#living in the west and the global north and whatever you become very conscious of that
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had a really interesting convo yesterday about ethics and whether intent or results matters (eg if you tried to make an ethical purchasing choice but the business was actually exploitative as hell, does that "count") and very much came to the conclusion that sure, if you're concerned with your personal immortal soul, as a christian might be, then intention counts. but if what you're focused on is your impact on the world, then intention means nothing if the actions have negative results, right? (that doesn't mean you're to blame for them! you didn't know! but you also don't get "ethics points" for trying, you know?)
and this also got me thinking about the whole christian idea that sinful thoughts are as bad as sinful actions because. they're just not imo. maybe for the sake of your Immortal Soul they are points against you, if that's your jam. but in terms of putting good into the world, in terms of your impact on other people, the ONLY thing that matters is what you choose to do with those thoughts. there is no way that "was kind to someone who was pissing me off, for the sake of community harmony" or "helped an acquaintance with a task even though I felt resentful about the time spent doing that" is a Bad Thing for the world
and it made me wonder how much purity culture and thought policing is rooted in (mostly evangelical) cultural christianity and this idea that ethical choices are an individual thing because what matters is the impact of them on YOUR soul and not, you know, things we do because of what we owe the world around us / because of love for others / because a world where people are trying to put good into it is a hell of a lot nicer to live in than one where people are only worried about themselves
i grew up evangelical but like. fairly mild evangelical and even though there wasn't a big focus on hell and stuff, i definitely fixated on imperfect thoughts and behaviours that were putting absolutely no harm into the world, rather than focusing on what i could do to put good into it, and that individualistic vs outward-focused approach to morality has been something i've grappled with a lot as an adult. but i never really thought about it as simply as this and really that's what it boils down to. are you making the ethical choice because you're trying to put good in the world, or because it would make you a "good person" to do so? because the answer to that 100% defines whether it's the thought or the result that counts
#also i feel like Sinful Thoughts Are As Bad As Sinful Actions...#as well as being bullshit...#is just like a one way trip to moral ocd and a whole lot of guilt spirals#and i just don't think it's useful! you can't necessarily choose your thoughts!#you can however choose your actions because Good is something you do not something you are#ethics#i do think The Good Place did more to make me interrogate my evangelical upbringing and ethical assumptions than anything else#but also this idea of putting good into the world... idk. it's kind of encouraging AND scary#i don't think I'm naturally a very good person but i can choose to do good#i can be bitter and jealous and resentful and still help people and make their lives a little easier#and my feelings are not actually impacting on the world whereas my actions are#at the same time in a society built on exploitation and corporate greeed#it's hard not to be conscious of the harm my actions are doing without me trying#i didn't necessarily make an unethical choice but all of my choices cause harm to someone somewhere#living in the west and the global north and whatever you become very conscious of that
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AFA Open-Chat Series with Tosin Oshinowo pt.2
Tosin: We are a very interesting conundrum, as a continent. We are a series of ethnicities, that were divided into countries in 1835. There isn't a singular identity for Nigerian, Congo, or Uganda or Ghana. We are a series of cultural groups, who by the lining of a boundary line of a country, have been told 'go, and become a standardized identity'. It doesn't exist. In Nigeria we have so many different cultures, if I go to the North, South or West - even what should have been our vernacular, is not the same. It's based on the terrains, it is based on the people, it is based on traditions.
This question of identity is one that I think is terribly fluid; and we were brought into modernism. Modernism was populated across the whole world not just in Africa, yes, in many terms it took the climate into consideration : modernism in Europe look absolutely different from Modernism in Tropical, to North and South Africa; and there are certain consistencies of modernism. But if we are looking for specific identities: I think we are just beginning to see that.
Covid came in as a material, and completely changed the game everywhere. Most of us, we are still building in concrete; a lot of the West builds with steel and they've got more advanced materials. We are stuck in the materials of early modernism, and we are now beginning to appropriate and create identities based off that. Although no one has really documented here, you start to see elements of identities when you step back; and you've to step back. And it's always at the end of a movement that you can actually see and categorize it as such. If I look at Architecture in Nigeria from the 80's, it's very specific and you can actually categorize it as such: the materials that were used and the scaling of the building tells me that. If I look at a building from the Northeast in Nigeria, you can tell that that was a period: by that type of windows that were used, spaces, and the finishes. We do have something, but it's not that distinct. That kind of vernacular and identity is a transition. But in a world where we have a globalization exposure; somebody who lives in Nigeria wants a house they saw in Florida. You've, then, to find interesting ways to carry that cultural identity in modern-day context. Yes, I do think there are nuances of identity but they're not strong in terms of very-striking particular form.
