agriculture

Recently, ScienceBlogling Jeff Toney responded to Chief Veterinarian of the National Pork Producers Council Liz Wagstrom's argument that widespread antibiotic use in agriculture has little effect on the antibiotic resistance problem. He concludes: However, the scientific facts support this idea [of agricultural misuse being a problem] - imagine the effect on our population of literally thousands of tons of antibiotics used in agriculture and animal husbandry, not intended in any way to support public health. Any microbiologist knows that if you grow bacteria in low levels of antibiotics, you…
...and I can't blame them. The recent and ongoing E. coli outbreak which began in Germany was originally claimed to have been traced to Spanish cucumbers. Erm, not so much: German agricultural authorities on Sunday identified locally grown bean sprouts as the likely cause of an E. coli outbreak that has killed 22 people and sickened hundreds in Europe. The Lower Saxony agriculture ministry was sending an alert Sunday warning people to stop eating the sprouts, which are often used in mixed salads, ministry spokesman Gert Hahne told The Associated Press. "Bean sprouts have been identified as…
ScienceBlogling Tara Smith has a great summary of the recent paper reporting high frequencies of multi-drug resistant Staphylococcus aureus in uncooked meat products (S. aureus is the "SA" in MRSA--methicillin resistant S. aureus, so I won't go through the whole paper here (and Maryn McKenna, as usual, had the best early report). But there are two issues I want to raise, the first being that the agricultural system can serve as a 'reservoir' of antibiotic resistance genes and resistant organisms. That is, unlike Las Vegas, what happens on the farm doesn't always stay on the farm. Tara:…
On some level, all disasters are agricultural disasters. When seawater washes over land, when the earth cracks and collapses buildings, when livelihoods and lives are lost, farmers die and lose their jobs. It is easy to forget this, of course, but it is always true - and there's something immensely sad about people loving a place and having to leave it at any time. But there's something particularly poignant about this: Mr. Sato, 59, is a 17th-generation family farmer, a proprietor of 14 acres of greenhouses and fields where he grows rice, tomatoes, spinach and other vegetables. Or did grow…
One of the reasons I've not been blogging as much over the past 2 years or so is that it's been just insane in the lab. As I was still living off start-up funds and pilot grants, I didn't have anyone full-time to take care of everything, so all the work has been done by myself and a handful of excellent graduate & undergrad students. Happily, some of the initial projects are wrapping up, and publications are starting to come out (I'll be blogging about others in the coming days/weeks). One of them was published yesterday in Emerging Infectious Diseases: Livestock-associated…
What I stand for is what I stand on. - Wendell Berry Note: You've got to give the Dervaes' some credit - their asshattery has inspired a wholel lot of focus on urban sustainable agriculture, homesteading and making a good life in the city! Today is "Urban Homesteading Day" and in its honor, here are some meditations on the relationships we need between city homesteaders and farmers, country homesteaders and farmers and everyone in between. Urbanization is the biggest trend in history. For the first time, more human beings live in cities than in the country. More than 50,000 farmers worldwide…
One of the projects we're working on is ways to bring more people to our farm. A lot of folks want to see what we're doing, and we've been contemplating open farm days, and possible ideas for classes we might teach. Well, while Eric and I were discussing it the other night, we came up with the idea of the "realistic farm tour" that gives people a real sense of what actually goes on on a farm - we could market ourselves a unlike all those other agritourism ventures that sell the dream - we sell the reality! Here are some of the activities we are sure people would pay us to do! "Explore the…
This is a lightly revised and updated version of a piece that ran at ye olde blogge and at Grist, but it seems just as pertinent now as it did in 2007 when I wrote it. At the time, some people doubted that the boom we were seeing in biofuel production, which was pushing up grain prices, would be followed by any kind of a bust. Farmers were predicting many, many good years - but we all know what happened. Farm incomes dropped by more than 20% during the recession. Just another reminder that busts are part of the boom and bust cycle, no matter how little we like to admit it. There is no…
I once wrote an essay about my son Isaiah's wish for a farm. He has a farm, of course, but he also dreams of a different one, the one in his imagination. What was funny was that all the adults that saw his wish understood it so very well. Many people tell me how much they want a farm. But other people show me that farms are easier to find than you think, even if they aren't perfect. These are all real people, who I know. As i start our garden design class today, I started thinking about all the farm dreams I've known! I know a man who wanted to start a farm. So he worked and saved for…
The Food Crisis, of course. In fact it really never left - since 2007 we've had more hungry people on the planet than ever before in human history, and while we've seen brief declines in the numbers of the hungry worldwide, those declines were of such short duration that they were essentially meaningless - earlier this year when the UN trumpeted that the number of the hungry had dropped back below 1 billion, it admitted that this excluded Pakistani flood victims, the impacts of the crisis in the Russian wheat crop and a host of other late-year issues. On the lists of guests no one ever…
