Women We Love: 27 Influential Women in Food and Agriculture

I added all of these ladies as my friends on Facebook:

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Using the legal system to fight factory farms | Michele Merkel | TEDxMan...

More Info on Genetically Modified Super Crops

http://www.vice.com/video/watch-our-hbo-episode-about-genetically-modified-super-crops

Wealth Inequality in America

The pulse of life

Jan 27, 2016

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Vandana Shiva

When pulses are removed from farming systems, synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are used... A recent study has shown that organic farming increased nitrogen content of soil between 44 and 144 per cent. 

Pulses are truly the pulse of life: for the soil, for people and the planet. In our farms they give life to the soil by providing nitrogen. This is how ancient cultures enriched their soils. Farming did not begin with the Green Revolution and synthetic nitrogen fertilisers. Whether it is the diversity-based systems of India, or the three sisters planted by the first nations in North America, or the ancient Milpa system of Mexico, beans and pulses were vital to indigenous agro-ecological systems.

As Sir Albert Howard, known as the father of modern agriculture, writes in An Agricultural Testament, comparing agriculture in the West with agriculture in India: “Mixed crops are the rule. In this respect the cultivators of the Orient have followed nature’s method as seen in the primeval forest. Mixed cropping is perhaps most universal when the cereal crop is the main constituent. Crops like millets, wheat, barley and maize are mixed with an appropriate subsidiary pulse, sometimes a species that ripens much later than the cereal. The pigeon pea (cajanus indicus), perhaps the most important leguminous crop of the Gangetic alluvium, is grown either with millets or with maize… Leguminous plants are common. Although it was not until 1888, after a protracted controversy lasting 30 years, that Western science finally accepted as proved the important role played by pulse crops in enriching the soil, centuries of experience had taught the peasants of the east the same lesson.”

The monocultures promoted by the Green Revolution had a direct impact on the decline of pulse production by displacing biodiversity, and with it depleting soil fertility. Mixed cropping was impossible with the intensive use of chemicals of the Green Revolution. With the change from mixed cropping to monocultures, less pulses were planted, production reduced and with the absence of legumes, nitrogen levels in the soil got depleted.

The Green Revolution ensured India produced more rice and wheat, but our pulses have disappeared from the monoculture fields. Between 1960-61 and 2010-2011, acreage under wheat has gone up from 29.58 per cent to 44.5 per cent and rice from 4.79 per cent to 25 per cent. Meanwhile, the area under pulses has dropped from 19 per cent to 0.21 per cent, oilseeds from 3.9 per cent to 0.71 per cent, millets from 11.26 per cent to 0.21 per cent. When measured in terms of nutrition per acre and health per acre, Punjab is actually producing less food and nutrition as a result of the Green Revolution.

Pulses fix 150-200kg of nitrogen per hectare. When pulses are removed from farming systems, synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are used. Returning organic matter to the soil also builds up soil nitrogen. A recent study we undertook has shown that organic farming increased nitrogen content of soil between 44 and 144 per cent (depending on the crops grown).

My book, Soil Not Oil, highlights how industrial agriculture is a fossil fuel-based system, and contributes more than 40 per cent of the greenhouse gases (GHGs) that are contributing to climate change. Nitrogen oxide released by synthetic fertilisers is a GHG which has 300 times more impact than carbon dioxide in destabilising the climate. Nitrogen oxides also react with water in the atmosphere to form acid rain.

Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers are based on fossil fuels and use the same process that also made explosives and ammunitions for Hitler during World War II. Synthetic nitrogen fertilisers started being promoted in agriculture when large stocks of ammonium nitrate munitions, left over from World War II, were marketed for agricultural use. The energy intensive Haber-Bosch process is used to make ammonia — the feedstock for all synthetic nitrogen fertilisers, as well as for explosives. It uses natural gas to artificially fix nitrogen from the air at a high temperature to produce ammonia. To make 1kg of nitrogen fertiliser, the energy equivalent to two litres of diesel is used. Energy used during fertiliser manufacture in 2000 was equivalent to 191 billion litres of diesel and is projected to rise to 277 billion litres in 2030. This is a major contributor to climate change, yet largely swept under the rug.

