A GM & Pesticide Free Rice Growing Revolution

Rice farmers have been growing their crop in the same way for hundreds of years and most people have assumed the most efficient way to grow rice has been figured out. That is until some farmers in India decided to change how they grow their bounty and now scientists have take note of their success.

What happened in Darveshpura has divided scientists and is exciting governments and development experts. Tests on the soil show it is particularly rich in silicon but the reason for the “super yields” is entirely down to a method of growing crops called System of Rice (or root) Intensification (SRI). It has dramatically increased yields with wheat, potatoes, sugar cane, yams, tomatoes, garlic, aubergine and many other crops and is being hailed as one of the most significant developments of the past 50 years for the world’s 500 million small-scale farmers and the two billion people who depend on them.

Instead of planting three-week-old rice seedlings in clumps of three or four in waterlogged fields, as rice farmers around the world traditionally do, the Darveshpura farmers carefully nurture only half as many seeds, and then transplant the young plants into fields, one by one, when much younger. Additionally, they space them at 25cm intervals in a grid pattern, keep the soil much drier and carefully weed around the plants to allow air to their roots. The premise that “less is more” was taught by Rajiv Kumar, a young Bihar state government extension worker who had been trained in turn by Anil Verma of a small Indian NGO called Pran (Preservation and
Proliferation of Rural Resources and Nature), which has introduced the SRI method to hundreds of villages in the past three years.

Read more here.

Soil Benefits from Organic Farming

The benefits of organic farming keep revealing themselves – it turns out that the soil itself benefits from farmers growing organic crops.

“Farmers interested in transitioning to organic production will be happy to see that with good management, yields can be the same, with potentially higher returns and better soil quality,” said Delate, who leads the project.

The U.S. organic ag industry continues to grow and was a $31 billion industry in 2011, Delate said. To market a crop as organic, it must be grown on land that has received no synthetic chemicals for three years prior to harvest.

Read more.

Thanks to @ThePeterKelly

Monocle Looks at the Best Urban Farm Projects

Monocle recently took a look at some of the world’s best urban farming projects.

Monocle’s favourite cities combine small-scale neighbourhoods with green spaces, but not all cities were built with the right foundations for future growth and sustainability. We champion four urban innovators who see potential in derelict spaces and find creative approaches to make some of the worlds more challenging neighbourhoods bloom into richer and more pleasant places to stay.

Organic Farming is Better than Factory Farming for Carbon Capture

It turns out that not only is eating organic food better for you than processed foods, growing organic food is better for everyone. Organic farms (and likely home gardens) are better at capturing and retaining carbon than farms that are focused on mass production.

Last year, researchers reexamined all 74 studies that had looked at organic farming and carbon capture. After crunching the numbers from the results of these studies they concluded that, lo and behold, organic farms are carbon sponges.

Recently, a team of scientists decided to compare the microbes in organic and conventional plots (plus one “low intensity” field that was somewhere between organic and conventional) at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station in Michigan. They noticed that there was a much lower diversity of microbes in the conventionally farmed plot [PDF]. Perhaps the more complex community is better at exchanging the carbon among themselves, rather than releasing it to the atmosphere.

Read more at Grist.

Young, Urban, and Farming in Rural Ontario

In Ontario women from the city are defying stereotypes and running farms. Once the purview of the stereotypical old white farmer who hates cow-tippers, now women raised in cities are buying and operating farms in rural Ontario. These young and educated farmers are using organic process and community driven opportunities to run successful farms.

“I saw that something was wrong with the world, but I didn’t want to push paper around trying to change it,” she said. “When you work on a farm that respects the environment, you see your impact on the earth in a very real way.”

Now a proud owner of a 38-hectare vegetable farm in Neustadt, Ont., she finally feels she’s saving the earth from the ground up, caterpillars and all.

Both Young and Moskovits sell organic vegetables using a community-supported agriculture model. Local families buy in at the start of the season and receive farm-fresh fruits and vegetables every week.

“It’s a great feeling to sell directly to people that are eating your food,” said Moskovits. “Marketing locally also means you aren’t shipping great distances and wasting energy.”

It’s also a model that is relatively drought proof. Since members have already paid, they, too, bear the burden when harvests are low.

Read more at The Star.

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