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If we want a better food system there are plenty of things that would make a bigger difference than GMO labeling. The other day I argued that labeling probably wouldn’t have an effect on the big picture issues that people attach to GMOs. Here are the top 10 political initiatives that I’d rather be debating and voting on:

10. Ban the advertising of unhealthy foods to kids, or at least stop giving companies a tax break for these ads.

9. Protect the most fertile lands from being covered in concrete.

8. Eliminate subsidies for agriculture.

7. Institute measures to improve farm animal welfare.

6. Pay farmers for ecological services — like sheltering wildlife, sequestering carbon, and protecting watersheds.

5. Tax sugar.

4. Eliminate use of medically important antibiotics in agriculture.

3. Guarantee the right to good food (perhaps through programs like this), and spend a little money up front so that we don’t have to spend so much later on diet-related disease.

2. Guarantee farmworkers’ right to make a decent wage without beingsexually abused or exposed to unsafe chemicals.

And the piece of policy I’d most like to be voting on this coming election day:

1. Tax — or cap-and-trade — greenhouse gases, which could turn agriculture into a climate solution, rather than a big part of the problem.

A species of peach related to the 7,500-year-old pits found in China recently (left), and today's more modern versions (right).

Courtesy of Jose Chaparro/University of Florida

The modern peach is a work of art: rosy, fuzzy, fragrant, fragile — and, of course, impossibly sweet and juicy. But that enchanting fruit is the product of centuries of painstaking breeding that have transformed it from its humble origins. The peach of the past was much smaller, acidic and a greenish-cream color.

Where the original, wild peach came from has been a mystery, but a new clue brings us closer than ever to its origin.

"It's such a kind of a monkey wrench in the works," Gary Crawford, paleoethnobotanist at the University of Toronto, Mississauga and lead author of the study, tells The Salt, "Everybody's been saying western China or northern China, but now we're saying the data are coming from the lower Yangtze Valley."A recent archaeological excavation of peach pits points to the lower Yangtze River Valley in southern China as one of the first places the peach was domesticated, a studypublished in early September inPLOS onE reveals. About 7,500 years ago, farmers there began cultivating a much smaller, whiter peach than we know today. Radiocarbon dating of the pits and their location indicates that these farmers were pretty savvy about grafting and fruit reproduction. But the location of the agricultural evidence is not where scientists expected it to be.

Crawford's research examined Chinese peach pits, including their length, width and suture diameter, in addition to radiocarbon dating to conclude that the cultivation of peaches in China occurred much earlier than previously thought. Their findings indicate the domestication process took at least 3,000 years, with the most similar to modern peach stones found in the Liangzhu culture about 5,000 years ago and the least similar in the lower Yangtze Valley.

In the ensuing millennia, the peach traveled from China to Japan, India, through the Roman Empire (making an appearance on a mosaic in Herculaneum, Italy, 2,000 years ago), and finally from Europe to the New World. All along the way farmers selected for certain desirable traits, markedly shaping the peach's destiny.

China has the highest genetic diversity of peaches of any country, with 495 cultivars.

"Basically they collected and started crossing it with other varieties, and they started producing seedlings out of that," says Dario Chavez, a peach research specialist at the University of Georgia. That's how we arrived at varieties like the Elberta peach — a stereotypically good-looking peach with orange flesh and orange and red skin. "What happened with Elberta is present in all the peaches," he says.

In other words, all the varieties we have today came from something very different. We don't know exactly what the original, wild peach looked like. What we do know is that over years of domestication, the peach became red and blushed. While the peaches of yore left clean pits, they now leave fruit clinging to their centers. We also selected for firmer fruits for shipping and canning purposes.

Although they think they're close, Crawford and others want to find that first peach — before domestication. He says, "We're still trying to figure out what the wild peach actually is, what the ancestor of this peach is."

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For most small-scale farmers and producers, the local farmers’ market is the engine of their business. The opportunity to sell direct to customers offer not only a fair price for their products, but also a chance to develop personal relationships with their customer base, many of whom will return week on week. It is a chance to talk about how the food is produced and the importance to farmers of their local clientele. Farm to fork is good for both producers and consumers. For consumers, it’s a great way to connect with their food, to shake the hand of the person that feeds them and to really understand where their food has come from.

In the US, farmers’ markets are thriving. There are nearly 8,000 of them across the country. Here in the UK, we have about a tenth of that number. The farmers’ market is still a long way away from replacing the supermarket run on a Saturday mornings. We need our local food systems to be more widely used if we’re going to make our global food system more sustainable – and that means sustainable not just in environmental terms, but also sustainable in relation to our health. Because, let’s be honest, most of what you find in the supermarket is highly processed food-stuffs; while most of what you find at the farmers’ market is home-made, home-grown and fresh. But luring locals to farmers’ market isn’t easy, even when it’s smack in the middle of town on a weekly basis.

Timing is everything

Many markets don’t do themselves any favours by being bi-weekly or, worse, monthly. Honestly, who shops for food on a monthly basis? The supermarket always wins out on convenience, so maybe farmers markets need to work harder to be convenient, admitting, however, that they are never going to open at 10:00pm on a Monday night.

Regularity is key – farmers’ markets must be weekly at the very least. People shop weekly, so you should be able to get the things you love and want at the farmers’ market on a weekly basis – especially because many people go to buy fresh fruit and veg, meat and fish, cheese, bread and other things that need to be eaten within a week. Running a farmers’ market any less than once a week simply contributes to the perception (one which can deter people from attending) that farmers’ markets are speciality markets where you go to buy special, and inevitably more expensive, products than you would get from the supermarket. This perception puts a lot of people off, particularly with Jay Rayner helpfully saying things like the ‘overpriced fare sold at local markets is nothing more than a “status symbol” for wealthy shoppers.’ Let him eat his cheap supermarket cake made with unpronounceable fillers say we!