Green Revolution displaced pulses from the fields, and replaced them with Bt cotton and soya monocultures. 11.6 million hectares of Bt cotton were planted in India in 2014. If pulses had been planted on half this land, we would have had an additional 4 million tonnes of pulses available. In 2014, 12.12 million hectares of land were planted with soya instead of growing the 10 million tonnes of pulses we needed. Why are we growing soya for export and importing the pulses we eat?

With the artificially created pulse scarcity, pulses have become unaffordable for many Indians. This artificially created scarcity is being used by the government to import pulses from corporations like Cargill India Pvt Ltd. Today, we are the biggest importers of pulses. And since the rest of the world does not grow the diversity of pulses we grow, what is being imported cannot replace the diversity necessary for the Indian diet. Large quantities of yellow pea from the US and Canada are imported for billions of dollars. . In 2015-16, India plans to import more than 5 million tonnes of yellow pea from Canada and the US. In 2012, the Comptroller and Auditor General of India had audited the pulse imports and had questioned the repeated import of yellow pea stating, “The ministry of consumer affairs and food and public distribution decided in 2008 that the agencies need not go for further contracts of yellow peas, but the Union Cabinet in 2009 decided to allow the agencies to import these. The agencies continued
to import even when they had huge unsold stocks, resulting in a loss of Rs 897.37 crore, 75 per cent of the total loss of Rs 1,201.32 crore.”

But the loss is not only to the exchequer. Import of yellow pea translates into importing nutritional deficiency for people and the soil, and decline in soil health. Yellow pea has only 7.5 per cent protein compared to indigenous pulses having 20-30 per cent.

2016 is the “International Year of Pulses”. It provides an opportunity to remember how important the diversity of our pulses is to the health of the soil and our health. We need to rejuvenate the pulse of life on our farms and our thalis.

Dr Vandana Shiva is the executive director of the Navdanya Trust

The Great Bell Chant (The End Of Suffering)

Natural Homes built by Women

Natural Homes built by Women: Natural homes built by inspirational women around the world using clay, lime, stone, straw, reed and roundwood.

Magic Mushrooms That Turn Your Room Into A Glowing Forest

Magic Mushrooms That Turn Your Room Into A Glowing Forest: These whimsical fairy lamps can turn an ordinary room into an enchanted forest!

Designed by Yukio Takano, these glowing fungi are made up of tiny LED lights embedded in delicate glass mushrooms. They are then

Plant These for the Bees

On Being a Mushroom

Not sure who wrote this, but I like it.

"I am old, older than thought in your species, which is itself fifty times older than your history. Though I have been on earth for ages I am from the stars. My home is no one planet, for many worlds scattered through the shining disc of the galaxy have conditions which allow my spores an opportunity for life. The mushroom which you see is the part of my body given to sex thrills and sun bathing, my true body is a fine network of fibers growing through the soil. These networks may cover acres and may have far more connections that the number in a human brain. My mycelial network is nearly immortal, only the sudden toxification of a planet or the explosion of its parent star can wipe me out. By means impossible to explain because of certain misconceptions in your model of reality all my mycelial networks in the galaxy are in hyperlight communication across space and time. The mycelial body is as fragile as a spider's web but the collective hypermind and memory is a vast historical archive of the career of evolving intelligence on many worlds in our spiral star swarm. Space, you see, is a vast ocean to those hardy life forms that have the ability to reproduce from spores, for spores are covered with the hardest organic substance known. Across the aeons of time and space drift many spore-forming life-forms in suspended animation for millions of years until contact is made with a suitable environment. Few such species are minded, only myself and my recently evolved near relatives have achieved the hyper-communication mode and memory capacity that makes us leading members in the community of galactic intelligence. How the hypercommunication mode operates is a secret which will not be lightly given to man. But the means should be obvious: it is the occurrence of psilocybin and psilocin in the biosynthetic pathways of my living body that opens for me and my symbiots the vision screens to many worlds.

