Can the USDA Really Fight Industry Consolidation?

by TOM LASKAWY
The first of the much anticipated agricultural competition workshops are underway right now in Iowa. Hosted jointly by the USDA and the Department of Justice, the workshops aim to explore the question of consolidation in agribusiness. The workshops themselves have already come under scrutiny for initially excluding actual farmers on the panels -- and have come in for continued criticism that the farmers who have been put on are more representatives of corporations than real farmers.

It's hard not to be somewhat cynical about our government's claim that they're shocked, shocked to discover there's anti-competitive behavior in agriculture. On the other hand, for the last twenty or so years, consolidation has been -- in Washington at least -- the crime that dare not speak its name. So the fact that it's the USDA and DOJ running these workshops is nothing short of astonishing.

And while the whole of the industry will get attention, much of the focus so far has been on Monsanto, which thanks to its aggressive practices -- along with support from the USDA -- now controls up to 90% of the seed business in some markets. It's to the point that in many parts of the country non-Monsanto (and thus non genetically engineered seed) are simply unavailable to farmers.

The Justice Department is already investigating the company and it will undoubtedly get a lot of attention during these workshops. But knowing the Obama administration's support for biotechnology generally and reading between the lines in this NY Times article on the issues involved with Monsanto, I'm starting to get concerned.

The way the article characterizes the debate, the goal appears to be to broaden access to Monsanto's intellectual property, i.e. the herbicide-tolerant genetic traits in its seeds, rather than to broaden access to conventional seeds:

Monsanto sells its own branded seed varieties, like Dekalb in corn and Asgrow in soybeans, to farmers. But it has expanded its influence and profits by licensing those traits to hundreds of small seed companies, allowing them to incorporate the traits in the seeds they sell. It has also granted licenses to the other large trait developers, allowing them to create combinations of engineered traits in a process known as stacking.

Monsanto says that its licensing shows it is the opposite of a monopolist, encouraging rather than hampering competition.

But critics say the licenses give Monsanto excessive control. Seed company executives said the licenses were sometimes worded in a way that compelled them to sell Monsanto traits over those of its competitors. Mr. Quarles denied that, saying the contracts contain sales incentives typical of the industry.

The rest of the article focuses on the legal battles between Monsanto and Dupont, another biotech giant, over access to Monsanto's patents. It may very well be that the anti-competitive behavior the government punishes is that which prevents even greater adoption of biotech seeds -- the opposite of what many progressives want out of anti-trust enforcement.

Until we can displace agricultural productivity as the only measure of success of government policy, even this new attention to anti-competitive practices is unlikely to lead to meaningful reform. To me the focus must be on finding ways to increase farmers' share of consumers' spending without threatening significant increases in food prices -- there is, after all, no government that likes to champion policies that increase the cost of food. Nothing puts a damper on electoral prospects like bread riots.

Keep in mind that a mere 7 cents of the consumer's food dollar gets to the farmer, while 73 cents goes to distribution costs. The only way we can get to a win-win -- and not be forced to choose between higher farmer income or higher retail prices -- is to let the middleman, i.e. the processors and yes, the retailers -- take the hit. Sadly, I don't think Walmart, Safeway or Whole Foods are on the agenda at the moment, even though some experts believe the real squeeze on farmers comes from them.

It's when we start having discussions like that and start recognizing that a relentless focus on agricultural production simply is not consistent with helping rural economies that I'll believe we might just be getting somewhere.

Photo credit: Farm Aid

The Happy Story of GM Crops :-(

March 11th, 2010 By Jim Goodman Since the first commercial cultivation of Genetically Modified (GM) crops in 1996, Monsanto and the rest of the big six Biotech seed companies, (Pioneer/DuPont, Syngenta, Dow, BASF and Bayer) have become masters at the art of story telling. Farmers looking for the next big technology fix have loved their stories: the promise of better yields, less chemical need for weed control, higher profits and of course, a solution to the elusive goal of feeding the world. Governments, seeing biotechnology as a huge economic engine, embraced the technology. University research was shifted almost exclusively to biotech crops. GM was the wave of the future, bankers encouraged planting GM crops to guarantee a “profitable harvest”. Crop insurance premiums were lower for farmers planting GM. Everyone bought the story. In a recent opinion piece in the Wisconsin State Journal, former Secretary of Agriculture, John Block, touted the virtues of GM crops and credited them with producing higher yields, lower pesticide use and solving the ever growing problem of world hunger. Current Agriculture Secretary, Tom Vilsack, plugged GM at last week’s USDA Outlook Conference. Problem is, the promises are just good stories. The believers are missing the truth. Weeds have become resistant to Monsanto’s Roundup and insects became resistant to the toxins produced by their GM corn. As GM was planted on more acres, overall pesticide use went up, not down. A University of Kansas study found that GM crops actually had lower yields than their conventional counterparts. Even as the problems of GM crops become more apparent, the cost of GM seed continues to rise. Many farmers are backing away from GM, but finding non-GM seed is difficult, considering Monsanto controls roughly 90% of the corn and soy genetics in the U.S. With corn and soy well under their control, Monsanto now hopes to gain USDA approval for Roundup resistant alfalfa. A perennial crop, alfalfa is the fourth most widely grown crop in the U.S. and again, Monsanto sees profit. The contamination of non-GM and organic alfalfa, the potential for further reduction of bee populations, among other problems, seem of little consequence. Feeding the world? GM will not do it, even former Monsanto CEO Robert Shapiro admitted, “The commercial industrial technologies that are used in agriculture today to feed the world… are not inherently sustainable.” Still, Monsanto bills itself as a leader in global sustainability, ignoring the fact that true sustainability cannot be achieved when your driving goal is the next quarterly profit report. The world stands a better chance of feeding itself by using and improving upon farming methods [PDF] that have been relied upon for centuries. In Africa, if indigenous crops, long adapted to their environment, were put forward as the solution to hunger, studies show that the population could have adequate food supplies and at times, cash income from sales of surplus crops. So, why do so many continue have faith in the story, when the evidence is against them? GM crops do not yield as promised. A USDA report [PDF] shows that farmers actually loose income by planting GM crops. Seed costs are unreasonably high, as are the fertilizers and chemicals that are absolutely required to grow GM. Researchers continue to reject GM foods citing concerns of their serious health risks. GM will not feed the world [PDF] The GM story as told by the Biotech giants paints the future as a happy and prosperous place: Farmers are profitable, everyone is well fed and the environment is protected. The real GM story is not so happy. It is a story of market control, environmental degradation and deceived farmers and consumers.