Moderator: With a number of architects in Nigeria, do you visually see an impact of the presence of architects currently in your country?
Tosin: I don't think so, but it's not because there are no architects, but how projects are executed. For example, there was an upgrade of an existing train station that was inaugurated recently by our President. But this was done by Chinese contractors, and it doesn't look anything like where it is located; it could've been a spaceship that was just dropped in. There was absolutely no local context included in it; and even the Institute were not aware. When you look at Singapore, there was a big emphasis on marrying local and foreign architects; and there was a cross of information. You can't improve a profession, if you don't allow them to be part of innovative process. When that happens, what value does it add or make of us, if no local consultancy is involved? That biggest impact to show a strong physicality norm of infrastructure on a government-led project, where the government is not involving local practitioners then you can't see the impact.
Moderator: We are dealing with the same issues here in Rwanda, we are struggling to make understand the importance of having an architect in the community.
Tosin: As Africans we need to make an effort to upscale ourselves as well. Some areas, some architects are still drawing-by-hand. Who's going to call you when you're drawing-by-hand. There are no excuses today. With the information age, everything is online. If you want to learn something, you can learn it. Software companies aren't accommodating to the situation that we have in this part of the world. If you look at a dollar and naira; the naira is like a nonexistent entity that happens to be a dot in the atmosphere compared to a dollar. When you earn in a country with a slightly lower GDP, if you look at GDP per capita, the reality is that the economy is going to determine how much people can afford to build, and to pay towards professionals' fees. If the software is x amount, how do you expect a local consultant to pay for it? Because in this market you cannot command a high fee. What I'd expect is that for these programmers and software companies were really thinking about the professionals; they would make it affordable for a local person because they won't have to kill themselves to get a Revit license. What you happen to have here in a lot of situations, is that people just use bootlegs; but the problem with that is you're not part of the community. When innovations are happening, when new programs are being added, you're not even aware of that information. Information is there, but that barrier of money is also very present.
Moderator: We need to raise awareness of that issue, especially even for students; as soon as they graduate they're not going to be able to afford it right away.
Tosin: They need to scale it for us based on economies. I know the West doesn't consider us. For example, if buying an Iphone in Nigeria is different than buying an Iphone in Europe. Some people's whole salary here is the price of an Iphone and less. And they have a better system on how to acquire these things. We are in a skewed environment, but it is still much better than what it would have been in the 60's.
Moderator: Looking then, architects were sketching to the last detail of a building. Do you think we should still invest ourselves in that way?
Tosin: We live in a global world, and Africa is left much farther and farther behind. It's worrying how much attention is not being paid to it. I was looking at a project done by Mass Design and they're doing a lot of work in Africa. One of the biggest selling-point is that they have skills, and exposure to research that a local practitioners doesn't have. This is a good age for an American Firm to give back, and they're a not-for-profit organization and it's of value, with policy about social change. It's a good thing, but the reality irrespective if they were doing it or not, these are necessary projects: schools hospitals, etc.. These are necessary projects irrespective if a foreign company was coming in, it has to be done! But the government are more willing to give that project to a foreign consultant because they have the skills. Even not just the government, a private client in Nigeria will pay a lot of money to a foreign consultant because they believe they are getting the best. What happens to people who are pushing boundaries, who are trying to produce work that is global anywhere? This puts you in an awkward position.
If we don't upscale ourselves, we are going to get further and further behind. Those who have the choice, will rather not use local consultancy. This is not just based on being a good designer, it's about being conscious of what's happening globally. It's about exposing ourselves on technology, and innovation; and bringing that into your work as well.
Moderator: It's a competitive market.
Tosin: Yes, and I think this is something architects don't realize: you can't tell anyone how to spend their money. It is a market and it's an open market. The sooner we realize that we must equip ourselves with skills to stay ahead, then we will put ourselves in a better position.