Since it is not easy for you to recognize other varieties of intelligence around you, your most advanced theories of politics and society have advanced only as far as the notion of collectivism. But beyond the cohesion of the members of a species into a single social organism there lie richer and even more baroque evolutionary possibilities. Symbiosis is one of these. Symbiosis is a relation of mutual dependence and positive benefits for both of the species involved. Symbiotic relationships between myself and civilized forms of higher animals have been established many times and in many places throughout the long ages of my development. These relationships have been mutually useful; within my memory is the knowledge of hyperlight drive ships and how to build them. I will trade this knowledge for a free ticket to new worlds around suns younger and more stable than your own. To secure an eternal existence down the long river of cosmic time I again and again offer this agreement to higher beings and thereby have spread throughout the galaxy over the long millennia. A mycelial network has no organs to move the world, no hands; but higher animals with manipulative abilities can become partners with the star knowledge within me and if they act in good faith, return both themselves and their humble mushroom teacher to the million worlds all citizens of our starswarm are heir to."

Happy Full Wolf Moon

Mind Vacation

9 Fantastic Uses of Builder's Lime

9 Fantastic Uses of Builders’ Lime Hardly Anyone Knows About

1/21/2016 4:16:00 PM

By Atulya K Bingham

Tags: natural building, lime, Atulya K Bingham, Turkey

 

“Lime? What kinda lime? Whatcha gonna do with it?” I was sitting in a hardware store staring at a tower of dusty white bags. “You’re whitewashing your house, right?” The store owner grinned at me from beneath a large black moustache. “Erm, no. I’m building with it. I’m constructing a house without concrete, and I’m making the foundations with sacks full of limecrete.”

The store owner shook his head gravely. “Oh no no no,” he said. “You can’t build without cement, dear.”

Sigh. Unfortunately, this is still the opinion of far too many builders and architects, even those living in Turkey, a country visibly crammed with ancient buildings that have stood for thousands of years on foundations of lime.

After a long discussion in the hardware store, I finally managed to buy a tractor load of hydraulic lime. Four years later, I have one sack left. In the end I didn’t put it in the foundations at all, but I did use it plenty of other places. And the more I work with this wonderful white substance, the more I fall in love with it.

 

What is lime?

Lime is the predecessor of Portland cement, and is manufactured by heating limestone. It is can be purchased in two forms: Hydraulic lime, a powder which you need to mix with plenty of water and leave to soak for about two weeks until it looks like yoghurt, and slaked lime, a wet putty that has already gone through this process.

One thing to be aware of when using lime is that it’s caustic, so you need to wear gloves. But apart from that, it is everything that Portland cement isn’t: Namely, beautiful, breathable and best of all, carbon neutral.

9 Ways to Use Builders’ Lime

1. To offset the greenhouse effect. Unlike Portland cement, which is currently one of the top two largest producers of CO2 (huge amounts are produced in the manufacturing process), lime is carbon neutral. It is produced at lower temperatures than Portland cement so uses only about 20% of the energy to manufacture. But best of all, lime reabsorbs the CO2 during its lifespan.

2. Earthplaster. For those building with mud in wet climates, lime is your best friend. Unlike Portland cement, lime breathes, so it doesn’t trap water vapour. When added to earth plasters, lime allows the damp to escape from the walls fast, preventing rising damp, mold and unstable plasters.

3. Lime wash. Lime wash has been used as a paint for centuries. Nowadays you can also colour the wash with natural pigments. The beauty of using lime on walls is that it’s non-toxic, allows your walls to breathe and creates magical interiors. It also repels bugs and prevents mold.

