Our Turn: New England agriculture gets a new voice in D.C.

New Hampshire may have a new all-women dream team representing it in Congress, but forging a path for women may not be their only opportunity. Flying under the radar is the fact that 2nd District Rep. Annie Kuster is now a member of the House Agriculture Committee, the first representative from New Hampshire in many years.

While it may seem an odd match for a state not known for agriculture, it is really indicative of how local, sustainable agriculture is on the rise in our region. Kuster’s seat on this committee is an opportunity for the agricultural community of New England and for area consumers whose interest in knowing more about their food has been steadily mounting. Now more than ever, people are becoming more connected with the source of their food and recognizing that what they eat is closely linked to their health, as well as to the health of the environment and their local communities.

This heightened consumer awareness is helping to keep New England farms in business, especially the hundreds of organic dairies in the region. Not only are these dairy farms an iconic part of our New England landscape, but they are also a critically important part of our local economy.

On the political front, we see evidence of the growing importance of New England agriculture in the establishment and growth of the New England Farmers Union. The diverse membership of this group, from century-old family farms to young urban farmers, is a testament to the surge in the region’s interest in producing and eating local, sustainable food and the need for advocating for policies that better serve our farmers.

New Hampshire’s agricultural economy is small in comparison with other states, but it still accounts for nearly $1 billion in economic activity and thousands of jobs. It also helps conserve our landscapes, both farm and forest. Well-managed farm and forestland contribute to improved soil health and water quality, and provide wildlife habitat and recreational use. Federal farm programs that support better management on these lands are essential to maintaining these benefits.

One of the first orders of business Kuster will have to deal with is the farm bill, which affects New Hampshire and New England in ways we rarely hear about. It’s critical to our region’s conservation and forestry programs, and it also holds the key to nutrition initiatives that will help families in need get greater access to fresh fruits and vegetables from local farms.


Over the past few years, we’ve seen the introduction of a variety of farm bill programs that would really help our area. They focus on organic agriculture and fresh fruits and vegetables, as well as beginning farmers and ranchers. Programs designed to help build local food systems really help our area. Unfortunately, Congress gutted all of these programs, including the nation’s largest conservation program, when it extended the farm bill as part of the fiscal cliff deal passed early this year.

This year Congress has a chance to reauthorize this bill, restore funding for these critical programs, and make much needed reforms to the farm safety net. While this won’t be easy, especially in light of the need to reduce the federal deficit, it’s never been more important for Congress to deliver a farm bill that meets the needs of both consumers and agriculture. A more regionally diverse agriculture committee is sure to do a better job of this than one that is stacked with members from the Corn Belt.

We’re counting on Kuster to make hay of this opportunity.

Original Article Here

Climate science under dust cloud

Jack Waterford

OLD AUSTRALIA is sustained by a number of myths far more satisfactory than the truth, and I will thank the climate change people to focus their deconstructions in another direction.

One of their myths is that most of us - at least the people whose ancestors had arrived by World War II - were rural people by background, with the full suite of baggage involving wholesome values, hard work, knowing the Kildare side of a cow and being of an active family, clan and close community in which all knew each other well, were often related, and met regularly at church, or chapel, at the top of the hill.

That did, more or less, happen to me, but the overwhelming proportion of white Australians, from 1798 on, lived always in cities, and practised urban sorts of pursuits, such as factory work, hanging, flogging and exogamy. On the whole, they did not even come, voluntarily or otherwise, from rural villages and towns in England, Scotland, Wales and Ireland, but from the slums of the larger cities. Ways and customs of farm or field, paddock and bush did not much abide in most of these folk.

But they did like to think that they were rural folk at heart, because so many had a vision of themselves as simple, proud and dignified folk, working not as tiny factors of production but in wholesome, simple but hard-working labour involving the production of food, simple tools and personal wherewithal, far from the dark satanic mills of the England of several hundred years ago.

In this fantasy of Merrie England, people lived as they had for centuries, the population was usually fairly steady, most people never travelled more than 20 miles from where they were born in their entire life, except sometimes as soldiers, and great events and tumults usually had only mild local impact. Transplanted in Australia, many Australians developed, within only a generation or two, a notion that a good sprinkling of the ancestors had worked the Australian land as well.

We like these myths because we tend to imagine that most social change has taken place in relatively recent time - and that it has, perhaps, involved some sort of expulsion from Eden from the embrace of technology, strangers, the slums, the smells and the indignities of the factory, the machine and the wicked temptations of all too crowded flesh. Many of us yearn in our hearts for simpler, less complicated, and imaginably more healthy times.

Facts do little to affect this romance, or rural idyll. The history of Australia, as much as of Britain or Ireland, has always involved great change and dislocations, usually at least once every generation, caused not only by war, but by the rise and fall of empires, of industries and of diseases. Quite apart from the inexorable sprawl of our cities, there is hardly a part of settled Australia that is not substantially different than a 150 years ago, than 100 years ago, or 50 years ago.

