Swedish researchers have found that applying human urine is as effective as chemical fertilizers in producing tomatoes - both methods produced four times as many tomatoes as the plants that were not fertilized at all. The study also looked at applying wood ash as a means of reducing the acidity of the soils and adding minerals, but those results have not yet been reported. A similar study from Finland on using human urine to fertilize cabbage showed similar results. In both cases, the study found no health concerns related to using human urine.

The implications and opportunities are worth exploring. Not only does the cost of chemical fertilizers impose a burden on growers, but there are also serious questions about the sustainability of using fossil fuels to raise food. Not only do emissions contribute global warming, but numerous factors can lead to devastating price hikes, and the theory of peak oil raises questions about future supplies.

Human urine, in contrast, is usually viewed as a disposal problem. When I was researching ways to reduce home water use, I came upon waterless home urinals that could be installed in the bathroom. In an office, such units can save up to 40,000 gallons of water a year. Outfit one with a holding tank, and home gardeners could save on water use while collecting valuable nutrients to fertilizer their vegetable plants. Larger operations could partner with office parks or find ways to separate the human urine from the stream of sewerage that currently costs us tax dollars to process.

Echoing one of my recurrent themes, the fact that we see this research being done in other countries and not here underscores my concern that too much of our university-based ag research in the U.S. is corporate driven. We should be the leaders in exploring this kind of win-win strategy.

In a recent article called GMO crops: Battlefield in “Nature” magazine, reporter Emily Waltz looks at the reaction - some would say overreaction - to research published by Loyola University crop scientist Emma Rosi-Marshall in 2007 in the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Rosi-Marshall’s two-year laboratory study showed that caddis flies “fed only on Bt maize debris grew half as fast as those that ate debris from conventional maize. And caddis flies fed high concentrations of Bt maize pollen died at more than twice the rate of caddis flies fed non-Bt pollen.” (Bt maize refers to corn that has been genetically engineered to express the “natural” pesticide bacillus thuringiensis.)

Rosi-Marshall went on to say that the study suggests genetically modified (GMO) corn could have negative effects on nearby streams and that “widespread planting of Bt crops has unexpected ecosystem-scale consequences.”

The publication touched off a firestorm of criticism (or as much of a firestorm as academic battles ignite) from a band of scientists perceived by many as ready to pounce whenever anyone criticizes GMOs.

The “Nature” article says that this was Rosi-Marshall and co-author Jennifer Tank’s debut research. Instead of a collegial discussion of the study’s merits and flaws, the alleged GMO true believers, many of whom have been involved in GMO efforts since the early years, launched heated attacks. One researcher said that the duo had given ammunition to those who would “hamper the progress of science.” Henry Miller, a research fellow at the conservative Hoover Institution, wrote that the conclusions were “dubious,” and the work “arguably amounts to investigator misconduct.”

Rosi-Marshall admits that some of the rhetoric used overstated the results. But researchers such as cell biologist David Shubert of the Salk Institute in California said:

People who look into safety issues and pollination and contamination issues get seriously harassed.”

In addition to questions about the merits of the criticism and its tone is the question of whether such vitriol dissuades young scholars from raising questions about GMO crops. At issue also is whether some researchers have crossed the line into becoming zealots.

About the critics’ motivation, the Nature article says: “What drives the critics? Financial or professional ties to the biotech industry don’t seem to be the impetus. Such ties do exist — like many people researching biotech crops, some have received research grants from industry or have other interactions with it — but in interviews they say that these are not the major driving force. Rather, many of them feel strongly that transgenic crops are safe and beneficial to the environment and society, and that the image and regulation of these crops has been too harsh.”

Asking the scientists themselves whether research dollars influence their views is like asking senators who receive campaign donations whether they can remain pure. When you live in a swamp a long time, you are less likely to notice you are damp, it not wet.

After spending more than 20 years at a major research university, my experience suggests that researchers are under increasing pressure to focus on work that generates grant money. Like it or not, this results in a subtle if not overt corruption of the process. Work that does not lead to the creation of a lucrative new product is typically less likely to be funded. And the utopian world painted by some true believers all too often serves as a reinforcing echo chamber. It is not much of a leap to suggest that these unseasoned new scholars do not realize that such work would deny poor and starving people around the world the bounty that new technological breakthroughs can provide.

