Back to the Start

Simple. Sweet. Back to the start.

Lecture Series: The Benefits of Eating Green

I will speaking at this lecture series on behalf of Allison Lilly and The University of Maryland Public Health Garden. Representatives from Grow Annapolis, Local Food Beat and attendees will discuss how the local food and sustainable agriculture movement is impacting out health, community, economy and ecosystems. My lecture will highlight the University of Maryland's participation in the movement.

The Benefits of Eating Green
The 7th Installment of Quiet Waters Park Environmental Lecture Series
Thursday, June 16th, 2011 @6:30pm
Blue Heron Center, Quiet Waters Park, Annapolis, MD

Speakers include: Joel Bunker of Grow Annapolis, Sharon New of Local Food Beat and Allison Lilly/Deborah Dramby from the University of Maryland Public Health Garden. Admission is free thanks to event sponsors: Friends of Quiet Waters Park. For more information, visit the event website or contact Natalie Nucifora at rpnuci22@aacounty.org

University of Maryland News

I am pleased to report that Scott Glenn, Ph.D., an associate professor of weed science at the University of Maryland and personal favorite of ours, was awarded the 2011 Outstanding Teacher Award by the Weed Science Society of America. Doc Glenn's research focuses on perennial weeds and the environmental impact of herbicides and I know quite a few Terps who highly recommend his courses.

In other award news, for the third year in a row, the University of Maryland has earned Tree Campus USA recognition from the Arbor Day Foundation for its dedication to campus forestry management and environmental stewardship. The University campus is an arboretum boasting an inventory of more than 8,000 trees. Read more about the award here and here, and learn about the distinguished Arboretum and Botanical Garden here.

And last but certainly not least, Mary(land) has little lambs! Spring has sprung on the campus farm. Here are a few pictures of the little cuties and some of their farm friends:

UMASS Permaculture

Although Permacutlure (permanent agriculture) has been developing and growing since the 1960s, the practice is far from mainstream so here is the official definition, via the Santa Fe Permaculture Institute:

"Permaculture is an ecological design system for sustainability in all aspects of human endeavor. It teaches us how build natural homes, grow our own food, restore diminished landscapes and ecosystems, catch rainwater, build communities and much more."

It's about doing what is best for the land, most aligned with the natural eco-system, and developing increasingly self-sustaining human settlements and agricultural systems, and highlights the ever-important question facing sustainable gardeners: To dig or not to dig? I bring it up today in light of a new project happening up at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, in which a quarter acre of turf was transformed into a thriving garden. The video above is one of several in their documentary series about the initiative.

Pretty incredible, huh? Learn more on the Umass Permaculture blog.

(thnx John Mowbray and Treehugger)

"Red, White and Blueberries"

“One thing I’ve noticed about agriculture is that you become a creator rather than a destroyer.”

- Mike Hanes, 34, Former Marine, Veteran for Sustainable Agriculture

Just Saying has received more than a dozen reader emails about Patricia Leigh Brown's New York Times article: Helping Soldiers Trade Their Swords for Plows. If you haven't read it, we urge you to do so. And if we haven't responded to your email individually, please know that we deeply appreciate and admire the sentiment as well as the multiple battlefield-to-farm transition programs popping up nationwide.

In short, Brown's article highlights the need for strength, vigor and commitment in farming and the potential for finding it in veterans seeking employment and, well... peace. Colin Archipley, a decorated Marine Corps infantry sergeant turned organic farmer who developed Archi's Acres with his wife, works with Camp Pendleton's transition assistance program teaching planting and irrigating as well as business plan preparation. The University of Nebraska's College of Technical Agriculture is now offering a new program for veterans called: Combat Boots to Cowboy Boots.

Many soldiers are accustomed to working outdoors, find comfort in doing so, and come from rural backgrounds to begin with. Everything about this movement warms my heart yet nothing I am writing today is doing it justice. Perhaps my time would be better spent lobbying for such a program at the University of Maryland and yours would be better spent with the New York Times article.

Sustainable Agriculture: At UMD's Institute of Applied Agriculture

Walk around any college campus in autumn, and you’ll see sidewalks illustrated with neon, chalk‐written invites to rush sororities and attend student government rallies‐‐but if you want the real news on the University of Maryland, College Park campus, you’ve got to look up as well. Up to the roof‐top community gardens, that is.

Fruits, veggies and herbs are growing as strong on the top of the campus diner as they are in the Greenhouse. Soil nurtured by student volunteers this summer produced more than just delicious heirlooms and a sense of community scarce in modern society. It produced a group of students interested in sustainability.