A bit more than 150 years ago, for example, there were more than 20,000 people scrabbling for gold around Braidwood, most of whom had likewise scrabbled up the Clyde mountain with everything they possessed in the world. There were perhaps 10,000 living in tents through winter at Kiandra, but, as at Braidwood, one has to search hard for evidence these days. About 120 years ago, Wiluna in Western Australia (present population perhaps 200, nearly all Aboriginal) had a population of 20,000. About the same time, towns such as Wilcannia on the Darling River were among the busiest ports in Australia, taking wool and copper to the sea at Goolwa in South Australia.

Nothing has dislocated modern Australia more than the mortality of WWI. Half of the population of young adult males went overseas: one in seven was killed; three of that seven suffered disabling wounds or disease. Less than a year after the survivors reached home, about 10,000 Australians died of the Spanish flu. If the flu death rate were the same in Canberra today, we'd have had 900 extra deaths in two months. In Indonesia, the net mortality was about 1.5 million - perhaps three times the mortality of the 2004 tsunami, or, comparing on a population-equivalent basis, with the social effect of the death of 12 million people there today.

As mining boomed and busted, agriculture waxed and waned, other industries flourished then disappeared, and people moved about Australia for jobs and opportunities. Few Australians - even well-off farmers - have occupied the same soil for more than two generations, or, for that matter, practised much the same trade as their grandfathers or mothers. It is unlikely that even pronounced climate change will have such effects, unless it drowns coast-dwellers.

This week some city-based climate change scientists looked at some remote Australian towns and villages, looking at weather and economic data to see which might wax and wane as a result of climate change - assumed to be likely to make weather hotter, drier, and subject to greater fluctuation than before as a result of a general warming of the earth.

To my shock and horror they predicted an end to Goodooga - fondly described by me often in these columns as the jewel of the Bokhara, centre of civilisation, and once the location, admittedly a while ago, of the Magnetic South Pole as well as of the family of the person to whom I sometimes refer by means of the perpendicular pronoun. It was number 17 on a list of places which might disappear up its own fundament, led by White Cliffs, which I likewise expect to see Queanbeyan out.

Pigs, I say. What would these boffins know? Out at Goodooga we are not even sure that the evidence is in, as yet, that the climate's getting hotter, locally. Or drier. Or dustier. This is not to doubt the general pattern of warming, or its anthropogenesis. It reflects, rather, the fact that the local weather has always been on the warmish side, the dryish side, the dusty side, and that there have always been marked and unpredictable variations. Right now, we are in goodish times, indeed have recently had floods after longish droughts, but neither the length nor severity of the droughting or the flooding was anything special, by our reckoning. As for hot weather, we remember a consistently warmer spell in 1963-64, and no one left town then, except for extra beer supplies. Some locals reckon it was drier in Noah's time, as well as in the federation drought. When it rained at Ararat for 40 days and 40 nights, we got only 17 points (4mm) at Goodooga. And survived, of course, and without bitching.

In only the past 50 years, people have received 240 volt electricity, air conditioning, telephones and now mobile and computer reception, refrigeration, bitumen roads and a metropolis only 100kms to the south-east. And a good many undesirables have moved out.

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose, we say. You city folk should worry about yourselves. We'll be OK until the next Ice Age.

Original Article Here

Lords Scrutinise Food Security, Highlight Biofuels

UK - Members of the Lords, including the author of the Curry Report on the sustainable future of farming and food and a former chair of the Royal Agricultural Society of England, debated current government policies on food security last week.

Baroness Miller of Chilthorne Domer (Liberal Democrat), who tabled the debate, said: "We have only recently begun to understand the importance of the concept of global food security rather than seeing it as an issue only when there is a regional famine or shortage far from these shores."

Baroness Miller highlighted how the UK has the 'best grass-growing conditions in the whole world and a wonderful range of livestock breeds'. Baroness Miller continued: "Food security is all about resilience and diversity. We must value our seed heritage and our different animal breeds." Baroness Miller predicted biotechnology would be a 'hot topic' and said: "I do not think that GM is the answer to food security issues, but nor should we seek to halt scientific exploration and trials."

Earl of Selborne (Conservative), former chair of the Royal Agricultural Society of England and current chair of the Foundation for Science and Technology, stated: "Our present food system is clearly unsustainable, inadequate and failing in some respects."

Earl of Selborne listed reduced dependence on fossil fuels and exploitation of natural resources, economic use of water, increased use of biomass and reducing carbon leakage as essential components of sustainable agriculture. "It will not be agricultural science that delivers totally. Financial services, the communications sector and a whole raft of interventions - political, economical, sociological and technological - will be involved," he said.

Lord Giddens (Labour), member of the Agriculture, Fisheries and Environment EU Sub-committee, took a global view and spoke about 'new style risks' which 'we tend to be in denial about'. Human created risks are rising steeply yet "we are not in a world that is getting close to managing their consequences, or even to accepting their seriousness," Lord Giddens explained.

Lord Giddens added: "Three of the biggest new-style risks are climate change, population growth and world urbanisation. In the case of food security these risks overlap and it's time 'to make far more of a dent in these risks than we have so far."

ThePoultrySite News Desk