Category: Potatoes in History

“… the coming multidecadal megadroughts will be much worse than the Dust Bowl of the 1930s — ‘worse than anything seen during the last 2000 years,’ as explained in a major 2014 study, ‘Assessing the risk of persistent drought using climate model simulations and paleoclimate data.’ They will be the kind of megadroughts that in the past destroyed entire civilizations…

“Bottom line: The U.S. Southwest isn’t passively drifting into a drier state — humans are actively pushing it into a drier state.”

http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2016/02/08/3746706/southwest-enters-drier-climate-state/

“These catalogs, many of them beautifully illustrated, are more than just charming – they represent agricultural history. Their pages are littered with lost varieties and clues to how and what we grew in earlier centuries. They’ve always been available to the public, but until being digitized, that meant a trip to the fifth floor of the National Agricultural Library’s building in Beltsville, Maryland, where the originals are stored in an environment carefully controlled to high archival standards.

“Now anyone with Internet access can see them. But if it weren’t for a Mainer born in Brunswick in 1878, this collection might not exist at all.”

http://www.pressherald.com/2016/01/17/find-a-treasure-trove-of-old-maine-seed-catalogs-online/

“’It is absolutely just the most hearty tree,’ he says, looking at the tree like it’s a friend. ‘It’s thrown huge crops every year in the drought. It doesn’t get diseases, it doesn’t get insects. Nobody prunes it, nobody waters it, nobody fertilizes it, and it is just prolific as heck. I’ve picked over 500 pounds of pears off of it.’

“Cantisano says these resilient heirloom trees have lessons for growers in California today, where highly tended crops face drought, pests and disease.

“‘If we can figure out how to take those characteristics and meld them into modern agriculture, we’re going to have a more sustainable agriculture,’ he says.”

“Campbell Soup says it now supports mandatory national labeling for products containing genetically modified ingredients, and that it will stop backing efforts opposing such disclosures.

“The change of heart by the maker of Pepperidge Farm cookies, Prego sauces and Spaghetti-Os marks a break from industry groups that have sought to make labeling voluntary…

“The change in position by Campbell comes amid dimming prospects for industry-backed legislation that would prevent states from requiring GMO labeling.

“Last month, the industry made an aggressive push to add the federal legislation to a massive year-end spending bill in December, but failed to win enough support. That may have been its best bet before Vermont’s law is enacted, although lawmakers say they will keep trying in the coming months.”

http://www.pressherald.com/2016/01/08/campbell-soup-now-supports-federal-gmo-labeling/

“Anyone who has followed the growth of organic products for the garden knows that the products popularity were established early in some regions, while others were slow to adopt them…

“The Northeast, one of the early adopters of organic products, reports a much different experience than the Midwest’s. Those reporting increased sales are almost 10 percentage points above the Midwest.”

http://www.greenhousegrower.com/retailing/organic-controls-sales-have-caught-up-with-traditional-pesticides-garden-retailers-report/

“Naafs and his research team showed that previous environmental change events that occurred naturally happened potentially a ‘thousand times slower than today.’

http://www.weather.com/science/environment/news/environmental-change-unprecedented?cm_ven=T_SCI_AN_10916_18

“So it’s vital for the public to identify the latest corporate shenanigans using deception and black hat PR to deceive public officials for financial gain.

“These would be the giants of the industrial agriculture industry, including Monsanto, Dow, DuPont, Syngenta, Bayer, McDonald’s and the entire synthetic fertilizer industry—the corporations that have undercounted and misrepresented America’s agricultural greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions…

“It’s plain to see why Monsanto and friends, via their high-level political appointees, influenced the U.S. and United Nations delegates at COP21. They eliminated agriculture and soils from the COP21 agenda and thus the final agreement—despite overwhelming evidence that soil sequestration (carbon farming) is the number one solution to stop the rise of CO2.

“’I am stunned,’ said Andre Leu, president of IFOAM Organics International, the world’s leading organic farmers and producers association, based in Bonn, Germany. ‘This is a game changer, because soil carbon is now central to how the world manages climate change. After all the years of advocating for this at UN Climate Change meetings and being the lone voice in the wilderness, it has taken off so quickly and now is global, with numerous countries and key institutions supporting it. However this is true of all tipping points.'”

https://ecowatch.com/2015/12/17/fraudulent-science-cop21/

“‘This is really just a matter of listening to and being responsive to what consumers want us to put into their products,’ he said.

“Minnesota is the top sugar beet producer in the nation, followed by Idaho and North Dakota, and industry officials would not disclose how much of their sugar is sold to candy companies. About 55 percent of domestic U.S. sugar is produced from sugar beets, and nearly 100 percent of the beet seeds are genetically modified to tolerate the herbicide glyphosate, the active ingredient in Roundup.”

http://www.startribune.com/hershey-dumps-sugar-beets-because-of-gm-concerns/363498311/

“… part of what happened in Cuba was that in the mid-’80s Cuba had a highly mechanized and industrialized agriculture system. They had more tractors per capita than any country in Latin America, and they were investing a lot of money into national food production. But nonetheless, they were still importing 57 percent of the calories eaten on the island from the Soviet Union and Soviet bloc countries. So, when the Soviet Union fell apart, Cuba lost those imports immediately, within a two-, three-year period, along with a 34, 35 percent contraction of their GDP. It launched Cuba into a major economic crisis, and that was a food and agriculture crisis, as well, in a central way, because of the loss of the direct food imports and also the loss of the many other imports into the agriculture sector upon which national food production had become dependent—again, pesticides, fertilizers, petroleum, tractor spare parts, spare parts for other kind of agriculture machinery. So, they were faced with the daunting task of needing to greatly increase food production with a fraction of the resources available.

“Immediately, city residents—in particular, Havana has two million of the 11 million people on the island, live in Havana, largest city in the Caribbean—Havana residents started going out and growing food on empty lots that were close to their homes, using any seeds they could find, with any tools that were available, and literally on any space that was near their homes, including some in their homes—patios, balconies, rooftops.”

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/2/organic_farming_flourishes_in_cuba_but