The Institute of Applied Agriculture (IAA), in the college of Agriculture and Natural Resources, partnered up with the Accokeek Foundation to create a program designed specifically for Sustainable Agriculture that officially began this fall semester.

Brian Hughes, a University of Maryland graduate in Landscape Architecture with nearly 20 years farming experience, teaches the new course required for the major but open to allstudents: Introduction to Sustainable Agriculture. Interest in the course this fall was sogreat that students found themselves waitlisted.

Wednesday nights, earth‐conscious students pile into a small classroom in Jull Hall to learn how to integrate sustainable conservation practices into their respective courses of study and perhaps most importantly: their own farms and gardens. The class met on Hughes’ organic CSA Shaw Farm in Columbia, Maryland once this semester already. Seeing the health of carefully nurtured soil on a bio‐diverse farm enhances students’ understanding of soil health, compost practices, and the rich atmosphere of community supported agriculture.

“I’m excited to be at the beginning of a shift like this,” Hughes said while waiting for students to arrive on the farm. “I feel like the university needs to catch up with the students on this creeping awareness. Interest in sustainable and organic agriculture used to be the fringe but it’s becoming common now.”

The enthusiasm and activism of students interested in this resurgence of community‐supported, sustainable agriculture is contagious. Class discussions allow for spirited and constructive debates between students from varied backgrounds and courses of study. Many have spent summers working on organic farms while others come with a strong background in economic and environmental policy. A handful have grown up on or worked on conventional farms and offer a grounded perspective for the fundamentalist organics. Hughes encourages cutting‐edge Urban Farming and Aquaculture majors to share their perspectives and concerns about farm run‐off and the importance of small, local farming ventures. Several students have even begun a small, honor‐based book exchange in the computer lab of the IAA’s main building, Jull Hall, to which local author and conservationist Ned Tillman has agreed to gift copies of his award‐winning book The Chesapeake Watershed: A Sense of Place and a Call to Action.

On top of regular coursework, the unique certificate program allows students to spend six months in a full‐time cooperative position with local farms and organizations to plan, plant, cultivate, harvest and market various products. Upon graduation, students will have the tools to start or manage sustainable agricultural operations or seek employment at established operations, parks, schools and organizations focused on natural resource management and advocacy.

IAA Director, Glori Hyman, hopes that the new Sustainable Agriculture Program will provide a growth area within the Agricultural Business Management Program, which has been stagnant for the past decade. A partnership with the Accokeek Foundation will help place students in co‐ops and internships catered to their specific area of interest.

“Two years ago we met with the Accokeek Foundation and began working on a plan to jointly offer education and training in sustainable agriculture,” Glori explained. “Matt Mulder, the Director of the Center for Agricultural and Environmental Stewardship at the Accokeek Foundation, helped us design the curriculum and the Introduction to Sustainable Agriculture course.”

“This type of educational opportunity in sustainable agriculture has not been available in the Mid‐Atlantic region,” Mulder adds. “Until now, those interested in this style of learning have needed to leave the area to get the educational component or they have had to cobble together information from various programs. The consolidation of information will prove invaluable to farmers whoa re just beginning their careers or those who are looking for ways to enhance their existing operations.”

Established in 1957 to protect the view from Mount Vernon across the Potomac River, the Accokeek Foundation became one of the nation’s first land trusts. The educational nonprofit stewards 200 acres of Piscataway National Park where visitors can hike trails to the wetlands, walk through a native tree arboretum, visit an outdoor living history museum, and observe an award‐winning forest restoration project.

IAA Horticulture graduate Carin Celebuski is currently enrolled in the Sustainable Agriculture course and interned at Accokeek’s Eco‐System Farm last year. “The Integrated Pest Management practices there are remarkable,” reported Celebuski. “Conservation strips and proper irrigation make a huge difference as far as energy consumption and pesticide use.”

The eight‐acre USDA‐certified organic vegetable farm is a model for farming in the future. Its aim is to achieve optimal production per square foot, as opposed to maximum yield per acre.

For now, the IAA’s aim is to pull all these conservationist components together to provide an educational resource for the progressive agriculture student.
 
*Note: For mor information about the program, which yours truly is currently enrolled in, check out the IAA website.

Baltimore's Redefining "Seedy"

Baltimore is highlighted in the Grist's Feeding the City series. Christine Shenot reports:

"For many Americans, any mention of Baltimore conjures up images from two popular TV dramas set in the city: NBC's Homicide: Life on the Street and HBO's The Wire. For nearly two decades, those glimpses of Baltimore's drug trade and violent crime helped define the city.
But that era is fading. In some circles, there's now a lot more talk of sustainability and green living than of the murder rate, and it's an agenda that goes beyond the traditional focus on parks, transit, affordable housing, and other longstanding goals.