Moderator: I hope students are listening. Get into the most complicated and innovative way of design and build, and excel in that; and do something that local markets aren't doing currently. I have been 5 years in the career, and I know, I'm still far and I'm pushing myself to learn and excel at these. I'm really glad you highlighted it. How would you advise women architects to invest in their career?
Tosin: I think everybody needs to understand the importance of strategies in life, and not just in the profession - especially; as a woman. How many children do you want? Do you want children? Have you thought about how you'll balance life with having children with work? Will there be a point where you'll focus more on your children? Will you be doing half and half? Everybody's approach is different, but you must be intentional. You can't just let life happen to you. You have to decide, 'what do I want?'. When I look back in 30 years, what do I want to have achieved? If you don't have a class strategy or a plan, then that's the beginning of failure; because life will happen to you. And there's no right or wrong. But whatever decision you make, you must make a conscious decision. If you want to be a stay-at-home mom, there's nothing wrong with that - but decide that's what you wanted. If you want to be a working professional with working children, decide that's what you want, and again, there's no right or wrong. For any person who's at the beginning of their career, look at your goals, and make conscious decisions. And follow through! Life will change your plans.
I always get confused when I see people letting life just happen to them. How did you not think? And the sad thing is life is very short.
I'm 41 now. I see people who are 26, and I tell them, go turn the world! And they' tell me they don't have the time. You have all the time in the world. The older you get, the more you realize that this journey is very short. I'm already half-way, and eventually things are going to start working properly. I've 20 years of professionalism, I've done half of it. Am I happy with the decision I made? Will I continue on this path? Even on my journey, I'm conscious of the decision, I've made, and what I'm trying to achieve. And ultimately, one of my biggest goals is I want to leave a legacy of work. And this is just for me, it might not be somebody else's plan. But I want my great-great-grand-children to know that their great-great-grand-mother added value. I don't want my country to put a plaque on my name, but my children's children who did not meet me, know that their grandma was hard-working. That for me is enough, and that means that I have done my job.
Moderator: Definitely, and I'll check again, but I haven't seen another African woman who has been featured this much, either on Archdaily or other things as well. You are being intentional.
Tosin: Yes, even as a practice now, when I see what I've achieved, I wonder what can I achieve on a global stage? How do I start building networks, and tactical points on how I can build a project in this region? It's no longer impossible in mind. And I've realized that there's so much you can do, without being in a fixed location. I realize now I can work in a global capacity. BurnaBoy won a grammy. For Nigeria, that means a lot. Talent has no geography. If you're good at what you do, the world will come and look for you
.
Moderator: You have to have a target. As an architect, do I want to stick to what's existing or do I want to do more than that?
Tosin: There's nothing wrong with that. Because everybody can't be the super-star; that's the reality. There has to be a place for everyone. Just be intentional. And as you excel, you can check where you want to go next. We all have different paths.
Moderator: Whichever level you're at, try to improve what's existing and make an impact; and that's what our career is about. What can architects do, to improve Gender Equity in the profession? What are males can do to level your ground?
Tosin: We don't live in Utopia. If you are waiting for people to give you a seat at the table, go and take the chair yourself. No one is going to handle you anything. We have this problem in Nigeria, everybody is waiting for government; what can you do, yourself? Don't wait for anyone. Do what you can do within the limits of your environment. People who are successful do not wait for hand-downs, as they do not get you anywhere. We are born into different situations.
Moderator: What practices can someone do professionally and personally to find their niche in the architectural field.
Tosin: That's a very open-ended question. Look at your strengths and your weaknesses. Make sure you try to amplify your strengths. As a professional, you must need balance.
Moderator: What career advice would you give to fresh graduates?
Tosin: Go work for someone first. Learn the ropes. It's a lot easier to start under tutelage of somebody else. Learn from somebody else's mistakes. When you have gained a certain level of confidence, you can step out on your own.
Moderator: What thoughts would you like to share with the world, about the importance of inclusivity?
Tosin: I don't like to wait for the world, but the profession could be more inclusive, not just for the female architects but for the African architects, in general. We have always been at a large disadvantage, as innovation is happening in the fourth revolution, we are getting further and further behind. I'm very conscious of it, because I'm paying attention. For the example I gave of Autodesk, actually looking at the realities of our economies of scale, and pricing the software to something that we can afford, would be a massive help. Those are things we don't control.
