Canopy Roads of South Georgia

South Georgia Growing Local Conference, 14 January 2012

Last time some okravores (south Georgia locavores) realized nobody else was going to hold a conference about growing local in the characteristic soils and climate and with the characteristic foods and culture of south Georgia, so okravores met in Tifton and learned about everything from controling insect to which breeds of cows produce the best organic milk. Raven demonstrated you can make cheese in south Georgia and Gretchen demonstrated preserving beautyberry and other jams and jellies, along with many other interesting talks and demonstrations, and good food. The South Georgia Growing Local Conference is back, this time near Reidsville, in January.

When:

Saturday, Jan. 14, 2012, 9-5

Where:

UGA's Vidalia Onion & Vegetable Research Center, between Lyons & Reidsville, Ga. & Red Earth Farm, Reidsville

What:

Organic farming as productive as pesticiding (proven yet again)

Rodale Institute has been running a side-by-side comparison of organic and chemical agriculture since 1981. They report:

After an initial decline in yields during the first few years of transition, the organic system soon rebounded to match or surpass the conventional system. Over time, FST became a comparison between the long term potential of the two systems.

Year after year, Rodale found:

Organic yields match conventional yields.

As Tom Philpott reported for Mother Jones 17 November 2011, Yet Again, Organic Ag Proves Just as Productive as Chemical Ag,

And now comes evidence from the very heart of Big Ag: rural Iowa, where Iowa State University's Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture runs the Long-Term Agroecological Research Experiment (LTAR), which began in 1998, which has just released its latest results.

At the LTAR fields in Adair County, the (LTAR) runs four fields: one managed with the Midwest-standard two-year corn-soy rotation featuring the full range of agrochemicals; and the other ones organically managed with three different crop-rotation systems. The chart below records the yield averages of all the systems, comparing them to the average yields achieved by actual conventional growers in Adair County:

Norman Borlaug, instigator of the "green revolution" of no-till and pesticides, when asked in 2000 whether organic agriculture could feed the world, said:

Southern Nevada Health District forced private citizens to pour bleach on home-grown organic food

Quail Hollow Farm was holding a Farm-to-Fork dinner for invited guests, when a health inspector showed up and forced them to destroy the food. In this video of the event you can hear the arrogance of the inspector:

That's all the information you need.

Well, no, it's not.

The inspector said it was a public event because the guests had paid for d inner.

The farmer eventually called their lawyer who said ask the inspector to see her warrant. She had none.

But they had already been told their food that they grew with their own hands was not fit for a public dinner, nor a private dinner, not even to feed to their pigs. They were forced to pour bleach on it, making it unfit even for compost.

Given that every food contamination recall in recent years has come from big factory farms, not from small organic farms, does this raid seem right to you?

Via Campesina: locavores worldwide

Claimed to be "the largest social movement in the world, with more than 400 million members," it's Via Campesina:

Enterremos el sistema alimentario industrial!
La agricultura campesina puede alimentar al mundo!

Bury the corporate food system!
Peasant agriculture can feed the world!

Peasant agriculture as in local agriculture. It's a global movement of locavores!

They're planning an International day of Peasant's Struggles on 17 April 2011:

Monsanto shouldn't get away with it anymore --Vandana Shiva

Quantum physicist and environmental activist Vandana Shiva foresees The Future of Food, in three parts.

• Part 1:

  There are only two applications that have been commercialized in these twenty years of genetic engineering. One is to make seeds more resilient to herbicides, which means you get to spread more Roundup, you get to spread more Glysophate, and you get to spread more poison. Not a very desirable trait in farming systems. Especially since what Monsanto will call weeds are ultimately sources of food.

  It gets even better from there.

  These are illusions that are being marketed in order for people to hand over the power to decide what we eat to a handful of corporations.

  Vandana Shiva is the keynote speaker at the Georgia Organics conference in Savannah, 11-12 March 2011. There's still time to sign up!

  Here's Part 1:

Monsanto blocks independent GMO research in the U.S. --L.A. Times op-ed

Doug Gurian-Sherman writes No seeds, no independent research:

Multibillion-dollar agricultural corporations, including Monsanto and Syngenta, have restricted independent research on their genetically engineered crops. They have often refused to provide independent scientists with seeds, or they've set restrictive conditions that severely limit research options.

In case you wondered why all the research seems to come from other countries, such as Argentina and France, as shown in this documentary from Germany? Well, now you know.

-jsq