MLT NEWSLETTER
SPRING 2014
Cultivating
Resilient Communities
MLT Board of Directors:
|
Rita Bober
Norm Bober
Ken Dahlberg, Chairperson
Maynard Kaufman
Ron Klein
Suzanne Klein
Michael Kruk
|
Jim Laatsch
Lisa Phillips, Treasurer
Michael Phillips
Thom Phillips, Managing Director
Jan Ryan, Secretary
Jon Towne, Newsletter Editor
Dennis Wilcox |
CARBON SEQUESTRATION, NATURALLY
Maynard Kaufman
It is time for the conversation about climate change to shift from
problems to solutions. For too long we have learned how serious
this problem is, how it contributes to the loss of biodiversity or
even, some assert, to the extinction of human life on
earth. The net result of this focus on the problem of
climate change is that people have become hopeless and fatalistic while
carbon emissions continue to rise. Many people can recognize the
scientific truth about climate change on an intellectual level and
still deny it on an emotional level because it is too
overwhelming. Such split consciousness leads to confusion and
paralysis.
The solution to climate change is to reduce carbon emissions and to get
the excess carbon dioxide out of the air. Part of this task
is political; we need policies, such as a tax on carbon, that could
curtail the burning of fossil fuels, which causes most of global
warming. Even this is daunting at a time when large energy
corporations seem to control policies. But much carbon dioxide
also escaped from the soil because of deforestation and agricultural
practices. Can this carbon dioxide be sequestered back into the
soil and stored in plants? This is the question explored in this
paper.
It is possible to sequester carbon in natural ways that are beneficial
to life on the planet. Once we understand this we can move from
hopelessness to hopefulness. This is especially true if many of
us can actually participate in solutions to global warming.
Rising prices for energy and food are already pressuring social changes
as new attitudes about food raising emerge. Unused land in many
cities opens possibilities for urban gardening, and rising unemployment
opens the need and time to do so.
Also evident is new interest in a back-to-the-land movement motivated
by rising food prices. In view of such trends, this paper
disagrees with many writers about climate change who simply assume that
our future will be shaped by business as usual with increasing
emissions of carbon dioxide.
It will be helpful, as we look at ways to sequester carbon dioxide, to
have a clear understanding of how it is emitted. The burning of
fossil fuels has already been mentioned, and it is certainly a major
factor. Deforestation is also mentioned as a cause of
global warming along with agricultural practices such as plowing.
The amounts here are much more difficult to quantify than carbon
emissions from burning fossil fuels, and where hard data is not
available some scientific writers seem to avoid the issue. This would
be a serious error, because if we fail to see that carbon is in soil,
how it escaped from the soil, and how it could be sequestered back into
the soil, we miss an important opportunity.
The Value of Organic Farming
Carbon exists in the soil as organic matter. When tillage exposes
it to air it oxidizes and escapes as carbon dioxide. The
pioneers plowed the prairie of perennial grass to plant the annual
grasses we know as grains, such as wheat or corn. These are great
for food production because annuals put their energy into seeds instead
of into roots as perennials do. Those pioneers were part of a
process, begun with the origins of plowing hundreds of years ago, in
which large amounts of carbon dioxide escaped as the prairie lost its
organic matter and fertility. We speak of this process as the
loss of topsoil, and water and wind erosion contributed to it, but it
is more specifically the loss of organic matter that destroyed soil
fertility and contributed to carbon emissions.
This early agricultural regime was clearly not sustainable and it soon
had to be subsidized with chemical fertilizers, especially for
nitrogen. This was made available after World War II with
anhydrous ammonia, after it was no longer used to manufacture
explosives. Fertility in the soil that was lost through bad
agricultural practices was now replaced by chemical
fertilizers. These could make plants grow but they also
destroyed more of the biological life that had earlier liberated
nutrients for plants. The result was the release of more carbon
dioxide and methane. Other fertilizers, treated with acid to make
them water soluble, were soon added to supply plants with
phosphorus and potassium, and they added to the destruction of
earthworms and other microbial life in the soil.
These artificial or chemical fertilizers produced plants that were more
vulnerable to insect pests. Monocultures, large fields of
the same crop, added to this vulnerability. This led to the
“need” for pesticides which, when dumped on farmland, continued to kill
off any remaining micro-organisms in the soil. Organically-grown
plants are less attractive to insects and organic growers do not use
chemical pesticides. When they notice damage from insects
they seek to understand why and employ more knowledge-intensive
management strategies. Organic farmers and soil scientists have
long criticized chemical farming for destroying life in the soil and
they have developed the adage: “feed the soil, not the plant.”
