Farming

Yakama Nation Acquires Inaba Produce Farms

November 2, 2021 Indian Country Today. Create! Farming, Food Sovereignty, Indigenous Rights, Yakama

On Monday, November 1, 2021, the Confederated Tribes and Bands of the Yakama Nation (“Yakama Nation”), acting through its agricultural enterprise Yakama Nation Farms, purchased Inaba Produce Farms, Inc. from the Inaba family. “When the Inaba family began farming here on the Yakama Reservation in the early 1900’s, Yakama tribal members supported their efforts, leasing land to them when the laws of the United States did not permit Japanese immigrants to be landowners. Today, the Inaba family honors our historic relationship by selling Inaba Produce Farms to the Yakama Nation to support our sovereignty and food security,” said Virgil Lewis, Sr., the Yakama Tribal Council Vice Chairman and Yakama Nation Farms Board Chair.

Farmer Co-Ops Are Giving Latinx Communities Room To Grow

July 28, 2021 Victoria Bouloubasis, Civil Eats. Create! Community organizing, Farming, Latinx, North Carolina

On Sundays, Edith Alas Ortega travels 20 minutes from her home to a farm field in Henderson County, North Carolina, and takes a deep breath. “There’s a mental and physical healing that happens out here,” she said in Spanish. Ortega is one of five members of Tierra Fértil Coop—“fertile ground” in English—an agricultural, worker-owned cooperative for and by Latinx immigrants. The group—three Salvadoran and three Mexican immigrants—meet every week on their one-acre parcel in Hendersonville that provides vegetables for the families involved as well as enough for resale, with a focus on culturally appropriate ingredients for the Latinx market. Ortega marvels at the first strawberries of the season on a recent morning in June—just 40 for now.

Race, Poverty, Farming And A Natural Gas Pipeline

April 28, 2021 Brett Chase, Inside Climate News. Educate! Farming, Gas Pipelines, Illinois, Racism

Five years ago, the mayor of Hopkins Park, a Black, rural community in Kankakee County, Illinois, argued for building an immigration detention center there to boost the economy. The people who lived there said: No, thanks. Mayor Mark Hodge now has another idea for new development in his town and the surrounding, historic farming community of Pembroke Township, south of Chicago. He’s backing a proposal for a pipeline, built by the utility Nicor, that would run through the area and, he hopes, bring with it natural gas and a boost to taxes and the local economy. And again, some residents are not pleased. “People here love the earth,” said Dr. Jifunza Wright-Carter, who farms 45 acres with her husband in Pembroke Township and promotes sustainable agriculture.

For Small Farms Surviving The Pandemic, Co-ops Are A Lifeline

April 28, 2021 Lisa Held, Civil Eats. Create! Cooperatives, Farming, New Economy, Pandemic

Ian Colburn, Zoey Fink, and Casey Holland all operate small, diversified farms in the Albuquerque, New Mexico area. The farmers already had plants in the ground in March when they realized restaurants and farmers’ markets—two of their biggest sales channels—would likely shut down due to the pandemic. Colburn of Solarpunk Farm worried his acreage was too small to support a robust Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) program and that he hadn’t planned for the kind of crop diversity that model demanded. Fink works part-time at Farm Shark Farm with her husband. They already had a CSA but didn’t think they could increase membership enough on their own to sell the rest of the vegetables. “It was a scary time,” she said. “We thought: if we work together, we can be scaling up and serving 100 families per week.”

Pasture Cropping – The Innovative No-Kill, No-Till System

March 21, 2021 Andre Leu, Regeneration International. Create! Carbon sequestration, Farming, Pasture Cropping, Regenerative Farming

Regenerative agriculture is a global farming revolution with rapid uptake and interest around the world. Five years ago hardly anyone had heard about it. It is in the news nearly everyday now. This agricultural revolution has been led by innovative farmers rather than scientists, researchers and governments. It is being applied to all agricultural sectors including cropping, grazing and perennial horticulture. In previous articles we have described how regenerative agriculture maximizes the photosynthesis of plants to capture carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to increase soil organic matter. Soil organic matter is a good proxy for soil health, as it is important for improving fertility and water capture in soils, thus improving productivity and profitability in farming.

Add Atmospheric Drying To Climate Change Toll

March 14, 2021 Max Martin, Toronto Star. Educate! climate crisis, Farming, Food and Agriculture

Drier air brought on by climate change could put a dent in crop yields, triggering smaller and slower-growing plants, a new study says. “Globally, the atmosphere is drying as the climate warms up,” said Danielle Way, an associate professor of biology at Western University. “That’s been correlated with reduced crop yield.” Because air wants to hold as much water as possible, it starts to pull moisture from plants as its dries, with potentially devastating impacts on crops and vegetation. Way, working with researchers at the University of Minnesota, studied 50 years of data and 112 plant species, including wheat, corn and birch trees, to assess how they’re affected by drier air. The recently published findings show plants react to atmospheric drying — even if they don’t lack water in the soil — by triggering a drought-like response, growing smaller, shorter and slower.

How ‘Big Ag’ Ate Up America’s Small Farms

March 8, 2021 Bedabrata Pain, Times of India. Educate! Big Ag, Farming, Ronald Reagan, United States

The roads were icy and the wind biting cold as we started our 10,000-km journey through the heart of America one January morning. Sristy Agrawal, Rajashik Tarafder — young physicists pursuing their PhDs — Rumela Gangopadhyay, a theatre artiste, and I wanted to witness the state of farming in rural America, the quintessential “Trump country”. Shooting in the frigid weather amid a pandemic was gruelling, but the warm welcome we got from farmers — Republican or Democrat, black or white — made up for it. We were surprised to learn that the American farm landscape, like India’s, is dominated by small farmers. They make up 90% of all farms, but produce only 25% of the market value. This was our first clue to America’s rural crisis. In the last decade, income of small farms has consistently been in the red.

