This pandemic has brought into even sharper focus the need for resilient local food and seed systems--and a run on seeds across the county. Cultivate Oregon is partnering with Rogue Seed Keepers to immediately get seeds (and some starts) into the hands of those that need them, especially connecting heirloom seed varieties like the Three Sisters (corns, beans, squash) with indigenous communities in Oregon, and potentially beyond.

However, we are also working to simply connect those in need with the seeds that we have available, which include many other seed varieties.

Cultivate Oregon and Rogue Seed Keepers have officially become a “seed hub” for the Cooperative Gardens Commission and we received our first shipment of seeds to share! We have additional seeds and starts from our connections with Oregon’s seed growing community. Thank you #coopgardens!

However, because of the timing of getting seeds dispersed into communities for *this* growing season, we are looking for emergency funding for Phase I of this work, which includes the purchase of additional small envelopes for seeds that are currently in bulk, larger envelopes for mailing, postage costs, and potentially small stipends for people packaging and transporting the seeds. Even small donations will help! Please donate right now if you can. 

If you're in Oregon and in need of seeds to grow food, or if you would like to volunteer for this project, please contact us here.

Phase II will be working on a seed germination project to determine the viability of large stores of seeds that also will be shared with communities in need. Please stay tuned for more information.

I knew firsthand how calming gardening can be, especially when you’re not dependent on the food for your immediate survival. Time slows down a little, thoughts meander, and a feeling of flow can arrive, even when the land you’re cultivating is a tiny patch in earshot of a bus stop.

But as I searched for seeds to grow beautifully swirled red and white Chioggia beets, fiery peppers and enough basil to start my own pesto company, website after website warned that my vegetative dreams may be delayed.

"It feels like we are selling toilet paper," Mike Dunton, the founder of The Victory Seed Company, a small seed company focused on horticultural biodiversity told me via email. (He was too busy filling orders to come to the phone.)

I’d been searching his company’s website for glass gem corn, a popping corn that originated with Carl Barnes, who was a part-Cherokee farmer in Oklahoma. In recent years, the corn has become internet famous because of its kaleidoscopic jewel-like appearance. My pandemic prep included buying four pounds of standard yellow popping corn; glass gem corn felt like a way of stepping up my game.

But the website cautioned that all buyers were agreeing to abide by “pandemic ordering terms,” and warned that the current shipping backlog was 18 to 24 days.

Clearly, I was not the only person who felt that the best path through the pandemic was to panic-buy a bunch of seeds."

....

Noah Schlager, the conservation program manager of a nonprofit seed seller called Native Seeds/SEARCH, said: “I was talking with a colleague who was saying that a lot of elders lived through the Great Depression, and they remember times like this."

“They’ve been saying, ‘This is the time to be saving these seeds and making sure that we can feed ourselves,’” he added.

The mission of Native Seed Search, a nonprofit, is to promote and conserve the crop biodiversity of the arid American southwest. (Native Seed Search is responsible for bringing attention to glass gem corn.) The company sells seeds to the public, “but our priority is seeds for Indigenous communities,” Mr. Schlager said, pointing out that the Navajo Nation is already suffering because of the new coronavirus.

“They’re oftentimes the last place where real aid, or FEMA support, or anything really gets handed out to people,” he said."

Read Full Article >>

In honor of the International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, Food Tank is highlighting 17 global organizations that promote indigenous food systems. Through research, education, and increased awareness, these organizations focus on encouraging indigenous culture.

These organizations are based across the world and focus on food sovereignty, indigenous nutrition, and protecting traditional agriculture. Some of them are small—operating in a single U.S. state—while others function globally. And many are focused on ways to improve policies or to better share practices.

The First Nations Development Institute recognizes one of the major indigenous food problems in the United States: “Right now only three-tenths of one percent of foundation funding goes to Native causes, while Native Americans represent over two percent of the U.S. population. This disparity is compounded by the fact that the Native population has some of the highest rates of poverty, food insecurity, diet-related illness, and the poorest educational outcomes.” That disparity is not unique to the U.S. and it makes the passing on of indigenous food traditions more important than ever for expanding indigenous food sovereignty.

• African Biodiversity Network
• Alliance for Food Sovereignty in Africa
• the Andean Alliance for Sustainable Development
• Asian Farmers’ Association for Sustainable Rural Development
• Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, the Christensen Fund
• the Cultural Conservancy, Dream of Wild Health
• the European Coordination Via Campesina
• First Nations Development Institute
• Indigenous Food and Agriculture Initiative
• the Muonde Trust
• the Native Women’s Association of Canada
• Seeds of Native Health
• Soils, Food and Healthy Communities
• Traditional Native American Farmers Association
• White Earth Land Recovery Project.