This week, two press releases from the Institute: The first was on the sequencing of the woodland strawberry genome (unfortunately, in the same week the cacao genome was sequenced). The Institute scientists who participated in the project contributed in the computational analysis of genes encoding flavor- and aroma-related proteins. This wild cousin of the cultivated strawberry is a member of the rose family, along with fruit trees including apples, peaches, cherries and almonds. In other words, this small annual plant is sure to become a useful experimental model for plant and agricultural…
It is claiming I don't have permission to embed it (I do, actually), so you can see the video here. I gave this talk back at the beginning of October, in my conference as a member of the ASPO-USA Board. This was only the second time that ASPO has had a significant talk about the connection between food and agriculture, so instead of trying to make claims about how this may play out, I focused on what we already know to be true. As you all probably know, I think that we've barely begun to plumb the depths of the connections between food and energy. I will say, if I ever give a talk there…
Liz Borkowski of The Pump Handle and I are doing a series this week on the future of urbanization. Given that just about half the world's population now lives in cities, and that almost all projected demographic growth (we will come back to whether the UN's projections on this subject are realistic in a post later this week) will occur in cities, the realities - and future - of urban life are important discussions. Like Liz, I love cities. That may seem strange to people who know that I live out in a rural area, since many rural-dwellers don't enjoy the bustle and noise of urban life, but…
In a perfect world, perhaps we'd all have already made our own homemade gifts for everyone, but most of us aren't that perfect. Many of us need to acquire some gifts, and the challenge is how to spend our money well, in things that are valuable, lasting and worth having. Over the course of the month, I have some suggestions for what sources you might go to for good gifts. I try, generally speaking, to put my own money where my mouth is, so all of these are places that my family has donated to, or will be donating to this year. There are a lot of good causes, and I'll have more than one…
If you want to make a traditional Thanksgiving dinner wholly from scratch, you start ahead of time. If you want to make it from food you've raised yourself, you start way, way ahead of time - like in January of the year before. In some ways, it starts even earlier, but January is the new year - and when you grow your own, you are always thinking of the future - even if not consciously about any particular dinner. It is in January that we order seeds for the vegetables we'd serve at Thanksgiving, that we debate which varieties of pumpkin and carrots, celery root, sweet corn, squash and leeks…
Part I : Defining a functional local food system We got a supermarket in the springtime, and much has been made of that in my area. Many of the area's people rhapsodized about it - one woman told me she'd been waiting 15 years. It is about 8 miles from my house (compared to 13 to the nearest one before), in a town that is making the shift from rural to bedroom suburb, in an area that isn't quite ready for outer bedroom suburbs. Before the store opened there was much talk about how our area had been and would no longer be a "food desert." This term means an area where there simply isn't…
It is pouring down rain - Tropical Storm Nicole is dumping 5 inches on us - and the dogs are barking out of control. I can't see a thing in the storm, but I suddenly realize what they must be barking at - I forgot to put Blackberry in the barn. Blackberry, you see, is our pet rooster. He's so gentle than my children carry him around. Isaiah, who has a special rapport with animals snuggles him under his arm. In the winter, the children tried to teach him to ski down the plow piles. In the summer, they come running when Blackberry roams into the road, which for some reason, he does daily…
In some ways, we may be fortunate that the house we chose falls in a middle place in time - old enough to have character and beauty and a kind of solidity, new enough that we don't feel compelled to restore it to a past moment in time. Nor do I worry too much about the scratches the kids put in the pine floors or the authenticity of any particular improvement, although we aspire to keep the place beautiful and suitable to its landscape. My home is a fairly comfortable, moderately shabby work in progress, a mix of old and new that could be done better, but that mostly serves our needs. So…
Interesting discussion over at The Spandrel Shop and Cackle of Rad on doing field work in the sciences--and the potential dangers that might be encountered. Now, Prof-like Substance and Cackle of Rad are discussing field work along the lines of biological sample collection, sometimes in the middle of nowhere, which isn't something I've ever done. However, we have our own issues when carrying out our epidemiological field sampling; more after the jump. For new readers, my lab works on emerging infectious diseases, and zoonotic diseases (which can pass between animals and humans) in particular…
Phil-the-Housemate asked me recently for advice on getting his dissertation done. He's ABD, and having a tough time getting down to it. Asking me seems odd to me - I eventually baled about 1/2 way through my doctoral dissertation, due to a combination of childbearing, agriculture, slackdom and change of focus. But I did write three books in 2 1/2 years, so I do know a little something about finally giving up the slacker habits, I suppose. The sum total of my advice to him went pretty much like this "Phil, there's no substitute for the ass in the chair." And this, I think is probably the…