Organic farming is so called because it seeks to maximize organic
matter (i. e., carbon) in the soil to develop humus.
This happens naturally in photosynthesis as solar power uses carbon
dioxide in the air to make plants grow and provides oxygen in the
process. As the plants decompose and their organic matter
is worked into the soil, some carbon is sequestered. But this
requires a living soil, in which the soil micro-organisms and larger
organisms, such as earthworms, have not been diminished by
chemicals.
Most of the details in the preceding paragraphs were based on my many
years of experience as a part-time organic farmer who was also an
Environmental Studies professor trying to understand what he
was doing. The emphasis on organic matter in the soil (carbon),
and its loss after hundreds of years of plowing, has also been reviewed
by Albert Bates in The Biochar Revolution: Carbon Farming and Climate Change.
He reports that soil scientist Rattan Lal at Ohio State University
found that, with better carbon management practices, soils in the
continental US could soak up 330 million tons of carbon each year, more
than the emissions from cars, and improve food production by 12%.
Several books on the details of carbon offsets have been published
recently. One that supports carbon sequestration in soils and
forests is Harnessing Farms and Forests in the Low-Carbon Economy: How to Create, Measure, and Verify Greenhouse Gas Offsets
and it was edited by Zach Willey and Bill Chameides. This book
was intended to help those whose business causes carbon emissions to
purchase carbon credits or offsets from land owners who can sequester
carbon. Some trading like this already happens in other
countries. If a “cap and trade” program is mandated in this
country a book like this will be indispensable.
Specific programs to increase the amount of carbon stored in soil
include better tillage methods which avoid plowing, increasing carbon
inputs from crop residue, switching from annual crops to
perennial plants, and reducing the use of nitrogen fertilizer.
Programs to increase the amount of carbon stored in trees, which are
said to be the most common and most productive, include establishing
new trees, allowing existing trees to grow larger, increasing the
carbon in wood products, and decreasing the loss of carbon stored in
trees. All these programs reinforce the idea that carbon can be
sequestered in soil and plants, and some of the programs would
implicitly support organic methods.
A paradigm shift to organic farming is needed in agricultural
science. However, while the United States Department of
Agriculture tolerates organic farming, and regulates organic produce,
neither it nor state agricultural schools and their extension services
have given up the chemical paradigm of conventional
agriculture. Given the political power of agroindustrial
corporations, this is not likely to happen soon, but it is
beginning. Michigan State University scientists at the Long
Term Ecological Research site at the Kellogg Biological Station found
that conventional row crop farming emitted about as much carbon dioxide
as organic row crop farming sequestered, while unmanaged ecosystems on
abandoned farmland in the early stages of succession toward trees
sequestered about four times more carbon dioxide than organic
farming. This could lend support to tree crops for carbon
sequestration.
The Needed Transition to Tree Crops
Wes Jackson, who is developing perennial prairie plants to produce
grains at the Land Institute in Kansas, has argued that the best
agriculture in any region is the one that best mimics the region's
natural ecosystems. In the eastern part of the United States this
would be forests of various kinds, and my local Conservation District,
in urging people to plant more trees, claimed that an acre of trees
removes 2.6 tons of carbon dioxide each year from the air. These
trees can be food producing, as J. Russell Smith explained in his
important book of 1929, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture.
Smith's book was largely ignored for nearly fifty years until his
argument was resurrected in new ways by Bill Mollison and David
Holmgren as permaculture. This is a rapidly growing movement
which, although it had been focused on household food production, is
now expanding beyond that. A new book by Mark Shepard called “Restoration Agriculture: Real World Permaculture for Farmers,”
demonstrates a larger project of tree crops on his 106 acre farm in
Wisconsin. Permaculture generally emphasizes the revitalization
of life in the soil by building organic matter.
The new argument for tree crops is emerging in the context of a
changing climate. As they replace the energy-intensive annual
food crops, tree crops, with their deeper roots, can withstand droughts
and violent rainstorms which would otherwise cause loss of
organic matter from soil. They can slow the process of climate
change as they store more carbon, and thrive with virtually no tillage.
In the longer term, when trees mature and need replacement, they can be
burned with limited oxygen (pyrolysis) and turned into charcoal,
so-called biochar, and worked into soil for permanent
sequestration. I have patches of dark soil on my farm where fruit
trees were gathered and burned years ago and they remain more
fertile. Carbon sequestration in biochar or in tree crops is largely
ignored by scientists who seek one total technological solution to
climate change. This is easily seen by googling “carbon
sequestration.” Many large scale, expensive, and risky
geoengineering projects have been proposed. They are
reviewed by James Roger Fleming in Fixing the Sky: The Checkered History of Weather and Climate Control.