Read Full Article >>

Photo by Etty Fidele on Unsplash

On Thursday, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a global group of scientists convened by the United Nations to study our shifting climate—released a much-anticipated special report on climate change and land. In it, the panel concluded that cutting emissions from major polluters like factories and power plants won’t be enough to keep global warming below two degrees Celsius. Land use and food systems have to change, too. And our current land use practices are making problems worse.

The report found that food production (including post-harvest activities like transportation) accounts for between 21 and 37 percent of greenhouse gas emissions caused by humans.

The scientists emphasize the need to manage land better if we want it to stay productive under increasingly harsh conditions. That means dramatically shifting the way we think about soil health, managing fertilizer inputs, water usage, and handling manure from livestock. They also recommend diversifying cropland, reducing food waste and transitioning to vegetarian or vegan diets.

Read Full Article >>

Photo by Dietmar Reichle on Unsplash

This International Day of the World’s Indigenous Peoples, August 9, is an opportunity to celebrate the ecological and cultural value of indigenous foodways. In 1994, the United Nations General Assembly declared the day to encourage the world to protect and promote the rights of indigenous peoples. Celebrating their cultures means preserving their time-tested farming practices, agricultural knowledge, and traditional crops that can help address global climate change and food insecurity.

Of the roughly 250,000 plant species known to humankind, an estimated 30,000 are edible and approximately 7,000 have at some point been used as food. However, more than 90 percent of crop varieties have disappeared from farmers’ fields during the past 100 years; the varieties left that build our food system are predicted to suffer under climate change. The biodiversity maintained on indigenous peoples’ farms may be the key to building resilient food systems that can withstand changing weather patterns, meet nutritional and cultural needs of communities, and rehabilitate degraded ecosystems.

However, popularizing traditional crops in the international market can produce varying health and income effects for indigenous communities. Protecting indigenous peoples requires sustainably and ethically sourcing these crops from companies with social missions, such as fair trade organizations improving the lives of indigenous farmers.

Food Tank is highlighting 30 historically and agriculturally significant fruits, vegetables, and grains from regions across the globe. These food crops can thrive under a variety of harsh environmental conditions, help to rehabilitate degraded landscapes, and provide farmers and their communities a range of health and environmental benefits.

Read Full Article >>

Photo from Flickr. 

We’re used to thinking of escalating rents as an urban problem, something suffered mostly by the citizens of booming cities. So when city people look out over a farm—whether they see corn stalks, or long rows of fruit bushes, or cattle herds roving across wild grasses—the price of real estate is probably the last thing that’s going to come to mind. But the soil under farmers’ feet has become much more valuable in the past decade. While urban commercial real estate has skyrocketed in places like New York, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C., powerful investors have also sought to turn a profit by investing in the most valuable rural real estate: farmland. It’s a trend that’s driving up costs up for the people who grow our food, and—slowly—it’s started to change the economics of American agriculture.

Think of it this way: If you wanted to buy Iowa farmland in 1970, the average going price was $419 per acre, according to the Iowa State University Farmland Value Survey. By 2016, the price per acre was $7,183—a drop from the 2013 peak of $8,716, but still a colossal increase of 1,600 percent. For comparison, in the same period, the Dow Jones Industrial Average rose less than half as fast, from $2,633 to $21,476. Farmland, the Economist announced in 2014, had outperformed most asset classes for the previous 20 years, delivering average U.S. returns of 12 percent a year with low volatility.

That boom has resulted in more people and companies bidding on American farmland. And not just farmers. Financial investors, too. Institutional investors have long balanced their portfolios by putting part of their money in natural resources—goldmines and coal fields and forests. But farmland, which was largely held by small property owners and difficult for the financial industry to access, was largely off the table. That changed around 2007. In the wake of the stock market collapse, institutional investors were eager to find new places to park money that might prove more robust than the complex financial instruments that collapsed when the housing bubble burst. What they found was a market ready for change. The owners of farms were aging, and many were looking for a way to get cash out of the enterprises they’d built.

And so the real estate investment trusts, pension funds, and investment banks made their move. Today, the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) estimates that at least 30 percent of American farmland is owned by non-operators who lease it out to farmers. And with a median age for the American farmer of about 55, it is anticipated that in the next five years, some 92,000,000 acres will change hands, with much of it passing to investors rather than traditional farmers.

