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If you were to take a little bit of dairy, add a slightly larger serving of vegetables, fruits and proteins, and then pile on as many superfluous oils, fats, and grains as possible, you would have a reasonably accurate depiction of the modern American diet.

Americans on average now eat nearly 2,600 calories a day, almost 500 more than they did forty years ago, according to the USDA, which uses food production data, along with spoilage and waste estimates, to approximate per capita consumption.

That increase alone should be enough to raise an eyebrow (or three hundred million), but what's most troubling isn't the increase in our caloric intake, so much as its make-up. Over 92% of the uptick in per capita caloric intake since 1970 is attributable to oils, fats, and grains. Thirty years ago, the combination was responsible for roughly 37% of our daily calories; today, it makes up closer to 47% of our diet.

What exactly we should glean from that reality isn't entirely clear. Oils, fats, and grains, aren't inherently bad. In fact, there's good reason to believe that many fats and oils are actually just the opposite. And grains, despite a growing narrative about their potential harms, come in all shapes and sizes—some are protein-rich, like quinoa, while others offer little, if any, nutritional value, such as enriched white flour.

But to call a calorie a calorie is misguided—especially if one is highly processed, or refined—and it's easy enough to extrapolate from the kind of calories we're consuming more of nowadays. It's likely of little coincidence, for instance, that the two food groups Americans are eating more and more of—added fats and oils, and flour and cereal products—are the same ones that are found in most processed and fast foods.

Bentley isn't blindly holding her finger to the wind. A 2013 study by USDA's Economic Research Service seems to confirm her suspicion. Fast food is a much more integral part of the American diet than it was in the 1970s. Between 1977 and 1978, fast food accounted for just over 3% of calories in the US diet; between 2005 and 2008, that share skyrocketed to over 13%."It's hard to pinpoint why exactly it's increased," Jeanine Bentley, the social science analyst responsible for the USDA's food availability database, said in an interview. "But it probably comes from an increase in processed and fast foods."

Americans are also spending almost three times the recommended amount on refined grains, and many times more than the recommended amount on frozen and refrigerated entrees, according to the same study.

The sum of all those calories, which appear to largely be the wrong kind of calories, is an ever-expanding American waistline. Americans aged 20 and older are now almost three times as likely to be obese as they were only 30 years ago—the increase is enough to afford the U.S. the unenviable distinction of being the most obese major country in the world.

That distinction is that its more than merely a health conundrum; it's a full-fledged economic problem, too. As of 2008, the annual medical costs alone of obesity amounted to almost $150 billion, according to the Center for Disease Control and Prevention. Some, including food journalist Mark Bittman, believe the total annual costs of the epidemic in the US could now exceed $1 trillion.

Imagine if someone invented machines to suck carbon out of the atmosphere — machines that were absurdly cheap, autonomous, and solar powered, too. Wouldn’t that be great? But we already have these gadgets! They’re called plants.

The problem is, plants die. So there’s one hurdle remaining: We have to figure out how to lock away the carbon in dead plants so that it doesn’t just return to the atmosphere. The obvious place to put that carbon is into the ground. And so, for years, scientists and governments have been urging farmers to leave their crop residue — the stalks and leaves — on the ground, so it would be incorporated into the soil. The trouble is, sometimes this doesn’t work: Farmers will leave residues on a field and they won’t turn into carbon-rich soil — they’ll just sit there. Sometimes, the whole process ends up releasing more greenhouse gasses than it locks away.

This has left people scratching their heads. But now a simple idea is spreading that could allow farmers to begin reliably pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and into their soil.

Clive Kirkby was one of those government agents urging farmers to leave dead plant residues in their fields. He was working in New South Wales, Australia, where farmers traditionally have burnt off their wheat stubble after harvest. Kirkby implored farmers to stop. Instead of torching all that plant residue and releasing the carbon into the air, he told them, let it stay on the ground. It seemed like a win-win: The carbon was harmful in the air, where it contributed to the greenhouse effect, and beneficial in the ground, where it made the soil rich.

As he was proselytizing, Kirkby began to bump heads with an agronomist named John Kirkegaard. “Look, Clive,” Kirkegaard would say, “the best treatment here is burn and cultivate — that’s the one that’s growing the best crops.”

This made Kirkby crazy. Burning was bad enough, and cultivation, which essentially means plowing, was also exactly the opposite of what he wanted. When farmers break up the soil with cultivation it releases some of the carbon stored there, according to conventional wisdom. But Kirkby had to admit that Kirkegaard had data on his side. The agronomist would show him the numbers, and it was clear that the soil organic matter (which holds the carbon) wasn’t increasing. In some cases, it was decreasing.

“I’ve been returning the stubble to the ground now for six years, and it’s just not going into the soil,” Kirkegaard told him.

The way that soil locks up greenhouse gas has been frustratingly mysterious, but the basics are clear: After plants suck up the carbon, the critters (microbes and fungi and insects) swarming in the topsoil chew up plant molecules, subjecting them to one chemical reaction after another as they pass through a fantastically complex food web. If everything goes right, the end result is microscopic bricks of stable carbon, which form the foundation of rich black soil.

Kirkby knew that there must be some mysterious quirk of this topsoil ecosystem that was thwarting him. But how do you investigate a complex, microscopic community that lives underground? There are just so many different organisms eating each other, and cooperating, and parasitizing one another, that we have no clue what’s going on there. People are studying it — but mostly they are reporting that the soil microbiome, as it’s called, is far more confusing than anyone suspected.

Kirkby, however, came up with an idea, that in theory, might allow farmers to manipulate the soil microbiome without having to understand everything that was going on in that black box. He pursued this idea for years, and though he was already nearing retirement age, went back to school and earned a PhD as he assembled evidence. If he’d simply tried to win his original confrontation with Kirkegaard, they’d have remained locked in a stalemate. Instead, because they allowed their minds to be shifted by the evidence, that adversarial relationship was tremendously productive. Kirkby came full circle when Kirkegaard took him on as a post-doctoral fellow (at the age of 66, Kirkby had to be one of the oldest postdocs ever).

The idea that drove Kirkby was elegant in its simplicity. “The way you get carbon into the ground,” he said, “is to take plant residue and turn it into microorganisms.” To grow microorganisms you have to feed them.

They will eat corn stalks and wheat straw, but that, alone, is not a balanced diet. That’s like giving people nothing to eat but a mountain of sugar. There are certain elements that all creatures on earth need to build the bodies of the next generation: carbon, nitrogen, phosphorus, sulfur, oxygen, and hydrogen. These six elements are the basic ingredients of living organisms. By leaving stalks and stems on the fields they were providing a lot of carbon, and oxygen and hydrogen comes easily from the air, but the bugs were lacking in nitrogen, sulfur, and phosphorus. Provide enough of these missing building blocks, Kirkby figured, and the soil microbes would finally be able to consume the plant residue. He tried it. It worked.

One lab test provides a dramatic visual of how this works. The scientists added wheat straw to two pans of sandy soil, and fertilized one with nutrients. That pan looks like rich compost. The untreated control looks as lifeless as the surface of Mars.

I saw this picture recently when I met, via Skype, with Kirkby, Kirkegaard, and another collaborator named Alan Richardson. All work at the Australian government’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation. They crowded together in front of the computer in Kirkegaard’s Canberra office.

“That’s moist soil with chopped up wheat straw on the left,” Kirkegaard said. “There’s no reason why that shouldn’t have decomposed, except for the fact that nutrients are missing. When you give them the nutrients, all the wheat straw is gone, and you get the results of the microbial activity and their bodies and it creates a whole lot of…”

“Humus!” cried Kirkby. He spoke with enthusiastic, rapid-fire intensity, his accent pinching the vowels through the nose: “With the right balance of nutrients you get a population explosion. And that’s what you want. The carbon is in the soil’s organic matter, and that’s essentially dead bug bits. And live bugs. Humus!”

Richardson, who stood leaning against the far wall, chimed in, gruff and sedate compared to Kirkby. “Historically we’ve fertilized the crop,” he said. “We’ve been interested in the crop. The paradigm shift is in thinking that you have to fertilize the system, the microbes and all that. And through that you support the crop.”

Instead of simply trying to optimize for the plants, they’ve realized, you can optimize soil along with the plant – you can optimize the whole system.

