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Soil/Fertility

Debal Deb: ‘We have more hardy, nutritious grains than GM can offer’

26th April 2017

From India Water Portal: Records show there were 1.10 lakh varieties of rice in India in 1965. After the Green Revolution, which pushed for hybrid varieties, less than 7,000 remain. Debal Deb, who has conserved 1,200 climate-resilient rice varieties, speaks on the need to conserve traditional seeds and why we don’t need genetically modified ones….

Soil building, soil amendments and rain barrels: A primer

21st March 2017

From Robinson Love Plants: Regular soil building and correct use of soil amendments will give us nutrient rich soils which help vastly improve food security for future generations, while water wastage can be combated by installing an effective rain barrel system. These methods are time-consuming but relatively inexpensive, and yield many passive benefits over time….

Learning from the past: A new protocol for agricultural education and research in India

16th March 2017

We scientists, each one of us, should ask ourselves what the agricultural establishment needs to do in order effectively to address our current agricultural crisis. Given our present mechanistic scientific paradigm, we are part of the problem, and thus cannot, be part of its solution. Our first task, therefore, is to change our outlook fundamentally….

A protest on August 8, 2013 in Delhi against the BRAI bill and Monsanto

Karan Vaid/Greenpeace

UN experts bust ‘myth’ that pesticides are necessary to feed the world

10th March 2017

The Guardian reports: It’s a myth that pesticides are essential to feed a fast-growing global population, according to UN food and pollution experts. Their new report is severely critical of the global corporations that manufacture pesticides, accusing them of “systematic denial of harms”, “aggressive, unethical marketing tactics” and heavy lobbying of governments to obstruct reforms….

A truck leaves an illegal sand mine by the Yamuna in Greater Noida

http://ismenvis.nic.in

How to steal a river: New York Times on India’s rampant sand mining

7th March 2017

The hundreds of millions of Indians migrating from villages to cities require up to a billion square yards of new real estate development annually. Current construction already draws more than 800 million tons of sand every year, mostly from India’s waterways. All the people I spoke to assumed that much of it is taken illegally….

The team from Safe Harvest interacts with Farmers in Niwali (Sendhwa)

YourStory

This company is helping 50,000 farmers across 11 states grow and sell pesticide-free food

27th February 2017

Safe Harvest is a conglomeration of eight civil society organisations that have been working towards and promoting non-pesticide management (NPM) practices among some of India’s poorest and most disenfranchised communities. Today, they work with a farmer base of close to 50,000 across 11 states, many of whom have seen a 20% rise in their income….

Bookshelf: Tending Our Land – A New Story

26th November 2016

In ‘Tending Our Land’, authors M.G. Jackson and Nyla Coelho present a vivid, historical account of the great human enterprise of food production, an entirely new story– one that reinstates an ancient but eminently relevant imperative for our times. It makes essential reading for policy makers, academia and the budding bold generation of land tenders….

Bookshelf: Tending Our Land – A New Story

In ‘Tending Our Land’, authors M.G. Jackson and Nyla Coelho present a vivid, historical account of the great human enterprise of food production, an entirely new story– one that reinstates an ancient but eminently relevant imperative for our times. It makes essential reading for policy makers, academia and the budding bold generation of land tenders….

Pablo Tittonell: Feeding the world with Agroecology

14th November 2016

Pablo Tittonell is professor ‘Farming Systems Ecology’ at Wageningen University and one of the worlds most well known experts in the field of agriculture and ecology. In this TED Talk, he advocates intensification of agriculture by making optimal use of natural processes and the landscape to meet the worlds constantly growing demand for food.

Watch: “Good nutrition begins in healthy soils”

31st October 2016

There’s no such thing as ‘healthy food’ if it’s not produced by sustainable farming systems on living soils, Patrick Holden told the recent ‘Food: The Forgotten Medicine’ conference. But after 70 years of industrial farming, there’s a huge job to be done to restore depleted soils and the impoverished genetic diversity of seeds and crops….

Mushrooms can save the world (and put Monsanto out of business)

13th October 2016

EcoSnippets reports: According to Paul Stamets, one of the world’s leading mycologists, his patented ‘smart pesticides’ can provide a safe and nearly permanent solution for controlling over 200,000 species of insects – and all thanks to the ‘magic’ of mushrooms. In fact, pesticide industry executives have called it “the most disruptive technology we have ever witnessed.”…

India’s organic rice revolution proves GMOs are unnecessary

26th September 2016

Whitney Webb reports: Farmers in India’s poorest region are recording record rice yields by growing organically, debunking once and for all the myth that GMOs are necessary to feed the world’s growing population… In Bihar, Sumant Kumar and his family produced an astounding 22.4 tons of rice on only one hectare of land, in 2013….

Video & Report: Four important lessons from Cuba’s urban food survival strategy

11th September 2016

Aurel Keller writes: The collapse of the Soviet Union, and resultant loss of imports crucial for the island nation’s industrial agriculture system left Cuba with a severe food crisis in the 1990s. Today, Cuba has become a regional leader in sustainable agriculture, and its practices and institutions a model for localized and small-scale urban agriculture….

Debate: Can organic farming feed the world?

5th September 2016

Bjorn Lomborg, long known as a ‘contrarian’ environmentalist, recently triggered a heated media debate when he claimed that organic farming cannot provide food security for the world, and even asserted that it is bad for the environment. Here we present Lomborg’s original column in USA Today and a selection of voices that counter his view….

A desert storm is engulfing India

26th August 2016

Indira Khurana writes: A whopping 25 per cent of India’s total land (329 mn ha) is undergoing desertification while 32 per cent (105 mn ha) is facing degradation that has reduced productivity, critically affecting livelihoods and food security of millions across the country. Combating desertification brings together three interdependent natural resources: Land, water and biodiversity….

Video: This ‘botanical explorer’ believes that plants are our future

3rd August 2016

Crystal Stevens writes: Joseph Simcox is an ethnobotanist who has an intrinsic fascination with nature’s wonders. This ‘botanical explorer’, travels the world finding rare and even new plants. He believes that plants are our future, and passionately teaches the importance of symbiotic relationships between us and plants for us to live well on this planet….

Permaculture and Primitvism: Two alternatives to the technological destruction of nature

2nd August 2016

Gaurav Sangwani writes: Permaculture tries to utilise the existing elements in the land to take human freedom further, with a far lower ecological effect. Primitivism is the perennial belief in the need to go back to where we started, the lost Golden Age of freedom and guiltlessness which is at the heart of all the world’s religions….

Representative pic

Bharat Mansata: The rich diversity of forest foods

31st July 2016

Almost two decades back, about two dozen of us pooled resources to buy undulating land, now known as Vanvadi, in the foothills of the Sahyadris; our primary aim – ecological regeneration and local self-reliance. A survey of the botanical wealth of Vanvadi surprised us with 52 plant species of uncultivated forest foods that provide edible….

Representational pic

The Chizami model of development

24th July 2016

Ananda Banerjee reports: Chizami village, located in Phek district of eastern Nagaland, has 600 households with a population of 3,000. Chizami is considered a model village for the quiet revolution it has led in the past decade in terms of socioeconomic reforms and environment protection. The village council imposes strict fines on those violating norms….

Christopher Alexander’s neglected challenge to Permaculture

15th July 2016

Dan Palmer writes: Christopher Alexander is a radical architect and writer respected by permaculture practitioners. According to him, a whole is created by putting together parts. The parts come first: and the form of the whole comes second, but “it is impossible to form anything which has the character of nature by adding preformed parts.”…