We also need to think about the timing of markets. Saturday morning from 9:00am–1:00pm is ideal for many, but a lot of markets happen on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday mornings, which is not so good for the vast majority of us who work the 9 to 5. What if mid-week markets happened from 4:00–7:00pm or 6:00–9:00pm? You could get dinner and your weekly shop, perhaps with music and a quick drink. This shift in thinking revolutionised the arts and cultural sector who realised that a lot of people can’t come when they are open and that Thursday and Friday nights are a great time to visit a museum. Changing the shopping hours of farmers’ markets could make them accessible to much wider range of people.

Getting what you came for

If we really want people to use farmers’ markets more, they need to make sure they are perceived as providing most shoppers household staples. Ideally a market should have a full complement of produce and products and some choice among them.

Competition is often strictly controlled at UK farmers’ markets because the footfall may not be there to support more than two meat producers unless they are distinctly different. But this can leave markets ‘hoist on their own petard’, because variety will draw-in more people as evidenced by many of the thriving farmers markets in the US – Marin Civic Centre Farmers’ Marketin San Rafael, outside of San Francisco has 250 vendors and between 10,000 – 12,000 people through on Sunda

Think you might be paying more at the farmers’ market?

The fact of the matter is that there’s not a whole lot of research on the subject of whether farmers’ markets are cheaper than supermarkets, but what research there is has come out largely in favour of the affordability of farmers’ markets. The Kent Farmers’ Market Association does regular ‘shopping basket’ comparisons between the supermarkets and their markets. A recent survey, based on a Sunday dinner for six, found the produce bought at the Shipbourne Farmers’ Market up to 50% cheaper than that found at local supermarkets Tesco, Waitrose and Sainsbury’s. Other research – such as one written up in theAtlantic Monthly in 2011 found farmers’ markets to be generally cheaper than conventional, but definitively cheaper on organic – further proves the point.

It goes without saying that markets are all different, and it isn’t hard to find pricey veg or meat at the farmers’ market. This perception however, is not the norm and most farmers realise that they have to compete with the supermarkets if they are going to grow their market. Supermarkets often benefit from the assumption that they are the cheaper choice, when in fact they’re very often not.

We need more farmers’ markets

800 farmers’ markets in a population of 64 million people just isn’t going to cut it. If we want more people to use local markets to buy their food, we need more markets and the markets we have need to be supported and protected. Local councils and the public/private agencies that manage farmers’ markets have tremendous power over the producers and can make decisions that are not in their best interest.

Take one of the most successful farmers’ markets in the country, Stroud Farmers’ Market, run very well for many years by a private company called Made in Stroud, which had an excellent relationship with their producers. However, late last year Stroud District Council, which issues the market’s licence and provides the space for the market, decided to put the management of the market out to commercial tender – effectively putting the character and content of the market up for grabs to the highest bidder. The possibility of a large commercial management company, with no commitment to the local community, winning the tender could have fundamentally changed the nature of the market. They could very easily choose not to work with local producers. Fortunately, the producers had one very effective tool in their pockets – consumer demand. They gathered 2000 signatures on a petition at a single market and managed to turn the situation around.

Good sympathetic management of markets is essential – be it by a local councils, community groups or commercial companies. The market manager often has the power to decide who trades, manages competition, makes decisions about whether to cancel a market due to weather (this can be highly contentious), and can sometimes bar a producer from trading without any due process. Producers and traders sometimes have no input into these management decisions and may not even be issued with a clear set of guidelines on how decisions are made. There’s a balance to be struck here, because most producers don’t want regular meetings and hands-on involvement in market management, but they do want some consultation and input.

If we are going to grow the number of farmers’ markets in the UK, local councils need to be on board with helping to find spaces at affordable rates and support market infrastructure – like funding the purchase of stalls, which many councils will do. It’s not a big ask, because local councils should be concerned with the local economy and community and the farm to fork eating that farmers’ markets facilitate has been proven again and again to be vital to both of these.

http://sustainablefoodtrust.org/articles/farmers-market-moving-it-mainstream/?utm_content=buffer3c878&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter.com&utm_campaign=buffer

Maggie Cheney, center, the director of farms and education for the food-access group EcoStation:NY, at the Bushwick Campus Farm in Brooklyn with Kristina Erskine, left, and Iyeshima Harris, garden managers.

If you wanted to find someone picking a fat tomato this week in the City of New York, you could go see Esther and Pam, near the kiddie-pool planters on the rooftop of the Metro Baptist Church in Hell’s Kitchen. Or Maggie, Benia, Iyeshima and Kristina at the Bushwick Campus Farm and Greenhouse. Or Deborah, Shella, Sarah, Kate, Rachel and Chelsea in the West Indian haven of East New York Farms. Or Kennon, Leah, Jennifer and Charlotte at the Queens County Farm Museum, which has been planted continuously since 1697. Or Mirem, Cecilia and (another) Esther in the converted parking lot outside P.S. 216 in Gravesend. Or Nick, Caspar and Jared, on a one-acre farm and orchard in Randalls Island Park.

Wait a sec. Nick, Caspar and Jared: Are those unconventional girls’ names now, like Kennedy and Reagan? Because if you’re looking for a farm-fresh tomato in the city this summer, you’re likely to find a woman growing it.

In recent years, chefs, writers, academics, politicians, funders, activists and entrepreneurs have jumped on the hay wagon for urban agriculture. New York now counts some 900 food gardens and farms, by the reckoning of Five Borough Farm, a research and advocacy project.

Yet city farmers will tell you that the green-collar work on these small holdings is the province of a largely pink-collar labor force. Cecilia, not Caspar. And they’ll provide the staffing numbers to show it.

Deborah Greig, the agriculture director of East New York Farms in Brooklyn.

This is where the speculation begins — and, inevitably, the stereotypes. Are women more willing to nurture their communities (and also their beet greens)? Are men preoccupied with techie farm toys like aquaponics? Is gender the reason the radio at the Queens Farm washing station is always stuck on Beyoncé and Alicia Keys?More significant, if urban ag work comes to be seen as women’s work, what will that mean for the movement’s farming model, mission and pay?Counting New York’s urban farmers and market food gardeners can seem like a parlor game: part math, part make-believe. Data on gender is scarce to nonexistent.The federal 2012 Census of Agriculture isn’t much help. It suggested 42 farm “operators” in New York were men and 31 were women. But the census published data from just 31 city farms. (Under confidentiality rules, it doesn’t reveal which farms participated.) And its definitions fail to capture New York’s unique abundance of nonprofit farms and community gardens.