8 Steps the Department of Justice Could Take to Reform Farming

March 15th, 2010 By Robyn O'Brien
On Friday in an unprecedented move with the USDA, the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the farm business. The investigation began a 7-state probe into how Monsanto treats its customers, our nation’s farmers.

I recently had the honor of presenting for our nation’s top producing farmers in Chicago at the Top Producer Seminar, sponsored by Cargill and Pioneer. I was scheduled to present with Monsanto’s VP of Sustainable Yield, but a few days before the presentation was told that he had moved to China and that there was no one to take his place. I then had the privilege of spending the afternoon in an incredibly insightful discussion with the farmers, many of whom are Monsanto’s customers, who are remarkable fathers, grandfathers, and businessmen.

As I walked into the room for that presentation, I was greeted with “Welcome to the Lions’ Den.” As I found the courage to take the stage, I shared that according to the USDA, farm income was down 35% in 2009. I then shared that Monsanto is reporting, in forward looking statements to Wall Street analysts based on projected sales that they have asked for from the farmers, that Monsanto is expecting gross margins in Q2 2010 of 62% and that they are expecting to drive up the price mix of their products, corn and soy, by 8-10%. I also shared that according to these forward looking statements, Monsanto expects to expand their glyphosate revenue to an estimated $1 billion in gross profit by 2012, further enabling Monsanto to drive R&D into seeds and to price those seeds at a premium – further driving price increases on the farm.

And then I listened.

What I learned from these remarkable men and women is simply jaw dropping.

Due to Monsanto’s contracts with seed companies, farmers are now bound by the threat of a lawsuit if they speak out regarding farm practices. As third and fourth generation farmers, inheriting their grandfathers’ lands, their corn crops are no longer regulated by the FDA but by the EPA due to the insecticidal proteins they now contain, and they are subject to rising, unregulated costs never before seen in farming – contractual fees, trait fees, licensing fees and royalty fees and germ plasm fees associated with a technology that has been engineered into seeds designed to enhance Monsanto’s bottom line.

As I listened to the farmers and learned about their trade practices, I could not help but think of AT&T and the Bell System which for years functioned as a regulated monopoly until an antitrust investigation resulted in its break-up, as the practices employed by Monsanto on the farm, rival the fee structure that the phone company once had in place.

As our dialogue grew, we learned that together, we could affect remarkable change.

So in collaboration with our nation’s leading farmers to address the patents, licenses and royalties fees now being engineered into our food supply designed to enhance the profitability of the world’s largest agrichemical corporation , here are 8 steps that the USDA and the Department of Justice could take to address the financial impact that these practices are having on the farm:

As was done with AT&T, re-establish Monsanto and its subsidiaries into separate companies; separating the germ plasm and technology divisions into independent entities
Establish precedence that these newly established entities do not collect trait fees, royalty fees, licensing fees or other forms of income from each other, then they should not be allowed to collect these tech fees from the independent companies
Have Monsanto refund the money collected from the independent seed companies as retribution for the fact that the same fees were not charged to their partners and subsidiaries.
Require that all companies (Monsanto, DuPont, Syngenta etc.) supply genetically treated and untreated seeds and technology to the public in order to give the farmers a free market from which to choose how much the farmer wants to spend on a bag of corn or beans given that the current practice involves the blending of the best genetics into melting stock corns, so the companies can harvest more profit.
Establish an oversight committee with one term limits made up of independent seed companies and with multi nationals in an effort to prevent monopolistic price increases in the cost of corn and soy production that will impact food price inflation at the retail level.
Structure federal subsidies so that taxpayer dollars are used to subsidize and provide marketing and insurance programs for the growth of commodities (corn and soybean crops) that are grown without the use of synthetically engineered chemical ingredients
Reduce the fees charged to farmers growing crops without synthetic, chemical and genetically engineered ingredients that they must pay in order to certify that their crops are free of these ingredients (fees are paid to certifiers, not to the USDA National Organic Program).
Provide the same level of marketing assistance and crop insurance programs to farmers growing crops free of synthetic and chemical ingredients.
In a world in which food security is as much of an issue as nutrition, the establishment of a level playing field on the farm is vital to the health of our food system. And while the lack of federal oversight and regulation of trade practices on the farm has enhanced Monsanto’s profitability drivng shareholder value, its costs are being externalized not only onto our nation’s farmers but also onto the 300 million American eaters.

We are all stakeholders in our food supply and together, we can affect remarkable change for farmers, families and food.

Share and Enjoy:

According to the New York Times, Robyn O'Brien is "food's Erin Brockovich." As the founder of AllergyKids, an organization designed to protect the 1 in 3 American children with autism, allergies, ADHD and asthma, Robyn has appeared on Good Morning America, CBS Evening News with Katie Couric and CNN highlighting the role that chemicals in our food supply are having on our health. Born and raised in a conservative Texas family on supply side economics and the Wall Street Journal, Robyn earned a Fulbright Fellowship, an MBA and served as an equity analyst on a multibillion dollar fund prior to moving to Boulder, Colorado with her husband and four children. She is the author of the book, The Unhealthy Truth: How Our Food Is Making Us Sick and What We Can Do About It - Unhealthy-Truth-Food-Making-About/product-reviews

All Biochars are Not Created Equal, and How to Tell Them Apart | BioEnergy Lists: BioChar (or Terra Preta)

... "Biochar is at “the end of the beginning” and has the potential to play a dynamic role in the future of humanity and its societies.
All-Biochars--Version2--Oct2009.pdf
EXCELLENT DOCUMENT!

MAKING CHARCOAL THE JACK DANIEL'S WAY!