Likewise, the hand-wringing over Baltimore's unimpressive high-school graduation rates -- about half those of its suburbs in recent years -- is starting to give way to ambitious planning around workforce training and job opportunities in what some tout as a promising new economic niche for the city's youth.

The common denominator is farming. Baltimore's urban agriculture movement has quietly taken off in the past couple of years, with the twin forces of sustainability and economic benefits providing the boost. Under the eyes of hundreds of visiting school kids, two new multi-acre farms are flourishing at the hands of teenagers who come back to tend seedlings, turn compost, and harvest produce to sell at farm stands. The city also has seen a growing cadre of entrepreneurs launch smaller-scale projects, from container gardens on restaurant rooftops to earthworm-fueled composting, with residents discovering the benefits of worm castings as a nutrient-rich fertilizer that can turn a small garden patch into a prolific source of fresh fruits and vegetables."

(DEFINITELY) Read entire article here.

Another reason organic and sustainable farming practices need to be the majority

A new study published in PLoS ONE has found that "nitrate elicits developmental and reproductive toxicity at environmentally relevant concentrations due likely to its intracellular conversion to nitric oxide." In plainer terms, toxicologists at North Carolina State University studied water fleas, often known by their Latin name daphnia magna, and found that the little creatures can convert nitrites and nitrates to the significantly more toxic: nitric oxide. The nitric oxide can then cause developmental and reproductive toxicity in the tiny water fleas which, for example, leads to water flea babies born sans swimming appendages. So where are the nitrates coming from? Farms, golf courses, gardens... It's fertilizer runoff. And it turns out it is even more hazardous than previously thought. Ugh.

Read more here.

This just in. And essential.

The Howard County Economic Development Authority just announced the release of From My Backyard to Our Bay, a residential guide to help citizens in Howard and Montgomery counties improve our local environment and watersheds.

The guide, available for download here, offers tips for "living in harmony with the Chesapeake Bay. It provides ideas for how you can contribute to the health of your local watershed, maintain an environmentally friendly lawn, and manage storm-water runoff, wells, and septic systems--all in ways that will reduce the flow of nutrients and sediment into the bay."

As many of you are aware, excess nitrogen, phosphorus, and sediment encourage the growth of algae that can be toxic to marine life - think Dead Zones - so it is essential that we learn how to care for and manage agricultural practices in our own communities and backyards as to not effect the water quality in the Chesapeake Bay. It's as simple as proper waste disposal, cleaning up after pets, controlling weeds, and managing your water and energy use.

This guide, although focused on the Chesapeake Bay region, is applicable far beyond the borders of these two counties. Pages and pages of valuable information in here, folks.

(Thnx, Singleton. Big time. This is fantastic.)

Walmart may yet win over we greenies

Headlines are calling it The Great Grocery Smackdown. I'm just going to call it: the greatest green news I've heard in a while. Walmart is working pretty darn hard to do the right thing by local farmers as well as consumers.

Corby Kummer wrote a great piece for The Atlantic about the company's efforts to purchase and sell locally produced foods - which leads to a rather unexpected price and quality comparison to industry leader Whole Foods. Read the full article here.

To borrow a few words from the Environmental Defense Fund coordinator who is currently in charge of working with Walmart on agriculture programs, “It’s getting harder and harder to hate Walmart.”

MP Answers 10 Reader Questions

Michael Pollan answers reader questions in the February 1, 2010 issue of TIME magazine. If you can't wait, read it on their website here. Here's a good one:

How can consumers ensure a strong food system for future generations? -Brad Christian; MEMPHIS, TENN.

MP: We need to vote with our forks as consumers. We also need to make our agricultural policies support the kind of food system we want--support farmers who are growing organic food or local food, not just big corn and soy farmers.

Mmmmm.... SweeTango

If you share my fondness for Honeycrisp apples, you'll be thrilled to hear about the newest delicious variety born from the University of Minnesota:

SweeTango will start showing up in some Minnesota farmers markets Labor Day weekend and arrive in selected grocery stores around the Twin Cities, Seattle and Rochester, N.Y., a few days later. If all goes according to plan, the apple should be available nationwide in 2011 or 2012, said Byrne, who's president of the cooperative and vice president of sales and marketing for Pepin Heights Orchards in southeastern Minnesota.

SweeTango and Honeycrisp were developed at the University of Minnesota. The new apple has Honeycrisp's crispness and juice but kicks up the flavor and adds an intriguing note of fall spice. It was made by crossing Honeycrisp with Zestar!, another University of Minnesota variety.

