Sustainable Agriculture & Food Policy

In recent decades, consumers have become increasingly interested in local food, including local meat and poultry. To meet this demand, local meat producers need access to appropriately scaled processing facilities with the skills, inspection status, and other attributes to handle these products safely, legally, and to customer specifications. Farmers and others market participants suggest that limited processing infrastructure is a bottleneck restricting the flow of local meat and poultry to market, and they call for more plants to be built.

An open-source publication targeted to machinery manufacturers, engineers, researchers and development practitioners, this book describes and provides technical designs for small-scale agricultural machinery developed or produced in Bangladesh to support the sustainable intensification of agriculture by smallholder farmers. The focus is on smart, scale-appropriate equipment particularly for use with two-wheel hand tractors suited for the small plots typical throughout Bangladesh, but also in many countries where small-holder farmers predominate.

This reference resource, in atlas format, is an online-only compendium of maps and data sets accompanied by multimedia elements designed to illustrate key concepts in green issues and environmentalism graphically and interactively. Topics for the maps presented in this work were selected from articles in the 12-volume SAGE Reference Series on Green Society: Toward a Sustainable Future. Each map includes links to one or more of the series articles. Maps include interactive components, with clickable icons to deliver the data and statistics that make up each map.

Wilmar International, one of the world’s biggest palm oil producers, has agreed to ensure the oil it supplies will not result in any additional loss of rainforests, in a move that could significantly slow the destruction of tropical forests around the world. “If Wilmar is genuine in its commitments to deforestation-free, peat-free, exploitation-free palm oil, this could be a game-changer for the industry,” said Sharon Smith, palm oil campaign manager for the Union of Concerned Scientists.

Democrats blame record drought. Republicans blame Obama. But one thing both parties agree on is that food prices are going up. In his acceptance speech at last week's GOP convention, Mitt Romney openly mocked tackling climate change as the opposite of helping working families, yet pointed to food prices in his long list of ongoing concerns: "Food prices are higher. Utility bills are higher, and gasoline prices, they've doubled," he claimed.

The new O'Donohue Family Stanford Educational Farm will grow a diverse crop of vegetables, flowers, fruit trees and specialty plants to teach students and the public about sustainable farming. The farm will work with other campus programs and plans to distribute some of the food, said Patrick Archie, director of the Stanford Educational Farm Program in the School of Earth Sciences.

While a farmer can control the inputs on to his land, ensuring that fertilizer and pest management and other products meet organic standards, that level of control isn’t really available in a natural body of water, says Lisa Bunin, CFS’s organic policy coordinator. For example, pollutants move freely through water, making it almost impossible to ensure a fish raised organically is not exposed. Further, some fish, such as salmon, are migratory, and stopping that migration would be adverse to the spirit of organic, Bunin adds.

Andrea Johnson is now working in Turrialba, Costa Rica, at the Center for Training and Education in Agriculture and Forestry (CATIE, for the Spanish acronym), a well-known regional institution in Latin America. She is overseeing the monitoring, evaluation and planning for a project focused on supporting sustainable forest management, community forestry and wood product value chains throughout Central America. They have partners and activities in Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua and Costa Rica. Visit Andrea's LinkedIn profile

Liability is an issue that may give landowners pause. At a minimum, landlords are going to want their farmer/gardener tenants to have liability insurance, according to Nathan McClintock, an assistant professor at the Toulan School of Urban Studies & Planning at Portland State University.