But what about the people—often tenant farmers—who actually work the land being acquired? During the same period that farmland prices started gaining steam, many crop prices have stagnated or fallen. After hitting highs above $8 a bushel in 2012, corn prices today have fallen back to less than $4 a bushel—about what they were ten years ago, in 2007, when farmland prices first started to soar.

It’s a tenuous predicament, growing low-cost food, feed, and fuel (corn-based ethanol) on ever-more-expensive land, and it raises a host of questions. Is this a sustainable situation? What happens to small farmers? And are we looking at a bubble that will burst?

Three big factors have contributed to the rapid increase in the prices paid for farmland—which is usually defined to include grazing land and forests—according to Wendong Zhang, an assistant professor of economics at Iowa State University. (Zhang tracks farmland prices, especially Iowa farmland prices, which are among the best documented in the country.)

First, interest rates, since the financial crash of 2007–2008, have been at historic lows, which tends to drive asset prices up. There has been “phenomenal growth” in the ethanol market, Zhang says, linked to increasing interest in sustainable fuels. Indeed, if you graph ethanol production over the past 20 years, it shows exactly the same explosive growth as land prices. And as exports to China and elsewhere have increased, farm income has risen. “Farm income is the variable to track” in analyzing land prices, Zhang explains.

“Some act as landlords by buying land and leasing it out. Others buy plots of low-value land, such as pastures, and upgrade them to higher-yielding orchards.”

But there’s an additional factor: well-heeled investors are snapping up farmland, driving prices up. Here’s how the Economist explained it:  “Institutional investors such as pension funds see farmland as fertile ground to plough, either doing their own deals or farming them out to specialist funds. Some act as landlords by buying land and leasing it out. Others buy plots of low-value land, such as pastures, and upgrade them to higher-yielding orchards.”

And, says Craig Dobbins, a professor of agricultural economics at Purdue University, “Farmland and other real estate investments are good investments to balance the risk of investments in stocks and bonds. These buyers are sensitive to the expected rate of return that will be received from the purchase of such an investment. If farmland values rise to levels that it does not appear the investment will provide the threshold rate of return, they will not purchase. The location preferences of these buyers are much more flexible than an individual farmer.”

Institutional investors can and do buy land in every region and of every type: cropland in the Corn Belt, rangeland in cattle country, or fruits and nuts in California. Among the big players are TIAA-Cref, BlackDirt, Hancock Agricultural Investment Group, American Farmland Company, AgIS Capital, and Gladstone Land Corporation. There are other institutional investors as well, showing a cross section of financial interests in the relatively stable investment that land represents over time. According to RD Schrader, a real estate broker of farmland based in Colorado, “The number of investors is growing, and because of that, it occurs more often and makes the marketplace more fluid. With the downturn in values now, the institutional investors help keep the land values more stable.”

That sounds great if you want to sell land, as many American farmers, approaching retirement age do. But from the viewpoint of sustainability, there are many disadvantages to consolidating farmland in the hands of financially oriented landlords.

Read Full Article >>

Consumers should consider going organic because pesticides on foods are far more dangerous than was thought, causing damage to the human brain, a major study suggests.

The research, published by the European Parliament, warns of the “very high costs” of current levels of exposure to pesticides - especially for children and pregnant women.

It could result in new limits on pesticide levels or changes to labeling of foodstuffs, under EU laws which require the UK to review its policies by next year.

The landmark study suggests that the damage caused by pesticides across the EU amounts to at least £125bn a year, based on the loss of lifetime income from such damage.

The report warns of increasing evidence that residues from insecticides are damaging the brain, and reducing the IQ of the population. And it raises concerns that the chemicals could also cause cancer and damage to the reproductive system.

The research, commissioned by the European Parliament, is a review of existing scientific evidence about the impact of organic food on human health.

It says previous attempts to assess the impact of pesticides have disregarded too much of the research, raising concerns that regulation of insecticides has been inadequate.

The study was carried out by the parliament’s Scientific Foresight Unit, led by the Swedish University of Agricultural Scientists.

“At least 100 different pesticides are known to cause adverse neurological effects in adults, and all of these substances must therefore be suspected of being capable of damaging developing brains as well,” the report states.

“Such adverse effects are likely to be lasting and one main outcome is cognitive deficits, often expressed in terms of losses of IQ points. The combined evidence suggests that current exposures to certain pesticides in the EU may cost at least € 125 billion per year, as calculated from the loss of lifetime income due to the lower IQs associated with prenatal exposure.”

It goes on to describe the calculation as “almost certainly" an underestimate as it does not consider the possible contribution made by pesticides to conditions such as Parkinson’s disease, diabetes and certain types of cancer.