"It inherited Honeycrisp's texture, and that's a rare commodity, and it actually has more flavor than Honeycrisp," said David Bedford, the university apple breeder who helped develop Honeycrisp and SweeTango. (AP)

Learn more here and here.

"Soil Not Oil"

I've been meaning to link to this interview with Vandana Shiva, India’s leading environmental activist, in the Urbanite's April Green Issue for weeks now but I guess I let those peonies take precedent. The tension between traditional and industrial agriculture is a big and important issue that needs to be addressed globally. From the interview:

Q But if you have to feed more than a billion people, as farmers in India do, isn’t it impractical to hang on to traditional farming methods?

A Here, they want to connect all of India with superhighways, and 90 percent of the roads haven’t been built. They won’t be built because of the financial collapse. So this huge dream of a totally motorized world and tractorized agriculture is already failing in front of our eyes. It failed in Cuba under very tragic circumstances—under [the U.S.-imposed] trade embargo. But they rebuilt their agriculture [based on] principles that ancient cultures practiced. Now I don’t call that being locked into tradition. It’s highly innovative.I see fossil-fuel-free farming as a future of agriculture—not because of nostalgia, not because of romanticism, but because of a very hard-nosed realism. If your fertilizer prices have tripled in the past year, there is no way to carry on depending on chemical fertilizers. If your phosphate requirements in chemical agriculture are going to run out in the next twenty years, you’d better get ecological, organic sources. To depend on an agriculture that requires oil inputs at every step would be developing a system at this point that has no future.

Expect to see Shiva's book, Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis on my list of recommendations once I pick it up and finish it.

Food Films

There is a great article up on Treehugger collecting/contributing reviews of five food-focused films as well as clips from each of them: The World According To Monsanto, King Corn, Our Daily Bread, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, and Food Fight. Each film appeals to me for different reasons and you can bet they are all going on my Netflix list. Well, at least four of them. I'm on the fence about Our Daily Bread. Find the article here.

Arable Agriculture

This practical, inexpensive and achievable approach to reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the earth's surface is the recent suggestion of Andy Ridgwell and his colleagues at the University of Bristol in England, who have been researching agriculture as an alternative to building an enormous sunshade infrastructure in space or disseminating sulfate particles into the atmosphere.

Their calculations say that summertime cooling of more than one degree Celsius, about two degrees Fahrenheit, is achievable across central North America and parts of Europe and Asia simply by planting crop varieties with maximum solar reflectivity (albedo), a practice they call Leaf Albedo Bio-geoengineering.

From their findings, published in Current Biology:

Ultimately, genetic modification of plant leaf waxes or canopy structure could achieve greater temperature reductions, although better characterization of existing intraspecies variability is needed first.

Tom Vilsack

I think I'm pleased with Tom Vilsack, former Iowa Governor and soon-to-be agriculture secretary, but I'm not completely sure. In his confirmation hearing he promised to carry out provisions of the 2008 farm bill, which includes billions of subsidies for some farmers, expressed his intentions to modernize food safety, promote nutrition, work towards more sustainable food production and look for alternative incomes for farmers in areas like wind power and organic farming. All while aggressively pursuing new fuel sources to produce ethanol, which is nice to hear considering concerns that his roots in the corn belt. What do you all think?

South Lawn Garden

With the Obama family (and yet-to-be-chosen pup) moving into 1600 Penn in a few short weeks, I suppose it is about time I join the camp that is lobbying for an organic, sustainable, inspirational, victory garden on the South Lawn.

In case you haven't heard about the "first family garden," the Washington Post published a great article earlier this week. Check it out here.

I just signed a petition on Eat The View and (of course) encourage you to do the same.

Can pomegranate rival poppy in Afghanistan?

Maybe not tomorrow, but one can hope.

The southern province of Kandahar is said to produce perhaps the world's best pomegranates. It is also produces a huge percentage of the opium circulating the globe and is considered the heart of Taliban country. Ugh.

USAID and the UN are hoping that pointing out the quadrupling price of the healthfully pomegranates and dropping price of opium may position the fruit as a potential rival to the poppy. After all, the western demand for pomegranates is on the rise, we seem to be willing to pay out the wazoo for their juice (upwards of $4.50 for 16 ounces of the POM Wonderful brand), and from what I understand, the opium/heroin market may be a little over-saturated.

Of course the pomegranate alone will not fix the widespread nutrition deficiencies or defeat drug lords or Taliban, but perhaps shifting the focal crop of Afghan farmers is a step in the right direction.

Read more in this recent article from The Economist.