Train A Woman To Farm, And The Community Will Eat

September 26, 2020 Rita Otu, Organic Without Boundaries. Create! Farming, Food and Agriculture, Organic, Women

There is no shame in farming, there is only shame in biting the hand that feeds you. Farmers for a long time have been looked down upon and yet they are an essential group. Constantly working hard to provide food to sustain life on earth. Women farmers especially in my community have been ignored and their concerns dismissed. I did not like this attitude and wanted to change it. It was not until I ventured more into organic farming that I became more respectful of nature, but also myself and those around me.

Why The United States Is Criminally Attacking Venezuela’s Gasoline Supply

July 9, 2020 La Iguana, Orinoco Tribune. Educate! Farming, Oil and Gas, Sanctions, Venezuela

According to a report issued by the United States Department of Agriculture, the US government is attacking the gasoline supply to Venezuelan aiming at its agricultural sector and so attacking food production, which would lead to the total collapse of the Venezuelan population under the guise of illegal sanctions. In the report, written on April 5 of this year, analyzed by the agricultural engineer Clara Sánchez and quoted by the investigative website “La Tabla”, the US predicts a serious decrease in Venezuelan production of most of the basic food items, shortage of agricultural inputs, quality seeds, fertilizers and an inability to grant credits. “Without fuel you can not make the tractors work,” she wrote.

Colombian Farmers Continue Push Against Mining, For Peace

March 11, 2020 Sandra Cuffie, Towardfreedom.org Resist! Colombia, Farming, Mining

“What we have has cost us a lot of sweat,” said Ariel Velásquez, as an iridescent green hummingbird flitted between the flowers outside his home in search of nectar. “We don’t want mining in our territory.” A 36-year-old farmer, Velásquez lives at the very edge of Vereda La Soledad, a coffee and plantain farming community in the municipality of Jericó, in southwestern Antioquia, Colombia.

Three Steps For Building A Million-Person Food Citizen Force

December 15, 2019 Anthony Flaccavento, Organic Consumers Association. Organize! climate crisis, Farming, Food and Agriculture

Americans cherish the “family farm.” Most are also happy to be able to buy local foods at farmers markets, grocers or their favorite restaurants. In the marketplace, consumers are sending the message that they want more sustainable and organic food, sales of which exceeded $50 billion last year. And the vast majority of people in our nation believe that climate change is real, and that urgent action needs to be taken. While there is some variability depending upon one’s political affiliation, Democrats and Republicans alike hold these views. If this is what we collectively believe, across party, then surely our politics and public policies support these priorities, right? Well, not so much.

How One Boston Hospital Is Feeding Patients Through Its Rooftop Farm

September 12, 2019 Lindsay Campbell, Modernfarmer.com Create! Boston, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Health Care

Carrie Golden believes the only reason she’s diabetes free is that she has access to fresh, locally grown food. A few years after the Boston resident was diagnosed with prediabetes, she was referred to Boston Medical Center’s Preventative Food Pantry as someone who was food insecure. The food pantry is a free food resource for low-income patients. “You become diabetic because when you don’t have good food to eat, you eat whatever you can to survive,” Golden says. “Because of the healthy food I get from the pantry… I’ve learned how to eat.”

Regenerating The Human Story

August 17, 2019 By Tracy L. Barnett, Esperanzaproject.com Create! Farming, Organic

San Miguel de Allende, Mexico — Like so many other children of Mexican farm families, Azucena Cabrera’s father moved to the city to earn a living, becoming an electrician and a plumber to support his family, as farming had become a money-losing enterprise. Like millions of subsistence farmers throughout Mexico and Central America, the Cabreras could no longer eke out a living from the degraded soils and harsh arid climate of the region. Added to the general decline of productivity of the country’s degraded soils, Mexico’s rural agricultural economies have been decimated since the North American Free Trade Agreement by tons of cheap subsidized corn imported from the United States, making traditional agriculture more of a ceremonial ritual than a means of subsistence.

The Average U.S. Farm Is $1,300,000 In Debt, And Now The Worst Farming Crisis In Modern History Is Upon Us

August 16, 2019 By Michael Snyder, Endoftheamericandream.com Educate! Debt, Farming

We haven’t seen anything like this since the Great Depression of the 1930s. Leading up to this year, farm incomes had been trending lower for most of the past decade, and meanwhile farm debt levels have been absolutely exploding. So U.S. farmers were desperate for a really good year, but instead 2019 has been a total disaster. As I have been carefully documenting, due to endless rain and catastrophic flooding millions of acres of prime farmland didn’t get planted at all this year, and the yields on tens of millions of other acres are expected to be way, way below normal.

100 Years Ago, Farmers And Socialists Established The Country’s First Modern Public Bank

August 3, 2019 By Thomas M. Hanna and Adam Simpson, Inthesetimes.com Create! Farming, New Economy, Public Banks, Socialism

One hundred years ago July 28, a bank in Bismarck, N.D., opened its doors for the very first time. This would have been an unremarkable event, likely lost to history, except for the fact that it was a public bank, owned by all the residents of the state. A century on, the Bank of North Dakota (BND) is still the only publicly owned bank in the continental United States (a second public bank was recently established in American Samoa)—though potentially not for long. The BND is enjoying renewed time in the limelight as activists look to the institution as an example of how to regain democratic control over finance...

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