We see the same missionary zeal in the recent op/ed in the Wall Street Journal by 1970 Nobel Prize winner Norman Borlaug, whose Green Revolution continues to earn him high praise in many quarters. Borlaug writes that the old “romantic” agricultural traditions of organic farming may be appealing to some upscale consumers, but “not at the expense of the world’s hungry—25,000 of whom die each day from malnutrition.”

Borlaug instead proposes that feeding the world’s hungry requires finding ways to give farmers in the developing world the chemical fertilizers and pesticides and hybrid and seeds they can use to feed more people, particularly with the looming threat of climate change reducing global food production.

It is anathema in certain circles to suggest that Borlaug’s Green Revolution led many countries down the path to starvation when fuel prices rose in the Seventies. Critics are often labeled as naive for suggesting that destroying indigenous agricultural practices to promote the use of expensive inputs imported from U.S. corporations is short sighted. But maybe in this era, as people concerned about climate change and those who worry about peak oil join forces, we will pause to consider the possibility that finding ways to use compost and other natural practices makes better sense that putting all of our chips on technological “marvels.”

Sadly, there is no pot of gold waiting at the end of the rainbow for those who want to do research on how urban farmers around the world could help feed growing populations through innovations in backyard gardens and poultry and livestock production. Agri-chemical corporations have no incentive to put their research dollars toward efforts that do not result in higher sales.

Corporate money all too often narrows what researchers are willing to study. Even government research dollars are all too often influenced by concerted corporate lobbying efforts. Each succeeding generation of scholars risks finding the scope of acceptable research opportunities shrinking unless something is done to reverse this growing corporate influence. And expecting those who benefit from the system to realize how wet they are getting may be asking too much of them.

We need to find funds to support research that explores the downside of new technologies and support young researchers who challenge the status quo. We must also find the money to invest in studies that take “old” ideas such as composting and apply them to today’s challenges. It’s time to drain the swamp.

Novella Carpenter’s startling new book Farm City: The Education of an Urban Farmer is often unsettling but always inspiring. A second-generation serious-back-to-the-lander, Novella did not follow her mother’s footsteps into the country but instead decided to grow her own food on an abandoned lot next door to her apartment in the ghetto called GhostTown in Oakland, CA. Novella documents her efforts to raise her fruits, veggies, poultry, bees, rabbits and even two enormous hogs in a food desert where the sounds of gunshots are more common than the clucking of contented hens. Novella talks about the challenges without sanitizing them, and she shares her triumphs without becoming sanctimonious. (You can follow her further adventures in her Ghost Town Farm blog.)

As an occasionally lapsed vegetarian, I found it hard to identify with her passion for meat, and her willingness - and sometimes eagerness - to kill for it. If you are going to eat meat, I agree that the noblest course is to take the responsibility for killing those animals yourself. Halal slaughter requires that you look the animal in the eye when you kill it, as a way of acknowledging and sanctifying the reality of taking the animal’s life.

But I simply don’t like bacon enough to force myself to learn how to kill animals. Give me soy bacon every time if it means not having to harden my heart anymore than it already has. But I do empathize wholeheartedly with Novella’s desire to grub in the dirt to grow her own food (and her complete abandonment of maintaining a clean house as a consequence).

The book is also a love story. One refrain involves husband Bill, perhaps the only man willing to spend every night Dumpster diving to feed those ravenous pigs. But it is Novella’s romance with the city that makes the book hum. She’s not a naive hippie unaware of the dangers of living in a place where young black men too often die young. She is also honest about her own failures to be a good neighbor, whether that means inflicting animal noises and smells on those who live near her or the time she failed to stand up for neighborhood character Bobby when the police yet again towed away the abandoned cars he lives in.