Moderator: I think we have got everything covered for this interview, Tosin; I can't thank you enough.
Tosin: I also want to thank you. I started following you because particularly I was interested to see what other women were doing. I was pleasantly surprised that I'm not alone in this. It's nice to see other people doing interesting things as well; and it's a warming feeling to know that you're not alone. And I really enjoy your Instagram Page.
Moderator: Thank you very much. How accessible are you, and how can young architects reach you, for mentorship and more career advices?
Tosin: It's becoming a little difficult to be honest. I do have some people I do mentor now. I have someone I mentor from Bahamas, London, and in Lagos. It's becoming a little difficult with everything that I'm handling. If you send me an email, and you have a very specific question, I'll always answer because I know the importance of the people who also supported me when I was a young professional, and please be very specific.
Moderator: On this topic, I actually love this mentorship rotation you do on your sites
Tosin: On Thursday's every two weeks, I try to carry people along. I was actually surprised about how many people followed with a thousands of views on Instastory. Even highlighting the sites that way online is useful. If you're interested, please continue to watch that. I didn't realize it was a thing, but I know it's a thing.
Moderator: It's very much a great thing you're doing! Thank you so much for your time Tosin, if we have more questions we will cover them in other series in the future. We are thankful to have you as an advisor, and your enthusiasm is really great for us - I wouldn't be here otherwise.
Tosin: And keep it up as well! Thank you so much for having me!
Thank you for reading and to everyone who participated in this live and is supporting this platform and helping it grow.
Written & Edited by Lise Isaro, founder of AFA.
Published 21 August 2021
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Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
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―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
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Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
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Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
0 notes
Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
0 notes
Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
0 notes
Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
0 notes
Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
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Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
0 notes
Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
type=type=RelatedArticlesblockTitle=Related Coverage + articlesList=58000642e4b0e8c198a734d1,58a33ddce4b094a129ef5e22,58ad95aee4b0d818c4f0a3fa
―
Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
-- This feed and its contents are the property of The Huffington Post, and use is subject to our terms. It may be used for personal consumption, but may not be distributed on a website.
from DIYS http://ift.tt/2ohojg6
0 notes
Text
Climate Change Is Ruining Farmers' Lives, But Only A Few Will Admit It
When Christina Carter started growing vegetables 12 years ago, she looked forward to winters because they offered her the chance to recover from the strenuous growing and harvesting seasons.
That’s no longer the case. Summers are hotter and stormier than they used to be, and fall never seems to come. A true winter also seems to be a thing of the past, but that doesn’t mean spring won’t bring the occasional surprise hailstorm.
Today, Carter, who owns and operates the Ten Mile Farm in Old Fort, North Carolina, is managing crops and dealing with repairs and maintenance to her farm year-round.
“We used to have December, January and February off,” Carter said with a laugh.
Though the lack of an off-season presents the opportunity of feeding people year-round, it comes with many challenges, too. Intense, sudden rainfall can knock out a whole crop, causing carrots to rot in the ground or beans to die out from overly saturated soil. The work days are becoming longer and sweatier.
“We have neighbors who’ve lived out here their whole lives and they say they’ve never seen that kind of hail or that much rain,” Carter told The Huffington Post. “They know that it’s different and that it’s more intense.”
Carter said she believes climate change is to blame for such extremes, and making her farm more adaptable to such wild weather has been on her mind practically from the start. It’s the reason she grows a rotating variety of some 60 different vegetables, uses cover crops and avoids pesticides and fertilizers made with chemicals.
But she also knows that most farmers aren’t like her.
“It’s easier [for them] to pretend that it’s just liberal jibber-jabber,” Carter said.
In many ways, farmers are uniquely vulnerable to the effects of climate change.
Federal research indicates that extreme weather events like droughts and floods can harm crops and reduce yields — in one example, $210 million worth of Michigan cherries were lost due to a premature budding. Warmer weather can also mean more weeds and pests for crops, and more heat stress and disease for livestock.
The limited research available on the topic indicates that most farmers agree that climate change is happening. Yet only a few — perhaps about 16 percent, according to one survey of Iowa farmers — seem to believe that human activities are a primary cause of it.
They maintain this position even as a growing body of research shows that farming is a leading contributor to climate change and is responsible for as much as one-third of global greenhouse gas emissions. Livestock are a major source of these emissions, and the use of synthetic fertilizers is another factor.