The three men explained that, when they looked at soil organic matter from around the world, the proportions of nutrients — the ratio of carbon atoms to nitrogen, for instance — are stunningly consistent. The organic matter is microbes. And if you want to build more of it, you have to give the microbes the right ratios of nutrients to build more tiny, cellular bodies.

Instead of trying to identify every soil microbe and understand what it’s doing, they have hit upon a way of treating the whole mess like a super-organism that responds in predictable ways.

The scientist Richard Jefferson, who introduced me to this work, calls it breeding by feeding: We don’t actually know what these microbes are that we’re breeding; we only know that when we set out the right proportions of food, they click into high gear.

All this helps explain why organic farms often capture more carbon. In adding compost to amend the soil, organic farmers are adding the same ratios of nutrients. The organic claim that fertilizing with synthetic nitrogen kills off soil life actually makes sense, Kirkby said; it’s just that the problem has nothing to do with the nitrogen’s artificiality. The trouble is that farmers are applying the nitrogen without the other nutrients necessary to nurture the microbiome.

“As agronomists, we talk about nutrient-use efficiency,” Kirkegaard said. “Now, the best way to have high nutrient-use efficiency is to mine the organic matter, because that comes to you for free. You’re wanting to put on juuuust enough nutrients to feed the crop and not have any left over. And that just means the other crop, under the soil, the microbial crop, misses out. As a result, we’ve lost about half the organic matter in land we’ve been using for agriculture.”

I wanted to get a reality check from another scientist, because this all sounded almost too good to be true. So I got in touch with a true authority in the field, Rattan Lal, president elect of the International Union of Soil Sciences. Lal took a look at look some of the work and pronounced his judgment: “I agree,” he said. “This phenomenon is well understood.” A colleague of Lal’s was teaching students to applyexactly the same ratios of nutrients 50 years ago, he said.

This stopped me. If this is old news, why haven’t we been putting it to work? Why the confusion when no-till fails to capture carbon? Why the mystery surrounding the ability of organic farming to do so?

Sometimes good information simply doesn’t spread everywhere it should go, Lal said, with a note of weariness. This isn’t a exactly breakthrough, he said, but he welcomed the work and said he hoped people would pay attention this time. When he followed up with an email, he wrote: “The theme addressed is very important and it must be brought to the attention of general public and policy makers.”

When I initially spoke with Kirkby, Kirkegaard, and Richardson, they had been forthright in telling me that we’ve known about this golden ratio of nutrients for a long time. They also noted that there were other scientists like Sébastien Fontaine publishing similar papers. In a follow-up email, Richardson wrote, “What we think is new is the direct connection between the soil microbiome and the [soil organic matter], which is mediated by [the ratio of nutrients].  We think that our set of recent papers provides some of the first real evidence that underpins this connection and shows evidence that the dynamics can in fact be changed.”

Jefferson says the Australians are being modest, and conservative with their claims. Connecting the well-known nutrient ratios with the microbiome truly is a breakthrough, he said.

“Now they have a mechanism to explain how this works, which allows you to make predictions, so you can imagine experiments driving this forward. one of the things that’s exciting for me is that this really bridges empiricism and scholarly science nicely. There have been tens of thousands of anecdotes noted about the performance of small scale, traditional agriculture — empirical studies or stories of small farmers who do exciting things in terms of performance and resilience. It has been largely dismissed by the hard-core science community because it has not been scalable and replicable. We can’t take one farmer’s success and move it to the next farmer or the next ecosystem because we have no understanding of how it works — complex systems don’t extrapolate well, they don’t work out of context.”

In other words, when we see an organic farmer building up the soil and achieving amazing results, it’s hard to copy it because we don’t know what to imitate. What is it that makes this work? The type of fertilizer? The local microclimate? The prayer the farmer says before breakfast? The work coming out of Australia provides the traction to separate superstition from the stuff that gets results.

Both Lal and the Australian scientists agree that there’s still one more major hurdle, which may have kept this information from spreading: These nutrients cost money. If farmers were paid for locking up carbon, they would gladly buy the fertilizers, Lal said, but right now the reimbursements are far too low. Even at the high point of the carbon markets, when people were paying $30 per ton, it would not be enough to reimburse farmers. “It costs $800 a ton of CO2 to do geological sequestration, you know, pumping carbon underground,” he said. “If farmers could get even a tenth of that, $80 a ton, I know many soil-poor farmers would participate.”

Kirkby thinks that, by tinkering with the soil microbiome, farmers might see enough gains to pay for the extra inputs. There’s already evidence that the soil microbes can help suppress plant disease and improve dirt quality. Extending this concept of growing a healthy system, not just a healthy crop, could yield profits.

“We’re probably not going to increase yields incredibly, but we might be able to improve incrementally,” Kirkby said. “In a sandy soil we might improve water-holding capacity. In a heavy clay soil we might reduce diseases a little bit — added together it might pay for the nutrients at the end of the day.”

One thing is certain: If agriculture were able to switch from an emitter of carbon to an absorber of carbon, the effect would be huge. Plants, those cheap carbon-removal machines that nature has given us, work well. If we can get them to make our dinner while they are also sucking up greenhouse gas, what a coup that would be.

But it would be an even greater coup if we could begin, as these scientists have done, to understand how to manipulate whole ecological systems — rather than just systems that have been simplified and stripped down to easily controllable parts.

Further reading:

• Papers from Kirkby et al: Here and here.
• Papers from Rattan Lal noting the importance of nutrient ratios.
• And work by Sébastien Fontaine.

Vegetable, herb, and seed sales are booming, courtesy of a new wave of consumers who are not only concerned about the quality of their food, but who also recognize the physical, mental, and even spiritual benefits of connecting with nature.

Modern living has driven a concrete wedge between us and the natural world, and many are starting to connect the dots, recognizing that a connection with the land is important for health, fitness, happiness, and overall wellbeing.

A previous CNN Health1 article lists a number of the health benefits associated with gardening, spanning from stress relief to improved brain health, better nutrition and, of course, exercise.

The Fitness Benefits of Gardening

As you’ll see, there are numerous reasons why gardening is good for you. one is related to the fact that your body needs perpetual motion to function optimally, and gardening is one way to stay active at times when you might otherwise be sitting still.  

Research published in 20122, 3 also found that those who engage in community gardening projects have considerably lower body mass index (BMI) than non-gardeners, suggesting an active lifestyle indeed translates into improved weight management.

Male and female community gardeners were 62 percent and 46 percent less likely to be overweight or obese respectively than their non-gardening neighbors.

Fitness researchers have also found that when you exercise outdoors, you exercise harder but perceive it as being easier than when exercising indoors, which can have significant health benefits as it will encourage you to work out harder than you might otherwise.

Gardening Can Provide Moderate to High Intensity Exercise

Korean researchers have confirmed that gardening counts as moderate-to-high-intensity exercise for children,4 but it can certainly be intense exercise for adults as well—especially if you get into adding soil amendments, which I’ll discuss below. As noted by the Poughkeepsie Journal5

“... [I]n the Centers for Disease Control's 2008 Physical Activity Guidelines for Americans, gardening is classified as a moderate-to-vigorous activity.

Lifting and carrying 40-pound bags of mulch, stretching into hard-to-reach places to do weeding or pushing a lawnmower around demonstrates that gardening can be a physically demanding workout.”

The featured article6 also notes that a person weighing 150 pounds can burn about 300 calories per hour by gardening at moderate intensity. Higher-intensity activities such as stirring compost, raking leaves, spreading soil amendments, or digging holes can burn up about 400 calories an hour.

According to the Korean HortTechnology study,7 the following gardening tasks constitute moderate intensity exercise, based on energy expenditure evaluations in children:

Weeding	Mulching	Sowing seeds	Harvesting
Planting	Mixing growing medium	Hoeing	Watering

 

Raking and digging counted as vigorous exercise, the latter being the most intense of all gardening activities. Another task that can certainly turn gardening into a high intensity exercise is adding soil amendments such as wood chips, which can miraculously transform your soil by serving as food for earthworms.

