Taryn .'s Bookmarks tagged agriculture → View Popular
You are here: Diigo Home > Taryn .'s Bookmarks
The Barnyard Strategist - NYTimes.com
Tags: food, vegan, meat, PETA, farm, agriculture, government, regulation, religion, industry, animal on 2008-10-25 -All Annotations (7) -About
in list: religion
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
Because California is the largest agriculture state in the country, and often a trend-setter on social issues, the ballot is a bellwether for farm-animal-welfare reform nationwide. Many experts predict that if Proposition 2 becomes law it will create a ripple effect, putting pressure on other states to pass similar reforms and pushing major food corporations to go crate-free and cage-free.
-
“Nine billion animals are killed for food every year, and most of them are confined in intensive conditions,” he told his staff members not long after he was appointed president of the organization in 2004. “It is the greatest abuse of animals that occurs on this planet.”
-
The question, as Pacelle sees it, is how to create change when Big Agriculture, with its big money, has made it nearly impossible to get meaningful farm-animal-welfare legislation passed. Here the ballot-initiative process is crucial, since it offers an end run around legislators by taking issues directly to voters. Another key element in Pacelle’s strategy has been to create ballot measures that offer only modest reforms on which both vegans and hamburger lovers (at least many of them) can agree.
-
“Cruelty is cruelty,” he says, “and it’s been our assumption that if decent people see images of these farm animals suffering, they will have a similar reaction.” And in a generation or two, he argues, we will have made a mental shift. People will look back on these confinement systems and other standardized farm-animal abuses and wonder why we tolerated them for so long.
-
Framing the animal-welfare movement in terms of compassion and morality has helped cultivate support from a broad spectrum of religious leaders. The campaign has received endorsements from the president of Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena, Calif., and other religious leaders throughout the state. “Most denominations have statements on animals and ethics,” says Christine Gutleben, the director of the Humane Society’s program on animals and religion. “We have a shared agenda here. Religious people are looking for ways to integrate their spiritual life with their daily life. There’s this sense that animals were created and designed by God with wings to fly, feet to walk with, hooves to dig with, and by prohibiting them to engage in these natural behaviors we force them to live in contradiction with what they were born with.”
-
if you ask some vegan activists who are not endorsing Proposition 2. “We agree with an incremental approach, but if you give animals more space and a little sunshine and you take that to that logical progression, they are still raised for food,” says Alex Hershaft, president of the 27-year-old organization FARM, the Farm Animal Rights Movement. Instead, animal rights groups, he argues, should focus on getting people to incrementally reduce — and eventually eliminate — meat altogether.
-
Gary L. Francione, a professor at the Rutgers University School of Law and an animal rights scholar, has written that if Proposition 2 passes, “animals will continue to be tortured; the only difference will be that the torture will carry the stamp of approval from the Humane Society, Farm Sanctuary and other animal-welfare corporations that are promoting Proposition 2.” He urges animal rights activists to either abstain from voting or to vote no.
The Winemakers - A Landscape Reimagined - In New Egypt, N.J., a Winery Springs Up From Dairy Land - Series - NYTimes.com
Tags: vineyard, grape, agriculture, new_york, new_jersey on 2008-10-17 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
Encounter - A Green Revolution for Africa?
Tags: agriculture, farming, industry, africa, south_america, bill_gates on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (5) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
the Canadian ecological watchdog group E.T.C. warned of “a growing trend toward privatization of foreign aid, and the fusing of the private sector with governments.”
-
substantive critique of the Gates Foundation’s agricultural initiatives focuses on its excessive confidence in technology and market-based solutions — what Bill Gates himself has called “creative capitalism.” For Patel and other leaders of the agro-environmental movement, the net effect of Gates’s efforts is to enshrine this narrowly technical approach as the global response to the food crisis in Africa. “I’m happy to impute the best possible motives to them,” he told me. “But Gates’s success in imposing his terms on the debate strengthens the status quo rather than doing what needs to be done — which is to transform it.”
-
it’s hard not to feel that what we’re seeing is a foundation playing God in Africa.” He was careful to note that the reason the Gates Foundation could do this at all was that “no one else has the kind of money the foundation does.” Still, he said, “There has to be something problematic about a few big brains in Washington State making decisions about an entire continent.”