And many of these farmers probably won’t change their viewpoints anytime soon, as the Trump administration expresses climate skepticism and works to dismantle climate change-fighting initiatives.
Certain sustainable practices can lessen the negative effect that farming has on the environment. But not many farmers have adopted them, even as consumer demand for sustainably produced food is rising: For example, certified organic cropland, which by definition adheres to many sustainable farming practices, still represent just 0.8 percent of overall U.S. cropland.
Nevertheless, farmers like Carter are determined to make changes. HuffPost recently spoke to farmers across the country who are adjusting their farming practices to prepare for a warmer, stormier future.
Anne Schwagerl ― Browns Valley, Minnesota
Anne Schwagerl said she thinks there’s a growing curiosity about resilient farming practices in Browns Valley, a town of about 590 people near the border of South Dakota.
Schwagerl, who is surrounded by conventional farmers, grows a variety of crops that includes corn and soybeans grown without genetically modified organisms and organic alfalfa, barley, oats and wheat. She also rotationally grazes pigs on her Prairie Point Farm, which she and her husband established five years ago.
Their environmentally conscious approach touches everything they do. In order to reduce their energy use, they compost the pigs’ manure to fertilize their crops and use their own crops to feed the hogs. And they also use cover crops, which can reduce soil erosion and increase nutrient retention.
Schwagerl said she was initially shocked when one of her neighbors, a conventional farmer, asked her about the cover crops.
“This man farms 10,000 acres, which is very big — by my own standards, it’s mind-boggling when I think about how busy I am with a 300-acre farm,” Schwagerl said. “So for him to say something like he’s thinking about doing cover crops is crazy.”
The more Schwagerl thought about her neighbor’s curiosity, though, the less it surprised her. She said all kinds of farmers share the goal of being responsible stewards of the land.
“I think farmers big and small alike see that the writing is on the wall,” Schwagerl said. “Farmers have to do something because they care about the land and leaving it to the next generation. They’re going to find a way to make things work one way or another.”
Walker Miller ― Six Mile, South Carolina
When Walker Miller first established his pick-your-own fruit farm, climate change was “the farthest thought from my mind.” Miller and his wife Ann began growing a variety of fruits in the foothills of the South Carolina mountains, a 45-minute drive west of Greenville, some 37 years ago.
Their Happy Berry farm specializes in grapes, blueberries and blackberries. They’ve developed a large following for their fruit selection ― which has grown to include the likes of Goji berries and persimmons ― and free-range eggs.
Miller is worried, however. Warmer winters mean the temperature rarely drops low enough to kill off the bacterium that causes Pierce’s, a disease that threatens his grape crop. More trees are being downed on his 22-acre lot as a result of more frequent extreme storms. Warmer winters can also usher in premature blooms, which means he has to use a wind machine to protect against frost.
Miller has already run his wind machine three times this year in an effort to save his crops, which he said is unusual.
“It wasn’t like that before, but it’s like that now and it’s getting worse,” he told HuffPost. “I consider it to be the major threat to the success of our farm.”
But Miller has a plan. In fact, it’s a 35-page climate mitigation and adaptation plan that outlines how Happy Berry has approached climate resilience.
One of the more unusual elements of Miller’s plan is the planting of pine trees amongst the farm’s orchards — an effort to protect against frost, overheating and storms. So far it seems to be going better than a “failed” experiment with shade cloth, he said.
“I’m probably considered a radical,” he said of his approach to the farm, adding that he believes the stakes are too high to go about it any other way.
“It is the most serious problem that we as a civilization face,” Miller said in reference to climate change. “I’m trying to encourage the farmers in South Carolina and the nation to have a plan like I’ve got. I go around and talk to anybody who will give me an audience. But people have got to have the will to do this.”
Tyler Hoyt ― Mancos, Colorado
Tyler Hoyt is at the beginning of his farming life and still getting the lay of the land. He started growing vegetables and raising pigs, hens and dairy goats in southwestern Colorado in 2014.
The region can be very arid, but it’s been very wet since he started Green Table Farm. Often too wet.
“It makes you feel like a pro, like you can grow whatever you want, but other times we’re seeing deluges of water,” Hoyt said.
He knows he’s overdue for another dry, lean year — like the drought that hit in 2013 ― so he’s preparing by using a water-conserving drip irrigation system on his fields.