CHARCOAL MELLOWING - Jack Daniel believed "Every day we make it, we'll make it the best we can." For him, that meant mellowing his whiskey drop by drop through ten feet of sugar maple charcoal. PICTURES: MAKING CHARCOAL THE JACK DANIEL'S WAY! See wonderful web photo posts: Jack Daniel's Distillery Tour and Jack Daniel's Distillery

Harvesting Golden Rod Grass for Pelleting

The golden rod is harvested with the same equipment as hay -- a cutter, a rake, and then a baler. First, the plants must be cut. The cut golden rod still has some flowers and leaves which are not needed for pellets. The plants are allowed to stay in the field for a couple of weeks so most of everything other than the stalk comes off in the process of retting, similar to rotting. This leaves the soft and nutritious material to go back into the earth. This leaves the raking of the stalks lying loose all over the field. Not at all efficient for the baler to pick up. The baler straddles the windrows and picks up the stalks. If the weather has been dry enough, the rake and the baler can run at the same time. It's a coordinated "dance" The finished product, waiting to be picked up and taken to the pellet mill. Each one of these bales has the equivalent amount of energy as 40 gallons of oil when made into pellets for heating. That's money that stays here, not only in the States, but in the county! It is carbon neutral; it does not pump carbon dioxide into the atmosphere from fossil fuels. It is renewable and we can look forward to a new crop every year. Now it's off to the pellet mill!

The Biochar Workshop at Pony Farm

Watch amazing video demonstrations!

Graphic illustration of how the TLUD does not burn the fuel but rather the gases that have been driven off the fuel. The next demonstration produced charcoal with a retort made from a recycled Cornelius keg. Explanations of what it is and how to convert one as an excellent and affordable retort. Keg in action as a retort for making charcoal from wood scraps. Dr. Thomas B. Reed shows his technique for making charcoal with inspiration from Jack Daniels.

Make Biochar — this Ancient Technique Will Improve Your Soil

By Barbara Pleasant

Last year, I committed one of the great sins of gardening: I let weeds go to seed. Cleaning up in fall, I faced down a ton of seed-bearing foxtail, burdock and crabgrass. Sure, I could compost it hot to steam the weed seeds to death, but instead I decided to try something different. I dug a ditch, added the weeds and lots of woody prunings, and burned it into biochar, thus practicing a “new” soil-building technique that’s at least 3,000 years old.

What’s biochar? Basically, it’s organic matter that is burned slowly, with a restricted flow of oxygen, and then the fire is stopped when the material reaches the charcoal stage. Unlike tiny tidbits of ash, coarse lumps of charcoal are full of crevices and holes, which help them serve as life rafts to soil microorganisms. The carbon compounds in charcoal form loose chemical bonds with soluble plant nutrients so they are not as readily washed away by rain and irrigation. Biochar alone added to poor soil has little benefit to plants, but when used in combination with compost and organic fertilizers, it can dramatically improve plant growth while helping retain nutrients in the soil.

Amazonian Dark Earths
The idea of biochar comes from the Amazonian rain forests of Brazil, where a civilization thrived for 2,000 years, from about 500 B.C. until Spanish and Portuguese explorers introduced devastating European diseases in the mid-1500s. Using only their hands, sticks and stone axes, Amazonian tribes grew cassava, corn and numerous tree fruits in soil made rich with compost, mulch and smoldered plant matter.

Amazingly, these “dark earths” persist today as a testament to an ancient soil-building method you can use in your garden. Scientists disagree on whether the soils were created on purpose, in order to grow more food, or if they were an accidental byproduct of the biochar and compost generated in day-to-day village life along the banks of the Earth’s biggest river. However they came to be, there is no doubt that Amazonian dark earths (often called terra preta) hold plant nutrients, including nitrogen, phosphorous, calcium and magnesium, much more efficiently than unimproved soil. Even after 500 years of tropical temperatures and rainfall that averages 80 inches a year, the dark earths remain remarkably fertile.

Scientists around the world are working in labs and field trial plots to better understand how biochar works, and to unravel the many mysteries of terra preta. At Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y., microbiologists have discovered bacteria in terra preta soils that are similar to strains that are active in hot compost piles. Overall populations of fungi and bacteria are high in terra preta soils, too, but the presence of abundant carbon makes the microorganisms live and reproduce at a slowed pace. The result is a reduction in the turnover rate of organic matter in the soil, so composts and other soil-enriching forms of organic matter last longer.

In field trials with corn, rice and many other crops, biochar has increased productivity by making nutrients already present in the soil better available to plants. Results are especially dramatic when biochar is added to good soil that contains ample minerals and plant nutrients. Research continues (track it at The International Biochar Initiative), but at this point it appears that biochar gives both organic matter and microorganisms in organically enriched soil enhanced staying power. Digging in nuggets of biochar — or adding them to compost as it is set aside to cure — can slow the leaching away of nutrients and help organically enriched soil retain nutrients for decades rather than for a couple of seasons.

Finding Free Biochar

Biochar’s soil building talents may change the way you clean your woodstove. In addition to gathering ashes (and keeping them in a dry metal can until you’re ready to use them as a phosphorus-rich soil amendment, applied in light dustings), make a habit of gathering the charred remains of logs. Take them to your garden, give them a good smack with the back of a shovel and you have biochar.

If you live close to a campground, you may have access to an unlimited supply of garden-worthy biochar from the remains of partially burned campfires. The small fires burned in chimineas often produce biochar, too, so you may need to look no further than your neighbor’s deck for a steady supply.

Charcoal briquettes used in grilling are probably not a good choice. Those designed to light fast often include paraffin or other hydrocarbon solvents that have no place in an organic garden. Plain charred weeds, wood or cow pies are better materials for using this promising soil-building technique based on ancient gardening wisdom.