Here’s how to make a simple lime wash:

• 3 litres of slaked lime
• 200ml of white glue or salt (this helps fix the lime)
• natural colour (if desired)
• Water to thin

Mix all ingredients well until a smooth milky wash is created.

4. Pesticide and insect repellent. I can personally attest that a lime wash deters all manner of insects. Before I applied it to my mud plaster, mining bees were carving holes out of my walls. I’m happy to say they never returned post lime wash. Lime takes care of fire ants, wood ants, mites, aphids, flea beetles, and even mosquitos according to some sources. Lime wash can be applied to chicken coops, sheds, or sprayed on your garden to keep your plants bug free.

5. Putty If you drain off the excess water, slaked lime is putty-like in texture. You can then use it to fill in gouges in your plaster or smooth over cracks.

6. Limecrete Limecrete can be bought in slabs, or made and poured. Hydraulic lime is mixed with sand (and sometimes pozzolans) to create a durable surface. Limecrete can be used for floors, foundations and as a wall plaster, and is often preferred to Portland cement because it is breathable and reduces interior humidity.

7. Hempcrete Hempcrete is the natural building material of the moment. By mixing hemp, lime, sand and water together and allowing it to set in molds, a sturdy block is formed. These blocks can be used for wall construction. Hempcrete has also been used to create floors.

8. Fungicide and Disinfectant Lime is antifungal and a mild disinfectant. It prevents mold growing and is therefore perfect for walls that see damp or any area prone to bacteria.

9. Food preservation When I first heard a friend of mine saying she was going to dry eggplants with hydraulic lime to make eggplant jam, I was doubtful. “You taste it,” I said. ”I’ll stand by to call the ambulance.” In fact, the art of dehydrating food using lime is practiced in many countries, and often makes the food more delicious in the process.

One last word on lime: It’s very inexpensive.

Atulya K Bingham is an author and sustainable building addict. She lives semi off-grid in Turkey in her beloved earthbag house. Her days are spent growing her own food, experimenting with natural building techniques, and writing. For a limited time you can download her new ebook, Mud Mountain, The Secret Diary of an Accidental Off-Gridder for free! Read all of Atulya's MOTHER EARTH NEWS posts here.

You can also find a free earthbag building PDF and other natural building tips from her website, The Mudhome.

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Bhaskar Save: the 'Green Revolution' ruined India; agroecology can restore her

I would think that a "green revolution" would mean back to organic, but not in India.  It was the name for an industrial approach to farming that was introduced to the detriment of India.

Click on picture to read article.

Big Ag is Too Big

The Oregon Militia Is Picking the Wrong Beef With the Feds

—By Tom Philpott

| Wed Jan. 13, 2016 6:00 AM EST

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Arizona rancher LaVoy Finicum guards the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge on Tuesday, January 5, 2016, near Burns, Oregon. Rick Bowmer/AP

On January 2, a band of armed militants—led by Cliven Bundy's son Ammon—stormed Malheur National Wildlife Refuge in Oregon, seizing the visitor center both to protest the tangled legal plight of two local ranchers convicted of arson on public land, and to defy the federal government's oversight of vast landholdings in the West. (You might remember that Cliven launched his own successful revolt against federal authorities in 2014 to avoid paying grazing fees on public land in Nevada.)

For all the slapstick comedy on display at the still-occupied government complex—rival militias arriving to "de-escalate" the situation, public pleas for donated supplies including "French Vanilla Creamer"—the armed and angry men behind the fiasco are pointing their rifles at a real problem. In short, the ranchers who supply the United States with beef operate under razor-thin, often negative profit margins.

The ranchers who supply the United States with beef operate under razor-thin, often negative profit margins.

It's not hard to see why grazing rights are an issue. Ranchers' struggle for profitability gives them strong incentive to expand their operations to increase overall volume and gain economies of scale. A 2011 paper by the US Department of Agriculture found that the average cost per cow for small (20-49 head) operations exceeded $1,600, while for large ranches (500 or more head), the average cost stood at less than $400. Large operations are more efficient at deploying investments in labor and infrastructure (think fencing), the USDA reported.