Onika Abraham, right, the director of Farm School NYC, at the Governors Island Urban Farm with Katherine Chin.

A “farm,” by census standards, is any place that grew and sold (or normally would have sold) $1,000 worth of agricultural products in a year. Yet surveys from the parks department’s GreenThumb program suggest that some 45 percent of the city’s hundreds of community food gardens donate their harvest to neighborhood sources and food pantries. Blair Smith, who compiles New York’s data for theU.S.D.A., explained, “Those are not farm businesses, at least from our standpoint.”

New York’s urban farmers — the people who actually work in the field — offer a sharply different head count of what you might call bulls and cows. Of the 19 farms and farm programs that contributed information for this article, 15 reported having a majority of women among their leadership, staff, youth workers, students, apprentices and volunteers. (Of the remaining four, one claimed gender parity and another hired two men this summer from a seasonal applicant pool of 18 men and 30 women.)

It’s a snapshot, not a statistically rigorous poll. Still, the farms, from all five boroughs, represent a broad sample of New York’s particular growing models: a commercial rooftop farm; community gardens; and farms attached to schools, restaurants, parks, churches, housing developments and community organizations. The sample included two city-based farmer-training programs and two out-of-state sustainable farm-education schools and fellowships. These are the types of programs that mold future urban farmers.

Describing their own farms and gardens, managers suggested that women make up 60 to 80 percent of field workers, organizers and educators. Applicant pools are similarly unbalanced for summer postings, internships and certification programs.

Kristina Erskine, a garden manager at the Bushwick Campus Farm in Brooklyn.

Farm School NYC, an affiliate of the food-access nonprofit Just Food, “is 100 percent female-run,” said its director, onika Abraham. But then, she added, “I’m the only staff person.”

More important, Farm School NYC receives 150 to 200 applicants annually for professional agriculture instruction. For this year’s entering 30-person class, Ms. Abraham said, “the breakdown for applicants was 76 percent women and 24 percent male.” (Applications for next year are open through Sept. 15.)

The gender divide appears to exist in salaried posts and volunteer work alike. For 18 years, Steve Frillmann has led Green Guerillas, which provides support and materials to more than 200 community garden groups. Most of these sites lie in central Brooklyn, Harlem and the South Bronx, and three-quarters of their volunteer leaders, he estimates, are women. So, too, women typically represent 75 to 80 percent of the applicants who want to join Green Guerillas on an AmeriCorps stipend.

It’s challenging work, and Mr. Frillmann, 49, is happy to hire whoever wants to do it. “To be honest with you, we’ve never really lifted and looked under the hood and tried to figure out why,” he said.

At the extreme, Edible Schoolyard NYC runs a food and garden-teaching program with two growing plots and a staff of 16. Sixteen of these employees are women.

Kate Brashares, 40, who is the group’s executive director, said: “It’s a little unusual we don’t have any men on staff at the moment. There are usually one or two.”

Ms. Brashares believes that the diversity of her employees should reflect the low-income communities where they work. That diversity includes gender. “We talk about wanting to get a few more men in the place,” she said. “It’s funny, we haven’t talked about it that much, though. It’s one of those things that just sort of happened. As we’ve gotten bigger, it’s gotten more obvious.”

Less obvious is why the discrepancy exists. Ms. Brashares speculated about the prevalence of women in education and nonprofit careers. But ultimately, she concluded, “I honestly don’t know.”

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Karen Washington has been observing the community garden scene for more than 25 years from her plot in the Garden of Happiness, a couple of blocks from the Bronx Zoo. She also organizes the Black Urban Growers conference and a long list of other food and neighborhood initiatives. This roster may explain why Ms. Washington, 60, is prone to make work calls at 10 o’clock at night, say, after teaching a class on season-extending hoop houses, or on the way home from running La Familia Verde farmers’ market.

Nowadays, she sees a cohort in her gardens that she gauges to be 80 percent women. “It was more 60/40 back in the early days,” Ms. Washington said. “Mostly Southern blacks and Puerto Ricans. They were in their 40s and they’re in their 80s now.”

Explaining the gender gap on a community garden level, she said, “a lot of it, from my point of view, had to do with the fact women lived longer than men.”

The stereotypical image of an American farmer may be a white man of late middle age captaining a $450,000 combine in an air-conditioned cockpit, high above a flokati of corn. But this profile is a poor match for farmers in Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa — that is, the groups that often predominate in New York’s community food gardens. Nevin Cohen, 52, an assistant professor at the New School and an expert on urban food issues, points to a telling statistic from a United Nations special rapporteur: “Women are 80 percent of the global agricultural labor force.”

Many of the women who farm in Bushwick with Maggie Cheney possess experience in small-scale agriculture. They’ve long fed their families out of extensive kitchen gardens (as Colonial-era immigrant women did in New England). Ms. Cheney, 30, is the director of farming and education for the food-access group EcoStation:NY. And on the group’s two growing sites, she said: “I tend to work with a lot of recent immigrants from Africa, Mexico, Ecuador. And the islands: Jamaica and Haiti, the Dominican Republic.”

Ms. Cheney’s youth interns (five boys and nine girls) include the children of some of those immigrants. Yet wherever they were born, the youth growers at the Bushwick Campus Farm do not approach New York gardens as virgin soil.

Their fathers may have experienced farm labor as a harsh and exploitative activity, Ms. Cheney said. These men are not necessarily the easiest people to recruit for a hot afternoon of unearthing potatoes. By contrast, “I see a lot of girls interested because they may have that positive relationship to being the ones who cook in the family and buy the food in the market.”

She added, “The ones that I see, their roles at home are very gendered.” The politics of the New York “food justice” movement start at progressive and run to radical. But the connection between women and urban farming can appear traditional and even conservative.