How to Make Biochar

To make biochar right in your gardens, start by digging a trench in a bed. (Use a fork to loosen the soil in the bottom of the trench and you’ll get the added benefits of this “double-digging” technique.) Then pile brush into the trench and light it. You want to have a fire that starts out hot, but is quickly slowed down by reducing the oxygen supply. The best way to tell what’s going on in a biochar fire is to watch the smoke. The white smoke, produced early on, is mostly water vapor. As the smoke turns yellow, resins and sugars in the material are being burned. When the smoke thins and turns grayish blue, dampen down the fire by covering it with about an inch of soil to reduce the air supply, and leave it to smolder. Then, after the organic matter has smoldered into charcoal chunks, use water to put out the fire. Another option would be to make charcoal from wood scraps in metal barrels. (For details, go to Twin Oaks Forge.)

I’m part of the Smokey-the-Bear generation, raised on phrases like “learn not to burn,” so it took me a while to warm up to the idea of using semi-open burning as a soil-building technique. Unrestrained open burning releases 95 percent or more of the carbon in the wood, weeds or whatever else that goes up in smoke. However, low-temperature controlled burning to create biochar, called pyrolysis, retains much more carbon (about 50 percent) in the initial burning phase. Carbon release is cut even more when the biochar becomes part of the soil, where it may reduce the production of greenhouse gases including methane and nitrous oxide. This charcoal releases its carbon 10 to 100 times slower than rotting organic matter. As long as it is done correctly, controlled charring of weeds, pruned limbs and other hard-to-compost forms of organic matter, and then using the biochar as a soil or compost amendment, can result in a zero emission carbon cycling system.

Burning responsibly requires simple common sense. Check with your local fire department to make sure you have any necessary permits, wait as long as you must to get damp, windless weather, and monitor the fire until it’s dead.

The Bigger Picture

If global warming is to be slowed, we must find ways to reduce the loss of carbon into the atmosphere. In the dark earths of the Amazon, and in million-year-old charcoal deposits beneath the Pacific Ocean, charcoal has proven its ability to bring carbon release almost to a standstill. If each of one million farmers around the globe incorporated biochar into 160 acres of land, the amount of carbon locked away in the Earth’s soil would increase five-fold.

But there’s more. What if you generate energy by burning a renewable biomass crop (like wood, corn, peanut hulls, bamboo, willow or whatever), while also producing biochar that is then stashed away by using it as a soil amendment? (For an example, see the Archive article, Mother’s Woodburning Truck, about wood-gas generators.) The carbon recovery numbers in such a system make it the only biomass model found thus far that can produce energy without a net release of carbon. Research teams around the world are scrambling to work out the details of these elegantly Earth-based systems.

Much remains to be known about how biochar systems should tick, but some may be as simple as on-farm set ups that transform manure and other wastes into nuggets of black carbon that help fertilizer go farther while holding carbon in the soil.

As gardeners, it is up to us to find ways to adapt this new knowledge to the needs of our land. To make the most of my bonfire of weeds, I staged the burn in a trench dug in my garden, and then used the excavated soil to smother the fire. A layer of biochar now rests buried in the soil. Hundreds of years from now, it will still be holding carbon while energizing the soil food web. This simple melding of soil and fire, first discovered by ancient people in the Amazon, may be a “new” key to feeding ourselves while restoring the health of our planet.
To learn more about this fascinating topic, read Amazonian Dark Earths by Johannes Lehmann.

Dirk-Jan Rosse - Farm Scale Making of Biochar in place

Farm Scale Making of Biochar in Place

If we are going to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in order to to stop the greenhouse gas effect, we must do more than conserve energy and use sustainable fuel sources. We have to actually remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. Nature already does this. It pulls carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere through photosynthesis and stores carbon in plant matter. But when we burn it or let it compost or rot, the carbon is joined with oxygen again and goes back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide. The problem gas. To break the cycle, we can actually keep the carbon in the soil by making biochar, charcoal. It's something that farmers can do to help themselves by improving their soil. And help the rest of the planet!

If biochar is going to be used by farmers it has to be able to be made by farmers: it not only has to be relatively convenient for them to put into their fields but also into their already busy workloads. And it has to be in a quantity that can be applied to acres of farmland. It has to be made by the ton!

First, meet Dirk-Jan Rosse, who has been experimenting with making biochar in place. Dirk-Jan Rosse lives in farming country although he calls himself a "digger", running an excavating company. Since childhood he has prowled all over the woods and fields of northern Dutchess County, NY, where he still runs across traces of charcoal-making from the days when it was used to smelt the iron for weapons in the Revolution and Civil War. Dirk-Jan has a lot of surplus wood on his own property. He milled some lumber for his own use, but there was an awful lot more than he needed for himself and there was not much of a local market for firewood. He has been thinking about how to make charcoal at a scale that would suit a farm using equipment available to a farmer. But being in the excavation business, however, he had his own commercial earth-moving gear that you would not really find lying around a farm. This allowed him to ramp up the scale and the speed of making some tests, but on a smaller and slightly slower scale everything could also be done by tractor with a bucket and grapple. He remembered those remains of charcoal pits and kilns. His plan is quite simple: rather than make biochar someplace and then cart it to the field, why not actually make it in the field itself? It would be based on a traditional way: covering a pile of scrap wood, tree clippings, cut-offs, etc. with dirt and letting it pyrolyze right on the spot. The same dirt that forms the "retort" would end up as the home for the charcoal. There is no apparatus required. Just the existing dirt and some bad hay (of which there is plenty where we live). What needed to be tested was the design of the pile, how the wood should be stacked, and what kind of air or smoke openings should be placed.

STEP ONE: MAKING THE STACK Again, the Bobcat can be replaced by a tractor's bucket loader and grapple. It's time to light up! After a few days of smoldering, the pile was ready to be opened. Well, in truth, we were dying of curiosity! Now let's switch to an implement of a different scale... This is only a small fraction of the pile. There is plenty of good carbon to be put into the soil that has been taken out of the air. The experiment is not over. There will be more piles to make biochar and to improve the process: the smoke needs to be burned off, the air-flow improved... the charcoal will need to be matched with appropriate compost... more - videos of the process ....

Brave Thinkers - Magazine - Atlantic Monthly

Name: Danny Day
Job: Founder and President of Eprida
Why he’s brave: His company offers a promising method for absorbing and burying excess carbon dioxide.
Quote: “We have 3 billion people out there who are at risk for climate change and they can be making money solving our global problem.”