-
“The choices that confront African farmers and the world at large,” he went on, are simple and stark: “Either we will increase agricultural yields on the lands now under cultivation, or the combination of low yields and population increase will force smallholders” — small farmers — “to cut down virgin forest lands and cultivate them. There are no other realistic possibilities.”
-
The so-called Green Revolution, which developed high-yielding crops and increased the use of pesticides and fertilizers, transformed Asian and Latin American food production in the 1950s and ’60s. But it did not touch Africa
The Food Issue - An Open Letter to the Next Farmer in Chief - Michael Pollan - NYTimes.com
...Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change.
Tags: food, diet, meat, health, healthcare, agriculture, pollution, climate_crisis, energy, homeland_security, government, regulation, reform, technology, information, infrastructure on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (17) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
several steps the government can take to nurture this market and make local foods more affordable. Here are a few:Add Sticky Note
- four season farmers' markets, agricultural enterprise zones, local meat-inspection corps, establish a strategic grain reserve, regionalize federal food procurement, create a federal definition of "food", benefit programs that provide incentive to support farmers' markets and CSAsposted by taryn930 on 2008-10-12
-
the image of stewardship of the land, of self-reliance and of making the most of local sunlight to feed one’s family and community.
-
When Eleanor Roosevelt did something similar in 1943, she helped start a Victory Garden movement that ended up making a substantial contribution to feeding the nation in wartime. (Less well known is the fact that Roosevelt planted this garden over the objections of the U.S.D.A., which feared home gardening would hurt the American food industry.)
-
The F.D.A. should require that every packaged-food product include a second calorie count, indicating how many calories of fossil fuel went into its production. Oil is one of the most important ingredients in our food, and people ought to know just how much of it they’re eating. The government should also throw its support behind putting a second bar code on all food products that, when scanned either in the store or at home (or with a cellphone), brings up on a screen the whole story and pictures of how that product was produced: in the case of crops, images of the farm and lists of agrochemicals used in its production; in the case of meat and dairy, descriptions of the animals’ diet and drug regimen, as well as live video feeds of the CAFO where they live and, yes, the slaughterhouse where they die. The very length and complexity of the modern food chain breeds a culture of ignorance and indifference among eaters. Shortening the food chain is one way to create more conscious consumers, but deploying technology to pierce the veil is another.
-
The revival of farming in America, which of course draws on the abiding cultural power of our agrarian heritage, will pay many political and economic dividends. It will lead to robust economic renewal in the countryside. And it will generate tens of millions of new “green jobs,” which is precisely how we need to begin thinking of skilled solar farming: as a vital sector of the 21st-century post-fossil-fuel economy.
-
in the same way we now need to learn how to run an industrial economy without cheap fossil fuel, we have no choice but to find out whether sustainable agriculture can produce enough food
-
The U.S.D.A. estimates that Americans throw out 14 percent of the food they buy; much more is wasted by retailers, wholesalers and institutions.
-
Argentina. There, in a geography roughly comparable to that of the American farm belt, farmers have traditionally employed an ingenious eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture (and producing the world’s best beef), farmers can then grow three years of grain without applying any fossil-fuel fertilizer.
-
First, your administration’s food policy must strive to provide a healthful diet for all our people; this means focusing on the quality and diversity (and not merely the quantity) of the calories that American agriculture produces and American eaters consume. Second, your policies should aim to improve the resilience, safety and security of our food supply. Among other things, this means promoting regional food economies both in America and around the world. And lastly, your policies need to reconceive agriculture as part of the solution to environmental problems like climate change.
-
ammonium nitrate being the main ingredient of both bombs and chemical fertilizer — and the conversion of nerve-gas research to pesticides.
-
It is no small thing for an American to be able to go into a fast-food restaurant and to buy a double cheeseburger, fries and a large Coke for a price equal to less than an hour of labor at the minimum wage — indeed, in the long sweep of history, this represents a remarkable achievement.
It must be recognized that the current food system — characterized by monocultures of corn and soy in the field and cheap calories of fat, sugar and feedlot meat on the table — is not simply the product of the free market. Rather, it is the product of a specific set of government policies that sponsored a shift from solar (and human) energy on the farm to fossil-fuel energy.
-
Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessor’s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers
-
While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.
-
Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer.
-
chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food.
-
the bigger and more global the trade in food, the more vulnerable the system is to catastrophe. The best way to protect our food system against such threats is obvious: decentralize it.