“Farmers basically had not even planted [in 2013] because it wasn’t even worth it,” Hoyt said. “There was no water for it.”
He also plants many crops that are indigenous to the region and require little, if any, water, like certain types of corn, beans, pumpkins and squash.
Like Schwagerl, Hoyt sees some of his conventional farmer neighbors — who mostly raise cattle, horses or pigs, not vegetables — coming around on more climate-resilient practices.
But he said most longtime farmers probably won’t come around until there are better economic incentives for such practices. Carbon sequestration credits could encourage people to adopt cover cropping and green manuring, for example.
“When you’re talking about climate, it’s best to just talk about economics and how it can relate to their pocketbook,” Hoyt said. “I don’t ever want to say the words ‘climate change’ with the conventional crowd.”
Tony Schultz ― Athens, Wisconsin
Tony Schultz bought the land where he’s been farming for the past decade from his father, who had operated it as conventional dairy farm.
Since then, Schultz has transitioned Stoney Acres Farm into a diversified organic operation. He sells a range of food including vegetables, wheat, beef, pork and maple syrup at farmers markets and through a community-supported agriculture program.
But perhaps the most unusual thing Stoney Acres does is host a weekly “pizza on the farm” night where everything that goes into the pizza, except for the cheese, comes directly from the farm.
“We wanted to limit our footprint and be as sustainable as we possibly could, knowing that agriculture is an inherent imposition on nature,” Schultz said.
He’s been upfront about his interest in sustainability from the start — even though it cost him at least one CSA customer a few years back. (“The message was something along the lines of ‘I loved your tomatoes, but Al Gore doesn’t get it,’” he said.)
And despite living in a county that turned out overwhelmingly in support of Donald Trump in last fall’s election, he has stuck to his convictions (although he admits climate change isn’t the conversation he typically starts with).
Like Hoyt, Schultz said environmental stewardship and economic success are connected. And business resiliency is a good place for the conversation to start.
“I’m listening first,” Schultz said. “You have to go where they are, not where you are. You start where they are.”
Clare Hinz ― Herbster, Wisconsin
As a farmer, you also have to start where you are, adapting your practices to fit the conditions you’re handed.
A three-hour drive north of Schultz, on the shores of Lake Superior, is Clare Hinz’s Elsewhere Farm.
One of the first things Hinz did about a decade ago, when she moved from Chicago to start a farm in far-northern Wisconsin, was buy a tractor.
That same year, Hinz dealt with a massive flood that wiped out her crops. Not long afterward, she realized her farming plan wasn’t going to get the job done. And that the tractor wouldn’t be of much use to her.
Instead, Hinz opted to follow a style of farming originated by the Aztecs in the pre-colonial days: She grows vegetables in chinampas. The practice involves growing crops in raised beds surrounded by ditches that can hold water without drowning the plants. It is resistant to both extremely dry and extremely wet conditions.
“I farm in mud boots many months of the summer, but I rarely have to irrigate,” Hinz said.
It’s extra work, too — without the use of a tractor, she has to cultivate the crops by hand. But she felt it was the best approach to growing vegetables in a region not well-suited to more traditional methods.
Hinz also raises rare animals on her farm, including Icelandic chickens and her particularly unusual guinea hogs, which were once very popular due to their high fat content but are now considered a threatened species.
She’s been watching her animals a lot lately, looking for signs of hope at a time when she feels the Trump administration and its backers are trumpeting a “paradigm of scarcity” she refuses to accept.
“I look at them every day and they remind me that nature is tough,” Hinz said. “Like we’re going to do this and we’re going to pull through.”
Unlike Schultz and Hoyt, Hinz said that talking about climate change without saying “climate change” skirts the issue.
“It’s climate change and we need to call it like it is, because we need solidarity with all the growers all over the world who are facing the same thing,” she said.
She said she hopes to see more of her peers approach the issue head-on and resist the tide of denial. And for that, she feels optimistic.
“The farming community has always been farming in resistance to dominant forces,” she said. “The attitude is just rolling up our sleeves some more, here we go. We have to keep working.”
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Joseph Erbentraut covers promising innovations and challenges in the areas of food, water, agriculture and our climate. Follow Erbentraut on Twitter at @robojojo. Tips? Email [email protected].
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