Born and raised on the Lower East Side, Ms. Abraham, 40, recalls visiting her family’s black farmstead in Alabama. She said: “My grandfather grew row crops: cotton, soybeans and corn. He worked the fields. My grandma was home with a large vegetable garden and chickens.”

Put another way: “My grandmother grew the food; he grew the money. And I think maybe the scale of what we do in the city relates more to this kitchen garden.”

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The Five Borough Farm project identified three commercial farms in New York, all of them sophisticated rooftop operations. Gotham Greens, for example, runs two (and soon three) climate-controlled hydroponic greenhouses in Gowanus and Greenpoint, Brooklyn. (Next stop: Jamaica, Queens.)

Of the company’s 50-odd employees, more than two-thirds are men, said the company’s 33-year-old co-founder, Viraj Puri. “At Gotham Greens, our approach is more plant-science and engineering focused and less ‘gardening’ focused,” Mr. Puri wrote in an email. He posited that this orientation may account for the different gender skew.

Beyond these few enterprises, the city’s farms exist not just to grow okra, but to advance a shopping list of social goals. These include recreation, nutrition, public health, environmental stewardship, ecological services, food access and security, community development, neighborhood cohesion, job training, senior engagement and education. We ask a lot of our gardens.

Mara Gittleman, who jointly runs the Kingsborough Community College farm program, at the end of Manhattan Beach, often sees urban farming likened in the news media to “the new social work, or this thing you do for poor people.” In response, Ms. Gittleman, 26, founded the research project Farming Concrete to record and publicize the surprising yield raised in community gardens. These are vegetables that come not from the glittering glass on high, but from the ground up.

Be that as it may, if you’re trying to account for why so many college-educated women are attracted to urban agriculture, nearly everyone agrees that a social calling is the place to start. “Definitely, the most visible influx is young white people, and I’m one of them,” Ms. Gittleman said.

If urban farming were just about the crops, it would be cheaper and easier to do it 50 miles north. Urban farming, however, is not a solitary or single-minded activity. Along with the weeding and pruning, the job description includes sowing community interest and reaping grants.

Kennon Kay, the 31-year-old director of agriculture at Queens Farm, said: “What makes this farm different is the element of public interaction. We have over half a million visitors a year.”

The farm staff currently numbers two men and five women, which is actually a bumper crop of gents. And Ms. Kay takes pains to say: “I don’t want to knock the guys. They’re great.”

That said, in her experience, “Women have been extremely effective in multitasking, planning, communicating and being the representatives of this public organization.”

Inevitably, there’s an inverse to saying that women are attracted to work that involves children and the elderly, caring and social justice. In short, you’re implying that men don’t care, or care a lot less.

This is what you might call the men-as-sociopaths hypothesis (M.A.S.H.), and Nick Storrs, 29, who manages the Randalls Island Park Alliance Urban Farm, does not buy it. “I would refute the claim that guys are sociopaths,” he said.

Having cheerfully dispensed with that libel, he struggled to explain why men seem less interested in the social goals of community agriculture. “I don’t know, because I am interested in it,” Mr. Storrs said.

So where are the men?

“Wall Street,” Ms. Washington said (a theory that may not be inconsistent with M.A.S.H.).

The Bronx’s vegetable plots, she will tell you, are not insulated from what goes on outside the garden gates. “A lot of our men of color are incarcerated,” she said. “Huge problem. If you tell a 21-year-old man just out of jail to go into farming, he’s going to look at you as if you have two heads.”

Or in the words of Esther Liu, 25, a rooftop farmer at the Hell’s Kitchen Farm Project: “Men? Perhaps they want a living wage.”

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The time has arrived, as it always does, to talk about money. The pay for community-based agriculture starts low and climbs over time to not much higher.

Ms. Cheney endeavors to pay her youth interns $8.30 to $9.30 an hour and the Bushwick farm managers $17 an hour. Farmers with longer tenure may earn $20. These are decent wages in agriculture, Ms. Cheney said. Yet they’re hardly enough to keep up with the climbing rents in a gentrifying neighborhood.

Deborah Greig, 32, oversees the crowded market at East New York Farms, leads the gardener-education program, manages dozens of youth workers, and cultivates specialty crops like dasheen and bitter melon. (And some 65 to 70 percent of her farm staff, apprentices and youth interns are women.) “I get paid $37,000 a year,” Ms. Greig said. “I started at $28,000 or $29,000, which was huge at the time. And I have insurance included.”

The permanence of the job, which she has held for seven years, is a boon to Ms. Greig and to the community where she works. Ultimately, Ms. Abraham, of Farm School NYC, argues that only stable employment will make urban farming viable for neighborhood women — and men — who lack the safety net of a college degree and family support.

For her part, Ms. Greig is probably underpaid. Don’t tell anyone, but she would do the job for less. “People don’t expect to be paid very much doing this work,” she said. “It’s a labor of love to a certain extent. I don’t think we’ve come up with a hard and fast model to pay people exceedingly well for doing nonprofit urban-farming work.”

Sounds like a job for the guys on Wall Street.

In 1999, Dickson Despommier, a professor of environmental health sciences and microbiology at Columbia University, popularized the idea of large-scale urban agriculture by releasing a conceptual model for vertical farms. Crops would grow inside tall city buildings, using very little land to produce bounties of food that would not need to be shipped far to be eaten. With nine billion people worldwide to feed by 2050, and close to 70 percent of them residing in cities, bringing food production into dense urban areas had long been seen as a logical step toward sustainable living, and Despommier’s work seemed to take us in the right direction.

Fifteen years later, despite many experiments with farming inside city buildings, the first large-scale vertical farm, as envisioned by Despommier, has yet to be built. The urban farming industry, still in its infancy, is struggling to address the engineering challenges that make growing food in cities a costly business. Sales and distribution have also proven harder than almost anybody imagined. “What’s been lacking,” says Mohamed Hage of Montréal, “are players who will do it at a true commercial scale, with the right business model.”

