Sustainable Agriculture & Food Policy

Demand for locally produced beef is surging as never before, but the butchers who for generations have prepared and sold meat to customers and markets are a dwindling profession. ... Lauren Gwin, a professor at Oregon State University who coordinates the Niche Meat Processor Assistance Network, said the demand for specialty meat is prompting some new businesses to open, but that getting started is costly and difficult.

Meredith Niles will begin as an assistant professor of food policy at the University of Vermont in August 2015. She will be in the Department of Nutrition and Food Sciences and also affiliated with the campus-wide multidisciplinary food systems initiative, which currently has a master’s program and will accept PhD students beginning in 2016. Meredith will continue her work related to farmer responses to climate change and assessing the environmental, production and economic tradeoffs of integrated crop and livestock systems across different policy and climate contexts.&nbs

Maine Farmland Trust announced Feb. 26 it has established a new Policy and Research Fellowship program. Amanda Beal, a sustainable food policy advocate and consultant who grew up on a Maine dairy farm and is widely respected within Maine’s agricultural community, will serve as MFT’s inaugural Fellow.

New research published in January reveals that vast stretches of the ocean interior abruptly lost oxygen during the transition out of the last ice age that occurred 17,000–10,000 years ago. This event was the most recent example of large-scale global warming, and was caused primarily by changes in Earth’s orbit around the sun. Past climate events provide informative case studies for understanding what is currently happening to the modern climate system, says 2013 Fellow Sarah Moffitt.

If you didn’t know it was happening, it would have been easy to miss the public launch (appropriately made at the festival supporting local foods) of 50 x 60: A New England Food Vision—a report issued by Food Solutions New England, a regional collaborative network coordinated by the University of New Hampshire and organized around the effort to “transform the New England food system into a resilient driver of healthy food, sustainable farming and fishing, and thriving communities.”

A 2011 change in Oregon law freed poultry processors from state licensing if they handle no more than 1,000 birds per year, raise the birds themselves and process them on site. The legislation changed Oregon law to line up with the federal standard, which says producers are exempt from mandatory USDA inspection and can sell uncooked poultry on the farm and at farmers’ markets if they stay below the 1,000-bird threshhold. ...

The European Union led the world in wheat production and exports in 2014-15. Yet Europe is also the region where productivity has slowed the most. Yields of major crops have not increased as much as would be expected over the past 20 years, based on past productivity increases and innovations in agriculture. Finding the causes of that stagnation is key to understanding the trajectory of the global food supply.

There's a growing understanding of the factors that contribute to ocean acidification in coastal areas and how shellfish respond. A new study looks at the risks to shellfish and identifies areas where livelihoods are most at risk. ...

Africa needs more food. And to get more food, you need more farmland. There's a relatively simple solution — it's called "land conversion," and it can mean creating new fields to grow crops next to fragments of forest. Only there's a catch. The rats of the forest are drawn to the crops of the farmland — and to the grains that farmers often store outside their homes. And those rats can carry the bacteria that causes plague — the very same plague responsible for claiming millions of lives during the Middle Ages.