The Food Issue - Kosher Wars
kashrut: a shared concern for purity and an awareness of the process food goes through before it reaches the table. “The core of kashrut is the idea of limiting oneself, that not everything that we can consume should be consumed,” Kastner said. “I wouldn’t buy a ham sandwich, and I would also refrain from buying an exotic mangosteen imported from China, which wastes fossil fuels and is grown with pesticides.”
Tags: food, religion, jewish, agriculture, community, locavore, meat, PETA on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (7) -About
in list: religion
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
Perhaps surprisingly, more than 70 percent of kosher-food consumers in the United States are not observant Jews; they choose kosher products because they view them as safer or rely on the strict ingredient labeling for their food allergies or other religious concerns. According to a report released earlier this year by the Mintel International Group, a London-based market-research company, the observant Jewish population alone is not large enough to support the market for food bought specifically because it is kosher. (This finding is borne out by the dozens of candy and cookie companies that request kosher certification each year for special Christmas- and Easter-themed products.)
-
kashrut: a shared concern for purity and an awareness of the process food goes through before it reaches the table. “The core of kashrut is the idea of limiting oneself, that not everything that we can consume should be consumed,” Kastner said. “I wouldn’t buy a ham sandwich, and I would also refrain from buying an exotic mangosteen imported from China, which wastes fossil fuels and is grown with pesticides.”
-
In 2004, in response to tips about excessive use of cattle prods at the Postville plant, PETA, the animal rights group, sent undercover operatives into Agriprocessors, and they returned with especially gruesome footage of workers ripping out the tracheae of live cows after their throats had been cut. The PETA video was only the beginning of a long run of bad press for Agriprocessors. In 2006, The Forward, a national Jewish newspaper, published a long exposé claiming bad labor practices at the plant as well as health and safety violations. That May, Agriprocessors was the target of what was then the largest single-site immigration raid in U.S. history; 389 employees were arrested, and Iowa’s attorney general filed criminal charges against Agriprocessors and Aaron Rubashkin for more than 9,000 counts of child-labor violations.
-
he thinks that contemporary disconnection from our food sources is the cause of numerous environmental and social ills, like the national obesity epidemic. He wanted to be a shochet to help people make more healthful food choices and reconnect to the source of their food, and to encourage investment in local agriculture. He says the rules around kosher food — like the requirement that meat be slaughtered by a pious person with a certain intention and the requirement to say a blessing over every food acknowledging its source (land, tree, grain, other) — encourage mindful eating and discourage overconsumption of resources.
-
In some American Jewish households, the raid on Agriprocessors started a deep conversation about the very meaning of kosher: is it simply about cutting an animal’s neck and butchering it in a specific way? Or is the ritual also meant to minimize an animal’s pain or to bring sanctity to its death? Does it matter how the animal was treated when it was alive? How about the workers who processed it? Is reverence for life possible in a factory-farming setting?
-
traditional values of kashrut: community-based supervision of the food supply, reverence for agriculture and animal husbandry and attention to detail.
-
Mitzvah Meat, slaughtered and processed 31 lambs and two grass-fed cows, all raised on farms in the Hudson Valley.
Food Fighters Slide Show
Tags: food, agriculture, farming, locavore, entrepreneur, social_change, sustainable, climate_crisis, labor, youth, nutrition, urban, water on 2008-10-12 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
Carbon Commentary · Biochar can sequester carbon cheaply
Organic matter, such as agricultural waste, heated in the absence of oxygen splits into two types of material: a charcoal (biochar), and hydrocarbon gases and liquids. When added to soils, the charcoal can provide a powerful fertiliser. The hydrocarbons can be burnt, either to generate electricity or to power an internal combustion engine.
Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, agriculture, biochar on 2008-10-09 -All Annotations (2) -About
more fromwww.carboncommentary.com
-
The pre-Columbian population appears to have fed their naturally thin soils with large amounts of charcoal which have remained until today. Known as ‘terra preta’ soils, they have remained fertile for hundreds of years after the application of carbon in the form of charcoal.
-
Dynamotive in Canada and BEST Pyrolysis (Australia/US) are making good progress towards commercial-scale plants processing hundreds of tonnes of material a day. I don’t doubt that large industrial-scale biochar manufacturing facilities will be successfully developed within three or four years. This area is already attracting substantial sums of private capital, and the technological challenges are not of the greatest difficulty. The crucial determinant of whether the sequestration of biochar becomes a large-scale worldwide activity is financial. Does it make sense to store charcoal in soil rather than burn it?