Hage is trying to fill exactly that gap with his company, Lufa Farms. His path to scaling up urban agriculture is not vertical but horizontal. In 2011, Lufa set up the world’s first commercial rooftop greenhouse on top of a wide industrial building in northern Montréal. The area, a nondescript industrial zone bordered by two highways and an outdoor mall full of big box stores, doesn’t turn up in design magazines. But this is where Hage, after spending hours painstakingly scouring Google Earth, found the perfect rooftop for his next-gen greenhouse.

The 31,000 square-foot facility (2,900 square meters) uses hydroponics, a technique that uses water to deliver nutrients and therefore requires no soil. Lufa’s methods exclude pesticides, herbicides or fungicides, and use biological pest control to get rid of harmful bugs. The greenhouse is computer-monitored, recirculates 100 percent of irrigation water and composts all organic waste. And in a cold-weather region with a growing season of four to six months, Lufa works year-round, growing enough tomatoes, eggplants, zucchinis and lettuce to help feed 10,000 people in the Montréal area.

Lufa’s biggest innovation has little to do with farming techniques or architecture. It’s marketing and e-commerce. Lufa sells its produce through a complex distribution system that puts to shame the usual get-what-you-get offerings of farm co-ops found in many North American cities. For a minimum of $30 a week, Lufa customers select what goes into their basket through a fancy online marketplace (Sicilian eggplants have never looked sexier). To fill out its product offerings, Lufa partnered with a slew of other local food makers to provide customers with all kinds of products, from fresh bread to dairy, to herbs, honey and dry beans.

Orders close at midnight on delivery day — and then the magic happens. Each producer receives an order indicating exactly how many baguettes, liters of milk or pounds of potatoes are needed. Everything gets cooked, picked, prepared, bottled, packed, then shipped overnight to Lufa’s warehouse to be assembled in crates, and finally sent in the morning to more than 150 pickup points throughout the city.

This order-based system drastically cuts down waste, both on the producer’s side and in Lufa’s warehouse, since there aren’t any unsold products to be discarded from store shelves. It also considerably reduces packaging. By this remarkable logistical feat, Lufa may very well have solved one the biggest problems plaguing our global food system. Some 40 percent of food in the United States goes straight to landfills uneaten. And about 1.3 billion tons of food destined for human consumption get lost or wasted each year globally, discarded anywhere along the supply chain, from farmland to supermarkets and restaurants.

From farm to table

Eating food that’s grown locally and sustainably is a fantastic and increasingly popular idea, but it’s also expensive. Producers tend to drown under marketing and distribution costs, and struggle to find retail channels for their products. To assume that urban farms can escape that trap because of their extreme proximity to consumers would be a mistake; getting food to consumers has proven a logistical nightmare for them as well.

A pillar of the new “farm-to-table” economy is to facilitate marketing and distribution for local producers and limit the number of intermediaries along the supply chain. That challenge has proven perfect for a number of new tech companies hungry for new retail sectors to “disrupt.”

One of them is Good Eggs, a San Francisco-based company operating an online marketplace similar to Lufa’s in the San Francisco Bay Area, New Orleans and Brooklyn. Good Eggs considers itself a “local-food aggregator,” pooling together the marketing and distribution needs of many farmers who are often invisible to supermarket chains and find themselves limited to alternative channels such as farmer’s markets.  “A lot of the urban farms that we work with are not able to sustain themselves through traditional food retail channels,” says co-founder and CEO Rob Spiro. “The margins are too slim, and the volume requirements are too high. So they end up selling to restaurants.”

Good Eggs is determined to beat the supermarket, which it thinks will enable the model to go to scale. So the company has made it possible for customers to order throughout the week, rather than weekly, and is offering free home delivery. “If you’re less convenient than the supermarket, even if the food is better and better for the world, it’s going to be really hard to reach a mainstream audience,” Spiro says.

Whether flexibility and convenience can ultimately bring costs down enough to reach the mainstream remains to be seen. For now, the food sold by Lufa, Good Eggs and similar providers like Farmigo might be cheaper than what you’ll find at the organic food store or at the farmer’s market, but it’s still out of reach for households working with a tight budget. Good Eggs is planning to begin accepting food stamps, a form of government assistance for low-income families in the United States. But can local food aggregators work for the typical middle-class supermarket shopper?

Solving the engineering puzzle

For Lufa, logistics at the distribution level are just one of many sources of headaches. To build its first greenhouse, Lufa not only had to match the building’s structural requirements — using soil to grow root vegetables isn’t possible, for example, because it would put too much strain on the roof. It also had to respect the myriad rules and regulations imposed by local building and fire codes, from the number of bathrooms or parking spaces to the amount of glass used. “We had questions along the lines of, ‘Will birds hit the greenhouse?’” recalls Hage. “Because it’s all glass, and there’s lots of trees inside, so you have to go and do the right kinds of studies to show that no, birds do not hit the greenhouse.”

Other roadblocks reveal just how unprepared cities currently are for urban farming on the scale Lufa has in mind. Lufa can’t be considered an agricultural business, for instance, and therefore can’t claim the same tax rebates as other rural farms in the rest of Canada. Yet it still has to pay rent every month. Such types of policy changes, although welcomed by cities, could be entangled in bureaucratic procedures for years.

Last year, Lufa opened its second farm, a 43,000 square-foot (4,000 square-meter) rooftop greenhouse — the world’s largest — in the northern suburbs of Montréal. This time, the structure was integrated into a brand new building. Hage thinks building new will be important to scaling up urban farming — it allowed Lufa’s architects and engineers to work with structural challenges more easily. (A company spokesman says the second greenhouse was “significantly cheaper” on a per-square foot basis than the first one, which cost about $3 million to build.) The new farm is crammed with lots of new features; a system that increases air pressure inside the greenhouse prevents undesirable bugs from entering, and a chamber regulates airflows in order to maintain optimal growing conditions.