The final chapter in the book is devoted to the many proposals to “fix”
the climate and their technological hubris is alarming. We should
worry that some may eventually be tried if the many small-scale and
natural possibilities that could sequester carbon are not put into
practice.
Unfortunately, those sequestration strategies that are
beneficial, safe, and natural are ignored because they might not do the
job by themselves. But as they reduce emissions and slow global
warming they provide the time needed to phase out fossil fuels.
We must insist that better farming methods and more tree crops should
be promoted to sequester carbon dioxide and used as other safe and cost
effective methods evolve. It would be foolish to sequester carbon in
ways that do not simultaneously improve the soil. Soils can be
made more productive even as they sequester carbon in humus. This
is done by building up organic matter in the soil. More
productive soils will be needed in a future with more mouths to
feed under the constraints of global warming. A new book by
Kristin Ohlson asserts this in its title: The Soil Will Save Us.
The author reviews many initiatives and experiments in which people are
building organic matter by feeding soil micro-organisms.
Above all, we need to be open to the social changes that are
serendipitously pressured by higher energy prices and thus reduce
carbon emissions: more local food systems, more small farms and
homesteads, more people active in Transition Towns, and more tree
planting that gives people a stake in the fight against climate
change. Here it is the people who will lead in the changes that
are necessary. They should be helped with appropriate
governmental polices and assistance.
Bibliography
Bates, Albert, The Biochar Solution: Carbon farming and Climate Change. New Society Publishers, 2010.
Broecker, Wallace and Robert Kunzig, Fixing Climate. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.
Fleming, James Roger, Fixing the Sky: The checkered history of weather and climate control. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010.
Hamilton, Clive, Earthmasters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.
Hamilton, Clive, Requiem for a Species. London: Earthscan, 2010.
Hamilton, S. K., J. E. Doll, and G. P. Robertson, editors, The Ecology of Agricultural Ecosystems: Long-term research on the path to sustainability. New York: Oxford University Press, in press.
Hertsgaard, Mark, Hot. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcolurt, 2011.
Lal, Rattan and Ronald F. Follett, editors, Soil Carbon Sequestration and the Greenhouse Effect.
Madison: Soil Science Society of America, 2009.
Lal, R., J. M Kimble, R. R. Follet, and C.V. Cole, The Potential of U. S. Cropland to Sequester Carbon
and Mitigate the Greenhouse Effect. Boca Raton: Lewis Publishers, 1999.
Lehmann, Johannes and Stephen Joseph, Biochar for Environmental Management. London: Earthscan, 2009.
Ruddiman, William F., Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Scherr, Sara, and Sajal Sthapit, “Farming and Land Use to Cool the Planet, in State of the World, 2009
(Washington, DC: Worldwatch Institute, 2009).
Shepard, Mark, Restoration Agriculture: Real world permaculture for farmers. Austin, TX: Acres, USA, 2013.
Smith, J. Russell, Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture. New York: Devin Adair, 1950.
Willey, Sack and Bill Chameides, Harnessing Farms and Forests in the Low Carbon Economy: How
to create, measure, and verify greenhouse gas offsets.
Yeomans, Allen, Priority One: Together we can beat global warming. Australia: Keyline Publishing Company, 2005.
TACKLING
TOMATO LEAF SPOT
Jan
Ryan
One of my biggest
challenges in the garden has been battling leaf spot diseases of
tomato. From discussions with other gardeners (and snooping around
the neighborhood) I know I’m not alone. Michigan’s climate is a
big contributor to this problem. This week there is talk of the
potential for late blight in tomato and potato crops due to the
recent cool and wet weather conditions.
In 2009 there was an
outbreak of late blight, which is caused by the fungus-like organism
Phytopthora infestans. Commercial growers and home gardeners alike
were hard hit in many states, including Michigan. The outbreak was a
hot topic in academic and grower circles partly because it was a new
strain, but also because late blight is so highly contagious and
devastating: it can wipe out crops in a matter of days. This is the
same organism responsible for crop failures during the Irish potato
famine, where a million people starved and as many were forced to
emigrate to survive.
Since the 2009 outbreak
of late blight, a lot of work has gone into providing education for
home gardeners and farmers on early detection and prevention. Last
year I participated in an excellent webinar through eOrganic – a
wonderful online resource supporting research and education on
organic growing (see http://eorganic.info/). The webinar was hosted
by five pathologists from around the country - all women! While much
of the discussion focused on late blight, many suggestions were
relevant to other common leaf spot diseases, like Septoria, the one I
see most often in home gardens.