Uniting Around Food to Save an Ailing Town - NYTimes.com
Tags: agriculture, farming, locavore, entrepreneur, vermont, collaboration on 2008-10-09 -All Annotations (5) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
the town manager, said these enterprises have added 75 to 100 jobs to the area
-
“All of us have realized that by working together we will be more successful as businesses,” said Tom Stearns, owner of High Mowing Organic Seeds. “At the same time we will advance our mission to help rebuild the food system, conserve farmland and make it economically viable to farm in a sustainable way.”
-
These entrepreneurs, mostly well educated children of baby boomers who have added business acumen to the idealism of the area’s long established hippies and homesteaders, are in the right place at the right time. The growing local-food movement, with its concerns about energy usage, food safety and support for neighbors, was already strong in Vermont, a state that the National Organic Farmers’ Association said had more certified organic acreage per capita than any other.
-
a clubhouse for farmers, began with investments from its neighbors. It is a Community Supported Restaurant. Fifty investors who put in $1,000 each will have the money repaid through discounted meals at the restaurant over four years.
-
“Things that seemed totally impossible not so long ago are now going to happen,” said Mr. Kehler. “In the next few years a new wave of businesses will come in behind us. So many things are possible with collaboration.”
What the 21st Century Will Taste Like - Esquire
It's depressing, this state of affairs, and sometimes I let myself wallow in it. But then I think about the opportunity this situation presents. Let's allow these harsh new realities to force us to do something that Alice Waters has been advocating for decades: Let's finally embrace the truth that food is not something to be taken for granted.
Tags: food, agribusiness, agriculture, farming, oil, economy, new_york, new_york_city, restaurant on 2008-09-29 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (2) -About
more fromwww.esquire.com
-
The cost of food--of producing and procuring it--is soaring. In the restaurant world, it's all anyone can talk about. And the thing is, this is no temporary spike; it's actually a massive correction.
-
at the hyperglobal megachains that feed most of America, the only way they'll be able to keep selling one-dollar hamburgers is to grow their "protein units" in petri dishes, add even more filler to their products, and outright enslave the workers whose backs they're already breaking to keep costs artificially low.
Artist views city garden as method to reach kids - RecordOnline.com - The Times Herald Record
Tags: home, new_york, hudson_valley, agriculture, food, nutrition, children, ReadNex on 2008-09-23 -All Annotations (1) -About
in list: the hudson valley
more fromwww.recordonline.com
-
The plan is set in phases. The first involves Sandiford interviewing as many as 2,000 city residents about their neighborhoods and nutrition. He'll also drop off application forms.
Sandiford will be able to take maybe as many as 12 kids if a Department of Environmental Conservation grant comes through.
From New York Soil, a Taste of Mexico at a Farmers Market - NYTimes.com
Tags: agriculture, farming, new_york_city, new_york, staten_island, mexico, immigrant, food on 2008-09-23 -All Annotations (5) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
Mr. Juárez and a handful of other Hispanic farmers sell sought-after Mexican produce and spices at greenmarkets in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, on 175th Street in Washington Heights and on Staten Island
-
In recent years, the island’s Mexicans have built up the long-shuttered and drug-ridden Port Richmond Avenue, one of the North Shore’s main shopping strips, and have transformed the faded commercial center into a bustling thoroughfare.
-
life’s possessions: filing cabinets filled with clothes; free weights that he uses to keep in shape during the winter; a bed; a small dining table; a television to watch telenovelas; and a coffeemaker perched atop a crate, where he makes the first of the 10 cups he drinks daily. A beaded cross decorates a forest green wall.
-
New Farmer Development Project, an eight-year-old nonprofit training program that helps immigrant farmers ply their trade in the New York region. Mr. Juárez was one of the first participants, and he is one of 18 who still farm today. His plot is part of the Staten Island Historical Society’s 11-acre Decker Farm, tucked between the Staten Island Mall and a golf course in historic Richmond Town.
-
Monday is his day off from cooking at a local Italian restaurant, where he labors 60 hours a week in a small, poorly ventilated kitchen. “Only work, work and work,” Mr. Juárez said as he stood sipping his hot and sour soup.