Lufa is also developing its own in-house technology. The company has just received a patent for a system that allows it to grow 30 percent more food on the same area. Meanwhile, the IT team is developing a suite of iPad apps for greenhouse management. one of them, which helps manage insect populations, will soon be made available to all organic growers. “We’ve decided it’s too valuable for us not to be going out to the world and saying, use it for free,” says Hage.

Lufa’s greenhouses become profitable as standalone units within about 18 months of construction. The company as a whole doesn’t expect to become profitable until later this year or next year, as much of the revenue is being channeled back into growth activites. 

Lufa’s long-term goal is to become a provider of technology for property developers, real estate owners or businesspeople who wish to set up a rooftop farm on top of a building — any building. The company’s third greenhouse, which will be in Boston, will reflect some of the latest innovations cooked up by the team. “What we’re doing in Montréal and Boston is only to be able to have a test bed to be able to demonstrate our technology,” says Hage. “Every farm we build is a new R&D facility.”

No one on Lufa’s founding team had ever worked on a farm or in the food industry. Hage himself was running a software company; his business partner Lauren Rathmell was a biochemist fresh from McGill University. Yet they thought this was precisely the type of mindset needed for the urban farming sector to take off. To this day, Hage sees Lufa primarily as a tech and systems venture; most of the company’s budget goes to engineering and IT, with the e-commerce platform and logistics operations raking up the largest share. “Really,” Hage says with a laugh, “it’s farming with more software than farmers.”

See related story: Five urban farms that are growing big

- See more at: http://citiscope.org/story/2014/can-urban-agriculture-work-commercial-scale#sthash.GPwAEyo2.dpuf

Paul Kaiser of Northern California’s Singing Frogs Farm grows fruit and vegetables completely without machinery, a system he refers to as “non-mechanized, no-till.” He said goodbye to his tractor and tiller seven years ago after he felt he was unnecessarily harming wildlife, saw too many machines break down, and watched his soil quality decrease. Now, his eight-acre farm has a robust community supported agriculture (CSA) program, and his soil is full of life.

“I wanted greater productivity and healthier soils with less reliance on machinery,” Kaiser says.

Whereas many farmers believe in breaking up the soil with tractors to control weeds, others, like Kaiser, practice no-till agriculture. A subset of conservation tilling, no-till demands that crops be planted directly into the ground without overturning the earth to ready it for planting. Conservation tilling utilizes the residue (dead crops and plants) from the previous years’ harvest by leaving some, or all, of the residue on the surface before planting.

It took Kaiser two years to make the transition to farming this way, but it has made a big difference during years with lower than average rainfalls such as this one. Kaiser explains, “Our no-till soil management has led to an increase of our soil organic matter (SOM) from 2.3 percent to over 6 percent (at a 12-inch depth). For every 1 percent increase in SOM, an acre of topsoil can hold an additional 16,000 gallons of plant-available water.”

Because the soil retains water, Kaiser is able to use drip irrigation to water his crops for one hour every 5 to 6 days. “And we’re still dry farming tomatoes,” he adds.

The latest estimates say the drought to California could cost the agriculture industry as much as $2.2 billion in losses. And even if rain does come this year or next, scientists predict that global warming will increase the intensity and length of future droughts, making now a good time to begin adapting to a drier, hotter climate. No-till could be an important tool during that adaptation.

The Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Switzerland released a study in July suggesting that no-till farming is beneficial in lowering surface temperatures by as much as 2 degrees Celsius (or nearly 4 degrees Fahrenheit) during summer months. This is important because moderating soil temperatures helps reducing soil moisture evaporation, especially in the top two inches.

According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) report from Iowa State University, water filters into soil much faster (at a rate of 5.6 inches per hour compared to 2.6 ) if that soil hasn’t been tilled.

Scientists at the University of California, Davis have also found that using conservation tilling can help increase soil moisture retention.

Brock Dolman, a permaculture expert and Director of the WATER Institute at the Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, thinks that no-till can be instrumental during drought years—by protecting water quantity and quality. “At the field level,” Dolman explains, “the beauty of no-till in the wintertime is that rainfall is allowed to soak into that soil.” When left alone, healthy humus develops in the soil, and “humus has the capacity to absorb water and acts as a sponge that becomes available in the system for other plants to use,” he explains.

In the summer, when water is scarce, Dolman says, soil that hasn’t been tilled usually has a layer of mulch at the top. The mulch “reduces evaporation losses and holds more water. This results in both a conservation of water and a reduction in the total amount used.” All of this adds up to what Dolman refers to as “More crop per drop.”

But results don’t come quickly for farmers making the transition to no-till. “You can’t expect to get results in the first season if the soil you are working with is dead,” says Dolman. “The folks who complain about no-till are expecting miracles from a corpse.”

Indeed, no-till farming comes with its fair share of critics. For one, the practice often requires a great deal more herbicides than average to manage weeds, especially early on.

Jeff Moyer, Rodale Institute’s Farm Director, explains in his book Organic No-Till Farming:

Typically, as tillage is reduced, herbicide management is increased in an attempt to control weeds. Although some surface residues are generated from no-till, they are not enough to provide consistent weed control. This dependence on herbicides generates a host of problems, from resistant weeds to the destruction of beneficial insects.

That said, increasing evidence shows that heavy herbicide use might not be necessary when practicing no-till. And spraying herbicides is a shortcut that organic farmers, like Kaiser, refuse to endorse.

Jeff Mitchell, a Cropping Systems Specialist with the University of California, argues that if you practice no-till farming correctly, weed management isn’t an issue. Mitchell believes that the mindset of the farmer is the most important part of the transition. If the farmer doesn’t completely dive into the system, he or she will fail. It’s an all or nothing method of farming.

This is easier said than done. “Farmers are not used to it, they don’t have the equipment, and it is too hard to change their major systems,” Mitchell explains.

The consensus among no-till advocates is: If you treat your farm as an ecosystem and focus on soil health as the most crucial part of that ecosystem, the system works.

