Initiative is working with small-scale herders, vegetable growers, women farmers, and forestry workers at an individual and community level. The aim is to produce biochar to increase income, improve soil fertility, and combat global warming. They are using family-level low technology biochar production units based on feedstock common to rural Mongolia. The hope is to reduce desertification currently affecting the land. There is also the intention to make the stoves suitable for cooking and to replace current methods of using wood and dung for cooking and heating. The cleaner-burning stoves will also be introduced into urban areas where currently wood-burning causes serious smog in the winter months.4

Metta Spencer has pointed out the huge amount of wood biomass (living and recently living material) in trees destroyed by the pine beetle in western Canada and the US. Their conversion to biochar and use as soil amendment would be a big process that could be contribute significantly to mitigation of climate change and to impending unemployment with the global economic recession.

Notes

1 Gaia Vince. One last chance to save mankind: an interview with James Lovelock, originator of the Gaia hypothesis. New Scientist Jan.21, 2009.
2 The International Biochar Initiative: www.biochar-international.org/projectsandprograms/9countryprojects.html
3 Sara J. Scherr and Sajal Sthapit. Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet. In State of the World: Into a Warming World. 2009:Worldwatch Institute.
4 www.biochar-international.org/projectsandprograms/9countryprojects.html
5 Wardle DA, Nilsson M-C, Zackrisson O. 2008. Fire-derived charcoal causes loss of forest humus. Science 320:629.
6 Ernsting A, Smolker R. Feb., 2009. Biochar for Climate Change Mitigation: Fact or Fiction? www.biofuelwatch.org.uk/docs/biocharbriefing.pdf. This is a major critique of what the writers call the "biochar lobby." They liken it to the intense and premature enthusiasm with which large-scale biofuel manufacture was adopted, only to have it recognized, some years later, that this is a serious ecological and economic mistake. See "additional info" below.
7 www.biochar-international.org/timflannery.html
8 www.biochar-international.org

Additional info

147 environmental organizations are protesting the danger of biochar megaprojects: See this article on the megaprojects. IBI lobbyists urged negociators at Bonn talks in April leading up to Copenhagen COP-15 to allow industrial biochar projects under CDM -- part of the new round of "casino capitalism" that cap-and-trade threatens to unleash. Ecologists warn that

• vast areas of land could be converted to new plantations, repeating and deepening the agrofuel vs food crisis,
• small farmers would be driven off their lands, and
• major polluters will continue their earth-threatening activities, while collecting carbon credits.

The "industrial-biochar" lobby includes IES, GLOBE-EU, GLOBE-EUROPE, the European Economic and Social Committee and EurActiv, Biochar Europe (which includes Shell, JP Morgan Chase, a carbon offsetting company, and the Centre for Rural Innovations), Dynamotive, Best Energies, Eprida, Heartland Bioenergy. Friends among the COP-15 states are the business-friendly Australian Liberal opposition. governing NZ Nationals and Canada's Conservatives, Brazil's Embrapa, the Indonesian palm oil association (GAPKI), and the Bolivian Agribusiness company Desarollos Agricolas.

Unfortunately, university researchers with eyes on large corporate funders, as well as climate scientists James Hansen, Johannes Lehmann, Peter Read, and Tim Flannery also support the International Biochar Initiative (IBI), which uses small projects to camouflage its mammoth geo-engineering plans.

Small is beautiful: One alternative is small-scale biochar produced in smokeless kitchen stoves, and thus reduces respiratory disease among women children and "brown cloud" pollution while improving small farms. James Bruges (architect, eco-village planner) in The Big Earth Book (2nd rev ed. 2008, Sawdays ISBN: 978-1-906136-12-3) recommends SCAD: a biochar project in Indian villages, led by Prof Ravi Kumar of Mysore University, supported by Schumacher College and a small UK charity Salt of the Earth (SOTE).