You’ll need to do this about two to four times a year, and may spend a week or so getting it all done, depending on the size of your garden. The only investment required for this kind of exercise is a wheelbarrow and a pitchfork or shovel. Do keep proper body mechanics in mind when gardening—just as you would during any other exercise—as the bending, twisting, and reaching could cause injury if you’re careless. Key considerations include:

• Maintain proper spinal alignment while you work. This will help absorb shock, and allow for proper weight distribution and optimal range of motion
• Avoid over-reaching by keeping objects and work surfaces close to your body
• Whenever possible, work at waist height with elbows bent and arms comfortably at your sides
• When planting or weeding at ground level, make sure to bend your knees and squat or kneel, rather than stooping forward with your legs straight. Alternatively, use a gardening stool

Back to Eden...

The documentary Back to Eden (see below) reveals how you can transform your garden by adding a thick layer of wood chips (mulch) around your trees and plants. (As noted earlier, this task ranks high in terms of intensity; it’s definitely a workout.) If you haven’t seen it yet, I would strongly encourage you to watch the entire video. It has transformed my understanding of how to garden. The film offers excellent advice for anyone interested in sustainable agriculture, regardless of scale.  

It’s important to recognize that your health ultimately depends on the health of the soil—this is what allows your food, the vegetables and fruits, to grow nutrient-dense. As discussed in the film, nature is self-sustaining, and when left alone the ground will get covered with leaves and organic materials that then turn into lush compost, adding nutrients back to the soil. This top layer of organic material also shields the soil and helps retain moisture.

Imitating nature by covering your garden with wood chips will result in less watering, and improved yield. The most cost-effective solution is to contact your local tree service, where you can get large amounts of wood chips (tree branches that have gone through a wood chipper) for free, rather than purchasing mulch from a garden center. It is important to distribute all the chips within 1-2 days though, otherwise they tend to decompose and you will breathe in some nasty dust as you move them. 

Once you commit to this program you will eliminate the need for any fertilizers and radically reduce the watering. The chips also serve as phenomenal food for earthworms, which will digest them and create incredible topsoil of worm castings for free. You can easily get them to create a few tons of this valuable soil amendment every year if you continue to feed them. It is one of the absolute best soil amendments you can possibly use and it is just absolutely amazing that they are free. I have put down three truckloads so far and plan on putting down another ten around my home and thirty around my office. If you plan larger scale projects like I am you might be interested in this four wheel wheelbarrow that will carry half a ton. The only other tool you will need is a pitchfork to put them in the wheelbarrow and help you spread them.

Back To Eden OFFICIAL FILM from Dana & Sarah Films on Vimeo.

Adding Soil Amendments—A Great Workout That Delivers Remarkable Payouts in Your Garden

Besides wood chips, I strongly encourage you to consider adding biochar to your garden, to optimize the health of your soil. This soil amendment can truly transform your garden, in terms of dramatically boosting yields. one of the keys to a truly successful garden is to improve the microbiology of the soil. It is this diverse collection of bacteria, fungi, and parasites that actually transfer the nutrients from the soil into the plant. While synthetic fertilizers like Miracle Grow will supply some nutrients, these salts actually kill the soil microbes! As a result, your garden will not become “self-sustaining.”

To thrive and multiply, these soil microbes need a home to hang out in, or else they simply die shortly after application. Biochar serves this function perfectly. I’ve applied about eight tons of biochar on my property—and believe me, that was an intense workout!—and I’m now noticing major improvements.

Once you’ve applied the biochar, you need to activate it either by combining it with compost, rock dust powder, or my favorite, human urine. The urine is a phenomenal source of nitrogen potassium and phosphorus and will bind strongly to the carbon in the biochar. Wetting the biochar is also important in order to promote beneficial earthworms.8 You can certainly add biochar to existing plants, shrubs, and trees, but ideally it’s best if it’s in the soil prior to planting, so the plants have an ideal form of nutrition early on. If you have a small garden, you might only need a few hundred pounds. Larger landscapes will require more.

The Mental Health Benefits of Gardening

That said, let’s get back to the health benefits of gardening. There are many notable benefits besides exercise. For example, gardening can also help relieve depression. Many times depression is rooted in the feeling of being disconnected from nature, and hence disconnected from yourself... Researchers have also found that digging in the soil may affect your mental health via the microorganisms in the soil—again confirming the link between your personal health and the health of your soil!  As reported by CNN Health:9

“In a study conducted in Norway, people who had been diagnosed with depression, persistent low mood, or ‘bipolar II disorder’ spent six hours a week growing flowers and vegetables. After three months, half of the participants had experienced a measurable improvement in their depression symptoms. What's more, their mood continued to be better three months after the gardening program ended...

Christopher Lowry, Ph.D... has been injecting mice with Mycobacterium vaccae, a harmless bacteria commonly found in soil, and has found that they increase the release and metabolism of serotonin in parts of the brain that control cognitive function and mood -- much like serotonin-boosting antidepressant drugs do.”

According to a survey by Gardeners’ World magazine,10 80 percent of gardeners reported being “happy” and satisfied with their lives, compared to 67 percent of non-gardeners. This feeling of wellbeing can have other more far-reaching implications for your physical health as well. According to recent research from Johns Hopkins,11 having a cheerful temperament can significantly reduce your odds of suffering a heart attack or sudden cardiac death,12 for example.

Monty Don,13 a TV presenter and garden writer, attributes the wellbeing of gardeners to the “recharging” you get from sticking your hands in the soil and spending time outdoors in nature. This seems more than reasonable when you consider the health benefits associated with grounding, also known as Earthing.  As detailed in the documentary film Grounded, the surface of the earth holds subtle health-boosting energy, and all you have to do is touch it.

Walking barefoot on the earth transfers free electrons from the earth’s surface into your body that spread throughout your tissues. Grounding has been shown to relieve pain, reduce inflammation, improve sleep, and enhance your well-being. Many a gardener will attest to the sense of wellbeing obtained from sticking your hands in the dirt as well, and this is separate from the pleasure of accomplishment that comes from eating your own home-grown food.

Gardening Also Offers Stress Relief and Boosts Brain Health

Researchers in the Netherlands have found that gardening is one of the most potent stress relieving activities there are.14 In their trial, two groups of people were asked to complete a stressful task; one group was then instructed to garden for half an hour while the other group was asked to read indoors for the same length of time. Afterward, the gardening group reported a greater improvement in mood. Tests also revealed they had lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, compared to those who tried to relax by quiet reading. CNN’s report15 also refers to research showing that gardening may even help reduce your risk of dementia:

“Two separate studies that followed people in their 60s and 70s for up to 16 years found, respectively, that those who gardened regularly had a 36 percent and 47 percent lower risk of dementia than non-gardeners, even when a range of other health factors were taken into account. These findings are hardly definitive, but they suggest that the combination of physical and mental activity involved in gardening may have a positive influence on the mind.”

Gardening Is an Excellent Way to Improve Your Nutrition

Last but certainly not least, keeping a garden can also improve your health by providing you with fresher, uncontaminated, nutrient-dense food that you can’t buy in your local grocery store. It will also help you reduce your grocery bill.  Urban gardening is an important step toward building a more sustainable food system. In fact, I’ve been encouraging everyone to plant a “Victory Garden” as a proactive step toward fixing our broken food system and to improve your health. They’re named Victory Gardens because during World Wars I and II, 40 percent of the produce grown in the US came from people’s backyards. I believe it’s possible to catalyze a similar movement today, but for a different purpose. The new reality is that for most people it’s very difficult to obtain high quality nutrient-dense foods unless you grow them yourself.

Just start small, and before you know it, large portions of your meals could come straight from your own edible garden. I recommend getting your feet wet by growing sprouts, as they are among the most nutritious foods you could possibly grow. Seeds, when sprouted, can contain up to 30 times the nutrients of organic vegetables! Sprouts also allow your body to extract more of the vitamins, minerals, amino acids, and essential fats from the other foods you eat. Add to that the boon of requiring very little space, and the ability to grow them indoors, year-round.

You can use them in salad, either in addition to or in lieu of salad greens, or add them to vegetable juice or smoothies. I started out growing sprouts in Ball jars about 15 years ago, but I’ve found that growing them in potting soil is a far better option. You can harvest them in about a week, and in a 10x10 tray, you can harvest between one and two pounds of sunflower sprouts. That will last you about three days. You can store them in the fridge for about a week. Sunflower spouts will give you the most volume for your work and, in my opinion, have the best taste.