No-till farming is much easier to implement on large farms. For one it requires farmers to allow a few acres of field to rest between crops and that’s much easier when you have several hundred or thousands of acres. Smaller farms also generally need to maximize production on their limited land and might not have the flexibility to take a chance on no-till farming. It can also take years to fully master no-till methods and small farms rarely have that kind of time. Ironically, small and young farmers are more likely to experiment with the practice. Some smaller farmers feel that with less acreage, less capital is at stake. Newer farmers are less set in their ways and might want to try different methods of farming to yield better results.

Overall, the USDA reports that no-till farming in the United States is increasing by about 1.5 percent every year. In 2009 almost 35 percent of cropland had some portion of land dedicated to no-till, and no-till operations accounted for about 10 percent of the overall land. The 2012 Ag Census revealed that nearly 475,000 farms covering 173 million acres were farmed with conservation tillage or no-till practices.

What does Kaiser recommend to farmers thinking about making the switch? “Think outside the tillage box,” he says. “No-till [is]… so vastly different from the past 10,000 years of farming that one has to really commit to understanding soil science, soil biology, and ecology.”

- See more at: http://civileats.com/2014/08/26/more-crops-per-drop-no-till-farming-combats-drought/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter&utm_campaign=more-crops-per-drop-no-till-farming-combats-drought#sthash.REZiAb5r.dpuf

Quechua indigenous people from Asia and South America gather potato seed at the Parque de la Papa. Photo by Adam Kerby.

On top of a rugged Andean mountain situated high in Peru’s Cusco region, on about 22,000 acres of conserved land known as Parque de la Papa (Spanish for “Potato Park”), indigenous farmers met in late April to discuss conditions they feared were threatening their ancestral lands.

They came from as far as Bhutan and China, and from as near as the mountain itself. They discovered that their cultures were more similar than they had expected, and that one concern had been troubling all of them: Climate change was making it harder to grow food on the mountains that had sustained them for centuries. They were meeting to do something about it.

One farmer noted how signs of climate change had been subtle for the past 15 years, but have become conspicuous in the last three.

During a series of talks held between April 26 and May 2, the farmers forged a unique partnership entailing the exchange of indigenous crop varieties and farming methods, which they hope will protect agricultural biodiversity in the face of climate change. The exchange will begin with potatoes—a sturdy crop that thrives in the mountains of China, Bhutan, and Peru—and will enable the farmers to experiment together from a distance, so they can find the hardiest, most resilient varieties.

Doing so will ensure better food security for the farmers’ families and communities because having more crops that can survive the unknown, potentially destructive effects of climate change will increase their yields and mitigate strains on various resources.

Crop diversity is a serious issue but one commonly overlooked in the United States, where the food system tends to rely on just a few varieties of each plant species; traditional farmers in the Andes, on the other hand, might grow hundreds of ancient potato varieties. The world has lost 75 percent of its crop diversity in the last 100 years, according to the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization.

Today, many crops are cultivated in high-tech laboratories and tightly controlledexperimental farm plots. These environments fail to mimic real-life growing conditions, according to Krystyna Swiderska, who works for the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED), which helped organize the April meeting. Most crops used in modern agriculture, in other words, can only grow in ideal situations and might not survive in the chaotic, unpredictable ones that exist in nature.

Seeds shared in the context of this project will be subject to a stringent protocol that ensures their safety and purity.

The gathering included representatives of the Naxi people from Meiquan and Stone Village in Yunnan, China; the Monpa and Ura people from Bhutan; the Quechua and Q'ero people from Parque de la Papa; and the Q'ero Ayllu from Cusco.

“Communities cannot act alone because this issue is common [to us all],” said Andean farmer Lino Mamani in a video conference call. Mamani also curates the traditional seeds collection at Parque de la Papa, where six Quechua communities live and grow about 1,400 varieties of potato. “We can learn more from others with similar problems about technology that might be useful.”

When asked how climate change had affected their livelihoods, Parque de la Papa farmers began to stir in their seats, waiting for an opportunity to share their stories. one farmer noted how signs of climate change had been subtle for the past 15 years, but have become conspicuous in the last three.

“I’m farming some crops in lower areas now,” he said.

“I noticed crops like beans and maize having to be grown in higher elevations,” said another farmer. “But we might not have land in higher elevations. Also, it rains when it shouldn’t, and rains stronger.”

Farmers and scientists

But, the farmers seemed to agree, the challenge is also yielding some positive outcomes: It’s pushing them to adapt their traditional methods of farming and to include other methods that might enhance their production. These include learning how to grow plants that pollinate themselves, farming newer potato varieties, and working with a fuller collection of seeds thanks to a collaboration with scientists at the International Potato Center, a research institution based in Lima that runs a gene bank facility.

“Scientists would just take seeds from us, not recognizing our knowledge.”

The center will facilitate the exchange between farmers, and will fund much of the research conducted by its own scientists—who not only analyze the genetic potential of indigenous seeds in the center’s labs but also study the farmers’ traditional process on the Andean hillsides. Although seed exchange among farmers is an age-old custom, seeds shared in the context of this project will be subject to a stringent protocol that ensures their safety and purity, especially in transit. The actual exchange of raw material will not begin until such a system has been approved and implemented by the International Potato Center, according to Swiderska.

As farmer Mamani stated, “It’s time traditional knowledge and science work together.”

For years, however, they did not. Indigenous farmers from the Andes have long distrusted modern agriculture and felt exploited by its methods of research. For more than 40 years, scientists who worked for the center collected seeds from the Cusco region to advance the institution’s research and development. They refused to share their information with the farmers or even credit them for the success of their traditional methods, said Swiderska.

But that relationship has been improving recently. In 2005 the IIED partnered with Asociación ANDES, a Cusco-based nonprofit that has worked with Parque de la Papa farmers since 1998, to broker a “Repatriation Agreement” with the International Potato Center. The agreement granted Cusco farmers access to the Center’s collection of native potato seeds, which had been extracted years earlier from indigenous land and locked away in the gene bank.

“Small-scale and indigenous farmers rarely get access to seeds in gene banks,” Swiderska wrote in an email. “So seed exchange between farmers is important to enable them to [experiment with] new seed varieties”

Working with scientists has been an emotional, challenging process, Mamani said. “Scientists would just take seeds from us, not recognizing our knowledge.”