Indigenous tribes of the Amazon Basin had a neat trick for sequestering carbon: they buried a combination of animal by-products and charcoal in their fields, which made their crops grow in abundance. Thousands of years later, that soil, known as “terra preta,” remains exceptionally fertile—and rich in carbon. Day believes that this process could be the key to relieving the atmosphere of its burgeoning levels of carbon dioxide. He and others advocate expanded use of a material called biochar, which results when organic waste—like peanut shells or chicken excrement—is cooked in a special container that limits its exposure to oxygen. This process creates small pellets of charcoal (biochar) that lock in the carbon from the cooked organic matter—preventing it from escaping back into the atmosphere—and generates gasses that can be used as fuel. When the biochar is buried in the right agricultural areas, it enriches the soil, increases crop yields, and keeps the carbon trapped beneath the ground. The NASA climate expert James Hansen says that the carbon could be stored for “centuries to millennia.” Eprida hopes to use the biochar to soak up carbon dioxide at polluting factories and then bury it in areas with poor soil quality—potentially addressing two grave problems with one elegant solution.

Biochar work at Burt's Greenhouses

Hugh McLaughlin was in Kingston for 3 days of visits and work shops. Hugh had a very successful and well attended workshop at Queen's University. He covered a lot of ground over the course of an afternoon on the basics of characterizing charcoal down to his "1G Toucan" stove for making a small quantity of charcoal for experimental purposes. On Wednesday Hugh, Julie Major of the IBI and Lloyd Hefferty of Ontario Biochar spent the morning at our greenhouses discussing the process by which we make charcoal. This was a very fruitful exercise that was characterized by an openness that makes this type of work twice the fun! Thursday was the last day and Hugh gave a seminar in the morning. It was well attended with a mix of some academics that missed the Tues. workshop as well as local people from Wilton (wondering what Burt's are up to!) and a further mix of farmers and just plain interested from as far away as St. Catharines. After the seminar at the Wilton Woman's Instite Hall everyone came to the greenhouse for a tour. It was a hectic time for Alex to make sure the system was up and running and both of us were kept busy with questions about our system. It really was a delight to give the tour and see the sincere interest in Biochar as well as receive so many informed questions. Of course everyone should have been informed having just come from Biochar 101 with Hugh! ...

Innovation at Burt's Greenhouses

Video Explaining some of the innovations done in support of a biomass heating system. This has ultimately led to experimenting with the system to produce Biochar. http://www.burtsgh.com/

Organizing for America | BarackObama.com | Final March - Spread the Facts

Conversations With History: Natural Capitalism : BiotechConnection.com

Conversations host Harry Kreisler welcomes Amory Lovins for a discussion of Natural Capitalism. Lovins explains the origins and mission of Rocky Mountain Institute and analyzes the opportunities and benefits of using the profit motive to redesign the relationship between the environment and capitalism. Drawing on his thirty year career as an innovator/consultant/scientist,he analyzes the mechanisms by which ideas can impact business practice and government policy with the goal of sustaining the environment. Series: Conversations with History [1/2009] [Public Affairs] [Business] [Show ID: 15591]

The Power to Feed the World? a Tale of Sustainable Development, Bioengineering, and Citizen Activism : BiotechConnection.com

March 10, 2010 by biotechconnection.com Even set against the standards established by today’s behemoths of international trade and commerce, The Monsanto Company is a veritable giant. Since its founding in 1901, Monsanto has advanced through various embodiments, most often as a producer and purveyor of chemicals. Its many mergers and acquisitions have often dramatically altered the scope of its operations, and as the twentieth century came to a close Monsanto began a transition of its principal role from that of a chemicals company into a formidable biotechnologies operation where she remains today. Following this transformation Monsanto has sought to portray itself as a soldier of the sustainability cause; on its homepage a brief description asserts that “We apply innovation… while also reducing agriculture’s impact on our environment.” Monsanto maintains 17,500 employees around the globe, and recorded revenues of US$7.344 billion in 2006. And yet all is not well in the corridors at Monsanto headquarters in Saint Louis. Monsanto continues to carry the baggage of some dubious legacies which predate its biotechnologies reincarnation. Amongst them is the Texas City Disaster, a 1947 explosion during loading of its fertilizers at Galveston Bay which is considered the largest industrial accident in American history. In the years of the Vietnam War Monsanto supplied the defoliant Agent Orange to the United States Armed Forces for use in its herbicidal warfare program. In a 2002 report Monsanto was identified by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as being a “potentially responsible party” to the contamination of 56 industrial sites. Its popular “Roundup” glyphosate herbicides are cited in a number of studies as causes of cancer (though a number of countervailing studies refute these claims). Monsanto has been accused or implicated in a litany of cases of adverse health effects on both employees at its plants and users of its products. And Monsanto’s enthusiastic use and promotion of genetically modified seeds has provoked the ire of many in Europe and beyond, where a deep public mistrust of these organisms remains widespread. Enter Marie-Monique Robin. The veteran French investigative journalist has never earned a reputation as a scourge of corporate interests in the spirit of such crusaders as Ralph Nader; her interests and works in the past have been mostly political in nature. She was widely recognized for a book and accompanying documentary film which exposed the role of French secret services in endearing certain unsavory techniques to their Argentine and Chilean counterparts during South America’s troubled 1970s and 1980s. But with a new book and documentary film entitled Le monde selon Monsanto (The World according to Monsanto), she has executed a full frontal assault on Monsanto itself, and the corporate world may never be the same again. I have neither read the book nor viewed the documentary, but to judge from reviews and from the author’s own comments in interviews it seems that her premise is as follows. Following her extensive three-year investigation which exposes the depth of Monsanto’s vices past and present, Robin feels that we must ask the question: “Can we believe [Monsanto] when they tell us that biotechnologies are going to solve the problems of hunger and environmental contamination?” (My own translation from the French) (source: Arte TV) In essence Robin questions the ethic, given the ignominy of its past, of allowing Monsanto to feed the world today. The overwhelming evidence shows that Monsanto is indeed guilty of grave misconduct on many counts. Robin’s work is a product of an age in which we now expect our corporations to behave as responsible members of society, and its form and tone give teeth to this approach. Not only are these expectations legitimate and real, but the citizenry is willing to act, and act decisively, to ensure corporate compliance. The forceful way in which Robin transmits this message is welcomed, and Monsanto (and indeed any and all corporations that have committed environmental and other transgressions) is to make reparations accordingly. However I would make the point that it is important in this particular case to divorce the instances of Monsanto’s wrongdoing from the bio-engineering industry wholesale. I am not delusional and I acknowledge that it is the profit motive and not a spontaneous and overwhelming altruism which guides firms such as Monsanto. However if the entire system is properly monitored, there are many poster illustrations of how the interests of global capitalism and the underprivileged need not be mutually exclusive. It is a fact that high-yield seeds and other varieties, readily proffered by Monsanto and others, have allowed for intensifications of agricultural cultivation. This is of particular importance in densely populated poor rural regions where the land available for agriculture would otherwise simply not be sufficient to carry the population. The consequent reductions of malnutrition have saved many lives and have improved countless others. A New York Times article dated October 2007 gives a a sense of the enormous transformative potential at hand if only a comprehensive implementation can be achieved. In this article, Celia W. Dugger shows that seed programs in Africa have fallen short not owing to deficiencies of the seeds themselves, but rather to inadequate farm economy infrastructure and local know-how. She highlights the pockets of success, and makes reference to India’s “Green Revolution” of the 1960s and 1970s that enabled the feeding of hundreds of millions of people. India’s success, she says, is attributable to the stronger farm-economy foundation with which it was endowed. These truths serve as a telling example of the dangers that are inherent if we allow cases of corporate negligence and neglect to necessarily sink the entire ship. We can and must showcase specific outrages and demand redress, but it would be a mistake to paint an entire industry with the toxic brush. As with pharmaceuticals, the bio-engineering industry must be allowed and encouraged to continue its work with aid and input from philanthropic and other organizations, and under the oversight of national and international bodies of governance. We must demand accountability where accountability is often refused. But in the spirit of equity, we must also give credit where credit is well due.