He spends an additional 20 hours on the farm each week
MAKE: Blog: Pedal Powered World, #3: Outdoor Tools
(1) kitchen appliances (2) agriculture and clean water in developing countries (Note "Aquaduct" - awesome) (3) outdoor tools (4) shop tools
Tags: DIY, innovation, sustainable, agriculture, water, video, human_powered on 2008-09-14 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromblog.makezine.com
How Farmer Amy Hepworth Became a Cult Hero to Foodies -- New York Magazine
Tags: agriculture, organic, hudson_valley, home, women, farming, locavore on 2008-09-09 -All Annotations (1) -About
in list: the hudson valley
more fromnymag.com
-
holistic approach to agriculture. To restore ecological balance to her family’s farm, she now had to carry out purposefully destructive tasks like allowing mites to infest a portion of her apple orchards, in order to attract the mites’ predators—nature’s own pesticides. It was a slow process. Leaves bronzed and fell off, and some of that year’s crop was unharvestable. In making the transition, she says, “I must have lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. My family was almost ready to kick me off.” Yet Hepworth persisted.
Designer Wine? Characterization Of Grapevine Transposons May Aid Development Of New Grape Varieties
Tags: agriculture, wine_making, grape, genetics on 2008-09-07 -All Annotations (1) -About
more fromwww.sciencedaily.com
-
genes constitute only a very small proportion of complex genomes, with repetitive sequences and (in particular) mobile genetic elements or transposons making up a much larger part
Evolving Thoughts: Agriculture and the rise of religion
Tags: agriculture, religion, evolution, history on 2008-08-28 -All Annotations (0) -About
in list: religion
more fromscienceblogs.com
-
Agriculture makes possible a society not based on close kinship, which makes religion the solution to that dilemma only after societies of that kind arise.
-
the agricultural revolution was not, strictly speaking, a revolution at all. It probably occurred in these areas over several thousand years. It is a co-evolution. So, too, will the social institutions and behaviors be co-evolutionary.
-
As population sizes rise with the introduction of managed herds, in a semi-nomadic lifestyle as herds are taken to seasonal food sources, interactions between non-kin will rise. Where territories are shared, a way to resolve disputes and increase cooperation is needed. Shared rituals are always how humans do this
-
What the process of agricultural coevolution does is change the payoffs. Now, to get the benefit of these new carbs and fats, you have to cooperate with others who may cheat you at any time. So social institutions, rituals, and beliefs structures are shaped by these selective forces. To the extent this is a selection process (for there is still historical contingency to deal with), there is selection on variants, but they are not, mostly, genetic variants but social ones.
Once this process is underway, it sets up the fitness landscape for other evolutionary process to occur
-
I think religion is a natural phenomenon, with Boyer, Dennett and others. I think it arises from the cognitive properties of human beings. In particular I think it arises from our nature as social dominance apes, as I have said before. My slogan is: give a chimp language and agriculture and you'll get religions.
Yes, We Will Have No Bananas
Tags: food, agriculture, south_america, rail, sustainable, locavore on 2008-06-20 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
That bananas have long been the cheapest fruit at the grocery store is astonishing. They’re grown thousands of miles away, they must be transported in cooled containers and even then they survive no more than two weeks after they’re cut off the tree. Apples, in contrast, are typically grown within a few hundred miles of the store and keep for months in a basket out in the garage. Yet apples traditionally have cost at least twice as much per pound as bananas.
-
There are more than 1,000 varieties of bananas — most of them in Africa and Asia — but except for an occasional exotic, the Cavendish is the only banana we see in our markets
-
Banana: The Fate of the Fruit That Changed the World.
To create a truly sustainable food system, we'll have to confront the farm-labor crisis
New York would seem a particularly ripe state for a midsized farm renaissance. It boasts a bustling metropolis -- the nation's largest -- with a strong and growing locavore scene. Combined with population centers like Albany and Rochester, the vast organism that is greater New York City might be expected to provide a robust market for the midsized farms that dot the state's landscape.
Tags: food, farming, agriculture, new_york, locavore, labor, mexico, immigrant on 2008-06-01 and saved by2 people -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.grist.org
Does Your Wine Need Viagra?
Tags: wine, wine_making, agriculture, food on 2008-04-26 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromthepour.blogs.nytimes.com
-
This is formulaic winemaking, perhaps understandable in a large-scale operation where sameness is a virtue and distinctive qualities a flaw, but not in small producers. Frankly, these are the sorts of wines I try to protect myself from.
Luckily, we still have in the American wine industry producers who see wine as an agricultural product, who embrace the vagaries of each vintage and don’t try to impose onto the wine their notion of what the public wants. But the inexpensive end of the industry is dominated by big producers who do practice this industrial style of winemaking.