Gardening May Be a Key Facet of a Healthy Lifestyle

Food grown in your own garden is overall fresher, more nutritious, and tastes better than store bought food—and you can’t beat the price! Urban gardens are also key to saving energy, protecting water quality and topsoil, and promoting biodiversity and beautifying densely populated communities. Gardening may also hold the key to improved mental health, stress relief, and much-needed exercise in a world where most of us spend our days sitting in front of computers in artificially lit rooms.

I personally obtain the majority of my food from my own landscape now, which includes multiple varieties of kale, red peppers, hot peppers, onions, garlic, parsley, rosemary, cilantro, oregano, one olive and three avocado trees, and plenty of fruit, including 130 strawberry plants, mulberries, blueberries, service berries, cherries, lime, oranges, tangerines and mangos. It really is one of life’s great pleasures to be able to walk out the door of your home and pick fresh high-quality food.

The farmlands surrounding this tile factory in Dingshu are no longer suitable for growing crops because of heavy metal contamination.

The government resisted efforts to draw attention to cancer epidemics in China's newly industrialized areas.

The story of the cancer hotspot of Yixing is characteristic: In the rush to develop that engulfed China from the 1990s, local officials were eager to invite factories and chemical plants into the area, and their already weak environmental controls were often disregarded entirely. “Government officials just care about GDP,” Zhang complained. “They were happy to welcome any polluting firm.” So, for a time, were the villagers who found jobs in the new factories. 

Nearly 3,000 factories were built along Lake Tai in the last two decades, with chemical plants proliferating in the agricultural area where Yixing, Zhoutie, and Fenshui are located. (Map credit: Aaron Reiss/Yale Environment 360) 

The first real signs of the troubles to come were in Lake Tai itself, and were the subject of a long campaign by another resident of Yixing township, the fisherman turned environmentalist, Wu Lihong. In the early 1990s, Wu grew worried about the deterioration of Lake Tai’s once famously pure waters. He organized a local environmental monitoring group that he called Defenders of Tai Lake, to collect water samples from the lake and its feeder rivers. 

The poorest families still eat locally produced food, knowing that it is contaminated.

Establishing a clear connection, however, between pollution and cancer is scientifically challenging. At Hohai University, in Jiangsu Province, Chen Ajiang, a sociologist who heads the university’s Institute of the Environment and Sociology, admitted that the link between pollution and cancer is extremely complex, and it is difficult to pin down cause and effect. 

Chemical plants in the village of Zhoutie in Central China's Jiangsu Province have polluted waterways and contaminated locally produced rice and wheat with cadmium. Although the government has closed the worst of the factories, toxins remain in the soil. (Photo credit: Wu Di)

In 2007, Professor Chen won a government grant to study the interaction of human and water environments in the basins of Lake Tai and the Huai River. For five years, he and his four researchers carried out field studies in the provinces of Henan, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Jiangxi and Guangdong, looking for evidence of the health impacts of water pollution. Professor Chen believed that pollution-related illness was damaging economic development, keeping villagers in poverty, or driving them away from their native villages altogether. Although he admits that the medical world has not yet identified an undisputed link between pollution and cancer in the villages he studied, his team established beyond doubt that cancer villages exist and that the lives of those who live in them are severely impacted. 

The pollution that chemical factories released in gas and sludge, and in the wastewater they discharged into Lake Tai and other local waterways, has now accumulated in the surrounding soil, but the government has been reluctant to acknowledge the scale of the problem. In April, 2013, the Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development awarded Zhoutie a “Habitat Environment Prize,” an award, like the accolade given to Xining, that seems out of tune with the real state of Zhoutie’s environment. 

In April 2013, the Jiangsu Geological Survey published part of a report that showed that heavy metal pollution in the Wuxi, Suzhou, and Changzhou areas

Rice from Dingshu has long been in breach of safety limits on the amount of cadmium it contains.

has increased continuously since 2004, with once isolated spots of pollution from cadmium and mercury now expanding and merging to form larger, continuous areas. The report, New technologies for monitoring and preventing heavy metal pollution resulting from urbanization, revealed that between 2005 and 2011 increasing levels of cadmium were found at 37.5 percent of the sites sampled, with average increases of 0.03 milligrams (mg) of cadmium per kilogram kg of soil. At its highest, the annual average increase was 0.2 mg. 

Continuous monitoring revealed an escalating pattern of pollution. In one unspecified area, researchers reported, cadmium levels higher than 0.4 mg per kilogram of soil were found only in relatively isolated patches in the land surrounding industrial development. But by 2012, large stretches of nearby farmland were polluted to the same levels, and rice and wheat produced in the area were contaminated. 

It also described one case — later identified as the township of Dingshu, 18 miles to the southwest of Zhoutie — where, due to a cluster of township enterprises that were dumping their waste, cadmium levels in the river silt had reached 1500 mg per kg, and that rice produced on nearby land was contaminated with cadmium to levels of more than 0.5 mg per kg. China’s food safety standards rule that rice can contain no more than 0.2 mg/kg of cadmium, and the international limit is 0.4 mg/kg. Rice from Dingshu has long been in breach of those limits. 

Villagers in Zhoutie, where these farmlands surround a chemical plant, believe pollution is the cause of rising cancer rates there. When crops like rice and wheat are grown in soil contaminated with heavy metals, the grain absorbs the toxins. (Photo credit: Wu Di)

Dingshu is the centre of Yixing’s ceramics industry, home to many glazed tile factories, teapot factories, and clay workshops. Yixing’s stoneware is an important source of revenue, but the factories have also badly damaged the local environment and contribute to the area’s soil pollution. Yixing launched a crackdown on ceramic factories in early 2011, but by June 2013 only 300 had been fully shut down. 

The area’s problems illustrate the high price China is paying for 30 years of rapid economic development and the risks China’s increasingly serious soil pollution poses to its food. Official estimates say that China produces 12 million tons of heavy-metal-contaminated grain a year, with an economic cost of more than $3.2 billion. 

China’s official approach to soil pollution has been characterized by secrecy and obfuscation. Even now, a picture of the scale and severity of the problem must be pieced together from disparate reports. 

In 2010, for instance, a report on soil protection policy from the international expert body, the China Council for International Cooperation on Environment and Development (CCICED), warned that overall trends in China’s soil pollution gave no cause for optimism. Quoting China’s official 1997 Report on the State of the Environment in China, it characterized the pollution of China's arable land as “rather severe,” with pollution affecting an estimated 10 million hectares of land. By the year 2000, according to that year’s report on the state of the environment, 36,000 of the 300,000 hectares of basic farmland monitored for harmful heavy metals were found to be more than 12 percent above the standard.

CCICED’s researchers were no more optimistic about China’s system of supervision and management of soil, finding that investment in soil pollution prevention and control was too low. They stressed that soil pollution reduces the quality of crops and recommended legislation to protect the soil and to control pollution, as well as improvement in China’s environmental soil standards. 

There are now signs that gravity of the soil pollution problem is belatedly forcing the Chinese government to begin to deal with a problem that has accumulated over many decades, and to reconsider its policy of pursuing economic growth at

A recent survey reported that 19 percent of China’s farmland was contaminated.

the expense of the environment. In July 2007, the Ministry of Land and the National Bureau of Statistics launched a nationwide soil survey. It was completed in 2009, but partial results were not published until December 2013. In April 2014, the government released partial results of a second soil pollution survey, conducted from April 2005 to December 2013, and covering 243 square miles of farmland. The survey reported that about 16.1 percent of China's soil and about 19.4 percent of farmland were contaminated. 

China has 135 million hectares (334 million acres) of arable land in total, but the amount of available high quality arable land has been dropping due to advancing urbanization and pollution. According to the recently released data, the government classifies more than 3 million hectares of arable land as moderately polluted. How much of that is contaminated with heavy metals is still not clear, though in 2011, Wang Bentai, then chief engineer of the State Environmental Protection Agency (now the Ministry of Environmental Protection) put lead, zinc and other heavy metal pollution at 10 percent of China’s arable land. By official estimates, pollution cuts China’s harvests by 10 billion kg every year.