John Deere Attractions - The Plowshare Newsletter

If you're interested in John Deere history or vintage tractors and memorabilia The Plowshare should be required reading for you!

U.S. Department of Agriculture - Range Fuels, Inc. is the recipient of a loan guaranteed by USDA Rural Development to make cellulosic biofuel from wood chips

WASHINGTON, March 3, 2010 – The U.S. Department of Agriculture today announced that Range Fuels, Inc., a Colorado based firm with a planned biorefinery located near Soperton, Ga., is the recipient of a loan guaranteed by USDA Rural Development to make cellulosic biofuel from wood chips. The deal, recently finalized, was first announced last year and represents the first ever loan guarantee by USDA to a commercial-scale cellulosic biofuel plant. This project is expected to provide biorefinery jobs, construction jobs and support the timber industry.

"USDA's investment in the construction of Range Fuels' commercial facility, which will produce cellulosic biofuel from non-food biomass, such as wood chips, demonstrates the Obama Administration's goal to make the United States a leader in renewable energy production and furthers the President's ongoing efforts to bring jobs to rural communities," said Under Secretary for Rural Development Dallas Tonsager. "USDA is proud to work with the lender and the private sector to bring economic opportunity to rural areas."

The $80 million loan, being made by AgSouth Farm Credit to Range Fuels, Inc., is being guaranteed through USDA's Biorefinery Assistance Program authorized by the Food, Conservation, and Energy Act of 2008 and administered by USDA Rural Development. When fully operational, the plant is expected to produce an estimated 20 million gallons of cellulosic ethanol per year. USDA announced a conditional commitment to provide the loan guarantee for Range Fuels in January, 2009.

USDA's Biorefinery Assistance Program promotes the development of new and emerging technologies for the production of advanced biofuels - defined as fuels derived from renewable biomass other than corn kernel starch. The program provides loan guarantees to develop, construct and retrofit viable commercial-scale biorefineries producing advanced biofuels. The maximum loan guarantee is $250 million per project. The program is designed to create energy-related jobs and economic development in rural America. To learn more, please visit www.rurdev.usda.gov/rbs/busp/baplg9003.htm.

USDA Rural Development administers and manages more than 40 housing, business, and community infrastructure and facility programs through a network of 6,100 employees located in 500 national, state and local offices. These programs are designed to improve the economic stability of rural communities, businesses, residents, farmers and ranchers and improve the quality of life in rural America. Rural Development has an existing portfolio of more than $130 billion in loans and loan guarantees.

1366 Tech leaping from pure silicon to solar wafer | Green Tech - CNET News

Solar start-up 1366 Technologies is developing a technology to convert raw silicon ingots directly into solar cells, a process that could slash solar manufacturing costs. The Lexington, Mass.-based company, which was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, had received a $4 million grant last fall from ARPA-E, the federal government's Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, to pursue the technology.
If successfully commercialized, the technology could reduce the costs of making silicon wafers, which are turned into solar cells, by 60 percent, said Frank van Mierlo, CEO of 1366. Its target customer: companies that manufacture solar cells. "This can give significant competitive advantage. If anything can let us manufacture in this country, this is it," he said Tuesday.
The company is cagey on how it produces wafers from silicon ingots--which look like large logs of very pure, gray silicon--but executives say that it has already tested the process. The machine is being designed to cut out two steps in the traditional wafer-making process and use less silicon material.
Early runs have allowed it to make a wafer, which was turned into a cell with efficiency that's higher than existing thin-film solar cells, van Mierlo said. By the end of this year, it hopes to boost efficiency to the equivalent of multi-crystalline silicon cells, he added. Its plan is to start construction of a 100-megawatt demonstration plant with its Direct Wafer machines next year.
In addition to its ARPA-E-funded work, 1366 is also designing machines for improving silicon cell efficiency.
By year's end, 1366 plans to deliver its "patterning machine," which adds a texture to solar cells to trap more light and improve overall efficiency slightly. By next year, it hopes to finish its second piece of equipment, a machine that allows cell manufacturers to put thinner wires on solar cells and use copper, rather than silver.
Until recently, the company had not discussed its Direct Wafer work, but company executives began talking about it at last week's ARPA-E Summit near Washington, D.C.
Martin LaMonica is a senior writer for CNET's Green Tech blog. He started at CNET News in 2002, covering IT and Web development. Before that, he was executive editor at IT publication InfoWorld.