To scale up, ranchers need access to sufficient land. And in the West, land access often means obtaining grazing rights to public land through the Bureau of Land Management. Hence the bitter dispute playing out in Burns, Oregon: The ranchers accuse the federal government of ruining their businesses through overzealous environmental regulation of that public land.

Now, it's clear that what the Malheur militiamen appear to be demanding—essentially laissez-faire land management based on private ownership and overseen by local politicians—is a recipe for ecological ruin. In a recent New York Times op-ed, environmental historian Nancy Langston described what happened last time such a policy regime prevailed in the area: "By the 1930s, after four decades of overgrazing, irrigation withdrawals, grain agriculture, dredging and channelization, followed by several years of drought, Malheur had become a dust bowl."

But the real beef that struggling ranchers should take up with the federal government involves not zealous federal regulation, but rather its opposite: the way the feds have watched idly as giant meat-packing companies came to dominate the US beef production chain. Ranchers run what are known as cow-calf operations—they raise cows up to a certain weight on pasture, sell them to a feedlots to be fattened on corn and soybeans (and other stuff), and from there the cows are sold to companies known as beef packers that slaughter and prep the meat for consumers. As the University of Missouri rural sociologist Mary Hendrickson points out, after a decade of mergers and acquisitions, just four companies slaughtered and packed 69 percent of US-grown cows in 1990. By 2011—after another spasm of mergers—the four-company market share had risen to 82 percent, Hendrickson reports.

Such consolidation at the top of the value chain gives farmers less leverage to get a decent price for their cows. A market dominated by a few buyers is a buyer's market. The Kansas rancher and rural advocate Mike Callicrate has been making this point tirelessly for years. Callicrate thinks the Bureau of Land Management has been overly burdensome for ranchers in the West, he tells me, but there's a bigger problem that is "rarely mentioned" either by the gun-toting ranchers or the media covering them: "the historically low, below break-even market prices for livestock."

As the big beef packers scaled up and consolidated their market share in the 1980s and '90s, giant retailers led by Walmart did the same. The result has been steady downward pressure on the beef supply chain: The retail giants pressured the beef packers to deliver lower prices, and the beef packers in turn pressured ranchers. The result has been a big squeeze.

Just four companies slaughtered and packed 82 percent of US-grown cows in 2011.

In the chart below that Callicrate created for a 2013 blog post, drawn from USDA data, the trend is clear: Compared with 40 years ago, nearly a third less of every dollar you spend on beef goes into the pocket of the rancher who raised the cow.

Chart by Mike Callicrate

Under pressure from this squeeze, ranchers have had little choice but to scale up or exit the business altogether—as tens of thousands have done:

Chart: USDA

Rather than demanding unfettered access to public land, the Malheur rebels could be agitating for federal antitrust authorities to take on the beef giants. As the New America Foundation's Barry C. Lynn has shown repeatedly, since the age of Reagan, US antitrust regulators have focused almost exclusively on whether large companies use their market power to harm consumers by unfairly raising retail prices. Those regulators have looked the other way when companies deploy their girth to harm their suppliers by squeezing them on price. So antitrust authorities okayed merger after merger, even when deals left just a few giant companies towering over particular markets. As a result, writes Lynn, "In sector after sector, control is now more tightly concentrated than at any time in a century." The meat industry is aclassic example.

Rather than demanding unfettered access to public land, the Malheur rebels could be agitating for federal antitrust authorities to take on the beef giants.

During the 2008 election, Barack Obama vowed to challenge the big meat packers and defend independent farmers and ranchers from their heft. As Lina Khan showed in a 2012 Washington Monthlypiece, President Obama actually made a valiant effort to do just that—before surrendering to a harsh counterattack from the industry's friends in Congress.

The current presidential election would be an ideal time for beleaguered ranchers to bring corporate domination of meat markets back into the public conversation. Armed occupations of bird refuge visitor centers won't help with that struggle.