Rising public concern about the impacts of pollution have begun to force a change in government attitudes, but changes at the top can take some time to percolate down to lower levels of government. In November 2013, delegates to the Third Plenary Session of the 18th Chinese Communist Party Central Committee – an important party meeting — adopted a key strategy document that set out the government’s priorities for the immediate future. 

Conservation agriculture with trees combines the best of Conservation Agriculture with the best of Agroforestry to offer many benefits to landscapes and livelihoods. But its uptake is restricted by policy, cultural and technical issues, to name some factors. A group of scientists from the World Agroforestry Centre and partner institutions have teamed up to offer a solution to the technical barriers to uptake. “Conservation Agriculture With Trees: Principles and Practice”—a technical guide synthesized from trainings sessions conducted in Kenya, Tanzania and Rwanda, and specially designed for extension staff who train farmers, is now available from the Centre.

Vincent Rabach, a Research Assistant at the Centre, in a field where gliricidia sepium—a nitrogen fixing shrub—has been intercropped with maize.

Conservation Agriculture (CA) refers to farming practice where at least two of the following three are applied concurrently: minimum tillage, maximum soil cover and crop rotation/association. Conservation Agriculture With Trees (CAWT) introduces the incorporation of crop-friendly trees into agricultural enterprises such as crop production, along with good management practices, as aspects that can support the CA system. Combining the best of CA and the best of agroforestry (AF), CAWT aims to improve uptake of CA through the provision of tree products and services.

The World Agroforestry Centre’s Evergreen Agriculture (EGA) project, funded by the European commission (EC) through the International Fund for Agricultural Development (IFAD) promotes CAWT practices in Eastern and southern Africa to improve the livelihoods of smallholder farmers while sustaining the natural resource base. Although there is a lot of potential for the adoption of CAWT systems by farmers, there are many internal and external circumstances that may hinder fast and widespread adoption. These include policy issues; technology; cost and availability of inputs; arguments from different schools of thought; and cultural conditioning. In response to the technical barriers to uptake, Conservation Agriculture With Trees: Principles and Practice, ICRAF Technical Manual 21, seeks to equip extension agents with appropriate information for farmer empowerment processes through information, skills and technology transfer.

Between May and August 2012 a series of trainings were conducted in Kenya and Tanzania for extension agents from various ministries and organisations who work in partnership with the EGA project areas of Machakos County in Kenya, and Mbarali District in Tanzania. The trained extension agents further conducted training of farmers in their mandate areas with the Centre providing logistical support. It is expected that the agents will continue to stay in touch with and support farmers to increase the adoption of CA and AF.

The technical guide Conservation Agriculture With Trees: Principles and Practice was produced as a result of these trainings to assist extension agents in the East African Region conduct CAWT training for farmers and other interested stakeholders. Extension officers can use the guide to conduct a basic training course in CAWT and farmers can use an accompanying booklet entitled “Conservation Agriculture with Trees: Getting Started” to start practising CAWT. Discussion topics in the guide help solicit participation and provoke feedback from participants. Practical sessions reinforce learning and transfer of practical skills. Additional reading suggestions are provided throughout the guide.

The guide is organised into five modules and designed to provide learners with step-by-step guidelines and logical progression from one topic to the next:

• Module one identifies the problem by dealing with issues of soil health and soil degradation.
• Module Two proposes CAWT as a possible solution to deal with these problems; brings the principles of CA and its benefits into light; and deals with the main challenges that must be addressed for the successful application/adoption of CAWT.
• Module Three discusses the incorporation of trees into CA, thus CAWT.
• Module Four explains how to implement CAWT.
• Module Five deals with CA tools and equipment options to suit different categories of farmers.

Useful annexes contain a detailed soil-loss and run-off demonstration; instructions on how to check soil for hardpans; a review of CA equipment; species recommendations for incorporation with crops; and the domestication status of some important fertilizer, fuelwood, fruit and timber tree species. Propagation, pests and diseases, agro-ecological value, and management of key tree species are dicussed in detail.

The adoption of CA in Sub-Saharan Africa has been very slow in spite of successes experienced in some countries such as Brazil, Argentina and Australia. A set of strategies—including policy support and helping farmers to make the transition from Conventional to Conservation Agriculture—is needed to accelerate the adoption process in Sub-Saharan Africa. This transition starts from declaring a willingness to change the farming technology and goes on to implement CAWT practices step-by-step in sections of the farm until the whole area under management has been put to the best possible use. This technical guide promises be an invaluable guide in understanding and establishing those practices.

Download the full technical guide here.

Conservation Agriculture With Trees: Principles and Practice
Joseph Mutua, Jonathan Muriuki, Peter Gachie, Mieke Bourne and Jude Capis
A simplified guide for Extension Staff and Farmers
Technical Manual No. 21

Can the Aloha State transition to growing enough food to sustain its population using small-scale, agroecology practices?

- by Maureen Nandini Mitra

Chris Kobayashi & Dimi Rivera. Photo by Ian Umeda

The couple knew that it would be a tough vegetable to grow. Cucumbers (and melons) are prone to extensive damage from fruit flies in Hawai'i. So they covered every single cucumber that came up with plastic bags. "We'd charge a dollar for each at the farmers' market," says Kobayshi. "We set up a sign on that said 'Japanese Cucumbers, $1.' We offered samples and people got hooked because it's so crunchy. Then they started asking, do you have any kale? I was like, 'Kale? What is that?' So that's how we started growing other kinds of veggies. It was just all an organic thing that happened. None of this was planned." Today, Kobayashi's family's 10-acre Waioli Farm, named after the stream that runs beside it, grows produce using organic practices – mainly taro, which they supply to families and traditional poi (taro paste) makers on Oahu and the Big Island, but also some fruits and vegetables for their local farmers' market stand.

Kobayashi, whose family has been growing taro commercially for generations, is a member of Hawai'i SEED, a coalition of grassroots citizen groups and food activists that is working to promote ecological food and farming in Hawai'i. Earth Island Journal (EIJ) met with her when reporting on the growing Hawai'i citizens' movement against the genetically modified seed industry in the islands. (Read the in-depth story on the issue here.) To be more specific, EIJ met with her, and several other small scale farmers on Kaua'i and O'ahu, in an effort to understand whether there were indeed any viable alternatives to industrial-style farming in Hawai'i. Could this remote island chain, which currently imports nearly 90 percent of its food, transition to growing enough food to feed itself though small-scale, agroecological farming?

Kobayashi certainly thinks so. "Have you seen this?" she asks, sweeping an arm to indicate the lush fields and emerald mountains around us. "Over here we have year-round warm weather, we have land, we have water... We just need more farms that produce food." Of course, the transition would have to be more intentional than how she started out, and it would require setting up complementary cottage industries that could employ more people, she adds. "It will be a lot of hard work, but it can be done... I can see a vibrant economy take shape."

The thriving local food economy on Kaua'i's North Shore – with its diverse community of homesteaders, small-scale farmers like Kobayashi and Rivera, and upscale homeowners and tourists who often buy out the farmers' markets in a matter of hours – offers a window into what's possible in Hawai'i.

A widespread switch in farming systems, however, would first require a larger shift in perception of what most Hawaiian residents (and in fact, most Americans) consider the kind of farming that feeds and employs the multitudes. In Hawai'i specifically, the problem is that because of the islands' colonial history, its people have been alienated from their traditional livelihoods and sustainable agricultural practices, says Albie Miles, director of the University of Hawai'i - West O'ahu's Sustainable Agriculture program.

Large scale, plantation-style agriculture was a centerpiece of Hawai'i's economy for more than a century, until competition from overseas drove local sugarcane and pineapple plantations out of business in the 1990s, leaving many jobless. The dying plantations were then replaced by large biotech seed farms. For many Hawaiians, who worked or grew up with this kind of agricultural system, it's impossible to even conceive that islanders can sustain themselves without Big Ag. As Kaua'i Mayor Bernard Carvalho told me: "This kind of agriculture really feeds our families."

What Hawaiians forget, Miles says, is that the islands have another, much older agricultural and land-use history – one that is deeply intertwined with the region's environment and indigenous culture, one that had sustained the people of this remote island chain for several centuries before the arrival of the first European explorers.