But the tides are turning as climate change edges on, pushing science and tradition closer together to resolve common goals and slow the process of agricultural degradation. As Mamani said, “Scientists have been taught now how to collaborate with us. They have to respect our knowledge.”

A Quechua indigenous man harvests potatoes. Photo by Adam Kerby.

http://www.yesmagazine.org/planet/indigenous-seed-savers

The US Department of Agriculture recently posted new data on how genetically modified crops have taken over American farms in the past decade. It's worth taking a look at some of the highlights:

1) More than 93% of corn, soy, and cotton in the US is now genetically modified

US Department of Agriculture

In 2014, GMO crops made up 94 percent of US soybean acreage, 93 percent of all corn planted, and 96 percent of all cotton.

That's a big leap even from the previous year (when the figures were 93 percent of soy, 90 percent of corn, and 90 percent of cotton).

It's also worth adding that 95 percent of sugar beets in the United States are now genetically engineered to be herbicide tolerant — an event that took just three years after they were first introduced in 2008. Roughly 55 percent of US sugar production comes from sugar beets.

(There are a number of other GMO crops in the US — including canola, alfafa, papaya, and squash — but the ones above are the big ones.)

2) Herbicide tolerance and insect tolerance are the most popular traits

US Department of Agriculture

So how did GMOs become so popular? Mainly because of two traits — herbicide tolerance (HT) and insect tolerance (BT):

Herbicide tolerance: Crops that are engineered to be resistant to herbicides have become particularly widespread in the last decade — in part because they make it easier for farmers to kill weeds without damaging crops. (Since 1996, Monsanto has sold both Roundup herbicide and plants that are engineered to be resistant to Roundup.)

HERBICIDE TOLERANCE HAS BECOME WIDESPREAD IN THE LAST DECADE

The USDA has noted that herbicide-tolerance technology doesn't appear to boost crop yields significantly or increase profitability. But it doesseem to save time and make weed management easier — by, for instance, allowing farmers only to use a single herbicide — which likely explains why it continues to be so popular.

Critics of HT technology argue that this has led farmers to use more herbicides and raises the risk of creating herbicide-resistant weeds. (Some scientists also think that heavy spraying of herbicides has killed off milkweed in the Midwest, leading to the decline of monarch butterfly populations.)

Proponents often retort that farmers are now using a less-toxic herbicide (glyphosate) than they were using before, which is safer for workers — and that herbicide-resistance was a problem with older, conventional crops too. But throughout this debate, herbicide-tolerant crops have continued to soar in popularity in the United States.

Insect tolerance: Meanwhile, the vast majority of US corn and cotton are now engineered to carry a gene from the soil bacterium Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt), which is toxic to insects and protects the plants from pests.

How useful is this? The Department of Agriculture notes that Bt technology doesn't necessarily increase the maximum yields of plants. But it can help farmers limit their losses to pests — and studies have found that the technology boosts profitability. Bt technology also appears to have led to a reduction in insecticide use over time.

One downside? There's a some evidence that over-planting of Bt corn in some regions is leading to the rise of pesticide-resistant insects.

The USDA notes that use of insect-tolerant crops has fluctuated over time — a lot depends on what pests are prevalent in the United States in a given year. In the early days, Bt corn mostly protected against a moth known as the European corn borer. In recent years, new varieties have been introduced to protect against corn earworm and corn rootworm — and adoption has soared. Meanwhile, insects haven't yet posed a major problem for soybeans, so there's not a lot of demand for Bt soy, at least so far.

(The other big GMO crops being commercially grown in the United States are herbicide-tolerant canola, herbicide-tolerant sugar beets, herbicide-tolerant alfalfa, virus-resistant papaya, and virus-resistant squash.)

3) Up to 70% of processed foods in the US now contain GMO ingredients

There are a few other GMO crops in the United States — particularly canola, alfafa, papaya, and squash — but corn, soy, and sugar beets are the big ones.

MOST PROCESSED FOODS CONTAIN INGREDIENTS LIKE CORN SYRUP OR SOY LECITHIN

As a result, an estimated 60 to 70 percent of processed foods in US grocery stores contain at least some GMO ingredients like high-fructose corn syrup or soy lecithin. About half the sugar consumed in the United States is also GMO. on top of that, companies have used genetic engineering to create certain enzymes and hormones for cheese and milk production.

The fact that genetically engineered corn and soy are so widespread has also made it difficult for companies to avoid them. Annie Gasparro of The Wall Street Journal recently wrote about how Ben & Jerry's was trying to avoid GMOs entirely in response to consumer pressure. one problem? The vast majority of feed for dairy cows in the United States is made with GMO corn, soy, or alfafa — so the company is having a hard time finding "GMO-free" milk.

(By the way, it's worth reiterating that there's no good scientific evidence that GMO crops are particularly harmful to your health, although they remain unpopular in many corners for a variety of reasons.)

4) Worldwide, about 12% of farmland is devoted to GMOs

The Department of Agriculture doesn't keep tabs on genetically modified crops grown worldwide, but the International Service for the Acquisition of of Agri-Biotech Applications does.

Globally, GMOs were planted on 175 million hectares in 2013 — or roughly 12 percent of global farmland. That's up one-hundred-fold from two decades ago. And GM crops are now planted in 27 countries.

5) But GM crop growth may be slowing

The map above is a little simplistic, however. The vast majority of GM crops are grown in just five countries: the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Canada, and India. And as the chart below from Nature shows, growth seems to be slowing:

(Nature)

One reason is saturation. Virtually all corn and soy and cotton in the United States is now genetically engineered.

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(For the pointer to the USDA report, thanks to Kay McDonald at Big Picture Agriculture.)

http://www.vox.com/2014/8/12/5995087/genetically-modified-crops-rise-charts?utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter&utm_campaign=voxdotcom&utm_content=tuesday

유기농 사과와 배. 

Source: MySupermarket. Standard non-sale prices correct on Friday 11 July

by Mary Beth Albright