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• The EPA Finally Admitted That the World’s Most Popular Pesticide Kills Bees—20 Years Too Late

TOM PHILPOTT

Food and Ag Correspondent

Tom Philpott is the food and ag correspondent for Mother Jones. For more of his stories, clickhere. To follow him on Twitter, click here. RSS | TWITTER

The Secret Social Life of Plants

It's a Zany Year So Far

African Watering Hole

This amazing composite picture by photographer Stephen Wilkes shows the different animals that visited a watering hole in the Serengeti over the course of 26 hours. The photo transitions across time as you move across the frame starting with sunrise on the right.

The image is part of Wilkes’ Day to Night project. As he shot photos over 26 hours, the watering hole was visited by a large number of different animals, including elephants, hippos, zebras, wildebeests, and meerkats.

The Wild Farm

The 'Wild' Farm: Regenerative Agriculture at Village Farm

Article by Rebecca Hosking in Permaculture.co.uk

Farmer, Rebecca Hosking, explains how the language we use and our role within the natural world can transform farming from the production of commodities into a comprehensive regenerative practice that heals whole ecosystems.

Within the permanent team of five at Village Farm we have two qualified ecologists and one zoologist so, as you can imagine, nature and wildlife are frequent topics of debate.

One particular night the conversation focused on how many of our native British mammals and wild birds are categorized either as pests, vermin or game.

As far as mammals were concerned, we could only think of a single species that was universally considered neither pest nor game, the dormouse. All the others had at least one section of society seeing them as undesirables or quarry. Hedgehogs, moles, otters, bats, hares, mice, weasels, seals, foxes, badgers, deer etc… someone somewhere sees them as enemy or target.

The Hazel Dormouse, a UK mammal that actually doesn’t receive negative categorization. Photo credit @woodlanddave

With such negative categorization of our native wildlife it’s little wonder that in 2013 the State of Nature Report, a collaboration between the top 25 UK conservation and research organizations, concluded that in the last 50 years the UK has lost a staggering 60% of all our island’s wildlife, a horrifying loss.

Terminology and framing of language strongly effects everyone’s perception of reality in all walks of life. Most of the terminology we use has been created in the culture surrounding us.

Farming and agriculture are full of cultural framings. In fact, the only place where the framing differs is in science where the wording has been designed as far as possible to offer pure objective descriptions.

To demonstrate, a simple example between the framing in biology and framing in agriculture…

“We have a large amount of pioneer annuals establishing themselves in the fallow field” would be the biological term, and the agricultural term: “That field we ploughed last year is covered in weeds”.

Automatically, the different framing drives us to differing concepts that in turn lead to divergent actions. 'Pioneer annuals' describes the first process of soil and landscape repair; something to stand back, observe and be pleased about. 'Covered in weeds' is a call for action to repress those unwanted plants whether by machine or chemical.

‘Pioneer annuals’ or ‘Weeds’ framing can change mindsets. Photo Credit: @VillagefarmUK

When we started this journey of ‘farming with nature’ we realised how much of agricultural framing blinded our thinking.

Slowly we’ve had to dismantle its language, relying more and more on pure objective descriptions instead and this has led us to where we are today. This by no means is the definitive answer; it’s just further forward in our personal journey.

The farm's porous edge

Today at Village Farm we don’t view our land as a farm, we view it as an ecosystem; and our farm boundary is viewed as our ecosystems porous edge where any gas, liquid or solid leaving the land has to be beneficial to the greater biome and where any animal, bird, insect, seed or nutrient is most welcome.

By understanding that our land is an ecosystem, no longer do we view our wildlife as weeds, pests, vermin, or game. Similarly we no longer view our livestock or crops as qualitatively different; simply put, all we have on our land is species.

Yes we have ‘domestic species’ that we sell to create an income, but to keep those domestic species healthy and happy we need the wild ones just as much, giving equal importance to all because, as we all know, to have a healthy ecosystem you need great abundance and diversity of life. We certainly don’t want to poison or persecute any of those species because that will only result in weakening the ecosystem, simplifying the web and allowing disease an open backdoor.