The early Hawaiian settlers, who arrived in the uninhabited islands around A.D. 300 from Polynesia, developed a unique system of resource management to support their growing population. Recognizing the connection between the mountains and the oceans and the key role of freshwater in linking the two, they divided the islands into self-sustaining units called ahupua'a. The ahupua'a were usually wedge-shaped sections of land that ran from the mountains to the sea (extending into coastal fishing grounds) and contained a freshwater source such as a stream, spring, or river. Each ahupua'a contained within it all the resources needed for a community to sustain itself independently.

Photo by Ian Umeda.

There are few ahupua'a left intact in Hawai'i today (Kobayashi's farm is part of a fractured one), and none of them can support an entire community as in pre-industrial days. But some interesting efforts to restore versions of this ancient land-use system are being undertaken by organizations like the Waipa Foundation and the Limahuli Garden and Preserve, which lies just a little further north of Kobayashi's farm on Kaua'i's North Shore. Hawai'i's grassroots movement against the biotech farms and industrial agriculture finds much strength in this ancient agrarian history.

While it's unlikely that the islands can completely revert back to the ahupua'a system, it does offer a model of self-sufficiency that can be emulated, says environmental lawyer and author Claire Hope Cummings. "Most of the country has this mix of the means needed for local food and fuel production, and a choice of models," Cummings writes in her book Uncertain Peril: Genetic Engineering and the Future of Seeds. "But very few places have the needed leadership and proven ways to go about creating our ideal of diverse and locally controlled economies." Hawai'i, she says, is one of them.

Like Cummings, many farming experts and food activists say Hawai'i has to look beyond its colonial history to find the way forward to a food-secure state. The kind of agricultural model they are looking back to, and would like to see take root in Hawai'i, is gaining increasing international support.

A large body of scientific research – including studies by nonpartisan organizations such as the National Academies of Sciences, the United Nations Committee on Trade and Development, and the lesser-known, but hugely important, International Assessment of Agricultural Knowledge, Science and Technology for Development (IAASTD) – indicates that the best way to ensure food production as the world's population grows (and its climate changes) is by transitioning from the industrial, monocrop model to smaller, biologically diversified, agroecological systems that have proven to be better at addressing the challenges of food sovereignty, preserving biodiversity, and reducing poverty.

In fact, such food systems are already feeding most of the world. According to a 2012 report by the Canadian research and advocacy organization, ETC Group, at least 70 percent of the food the world consumes every year is grown by small-scale rural and urban farmers, while industrial farming, which gets most of the attention, land, and R&D dollars, actually produces only about 30 percent of the world's food. "Our 70 percent estimate is inadvertently corroborated by the fertilizer industry who worry that somewhere between 40 per cent and 60 per cent of the world's food is grown without their synthetic chemicals," notes Pat Mooney, the group's co-founder and executive director.

Unfortunately, research and development related to diversified farming systems receives minimal funding. (In the U.S., it gets less than two percent of public agricultural research funding.) Hawai'i University's Albie Miles argues that this neglect has led to a "knowledge gap" that makes it easy for Big Ag supporters to cite a "yield gap" between agroecologial and industrial food production. "The estimated 10 to 15 percent yield gap has to be understood in the context of historic underfunding of crop development using organic and agroecological farming methods," he says. "Even with a small investment into these alternative methods, we'd be able to close the yield gap." Miles believes that if the U.S. Department of Agriculture shifted its focus toward research and education in agroecology and biologically diversified farming systems, the potential to address global resource challenges would be enormous.

The state of Hawai'i came pretty close to making that shift on its own just two decades ago. When the plantation economy crashed in the nineties, the state agriculture department considered replacing the plantations with a more community-friendly model that included small farms growing diverse crops.

Photo by Ian Umeda.

Most of these companies produce commodity crops, mainly genetically engineered seeds, which get shipped to the U.S. mainland and overseas, leaving the islands heavily dependent on food imports.

"Everyone realizes that Hawai'i is in an incredibly risky situation in terms of food security," Miles says, referring to reports that show that in case of a disruption in shipping the state's inventory of fresh produce would feed Hawaiians for no more than 10 days. But, he says, there's clearly a way out of this precarious position that could also create jobs and sustain the local economy. A recent Hawai'i State University study estimates that replacing just 10 percent of imported food with locally grown food would create about 2,300 jobs (about the same number that the seed industry provides) and keep $313 million circulating within Hawai'i's economy. Miles says the state government needs to make "some serious choices" about its agriculture sector and needs to start removing the "structural obstacles" in the way of small, diversified farms.

The obstacles aren't small, either. For starters, there's the problem of providing potential smallholders access to land. Much of the state's 280,000 acres of arable agricultural land belongs to big trusts set up by erstwhile plantation barons and Hawaiian royal families who prefer the security of leasing out or selling large parcels rather than divvying their land up in five to 10 acre (or smaller) sections. They can't really be blamed for that either, given the massive property tax burden that they have to bear. (Kobayashi says a possible solution could be giving landowners some kind of tax incentive for taking a chance on new farmers.)

Then there's the issue of finding enough people willing to take up farming in the first place – a core problem facing the agricultural sector worldwide. Scott Enright, the chair of the Hawai'i Board of Agriculture, told me there simply weren't enough people in Hawai'i who were interested in taking up farming, or who had the basic knowhow in the first place. "But that said, we are looking to open up land in Kehaka [in Kaua'i] for agriculturalists. We'll see who steps forward," he says.

Farming advocates counter that the onus is on the state to invest time and money in teaching Hawaiians how to farm. "When the plantations closed, about 200 farmers were given two acres of land [each] to cultivate, but they weren't given full support. We didn't show them how to farm. So after a few years they gave up," says Hector Valenzuela, a crop scientist at Hawai'i University. "Even at the [state-run] university, we diverted our attention to GMOs. Crop scientists shut themselves up in labs when they should have been in the fields, showing farmers how to grow food," he says. "The hardest thing to do is to convince somebody to start farming, so when one decides to do so we have to help them succeed."

Back at Waiole Farm, Kobayashi says that it is pretty clear Hawai'i needs to start the transition with some rulemaking. "I don't know how to put it all together, but that's what we want to work on... It's quite a big complex issue, but we've just got to start chipping away."

This article is part of "What The Fork!?! Corporations and Democracy," a collaborative media effort investigating corporate control of our democracy and our dinner plates, and was first published by Earth Island Journal. Articles and radio pieces combine work of Making Contact, The Progressive, the Center for Media and Democracy (publisher of ALECexposed.org), and Food Democracy Now, along with reporting from Earth Island Journal, Grist, and Cascadia Times. Made possible in part by the Voqal Fund. Read stories and take action at wtfcorporations.com, and follow #wtfcorps and #BigAg on Twitter and Facebook.

Maureen Nandini Mitra is Managing Editor of Earth Island Journal. In addition to her work at the Journal, Mitra writes for several other magazines and online publications in the US and India. A journalism graduate from Columbia University, her work has appeared in the San Francisco Public Press, The New Internationalist, Sueddeutsche Zeitung, The Caravan and Down to Earth.

A trader herds his camels at Pushkar Fair in the desert Indian state of Rajasthan. Picture taken November 2013. REUTERS/Stringer

NEW DELHI, June 18 (Reuters) - About a quarter of India's land is turning to desert and degradation of agricultural areas is becoming a severe problem, the environment minister said, potentially threatening food security in the world's second most populous country.

India occupies just 2 percent of the world's territory but is home to 17 percent of its population, leading to over-use of land and excessive grazing. Along with changing rainfall patterns, these are the main causes of desertification.

"Land is becoming barren, degradation is happening," said Prakash Javadekar, minister for environment, forests and climate change. "A lot of areas are on the verge of becoming deserts but it can be stopped."

Land degradation - largely defined as loss of productivity - is estimated at 105 million hectares, constituting 32 percent of the total land.

According to the Indian Space Research Organisation that prepared a report on desertification in 2007, about 69 percent of land in the country is dry, making it vulnerable to water and wind erosion, salinization and water logging.

The states of Rajasthan, Gujarat, Punjab, Haryana, Karnataka and Andhra Pradesh are the among the most arid. These are some of the cotton and rapeseed growing states of India.