Stewart Brand’s nuclear enthusiasm falls short on facts and logic | Grist

Physicist Amory Lovins is Chairman and Chief Scientist of Rocky Mountain Institute and Chairman Emeritus of Fiberforge, Inc. Published in 29 books and hundreds of papers, he advises governments and major firms worldwide on advanced energy and resource efficiency.

Supporting technical details and citations for this post can be found here: "Four Nuclear Myths" (PDF). Download 485KB

Whole Earth Discipline, by Stewart Brand (Viking, 2009)
I have known Stewart Brand as a friend for many years. I have admired his original and iconoclastic work, which has had significant impact. In his new book, Whole Earth Discipline: an Ecopragmatist Manifesto (Viking), he argues that environmentalists should change their thinking about four issues: population, nuclear power, genetically modified organisms (GMOs), and urbanization. Many people have asked me to assess his 41-page chapter on nuclear power, so I'll do that here, because I believe its conclusions are greatly mistaken.
Stewart recently predicted that I wouldn't accept his nuclear reassessment. He is quite right. His nuclear chapter's facts and logic do not hold up to scrutiny. Over the past few years, I've sent him five technical papers focused mainly on nuclear power's comparative economics and performance. He says he's read them, and on p. 98 he even summarizes part of their economic thesis. Yet on p. 104 he says, "We Greens are not economists" and disclaims knowledge of economics, saying environmentalists use it only as a weapon to stop projects. Today, most dispassionate analysts think new nuclear power plants' deepest flaw is their economics. They cost too much to build and incur too much financial risk. My writings show why nuclear expansion therefore can't deliver on its claims: it would reduce and retard climate protection, because it saves between two and 20 times less carbon per dollar, 20 to 40 times slower, than investing in efficiency and micropower.

That conclusion rests on empirical data about how much new nuclear electricity actually costs relative to decentralized and efficiency competitors, how these alternatives compare in capacity and output added per year, and which can most effectively save carbon. Stewart's chapter says nothing about any of these questions, but I believe they're at the heart of the matter. If nuclear power is unneeded, uncompetitive, or ineffective in climate protection, let alone all three, then we need hardly debate whether its safety and waste issues are resolved, as he claims.

In its first half-century, nuclear power fell short of its forecast capacity by about 12-fold in the U.S. and 30-fold worldwide, mainly because building it cost several-fold more than expected, straining or bankrupting its owners. The many causes weren't dominated by U.S. citizen interventions and lawsuits, since nuclear expectations collapsed similarly in countries without such events; even France suffered a 3.5-fold rise in real capital costs during 1970-2000. Nor did the Three Mile Island accident halt U.S. orders: they'd stopped the previous year. Rather, nuclear's key challenge was soaring capital cost, and for some units, poor performance. Operational improvements in the '90s made the better old reactors relatively cheap to run, but Stewart's case is for building new ones. Have their economics improved enough to prevent a rerun?

On the contrary, a 2003 MIT study found new U.S. nuclear plants couldn't compete with new coal- or gas-fired plants. Over the next five years, nuclear construction costs about tripled. Was this due to pricey commodities like steel and concrete? No; those totaled less than one percent of total capital cost. Were citizen activists again to blame? No; they'd been neutralized by streamlined licensing, adverse courts, and Federal "delay insurance." The key causes seem to be bottlenecked supply chains, atrophied skills, and a weak U.S. dollar -- all widening the cost gap between new nuclear power and its potent new competitors.

Today's main alternatives aren't limited to giant power plants burning coal or natural gas. Decentralized sources provide from one-sixth to more than half of all electricity in a dozen industrial countries and, together with more efficient use, deliver the majority of the world's new electrical services. Booming orders did lately raise wind-turbine and photovoltaic prices too, but they're headed back down as capacity catches up; PVs got one-fourth cheaper just in the past year, and reactor-scale PV farms compete successfully in California power auctions. New U.S. wind farms -- "firmed" to provide reliable power even if becalmed -- sell electricity at less than typical wholesale prices, or at a third to a half the cost utilities project for new nuclear plants.

Rather than viewing nuclear power within this real-world competitive landscape, Stewart simply waves away its competitors. He praises efficient use of electricity, but rejects it because he says it can't by itself replace all coal and power all global development. He also dismisses wind and solar power, and omits small hydro, geothermal, waste/biomass combustion, all other renewables, and cogeneration. Yet worldwide these sources make more electricity than nuclear power does, and for the past three years, have won about 10-25 times its market share and added about 20-40 times more capacity each year.

The world in 2008 invested more in renewable power than in fossil-fueled power. Why? Because renewables are cheaper, faster, vaster, equally or more carbon-free, and more attractive to investors. Worldwide, distributed renewables in 2008 added 40 billion watts and got $100 billion of private investment; nuclear added and got zero, despite its far larger subsidies and generally stronger government support. From August 2005 to August 2008, with new subsidies equivalent to 100+% of construction cost and with the most robust nuclear politics and capital markets in history, the 33 proposed U.S. nuclear projects got not a cent of private equity investment.