Domestic and wild species working in an ecosystem together 2. Photo Credit: @VillageFarmUK

In addition we’ve changed the language we use about ourselves, we don’t view ourselves ‘wildlife friendly farmers’, or ‘guardians of the countryside’ creating some sort of farm wildlife reserve. 

Nor do we view the species on this land as working purely for our gain, a concept that is currently described as 'ecosystems services' which personally I find a very grubby little term. It defines species purely as resources and slaves to our human needs. Viewing ourselves above nature, on a higher plain, comes from a human-centric way of viewing our world. Placing humanity above all others is what has got us in trouble in the first place.

Instead we have realised we need to embrace the fact we are a species ourselves; a mammal that just happens to be pretty useful with implements, a tool-wielding monkey that cohabits this land with the myriad of other species.

On the surface this concept of cohabiting might seem a bit lame to some but that’s only until you stop to think about how the heck you are breathing right at this moment? Thank goodness for the plants, trees and phytoplankton that cohabit this planet with us. Their expired oxygen sustains us.

A more extreme example is to consider the multitude of diverse bacteria that is colonising our gut right now, allowing us to digest each and every mouthful we consume. We ourselves are individual ecosystems and most of the DNA in our bodies doesn’t even belong to us. 

When you’re naturally sharing your own body with such a vast number of other species, it makes cohabiting a piece of land outside in the elements seem quite cordial and Britishly polite in comparison doesn’t it?!

Getting to terms with understanding we cohabit this land. Image Credit @woodlanddave

By addressing ourselves as a species within an ecosystem, all of our human ego and guilt can begin to lift and be peeled away. No longer do we seek dominion over the land, neither do we view ourselves only as a negative destructive force. Instead we really start to question our role within that ecosystem and realise it’s up to us to learn as much as we possibly can about the other species that we share it with.

The Rewilding Debate

When you talk about British ecosystems and improving them for nature there is much talk and work now to encourage the ‘rewildling’ of parts of our uplands, allowing areas to revert back to a completely feral state not managed by human beings.

One of the elements to rewilding is the release species that are currently locally extinct into these areas and many of these are known as ‘keystone species’. A keystone species is a species that has a great effect on its surrounding environment in relation to its actual numbers. They play a crucial role in maintaining the structure of an ecological community, affecting many other creatures in an ecosystem and assisting to regulate the types and numbers of various other species.

Such usual examples of keystone species are wolves, golden eagles, lynx and beavers. These are creatures that are either at the top of the food chain and regulate the species below them, or they have a profound effect on their surroundings, such as beavers.

Something that is never mentioned, however, is that we humans entirely match the keystone species description and can work as one in a farmland ecosystem.

We, like the beaver, can dig ponds, create streams and slow water down, allowing it to penetrate the soil. We can and are working currently like a wolf; our form of grazing called ‘Holistic Planned Grazing’ means we move our flock around our land as if they were on migration. Suddenly from herbivores (namely sheep in our case) damaging the soil and creating green house gases, our sheep become part of a symbiotic relationship that locks down carbon and builds topsoil, a system that’s worked for millions of years. 

We can also, like a lynx, push herbivores away from wooded areas allowing them to re-establish. We can also work like smaller animals planting nuts like jays and squirrels and allow trees to grow by spreading seed like song birds and encouraging diverse wild flowers to flourish.

The Farm team digging in some of the 10 thousand trees they planted last winter. Image Credit @woodlanddave

As we can see from the dire statistics on the decline of wildlife in the UK, conservation by itself is not enough. Personally we believe we need to stop just conserving and start regenerating our surrounding landscape.

We are always told that to be sustainable we must tread lightly on the land, but just as you would not expect or desire a released beaver to treat lightly and not change its surrounding habitat, nor do we believe should we.