Sanitation is an
important tool for managing all kinds of garden pests. For late
blight, the recommendation is to remove all overwintering nightshade
plants in the area, including weeds, volunteer tomato seedlings and
potato tubers that were missed during harvest. These sources are the
only way the disease survives Michigan winters. Other cultural
methods include providing adequate ventilation for plants through
spacing and removal of lower leaves. Using drip irrigation and
avoiding overhead watering helps to minimize the spread of pathogens.
Starting with clean transplants is essential.
Host plant resistance
is another useful tool. It appears to be a bit out of fashion these
days with the focus on heirlooms. I understand the appeal of
heirlooms and have so far found a couple tomato varieties with good
disease resistance, namely Rutgers and Ace. But I’ll confess,
after a number of heirloom failures I have also been growing some
hybrid tomatoes specifically bred for disease resistance. According
to one of the pathologists on the webinar, all of these varieties are
the result of traditional plant breeding and crossing with wild
tomato relatives; there are no GMO tomato varieties available at this
time. Check out eOrganic for more information on disease-resistant
varieties.
Besides genetics,
resistance to plant disease can be fostered through the basic organic
principals of building good soil with a healthy micro biota.
Beneficial fungi and bacteria help to suppress pathogens in the soil
and on plant leaves through various and complex means. It is
exciting that these processes are being studied by plant pathologists
and are leading to new products. As a home gardener, I prefer to try
to set the stage for nature to do that work by enriching the soil and
spraying plants with compost tea.
When leaf spot diseases
do show up, early detection is key to getting control. Commercial
organic fungicides seem to be everywhere now. The most ubiquitous
formula I see uses neem oil extract. Though it appears to be pretty
safe overall, and for beneficial organisms in the garden, I am a bit
put off by its broad spectrum (triple action!) claims. I don’t
like using an insecticide and miticide that isn’t needed. Homemade
fungicides are a viable alternative. Baking soda, garlic, oregano
and thyme all have anti-fungal properties with some research to
support their efficacy. I like a recipe in Jeff Cox’s book, 100
Great Garden Ideas. You may be able to Google and find the recipe
online, but I would also recommend the book for its other virtues.
After many years of clogging hand held spray bottles, I have found
straining concoctions through a paper coffee filter helpful.
PRESERVING MEDICINAL PLANTS
Rita Bober
In the late 1990’s when I started studying herbal medicine, I became a
member of a non-profit organization called United Plant Savers (UpS)
started by Rosemary Gladstar, a longtime herbalist. Its mission
is “to conserve and restore native medicinal plants of the United
States and Canada and their native habitats.” Why do we need to
conserve and restore native medicinal plants? When Rosemary moved
to New England from the west, she was pleased to find many of the
famous medicinal herbs that she used in her herbal practice. But
she was also struck by the number of these plants that were no longer
so plentiful, ginseng and goldenseal just to name a couple.
Destruction of habitat, over harvesting for medicines, and harvesting
for financial gain, as well as climate change have affected the wild
medical plants usually found in our hardwood forests.
There is one story told of a field of Echinacea growing on a large
hillside out west – the area was covered by these plants growing in the
wild. The next time, the visitors came, they saw complete
destruction of the hillside – absolutely no Echinacea plants were
left. For years, American Ginseng has been harvested in the woods
of
Appalachia. Today there is a significant decline of ginseng
populations in our National Forests and National Parks due to poaching
and over-harvesting. United Plant Savers has a list of 19 “At
Risk” (at risk now in its natural environment) plants. We can help by starting our own plant preserve on our own land or in our yards.
So what are these plants that are “At Risk?” In the East and Midwest of the United States, they are: American Ginseng (Panax quinquefolius), Black Cohosh (Actaea racemosa), Bloodroot (Sanguinaria canadensis), Blue Cohosh (Caulophyllum thatictroides), Echinacea (Echinacea spp.), Goldenseal (Hydrastic canadensis), Lady’s Slipper Orchid (Cypripedium spp), Slippery Elm (Ulmus rubra), Trillium, Beth Root (Trillium spp.), Virginia Snakeroot (Aristolochia serpentaria), and Wild Yam (Dioscorea villosa, D. spp.). Additionally, UpS considers these plants to be on a “To Watch List”: Arnica (Arnica spp.), Butterfly Weed (Asclepias tuberosa), Gentian (Gentiana spp.) Lobelia (Lobelia spp.), Oregon Grape (Mahonia spp.), Partridge Berry (Mitchella repens), Spikenard (Aralia racemosa),
among other medicinals. What can we do? As “wild
places” disappear, we can still save these plants by organically
cultivating them for present and future generations. UpS has
initiated a number of replanting projects including their “plant
give-aways” where over 50,000 goldenseal roots and several thousand
other at-risk plants were distributed to members to plant on their own
land. These included black cohosh, blue cohosh, bloodroot,
slippery elm, and white oak saplings. UpS encourages caring for
existing wild medicinal plants by spreading their seed within the
habitat and by weeding out non-native species. They also
encourage gardeners to propagate at-risk medicinal plants in their own
backyards, gardens, farms, and privately owned land.
