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Greenhouse Farming Affecting Local Climate in Spanish Town

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November 6, 2008 in Environment, Farming and Weather. 0 Comments

Courtesy Treehugger:

The residents of Almeria, Spain, could be forgiven for not thinking global warming a great threat to their fair city. While their countrymen have had to endure an annual temperature increase of 0.5°C since the early 1980s, the citizens of this small city have, instead, experienced a period of cooling. According to a new study published in the Journal of Geophysical Research, local temperatures fell 0.3°C per year between 1983 and 2006 — an unexpected trend they attribute to the presence of a significant concentration of greenhouses, reports Anna Armstrong for Nature Geoscience (sub. required).

In recent years, Almeria has become a major provider of produce to regions of Europe that receive little natural sunlight. Once renowned for being the prime setting for a number of “spaghetti westerns,” the city, located in the southeastern region of Spain, has since become home to the world’s largest number of greenhouses.

Greenhouses: more than just for farming
Greenhouses are buildings that have roofs and walls made either of glass or plastic and are used to grow a variety of plants. lncoming solar radiation helps heat up the plants and soil inside the structure, facilitating growth; the roof and walls help retain air that is warmed up during the process, creating what is known as the “greenhouse effect” (which is where the term “greenhouse gas” comes from). This occurs because the glass or plastic used in the greenhouse acts as a selective transmission medium for several spectral frequencies, effectively trapping certain wavelengths of light within the structure and warming the surrounding air.

Strong albedo effect observed with greenhouses
Pablo Campra of the University of Almaria and several of his colleagues were interested in gauging the climatic impact of this large aggregation of greenhouses. They had already found that greenhouses in the coastal areas of Almeria reflected significantly more radiation back into space compared with plants in surrounding regions (this is the “albedo effect” I’ve mentioned in the past); the effect is greatest during the summer when farms whitewash the greenhouses to prevent the plants from being exposed to excessive sunlight.

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Farmer in Chief

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October 16, 2008 in Energy, Environment, Food, Government, Policy, Technology, Transportation and Weather. 0 Comments

Courtesy NYTimes.

It may surprise you to learn that among the issues that will occupy much of your time in the coming years is one you barely mentioned during the campaign: food. Food policy is not something American presidents have had to give much thought to, at least since the Nixon administration â€” the last time high food prices presented a serious political peril. Since then, federal policies to promote maximum production of the commodity crops (corn, soybeans, wheat and rice) from which most of our supermarket foods are derived have succeeded impressively in keeping prices low and food more or less off the national political agenda. But with a suddenness that has taken us all by surprise, the era of cheap and abundant food appears to be drawing to a close. What this means is that you, like so many other leaders through history, will find yourself confronting the fact â€” so easy to overlook these past few years â€” that the health of a nationâ€™s food system is a critical issue of national security. Food is about to demand your attention.

Complicating matters is the fact that the price and abundance of food are not the only problems we face; if they were, you could simply follow Nixonâ€™s example, appoint a latter-day Earl Butz as your secretary of agriculture and instruct him or her to do whatever it takes to boost production. But there are reasons to think that the old approach wonâ€™t work this time around; for one thing, it depends on cheap energy that we can no longer count on. For another, expanding production of industrial agriculture today would require you to sacrifice important values on which you did campaign. Which brings me to the deeper reason you will need not simply to address food prices but to make the reform of the entire food system one of the highest priorities of your administration: unless you do, you will not be able to make significant progress on the health care crisis, energy independence or climate change. Unlike food, these are issues you did campaign on â€” but as you try to address them you will quickly discover that the way we currently grow, process and eat food in America goes to the heart of all three problems and will have to change if we hope to solve them. Let me explain.

After cars, the food system uses more fossil fuel than any other sector of the economy â€” 19 percent. And while the experts disagree about the exact amount, the way we feed ourselves contributes more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere than anything else we do â€” as much as 37 percent, according to one study. Whenever farmers clear land for crops and till the soil, large quantities of carbon are released into the air. But the 20th-century industrialization of agriculture has increased the amount of greenhouse gases emitted by the food system by an order of magnitude; chemical fertilizers (made from natural gas), pesticides (made from petroleum), farm machinery, modern food processing and packaging and transportation have together transformed a system that in 1940 produced 2.3 calories of food energy for every calorie of fossil-fuel energy it used into one that now takes 10 calories of fossil-fuel energy to produce a single calorie of modern supermarket food. Put another way, when we eat from the industrial-food system, we are eating oil and spewing greenhouse gases. This state of affairs appears all the more absurd when you recall that every calorie we eat is ultimately the product of photosynthesis â€” a process based on making food energy from sunshine. There is hope and possibility in that simple fact.

