USA: Donald W. Reynolds National Center for Business Journalism, Arizona State University, Phoenix.
Location:
Agricultural Communications Documentation Center, Funk Library, University of Illinois Box: 166 Document Number: D11683
Notes:
3 pages., Via online article., Description of proposed legislation in support of efforts to implement environmental/green practices and technologies. Describes seven features of the Green New Deal and provides questions reporters might ask in gather information about it.
17 pages, U.S. agriculture is both a major source of global food and a key contributor to multiple interconnected crises. Climate change, biodiversity loss, and severe impacts on soil and water quality are among the challenges caused by U.S. industrial agriculture. Regenerative methods of farming are necessary to confront all these challenges simultaneously, in addition to addressing the increasing challenges to farm labor conditions. Transforming U.S. agriculture to a regenerative system will require a focus on creating traction for the values, beliefs, worldviews, and paradigms that effectively support such transformation while decreasing the friction that works against them. With a focus on creating traction for transformation, we review the factors and processes that tend to promote and maintain ecological improvements on farms. Starting from a case study that points to some of the sources of friction and traction in the current U.S. agricultural system, we use the framework of three spheres of transformation to focus discussion on how processes that form beliefs and values shape and can reshape farming. We develop a series of points of entry for engaging the systemic changes that will offer farmers traction for transformation. We review literature on agricultural networks, polycentric governance, social learning, agricultural education, and farmer characteristics that lend themselves to ecologically mindful change, thereby identifying interventions that tend to provide traction for change. These approaches, and the supports that allow rural communities and the people that work in them to survive and thrive, are necessary to create the traction needed for farms to undergo a shift to regenerative agricultural practices. We link these changes to the promise of the twentieth century New Deal agricultural programs and the potential of the Green New Deal.
8 pages, In the face of rapidly advancing climate change, biodiversity loss, and water scarcity, it is clear that global agriculture must swiftly and decisively shift toward sustainability. Fortunately, farmers and researchers have developed a thoroughly studied pathway to this transition: agroecological farming systems that mimic natural ecosystems, creating tightly coupled cycles of energy, water, and nutrients. A critical and underappreciated feature of agroecological systems is that they replace fossil fuel- and chemical -intensive management with knowledge-intensive management. Hence, the greatest sustainability challenge for agriculture may well be that of replacing non-renewable resources with ecologically-skilled people, and doing so in ways that create and support desirable rural livelihoods. Yet over the past century, US agriculture has been trending in the opposite direction, rapidly replacing knowledgeable people with non-renewable resources and eroding rural economies in the process. Below, we suggest how US policy could pivot to enable and support the ecologically skilled workforce needed to achieve food security in the face of climate change.
Opinion article, Via online digital edition. 1 page., Editor speaks to inaccuracies in politicians' descriptions of "farting cows" as a significant factor in greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S.