Our goal for Village Farm is to keep working to create copious amounts of high quality food while simultaneously developing a diverse ecosystem with an abundance of species. We humans can be a force for good as long as we are completely aware that we cohabit this land with myriad of other fellows.

The positive difference that’s happened in just 18 months of work at Village Farm. Image Credit @villagefarmUK

Rebecca Hosking comes from a family who has farmed the land in Devon since the 1500s. She trained and worked as a wildlife camerawoman and started the campaign to ban free plastic bags after seeing the damaged caused to marine wildlife all over the world. She now lives and farms full time at Village Farm in Devon. You can read more about the farm atwww.thevillagefarm.co.uk and follow them on Facebook @thevillagefarm and Twitter @VillageFarmUK where the team post regularly and share their superb photography and insights.

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No Neonics Please

The EPA Finally Admitted That the World’s Most Popular Pesticide Kills Bees—20 Years Too Late

—By Tom Philpott

| Thu Jan. 7, 2016 2:08 PM EST

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Armando Frazao/Shutterstock

Bees are dying in record numbers—and now the government admits that an extremely common pesticide is at least partially to blame.

For more than a decade, the Environmental Protection Agency has been under pressure from environmentalists and beekeepers to reconsider its approval of a class of insecticides called neonicotinoids, based on a mounting body of research suggesting they harm bees and other pollinators at tiny doses. In a report released Wednesday, the EPA basically conceded the case.

The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year.

Marketed by European chemical giants Syngenta and Bayer, neonics are the most widely used insecticidesboth in the United States and globally. In 2009, the agency commenced a long, slow process of reassessing them—not as a class, but rather one by one (there are five altogether). Meanwhile, tens of millions of acres of farmland are treated with neonics each year, and the health of US honeybee hives continues to be dismal.

The EPA's long-awaited assessment focused on how one of the most prominent neonics—Bayer's imidacloprid—affects bees. The report card was so dire that the EPA "could potentially take action" to "restrict or limit the use" of the chemical by the end of this year, an agency spokesperson wrote in an emailed statement.

Reviewing dozens of studies from independent and industry-funded researchers, the EPA's risk-assessment team established that when bees encounter imidacloprid at levels above 25 parts per billion—a common level for neonics in farm fields—they suffer harm. "These effects include decreases in pollinators as well as less honey produced," the EPA's press release states.

The crops most likely to expose honeybees to harmful levels of imidacloprid are cotton and citrus, while "corn and leafy vegetables either do not produce nectar or have residues below the EPA identified level." Note in the below USGS chart  that a substantial amount of imidacloprid goes into the US cotton crop.

Imidacloprid use has surged in recent years. Uh-oh. US Geological Survey

Meanwhile, the fact that the EPA says imidacloprid-treated corn likely doesn't harm bees sounds comforting, but as the same USGS chart shows, corn gets little or no imidacloprid. (It gets huge amounts of another neonic, clothianidin, whose EPA risk assessment hasn't been released yet.)

Soybeans could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable."

The biggest imidacloprid-treated crop of all is soybeans, and soy remains an information black hole. The EPA assessment notes that soybeans are "attractive to bees via pollen and nectar," meaning they could expose bees to dangerous levels of imidacloprid, but data on how much of the pesticide shows up in soybeans' pollen and nectar are "unavailable," both from Bayer and from independent researchers. Oops. Mind you, imidacloprid has been registered for use by the EPA since the 1990s.

The agency still has to consider public comments on the bee assessment it just released, and it also has to complete a risk assessment of imidacloprid's effect on other species. In addition to their impact on bees, neonic pesticides may also harm birds, butterflies, and water-borne invertebrates, recent studies suggest. Then there are the assessments of the other four neonic products that need to be done. Meanwhile, a coalition of beekeepers and environmental groups filed a lawsuit in federal court Wednesday pointing out that the agency has never properly assessed neonics in their most widely used form: as seed coatings, which are then taken up by crops.