The researchers recommend limiting exposure to non-organic fruit and vegetables - and say particular care should be taken by pregnant women and children.

Read Full Article >>

We know about open-source software and hardware, but can the concept – decentralized development and open collaboration for the common good – be expanded to address other global challenges? The nonprofit OpenSourceSeeds based in the German town of Marburg has just launched a licensing process for open-source seeds, to create a new repository of genetic material that can be accessed by farmers around the world, in perpetuity.

We spoke with one of the leaders of this initiative, Dr. Johannes Kotschi, to learn more about exactly how the open source model was adapted for seeds, and why this initiative is so important in an era of increasing global concentration of power in the agriculture industry.

Can you tell me a bit about the open-source seeds movement in Germany as well as around the globe? How big is it, is it growing, and who are the members?

Open Source Seeds (OSS) is a newly created organization, and we had our launch on the 26th of April in Berlin. We launched with a tomato called Sunviva. A tomato is quite a good symbol – everybody likes tomatoes, and everyone can grow a tomato. From all over in Germany we got requests from gardeners, plant breeders, from open-source activists for our open source tomato.

We are an offspring of AGRECOL, [which] is about 30 years old and focuses on sustainable and organic agriculture – mainly in the developing world. Within AGRECOL we started working on open source seeds about five years ago – first as a small working group. 

There is a similar initiative in the United States – the Open Source Seeds Initiative, based in Wisconsin – but they are not licensing, they are giving a pledge to varieties. We have different strategies, we, OSS, pursue the legal strategy, and they pursue the ethical strategy, but we are working closely together.

Read Full Article >>

Entomologists call it the windshield phenomenon. "If you talk to people, they have a gut feeling. They remember how insects used to smash on your windscreen," says Wolfgang Wägele, director of the Leibniz Institute for Animal Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. Today, drivers spend less time scraping and scrubbing. "I'm a very data-driven person," says Scott Black, executive director of the Xerces Society for Invertebrate Conservation in Portland, Oregon. "But it is a visceral reaction when you realize you don't see that mess anymore."

Some people argue that cars today are more aerodynamic and therefore less deadly to insects. But Black says his pride and joy as a teenager in Nebraska was his 1969 Ford Mustang Mach 1—with some pretty sleek lines. "I used to have to wash my car all the time. It was always covered with insects." Lately, Martin Sorg, an entomologist here, has seen the opposite: "I drive a Land Rover, with the aerodynamics of a refrigerator, and these days it stays clean."

Though observations about splattered bugs aren't scientific, few reliable data exist on the fate of important insect species. Scientists have tracked alarming declines in domesticated honey bees, monarch butterflies, and lightning bugs. But few have paid attention to the moths, hover flies, beetles, and countless other insects that buzz and flitter through the warm months. "We have a pretty good track record of ignoring most noncharismatic species," which most insects are, says Joe Nocera, an ecologist at the University of New Brunswick in Canada.

Of the scant records that do exist, many come from amateur naturalists, whether butterfly collectors or bird watchers. Now, a new set of long-term data is coming to light, this time from a dedicated group of mostly amateur entomologists who have tracked insect abundance at more than 100 nature reserves in western Europe since the 1980s.

Over that time the group, the Krefeld Entomological Society, has seen the yearly insect catches fluctuate, as expected. But in 2013 they spotted something alarming. When they returned to one of their earliest trapping sites from 1989, the total mass of their catch had fallen by nearly 80%. Perhaps it was a particularly bad year, they thought, so they set up the traps again in 2014. The numbers were just as low. Through more direct comparisons, the group—which had preserved thousands of samples over 3 decades—found dramatic declines across more than a dozen other sites.

Such losses reverberate up the food chain. "If you're an insect-eating bird living in that area, four-fifths of your food is gone in the last quarter-century, which is staggering," says Dave Goulson, an ecologist at the University of Sussex in the United Kingdom, who is working with the Krefeld group to analyze and publish some of the data. "One almost hopes that it's not representative—that it's some strange artifact."

No one knows how broadly representative the data are of trends elsewhere. But the specificity of the observations offers a unique window into the state of some of the planet's less appreciated species. Germany's "Red List" of endangered insects doesn't look alarming at first glance, says Sorg, who curates the Krefeld society's extensive collection of insect specimens. Few species are listed as extinct because they are still found in one or two sites. But that obscures the fact that many have disappeared from large areas where they were once common. Across Germany, only three bumble bee species have vanished, but the Krefeld region has lost more than half the two dozen bumble bee species that society members documented early in the 20th century.

Read Full Article >>