Nonetheless, Stewart rejects all non-nuclear options, for four fallacious reasons:

Baseload: Wind and photovoltaics can't keep the lights on because they can't run 24/7.
Footprint: Photovoltaics need about 150-175 times, and wind farms from 600+ to nearly 900 times, more land than nuclear power to produce the same electricity.
Portfolio: We need every tool for combating climate change, including nuclear power.
Government role: The climate imperative trumps economics, so governments everywhere must and will do what France did -- ensure that nuclear power gets built, regardless of economics or dissent.
I believe each claim is unsupportable:

Baseload: The electricity system doesn't rely on any plant's ability to run continuously; rather, all plants together supply the grid, and the grid serves all loads. That's necessary because no kind of power plant can run all the time, as Stewart says they must do to meet steady loads. I repeat: there is not and has never been a need for any particular plant or kind of plant to run all the time, and none can. All power plants fail, varying only in their failures' size, duration, frequency, predictability, and cause. Solar cells' and windpower's variation with night and weather is no different from the intermittence of coal and nuclear plants, except that it affects less capacity at once, more briefly, far more predictably, and is no harder and probably easier and cheaper to manage. In short, the ability to serve steady loads is a statistical attribute of all plants on the grid, not an operational requirement for one plant. Variability (predictable failure) and intermittence (unpredictable failure) must be managed by diversifying type and location, forecasting, and integrating with other resources. Utilities do this every day, balancing diverse resources to meet fluctuating demand and offset outages. Even with a largely (or probably a wholly) renewable grid, this is not a significant problem or cost, either in theory or in practice -- as illustrated by areas that are already 30-40% wind-powered.

Footprint: Stewart understates nuclear power's land-use by about 43-fold by omitting all land used by exclusion zones and the nuclear fuel chain. Conversely, he includes the space between wind or solar equipment -- unused land commonly used for farming, grazing, wildlife, and recreation. That's like claiming that two lampposts require a parking lot's worth of space, even though 99% of the lot is used for parking, driving, and walking. Properly measured, per kilowatt-hour produced, the land made unavailable for other uses is about the same for ground-mounted photovoltaics as for nuclear power, sometimes less -- or zero, for building-mounted PVs sufficient to power the world many times over. Land actually used per kWh is up to thousands of times smaller for windpower than for nuclear power. If land-use were an important criterion for picking energy systems, which it's generally not, it would thus reverse Stewart's footprint conclusion.

Portfolio: The one paper he cites as proof that we need all energy options (Pacala & Socolow's "Stabilization Wedges") actually says the opposite. There is no analytic basis for his conclusion, and there's strong science to the contrary. We can't afford to stuff our energy portfolio indiscriminately with some of everything, and we shouldn't: some options are less worthy and effective than others. The more you fear climate change, the more judiciously you should invest to get the most solution per dollar and per year. Nuclear flunks both these tests.

Government: If nuclear power isn't needed, worsens climate change (vs. more effective solutions) and energy security, and can't compete in the marketplace despite uniquely big subsidies -- all evidence-based findings unexamined in Stewart's chapter -- then his nuclear imperative evaporates. Of course, a few countries with centrally planned energy systems, mostly with socialized costs, are building reactors: over two-thirds of all nuclear plants under construction are in China, Russia, India, or South Korea. But that's more because their nuclear bureaucracies dominate national energy policy and face little or no competition in technologies, business models, and ideas. Nuclear power requires such a system. The competitors beating nuclear power thrive in democracies and free markets.

---

Stewart's reputation and his valuable prior contributions to clear thinking for a better world may win his nuclear views some attention. Yet judged on its merits, not his history, this nuclear chapter's assertions can only worsen climate and security risks.

Compost and climate change: how they are related | Peat free compost | guardian.co.uk

A peat bog on Westerdale Moor in the North Yorkshire Moors National Park. You can help protect such environments by using peat-free compost. Photograph: Alamy

Amateur gardeners take note: your choice of compost could be contributing to climate change. Why? It's all to do with peat.

Prior to the 1970s, most gardeners relied on loam-based potting mixes for growing plants. But they were heavy and expensive to transport and far from ideal. Then lightweight peat-based products began to be aggressively marketed as a cheaper alternative, and gardeners embraced them wholeheartedly.

As famous gardener Christopher Lloyd wrote in his 1970 book The Well-Tempered Garden: "There is currently a tremendous vogue for peat, which is so widely believed to be a panacea for every cultural problem that supplies can barely keep pace with demand."

Lloyd put his finger on a fact that may escape many modern gardeners - peat has only been a horticultural must-have for the past 40 years or so.

When Fisons launched a brand new invention called the Gro-Bag in 1973, filled of course with a peat-based compost mix, this black crumbly stuff became so common as a growing medium that many gardeners hardly realised what their compost sacks were full of.

But what is peat, and why did it become so popular? Peat is made of semi-decomposed plant debris that's formed at a snail's pace over hundreds or thousands of years in layers of about 1mm a year in the waterlogged, oxygen-starved conditions found in bogs both in the UK and around the world. Once extracted, this rich, dark stuff holds both water, air and plant nutrients well, meaning it's been seen as highly useful in the garden as a mulch, a soil improver, and most crucially as a growing medium.

But during the last two decades, we've woken up to the fact that the bogs being destroyed to feed our peat addiction are valuable habitats for all kinds of increasingly rare plants and animals, and need protection.

And in the last few years, the role of peat extraction in hastening climate change has hit home, too. Scientists recognised that peat bogs act as huge 'carbon sponges': as peat is formed it locks away the carbon dioxide that is absorbed by plants as they grow. When the peat is extracted, that CO2 - a potent greenhouse gas - is released back into the atmosphere. Digging up peat from British bogs for use in our gardens releases nearly half a million tonnes of carbon dioxide a year – the equivalent of carbon emissions for around 100,000 UK households.

Amateur gardeners make up around two thirds of the peat market, so it's vital that we wean ourselves off our peat habit. And the message is starting to get through to both growers and producers: peat's use in the garden dropped for the first time in 2007, (from 3.4m cubic metres to 3.01m cubic metres), and in the same year the proportion of peat in compost mixes used by amateur gardeners dropped to 72%, down from 94% in 1999.

The government set a target for compost to be 90% peat-free by 2010, but as more and more of us latch onto the delights of growing our own food movement, we're also heading to the garden centre to buy compost in increasing numbers. That means it is even more vital that alternatives to peat take centre stage in potting sheds and greenhouses across the land, as gardeners switch to peat-reduced products - or even better, peat-free compost wherever they can. Click here to check out the options.