In addition to the problems of climate change and Americaâ€™s oil addiction, you have spoken at length on the campaign trail of the health care crisis. Spending on health care has risen from 5 percent of national income in 1960 to 16 percent today, putting a significant drag on the economy. The goal of ensuring the health of all Americans depends on getting those costs under control. There are several reasons health care has gotten so expensive, but one of the biggest, and perhaps most tractable, is the cost to the system of preventable chronic diseases. Four of the top 10 killers in America today are chronic diseases linked to diet: heart disease, stroke, Type 2 diabetes and cancer. It is no coincidence that in the years national spending on health care went from 5 percent to 16 percent of national income, spending on food has fallen by a comparable amount â€” from 18 percent of household income to less than 10 percent. While the surfeit of cheap calories that the U.S. food system has produced since the late 1970s may have taken food prices off the political agenda, this has come at a steep cost to public health. You cannot expect to reform the health care system, much less expand coverage, without confronting the public-health catastrophe that is the modern American diet.

The impact of the American food system on the rest of the world will have implications for your foreign and trade policies as well. In the past several months more than 30 nations have experienced food riots, and so far one government has fallen. Should high grain prices persist and shortages develop, you can expect to see the pendulum shift decisively away from free trade, at least in food. Nations that opened their markets to the global flood of cheap grain (under pressure from previous administrations as well as the World Bank and the I.M.F.) lost so many farmers that they now find their ability to feed their own populations hinges on decisions made in Washington (like your predecessorâ€™s precipitous embrace of biofuels) and on Wall Street. They will now rush to rebuild their own agricultural sectors and then seek to protect them by erecting trade barriers. Expect to hear the phrases â€œfood sovereigntyâ€ and â€œfood securityâ€ on the lips of every foreign leader you meet. Not only the Doha round, but the whole cause of free trade in agriculture is probably dead, the casualty of a cheap food policy that a scant two years ago seemed like a boon for everyone. It is one of the larger paradoxes of our time that the very same food policies that have contributed to overnutrition in the first world are now contributing to undernutrition in the third. But it turns out that too much food can be nearly as big a problem as too little â€” a lesson we should keep in mind as we set about designing a new approach to food policy.

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The Cost of Steak

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August 24, 2008 in American Society, Environment, Food, Health, The Consumer and US News. 0 Comments

Courtesy The LATimes

f you are searching for signs that today’s high food prices won’t last, the latest report on the meat industry isn’t promising. In May, a distinguished panel of scientists and meat industry officials concluded that the current “factory farm” method for mass-producing meat poses so many threats to public health — from contaminated water supplies to deadly epidemics of E. coli E. coli — that the whole system needs to go. The good news: Even meat companies agree that change is unavoidable. The bad news: Replacing factory farms with something “sustainable” likely means an end to 50 years of falling meat prices.

The report, from a Pew Charitable Trusts commission, takes a hard look at “confined animal feeding operations,” or CAFOs, which produce most of the U.S. meat supply. These massive facilities house tens of thousands of cattle, hogs and chickens and generate not just huge amounts of meat but rivers of sewage, clouds of contaminated dust and nearly a fifth of all greenhouse gases.

The crowded, often unsanitary conditions promote disease, which has led to the overuse of antibiotics and to a class of superbugs that are resistant to those same antibiotics. Even the modern corn-based livestock diet causes problems. It makes meat fattier and may have helped some strains of the E. coli bacteria evolve from benign microbe to one of the deadliest pathogens in the food supply. And, of course, to grow all the grain we now feed our livestock, we’ve converted much of the Midwest into a huge corn and soybean plantation.

The only solution, the report concludes, is to replace the giant factory farms with models such as “free-range” operations that give animals more space and use different methods of feeding, sewage disposal and medical treatment. And that’s where things get tricky, because most of the practices the industry is being asked to abandon have been pivotal in making meat cheap.

For example, grazing cattle on pasture grass would probably mean less disease and leaner meat, not to mention happier cows. But because the mega-farms confine livestock specifically to restrict animals from moving (and thus burning calories unnecessarily), and because corn is more calorie-dense than grass, CAFO-raised animals fatten faster and thus more cheaply.

Likewise, reducing antibiotics in meat production, though it may improve our health, will deprive the industry of the meat equivalent of Miracle Gro.

Because small, steady doses of antibiotics kill the low-grade infections that normally plague livestock, dosed animals spend fewer calories fighting infection and thus have more calories available for building muscle and bone. When fed antibiotics, livestock can grow 25% faster on the same intake of feed — a critical point, given that feed is a meat companies’ biggest cost.

Of course, we’ve long known that our meat miracle wasn’t quite a free lunch. Yet we were willing to overlook the negatives because CAFOs made meat so abundant and cheap. Since 1960, for example, U.S. poultry output has jumped sevenfold while the price per pound, adjusted for inflation, has fallen by two-thirds. Prices for beef and pork also have fallen precipitously. And as we exported CAFOs to other countries, the entire world began to benefit from falling meat prices and rising dietary standards.

But as the downsides of factory farming have grown too large to ignore, we’ve had to admit that our meat is cheap only because we don’t count all the costs: Taxpayers spend $4.1 billion cleaning up livestock sewage leaks and $2.5 billion treating salmonella. All told, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists, CAFOs may be costing taxpayers $38 billion a year — costs that aren’t reflected in the retail price of meat.

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