international sustainable agriculture
In 1979, John Musser embarked on an expedition into the rugged far reaches of America’s southern neighbor to visit Mexican orphanages, where he witnessed both hungry children and food waste.
Upon his return, Musser founded the Texas-based non-profit Aquaponics & Earth and stepped up to the challenge of helping orphans in Mexico and across the world secure adequate nutrition. Through hardware and education, Musser’s organization enables orphanages to become self-sustaining, freeing themselves from dependence on food aid.
When Casey Houweling traveled to Tactic, Guatemala in the summer of 2012, he saw firsthand the poverty, illiteracy, and hunger faced by the people in a country torn by decades of civil war. Houweling, President and CEO of Houweling’s Tomatoes, made the trip at the behest of his daughter Rebecca, a nursing student who had served there alongside the staff at a school run by Impact Ministries.
Rebecca was convinced that Houweling’s Tomatoes had the resources to help improve life for Tactic’s residents. Houweling had his doubts, however.
The island city-state of Singapore is known as one of the most rapidly developing countries in the world. With 5.3 million people living on 275 square miles of land, Singapore is also one of the most densely populated countries in …
Larry Jacobs, a visionary from California, pioneered a new form of agriculture three decades ago that demonstrated to skeptics food could be cultivated profitably without the use of farming chemicals and pesticides. He went on to found the Del Cabo Cooperative in Mexico, which continues to assist indigenous farmers in growing and selling their produce at a price that creates a sustainable livelihood for their families.
In part one of a two-part interview with Seedstock.com, Larry Jacobs, NRDC’s 2013 Growing Green Award winner, explains why he chose in 1980 to make the switch to organic farming. This occurred at a time when U.S. farmers who experimented with organic farming methods were not even on the radar screen, and were often considered residents of “Kookville,” Jacobs says.
Scarcity of clean water poses an enormous threat to food security around the world. Both in the developing world, including China and India, and even here in the United States, farmers increasingly face the arduous challenge of obtaining sufficient clean water to grow crops. Faced with this daunting challenge, the team behind the GreenTop platform developed an innovative system that uses wind power to capture atmospheric water moisture, which in turn is used to grow fruits and vegetables hydroponically. By creating an affordable, scalable technology that relies solely on renewable energy, the GreenTop platform enables farmers to boost food production, particularly in developing countries where the climate is arid, arable land scarce and access to clean water limited.
Research Finds Ag and Food Production Contribute Up to 29 Percent of Global Greenhouse Gas EmissionsNovember 2, 2012 | CGIAR
News Release – COPENHAGEN – Feeding the world releases up to 17,000 megatonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere annually, according to a new analysis released today by the CGIAR Research Program on Climate Change, Agriculture and Food Security (CCAFS). But while the emissions “footprint” of food production needs to be reduced, a companion policy brief by CCAFS lays out how climate change will require a complete recalibration of where specific crops are grown and livestock are raised.
The following guest post was written by Aragon St-Charles, who founded Japan Aquaponics in June of 2011 after the great earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Through this social enterprise, St-Charles aims to introduce and promote aquaponics in Japan to increase food security and insure against disruptions to the food system.
Agriculture in Japan offers a tantalizing glimpse into the past, into an era of millions of small home farms of less than a few acres providing for family sustenance and hopefully a little extra to take to market. Given the high tech reputation of Japan this may seem to be at odds with our perception of the country, and yet with the average farmer and his wife (both heartwarmingly sharing the back-breaking work) being nearly 70 years old and farming less than 5 acres of land, the dichotomy is very real.
News Release – RIO DE JANEIRO, June 18, 2012 – Creating an index of sustainable development, enabling the opening of markets to countries that adopt correct environmental practices, and an international fund for the financing and dissemination of technology to contribute to agricultural development and livestock with respect to the environment are two of the proposals of the agricultural sector for the United Nations Conference on Sustainable Development – Rio +20. “Brazil, which produces inexpensive, high quality food while using only up to 27.7% of its territory, has the moral authority at Rio +20 to argue for new proposals which would ensure sustainable growth of the world output,” says the president of the Confederation of Agriculture and Livestock of Brazil (CNA), Senator Katia Abreu.