Most of these medicinal plants are challenging to cultivate. They
require very specific germination and growth conditions. Often
they are difficult to start from seed. When uprooted for their
roots that is the end of the plant, and it can take many years to be
replaced in nature, if ever. Several books help us understand the
planting and cultivation of these plants. The book, Planting the
Future: Saving Our Medicinal Herbs
edited by Rosemary Gladstar and Pamela Hirsch, includes articles by
respected herbalists who share their extensive experience in using and
growing thirty-three popular herbs. They also offer suggestions for
creating your own private herbal sanctuary. Growing At-Risk Medicinal Herbs: Cultivation, Conservation and Ecology by Richo Cech and illustrated by Sena Cech helps us
understand the plants life cycle, how to cultivate from seeds, what
ecology it needs (i.e. Black cohosh prefers the partial shade of a
mixed hardwood forest), and its general care among other knowledgeable
information. These were invaluable in helping us start our own
“at-risk” medicinal plants. If you have visited
us, you may have seen our black cohosh, bloodroot, wild yam, and
goldenseal plants growing in the shade of our farm buildings.
UpS has a directory of nurseries that can supply roots and/or
seeds to start “at-risk” medicinal plants. There are more than 20
listed. Contact UpS for more information (website: www.unitedplantsavers.org or email: plants@unitedplantsavers.org. J.L. Hudson, Seedsman (website: www.jlhudsonseeds.net)
has seeds of a wide variety of plants from all over the world.
All are open-pollinated, unpatented, and no GMOs. Richo Cech has
certified organic medicinal herb seeds and plants (website:
www.horizonherbs.com or email: herbseed@horizonherbs.com).
Consider making part of your land a medicinal
sanctuary. Help save our herbal medicine plants to use for
generations to come.
RECENT MLT ACTIVITIES
Ken Dahlberg
We continue our membership in the Michigan Environmental Council,
which is one of the most effective groups addressing state-level
environmental issues - ranging from climate change, energy efficiency,
forest and lake management, to CAFO regulation, etc. We provide
input on issues relevant to our goals.
Good Food Kalamazoo, which your
Chair participates in, is now holding bi-monthly roundtables designed
to encourage networking among the different groups and
organizations that influence greater-Kalamazoo food, health, and hunger
programs and issues.
The Kalamazoo Nature Center is coordinating the Kalamazoo Climate Change Coalition. We are participating in its Food Group.
There has also been a lot of activity by board members in building local transition groups. Rita and Norm Bober
have helped organize a number of activities for the Lawton Transition
group. Recently, they published through a purely volunteer
and no-cost effort a wonderful Local Lawton Area Food & Farm Guide which can be downloaded at: www.locallawton.org/local-food-farm-guide/ Maynard Kaufman continues to be active in TVBA (the Transition Van Buren & Allegan). With MLT support, they have created a very nice brochure.
Mike Phillips updated us on a Federal Emergency Preparedness Coalition
exercise to practice responses to any grave radiation release from the
Palisaides nuclear power plant in South Haven. The exercise
centered on evacuation routing and screening of suspect contaminated
vehicles and people.
Thom Phillips continues to monitor energy efficiency issues for us as well as many others as Green Building Coordinator for Habitat Michigan.
Finally, MLT continues to monitor and sign on to letters to different
state and federal agencies regarding legislation and/or regulations
that support or are contrary to our goals. Some recent examples
include:
*Signing on to a letter to farm bill negotiators
opposing attempts by the US Trade Representative and the meat packer
lobbies to weaken US rules on “Country of Origin Labels” which would go
against our support for locally grown meat.
*We continue to support ongoing efforts by the Farm
and Ranch Freedom Organization (FRF) to get the Food and Drug
Administration to make major changes in their proposed regulations to
implement the Food Safety Modernization Act (FSMA). They have
generally pursued very expensive and rigid “one size required” rules
for all - that size being for big industrial agricultural
producers. An extension for receiving comments until this summer
was granted last December. We will be ready to sign on to changes
aimed at helping the small ranchers and growers that FRF
proposes.
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