One issue that last year's Gezi Park protests drew urgent attention to was the importance and value of truly public spaces in our cities. Sonews of Gehl Architects' efforts to sensitively pedestrianise Istanbul form a positive step in the right direction. Jan Gehl and his practice have always prioritised the human urban experience and our desire for social interaction in inclusive spaces. An accessible and pedestrian Istanbul could demonstrate to many other cities the importance of valuing citizens and their public places.

The first of a new generation of genetically modified crops is poised to win government approval in the United States, igniting a controversy that may continue for years, and foreshadowing the future of genetically modified crops.

The agribusiness industry says the plants—soy and corn engineered to tolerate two herbicides, rather than one—are a safe, necessary tool to help farmers fight so-called superweeds. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Department of Agriculture appear to agree.

However, many health and environmental groups say the crops represent yet another step on what they call a pesticide treadmill: an approach to farming that relies on ever-larger amounts of chemical use, threatening to create even more superweeds and flood America’s landscapes with potentially harmful compounds.

Public comments on the Environmental Protection Agency’s draft review of the crops will be accepted until June 30. As of now, both the EPA and USDA’s reviews favor approval. Their final decisions are expected later this summer.

“We’re at a crossroads here,” said Bill Freese, a science policy analyst at the Center for Food Safety, an advocacy group. “With these, we’re dramatically increasing farmer dependence on herbicides.” In a letter to the USDA, the Center and 143 other public-interest and environmental groups warned of a “chemical arms race with weeds,” in which the new crops offer “at best temporary relief.”

The crops under consideration were engineered by Dow AgroSciences, a Dow Chemical Company subsidiary. They’re part of what Dow calls the Enlist Weed Control System: Enlist, a proprietary mixture of glyphosate and 2,4-D herbicides, and the plants onto which Enlist can be sprayed without causing them harm as it kills surrounding weeds.

A similar approach to designing solely glyphosate-tolerant crops—Monsanto’s Roundup Ready trait—has made glyphosate the most widely-used herbicide in the United States. Those crops now account for more than 80 percent of U.S. corn and cotton, and 93 percent of all American soybeans.

When Roundup Ready crops were first introduced in the 1990s, some scientists warned that weeds would eventually evolve tolerance to glyphosate: After all, any herbicide-hardy weed would have an enormous reproductive advantage. Monsanto said that wouldn’t happen. It did, sooner rather than later. Such weeds are now an enormous problem, infesting roughly 75 million acres of fields, an area roughly equivalent to the size of Arizona.

Farmers have been sent scrambling for solutions, and products like Enlist andsimilar multiple herbicide-resistant crops developed by other companies are the agriculture industry’s solution. “Enlist Duo herbicide will help solve the tremendous weed control challenges growers are facing,” said Damon Palmer, the U.S. commercial leader for Enlist, in a press release accompanying the EPA’s draft announcement.

According to Dow, weed resistance can be forestalled this time around. But critics say it’s inevitable, and that applying 2,4-D at the anticipated landscape scales could harm both humans and the natural environment. The companies consider those fears to be overblown and based on a biased interpretation of the science. That is also what critics say of them.

If there’s any common ground, it’s this: If the Enlist system is approved, much more herbicide will be used in the United States. According to the USDA, somewhere between 78 and 176 million pounds of additional 2,4-D could be used on U.S. crops by 2020, up from 26 million in 2011.

Herbicides and Health

Among the galaxy of chemicals found in agriculture and everyday modern life, 2,4-D is comparatively well-researched. Scores of studies over the last several decades have looked for population-level patterns linking exposures to human health problems, or described the effects on animals experimentally exposed to 2,4-D.

Considerable disagreement exists, however, on how to interpret that research. Critics of the 2,4-D resistant crops emphasize the population-level epidemiology, which raises cause for concern. Dow and the EPA place much more weight on results from laboratory animal exposures, from which the effects of anticipated human exposures are extrapolated.

Based on the animal research, “we have looked at the possibility that Enlist could be used on every acre of corn and soybeans and concluded there would be no human health risk from such use,” the EPA said in a statement provided to WIRED.

Their evaluation fits with the state of the science as described by Dow toxicologist and former Society of Toxicology president James Bus, who said that even farm workers who handle 2,4-D on a daily basis are exposed to levels “that are 1,000-fold below doses which in animals cause no effect.”

“Almost all the key toxicology studies are in the peer-reviewed public literature. They’re not hidden in company files,” said Bus, who described the misgivings of Enlist’s critics as resulting from a lack of familiarity with the literature, or giving too much credence to findings of harm that involved unrealistically high doses or impure 2,4-D formulations.

In turn, the Environmental Working Group, an environmental advocacy group, said in a June 4 letter to the EPA that the agency’s health reviews were flawed, incomplete and “significantly underestimate the real harm to human health.”

Broadly speaking, health concerns fall into two categories: whether 2,4-d might cause cancer, and whether 2,4-D might disrupt the human endocrine system, perhaps causing reproductive or neurological damage. on a possible link to cancer, most research suggests otherwise: Both the EPA and World Health Organization’s International Agency for Cancer Research have previously declared that 2,4-D does not appear to be carcinogenic to humans.

A more recent review of the epidemiology by two WHO cancer researchers did find a significant link between 2,4-D exposures and non-Hodgkins lymphoma. Dow’s own review of the epidemiology, published in Critical Reviews in Toxicology, found no connection.

On the risk of endocrine disruption, however, the science is more ambiguous. The EPA acknowledged in a 2005 evaluation of 2,4-D that, based on experimental effects on animal thyroids and gonads, “there is concern regarding its endocrine disruption potential.” But Bus pointed to a recent Dow-run study of rat exposures that figured prominently in the EPA’s evaluation and was published last September in the journal Toxicological Sciences. In those experiments, damage arose only at exposure levels far higher than is found in real-world settings.

Some research has pointed in a different direction, though. In a 2012 letter to the EPA, a group of 70 public health scientists and health professionals cited several population-level epidemiological studies that linked 2,4-D exposures and birth defects in several midwestern states.

Epidemiology shows statistical correlations, not cause-and-effect, and is necessarily messy: It can be hard to isolate one chemical’s signal from a sea of variable factors. on the other hand, epidemiology deals with real-world dynamics, and for 2,4-D resonates with some experimental observations. In a 2008Environmental Health article researchers wrote that “even though the evidence is sparse, some chlorophenoxy herbicides, in particular 2,4-D, have neurotoxic potentials and may cause developmental neurotoxicity.”

One of the study’s authors was environmental health professor Philippe Grandjean of the Harvard School of Public Health. Asked whether he still stood by that claim, Grandjean said that he does. “We know too little about the risks of developmental neurotoxicity” to dismiss concerns, he said.

A 2009 Archives of Neurology study also found suggestions of a link between 2,4-D exposures and Parkinson’s disease, though the number of cases was small. According to EPA, such reports will continue to be monitored as Enlist use is periodically reviewed, but may have resulted from older 2,4-D formulations that were contaminated by dioxin, an extremely toxic compound generated as a byproduct of 2,4-D manufacture.

Dioxin contamination is “no longer a factor in the modern manufacturing processes for 2,4-D,” said the EPA in its draft review. Again, critics are not reassured. “When you’re cooking it up, it’s inevitable that you’ll end up with dioxins being formed,” said Lynn Carroll, senior scientist at the nonprofit Endocrine Disruption Exchange.

A 2010 Environmental Science & Technology study by Australian toxicologists of dioxin contamination in 2,4-D found it to be an ongoing concern, though Enlist was not among the formulations evaluated. While buyers of Enlist seeds will be contractually obligated to use Dow’s reportedly cleaner formulations, Freese worries that farmers will evade those restrictions. “Based on general knowledge of enforcement of regulations in the field, it seems extremely likely that a lot of 2,4-D use will involve generic versions,” he said.

Environmental Impacts

In addition to possible human health impacts, many questions remain about the effects of 2,4-D on ecological health. In its statement to WIRED, the EPA said, “We are confident that there will be no off-site exposure to the choline salt of 2,4-D”—Dow’s new formulation—”that would be of concern for effects to plant or animals.”

But the agency’s own ecological risk assessment strikes a more uncertain tone: While stating that 2,4-D poses no direct poisoning threat to birds, fish, aquatic plants or insects, it noted a lack of empirical information about risks to mammals and terrestrial plants. “There is insufficient information to determine how the proposed new uses of 2,4-D choline salt will directly affect mammals … and terrestrial plants, and indirectly affect all taxonomic groups,” wrote the EPA’s ecologists.

