sustainable agriculture

Eight months after one USDA agency rescinded its standard for grass-fed beef, a sister agency published a "labeling guideline" — open to public comment for 60 days — that says the term is available only for beef from cattle "that were only (100 percent) fed grass (forage) after being weaned." A small-farm group said the step would "preserve the label's strong reputation."

Seven major food companies, with $124 billion in combined annual revenues, will work with growers around the world to reduce water use and pollution, said World Wildlife Fund and Ceres, a nonprofit group promoting sustainable food. The companies, Diageo, General Mills, Hain Celestial, Hormel Foods, Kellogg, PepsiCo and WhiteWave Foods, will submit detailed sustainable sourcing and water stewardship plans as part of the AgWater Challenge.

Nearing her 73rd birthday, Nora Pouillon, owner of the first U.S. restaurant to be certified organic, has decided to sell her business and retire, reports the Washington Post. It says the self-taught Pouillon, and the restaurant named after her, inspired "a generation of chefs to shop locally for high-quality ingredients."

Six U.S. farm groups challenged Dannon USA's pledge to switch to non-GMO ingredients in its yogurt as "the exact opposite of the sustainable agriculture you claim to the seeking." The chairman of the National Milk Producers Federation, Randy Mooney, said, "This is just marketing puffery, not any true innovation that improves the actual product offered to consumers."

Sundrop Farm, a 20-hectare site near Port Augusta in the South Australian desert, is "the first agricultural system of its kind in the world and uses no soil, pesticides, fossil fuels or groundwater," says New Scientist. The farm runs on solar-generated electricity and desalinates seawater that is piped 5.5 km to the farm, which the news site says "might be the face of farming in the future."

Community supported agriculture (CSA) began as a year-long direct-marketing commitment between farmers and consumers. With local food in high demand, "on-line hubs are using sophisticated distribution technology to snap into the food chain, often using CSA to describe what they deliver," says the New York Times, some of it is neither local nor direct from the farm, such as olive oil or tropical fruit.

Organic farms operate 1 percent of U.S. cropland, so Yuma County in the southwestern corner of Arizona is exceptional. As much as 12 percent of farmland in the county is in organic production, reports the Yuma Sun, up from an estimated 7 percent in 2012.

A hub of sustainability education since its founding in 1958, Sterling College in Craftsbury Common, Vermont, will launch a program this summer "to help students not only deepen their focus on artisan food and organic agriculture but also turn them into viable businesses," says Civil Eats.

As part of a White House meeting on environmental conservation, the USDA announced the availability of $20 million through the Conservation Innovation Grants program.

While organic agriculture yields less than conventional farming systems, it surpasses on a wide spectrum of sustainability benefits, a review study published in Nature Plants found.

The "floating gardens" of Bangladesh and mountain farming in Japan are among four traditional farming systems declared "globally important agricultural heritage systems" by the Food and Agriculture Organization.

The climate-change deal signed in Paris "is a game-changer" for the 800 million hungry people in the world, because it is the first global agreement to give priority to food security, says the UN Food and Agriculture Organization.

Organic farmers and producers who use integrated pest management to control weeds, disease and insect have overlapping interests, says a white paper that calls for collaboration between the groups.

Kansas native and founder of the Land Institute, Wes Jackson, "spent the last 39 years warning us that grain farmers are destroying the planet," says the Wichita Eagle.

Rather than argue about organic vs conventional farming or big vs small in local food production, the sector should "focus on what works best to achieve these concrete goals: Reliable and consistent production of safe, nutritious and affordable food; healthy working lands and ecosystems; and prosperous farms and communities," says the AGree farm-policy project.

In a new survey by the U.S. Farmers and Ranchers Alliance, a public-relations arm of the Farm Bureau and commodity groups, fewer than half of respondents agreed with the statement, “The way that most of today’s farming and ranching operations in the U.S. grow and raise food meets the standards of sustainability.”