The Green Issue:Live
Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, urban, farming, agriculture, religion on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
people think that environmental living is hard or deprives you, but we need
to change the system so that it supports environmental choices. The fact is,
I liked living in a more durable way -
“People are starting to realize that they
can’t just blame the government and corporations, that it comes down to
their own behavior.” We’ve reached a point where a quotidian activity
like bagging groceries raises existential questions about our ecological footprint.
The six stages of the Waking-Up Syndrome sound a lot like the stages of grief. -
URBAN FARMING: Jules Dervaes and three of his adult children live on
one-fifth of an acre in Pasadena,
Calif., a block away from a multilane highway. On this tiny sliver of land,
they manage to be mostly self-sufficient. “This is our form of protest,”
says Dervaes, who is 60, “and this is our form of survival.” The
family harvests 6,000 pounds and more than 350 separate varieties of fruits,
vegetables and edible flowers annually. They brew the biodiesel fuel that powers
the family car. Solar panels on their roof reduce energy bills to as little
as $12 a month. Goats, chickens, ducks and two rescued cats are in residence.
Red wiggler worms turn the kitchen and garden
waste into compost, which is then recycled back into the garden. Dervaes’s
father worked for Standard Oil, but his son took a markedly different path.
Dervaes moved into his current Pasadena home in 1985 — temporarily, he
thought. As the years passed and his hopes of relocating to the country were
delayed, he “decided that he wanted to see how much we could grow here,”
says his 33-year-old daughter, Anais. The family generates cash for their limited
expenses by selling produce to local restaurants. Though Dervaes and his children
are accustomed to the neighbors’ strange looks at their crowded lot, the
local chefs don’t seem to share the skepticism. “They’ll call
me in the morning and pick the amount that I need for that night,” says
Jim McCardy, who owns Marstons, a restaurant in Pasadena. “The flavor
is just incredible.” CHARLES WILSON -
Approximately 60 million Americans live in homeowner
and condominium associations, and those sometimes have covenants banning clotheslines
on the assumption that they look tacky and bespeak poverty, threatening both
views and property values. -
Sinclair says he believes that the “doom-laden
apocalyptic narrative” favored by the mainstream environmental movement
can paralyze rather than motivate necessary lifestyle adjustments. Conversely,
he says religion — which has been “in the behavioral-change business
for 3,000 years” — offers a distinct message of hope and boasts an
impressive track record of moral persuasion: “There have been watershed
moments when religion has barged into public life, blown away the windbaggery
of politics-as-usual and declared with irresistible force, ‘This must
change now!
The Green Issue:Eat
Tags: climate_crisis, carbon, emissions, global_warming, wine, agriculture, farming, hudson_valley on 2008-04-20 -All Annotations (0) -About
more fromwww.nytimes.com
-
Napa winemakers agree that 10-year averages are the hottest in memory.
Too often, a result has been overripe grapes, and the cooked flavors and throat-searing
alcohol that accompany them. -
Those cabernet clones imported from Bordeaux because they ripen so easily? Rip
them out and plant something more reluctant. Vines positioned near the ground
to soak up radiant heat? Install a trellis system and pull them higher. Wineries
have started planting vineyards on a northeast-southwest axis, which minimizes
strong afternoon sunlight. They add cover crops — clover, bell bean —
to compete with the vines and prolong the fruit’s maturation process.
And they’re removing fewer leaves -
grape varieties that do better in hot weather, like Grenache
and Syrah -
carbon farming, which operates partly on the principle that proper livestock
management leads to the rapid development of topsoil and increased plant growth -
high concentration of manure serves
as fertilizer, while complete plant regrowth allows for creation of the healthy
root clusters needed to build soil. And drought-prone regions benefit from the
clustered hoof prints, which capture what meager moisture falls from the sky.
Charles Rice, a soil microbiologist atKansas, says the potential is vast. “With proper land
State University
management, we could sequester an additional 160 million metric tons of carbon
annually.” That’s about 10 percent of total U.S. emissions. Collins
isn’t just promoting a new climactic model; he wants a new agricultural
paradigm, whereby farmers are paid for “eco-system services” and
beef and dairy livestock shed the stigma of environmental evildoers for a new
identity as a tool in the war on global warming. -
First, break
the packaging habit: “It’s not unc