That plants in areas adjacent to farm fields, or receiving soil-runoff water expected to contain 2,4-D, could be at risk seems self-evident: After all, 2,4-D is a herbicide, toxic to most plants that don’t have needles for leaves. “There are more and more concerns being raised about the drift problem,” said agroecologist Bruce Maxwell of Montana State University.

“These field edges are some of the last remaining harbors” of biodiversity in the midwestern United States, Maxwell said. They provide vital habitat and forage to many animals, in particular pollinators such as bees and butterflies, populations of which are in precipitous decline. The collapse of monarch butterflies has already been tied to the rise of glyphosate use.

The EPA’s draft review of Enlist, which emphasized the “practically non-toxic” direct effect of 2,4-D on bees, gave little weight to indirect effects, in part because the agency assumes farmers will use Enlist in ways that minimize its accidental spread beyond field edges. “If this product is used according to the label directions, no unreasonable adverse effects would result,” said the EPA in its statement.

It may be unreasonable, though, to expect farmers to always follow those directions, which include recommendations that Enlist not be sprayed closer than 30 feet to field edges, when wind is blowing above 2 and below 10 miles per hour, or when it’s too hot and dry. “Everyone knows these assumptions are unreal,” said Freese.

The Future of Superweeds

Such tensions between intentions and expediency are also evident in arguments over the potential for weeds to evolve in response to heavy 2,4-D and glyphosate use, just as they did in response to glyphosate alone.

According to Dow, this is unlikely, both because 2,4-D resistance is a relatively difficult trait for plants to acquire and because the company is committed to promoting growing practices—such as crop rotations and non-chemical weed control measures—that reduce selection pressures favoring herbicide-tolerant weeds.

Yet tolerance to 2,4-D has already been documented in several weed species that have elsewhere become glyphosate-resistant superweeds, including waterhempand horseweed. Particularly troubling, said Maxwell, is the existence of mutations that confer broad-spectrum herbicide tolerance. These could spread through weed populations much more rapidly than constellations of several mutations, each conferring a piecemeal defense.

Weeds that can survive doses of multiple herbicides have already been found—not 2,4-D and glyphosate, at least not yet, but the potential is clearly there. “Stacking up tolerance traits may delay the appearance of resistant weeds, but probably not for long,” concluded a recent Nature editorial, which also argued that real-world practicalities may preclude good intentions.

“A farmer making good money in the age of biofuel crop subsidies may be loath to switch to a different crop,” wrote Nature‘s editors. “And farmers may be hesitant to invest the money needed to properly manage weeds, when their farms could end up infested with weeds from less-assiduous neighbours.”

Herbicide resistance expert Pat Tranel of the University of Illinois said that multiple herbicide-resistant crops like Enlist could be useful tools for farmers, “but we’re concerned that, as with any new tool, it will be overused.”

Ideally, said Tranel, “we’d be using herbicides as part of a system, and using other strategies such as crop rotation and more-diversified cropping.” Indeed, research by Tranel’s colleague Adam Davis has demonstrated the industrial-scale potentialof such a balanced approach. But for now, said Tranel, “that’s not perceived as an economic alternative.”

The EPA’s draft assessment does not require farmers to rotate Enlist and non-Enlist crops. Instead, responsibility for slowing the rise of future superweeds is given largely to Dow. Farmers will be asked to scout their fields, reporting signs of Enlist-resistant weeds to Dow, which will investigate and decide whether to notify the EPA.

That raises obvious conflict-of-interest concerns, said Freese, citing as precedent Monsanto’s poor track record in monitoring the evolution of rootworm tolerance to genetically-engineered Bt corn. That was ultimately verified by independent academic researchers, not industry investigators. And even if Dow’s monitoring system is thorough, it may be insufficient.

“You can have the best surveillance system in the world, and the numbers are going to get you,” said Maxwell. “Resistance is going to be there. It will escape notice. And once it occurs at even a low, recognizable level, it’s going to continue to be there.”

Should that happen, the next logical step—at least from a commercial perspective—is to develop crops resistant to even more herbicides. Another of Dow’s soybean varieties, now being reviewed by the USDA, tolerates three herbicides; also in the regulatory pipeline are multiple herbicide-resistant crops from Monsanto and Syngenta, as well as crops that tolerate both herbicides and pesticides.

Freese pointed one of Dow’s patents, for a mechanism that would allow up to nine types of herbicide resistance to be engineered into a single plant. A patent claim is no guarantee that a technology will be used, but it may be an apt symbol for the near future of agricultural biotechnology.

“In the end, we’re going to render most of our chemical solutions obsolete,” said Maxwell. “In the meantime, unfortunately, we’re going to do some damage.”

Vermont is a cool place and it’s getting cooler. The Green Mountain State passed a “universal recycling law” (Act 148) that has a number of progressive provisions including mandatory composting. Starting this summer, enterprises that generate two tons or more of food scraps per week – e.g., grocery stores, restaurants and food producers – must divert them from landfills. Because the law is being phased in over several years, residents have until 2020 to comply. After that, food scraps and yard debris (i.e.,leaves and wood scraps) will be banned from landfills.

If this sounds a bit draconian, consider this: according to the EPA, food waste accounts for 14.5 percent of municipal solid waste. Add yard trimmings and you reach 28 percent of America’s waste stream. Add wood and paper to the equation, and the amount of biodegradable material headed to the landfill reaches a whopping 62 percent. You might ask, “If it’s biodegradable, then what’s the problem?” The problem is that all of this material unnecessarily ending up in landfills harms the earth’s delicate climate system, which affects us all. 

Let's look at the difference between what happens in a landfill and in a compost facility: When the remains of your “soup ‘n salad” is tossed in the trash it heads for the landfill. once in the landfill, it is packed so tightly that oxygen cannot aid decomposition. Instead, the food scraps release methane, a potent greenhouse gas with 21 times the global warming potential of CO2. When, however, those same soup ‘n salad scraps are tossed in the compost bin, oxygen enters the picture. Oxygen allows the food scraps to become food for other creatures, including hardworking soil microbes that miraculously turn those soggy scraps into a valuable soil amendment known as compost. Applying compost to soil enables it to become rich and healthy for your plants, and better able to store atmospheric carbon.

While it is best to avoid wasting food in the first place, none of us are perfect, and some amount of food waste is inevitable. Fortunately, more and more states are waking up to the fact that food waste is a moral problem and a climate problem, as well as a tremendous opportunity to take a significant slice out of our methane emissions. But, to follow Vermont’s bold lead will take investments in not only infrastructure, but education campaigns, and changes in policy.

In terms of education, everyone can learn from school children in New York, where school composting kicked off two years ago and 25 percent of public schools are already participating. Not only is a new generation participating in the circle of life, the Big Apple is saving from $10 to $50 dollars per ton in fees at the dump.  New York's goal is to move to 100 percent participation. 

Meanwhile, on the policy front, San Francisco has already set the gold standard for municipalities. The City by the Bay has been requiring residents and businesses to separate and recycle food waste since 2009 and with an 80 percent landfill diversion rate, has set a North American record for recycling and composting! Each summer, Center for Food Safety has law students from around the country clerking at our San Francisco offices, and learning the simple office composting protocol is part of their orientation. Even though these students are committed food activists, office composting in the city is often a novel experience. But it’s one that makes sense – once you get used to composting at home, it is just as easy to exercise these skills at the office. 

How do city residents feel about universal composting? According to San Francisco resident Gina Riggs, "composting is great because it makes your garbage less smelly, and it makes you feel good to know that you are doing something with environmental benefits right in your home." We agree: composting is an integral and satisfying part of a climate-smart lifestyle. For tips on how to get composting in your home, office or school, check out our “Watch Your Waste” board on Pinterest. once composting becomes second-nature, you’ll be ready to advocate for your school, city and state to join the compost revolution.

So cheers to Vermont, New York, San Francisco and others leading the charge for composting; they've recognized that throwing things "away" comes at a cost. once the rest of the country catches on to the monetary and climate benefits, we may well be on our way to becoming the United States of Compost!