Novella is not a wealthy trust-fund baby (she calls them “trustafarians”) gone slumming. She’s the hard-working daughter of a disabled single mom who raised two daughters after divorcing their mountain-man dad. She may have an education superior to many of her neighbors, but she’s literally not afraid of getting her hands dirty to support and to feed herself. She may benefit from white privilege, but she does not act like a missionary proselytizing among her Vietnamese, African, Hispanic and African American neighbors, unless it’s about the wonders of growing your own food.

One compelling section of the book involves her budding friendship with a famous Bay Area chef, Chris Lee of Eccolo, formerly of Chez Panisse. (It appears Eccolo is closing and Chis may open a butcher shop in San Fransisco.) Farmer and foodie find common ground based on a shared passion for food. Soon they are collaborating, and chef Chris is sharing family secrets on how to turn one of her hogs into “salumi” (an increasingly popular term that refers to all Italian pork-based deli meats).

The book confirms the growing number of young men and women willing to work hard and sacrifice to re-connect to food. They are the literal and figurative offspring of the hippie farmers of the Seventies. But they also better understand the economic and cultural changes that have created the damaging deadness at the heart of the creeping corporatization of our food. It has produced a system that leaves the children of Ghost Town eating Twinkies from the corner convenience store because they have so few other options.

One of the bigger ongoing scandals in ag circles is the continuing failure of the federal government to force Aurora Dairy to comply with organic requirements. The Cornucopia Institute has now filed suit against Aurora’ High Plains dairy near Kersey, Colorado. Part of the problem is Aurora’s failure to pasture its cattle, as required by the law. A previous Cornucopia filing in 2006 resulted in career USDA staffers certifying that “Aurora was in violation of 14 tenets of the organic regulations including confining their cattle to feedlots, instead of grazing, and bringing thousands of illegal conventional cows into their organic operation.”

According to Cornucopia, more than 1,800 organic dairy farmers who run family operations have asked Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack to intervene. The goal is to force Aurora to comply with national organic standards or give up its organic status. The situation now is particularly dire in a softening economy, since cutting corners provides Aurora an unfair price advantage that allows them to dump their milk on the market through big-box stores, driving down the price paid to family farmers who comply with the law.

It’s time for the Obama administration to grab the levers of power at its disposal and start using its power to help family farmers trying to do the right thing.

Whenever I find something cool that I do not have the time to pursue, I find myself saying, “When fall comes. The latest item on that to-do list is making my own business cards that are also seed packets.

Blogger Autumn Wiggins offers a downloadable template you can use to print cards on leftover grocery sacks using your inkjet color printer. (Now that I use cloth bags at the market, I will substitute recycled paper.)

Autumn suggests filling each packet with flower seeds, but I am thinking about heritage tomatoes. Or maybe some quick-growing radishes that might transform non-gardeners into mini-farmers.

Maybe use these as tags on Christmas gifts?

Click on this diagram to visit Autumn’s site to download the pattern

The crops that people like me think of as food (fruits and veggies) are not what the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg are talking about when they note the dramatic decline in farm income, down 38% this year, according to the USDA as reported in Huffington Post.

The big drops in income are among dairy farmers, cattle and beef producers and the growers of commodity crops such as corn and soybeans. The organic farmer who sells shares of a CSA is not the farmer who is hurting, but they are a small percentage of the overall whole.

Both articles note that competitive factors play a role. Bloomberg remarks that the “swine flu” moniker reduced pork consumption and thereby cost hog farmers significant income. WSJ notes that sugar beet producers, in contrast, did great because producers in India fared poorly. However, compounding the woes of traditional farmers is that, as land prices drop, their ability to borrow against that land in a tight credit market declines.

What many of us who want to major changes in the way food is raised in the United States would like to see if a simple change in the rules regarding farm subsidies. As it stands, farmers who collect subsidies for commodity crops such as corn and soybeans are precluded from raising fruits and veggies, that is “specialty crops.” Commodity farmers who violate the rule lose their government paycheck.

At a time when we want to encourage local food, a simple rule change would allow these growers to devote a portion of their acreage to growing fruits and vegetables for neighboring consumers. I, for one, would rather see them do this to boost their income than to invent another farm subsidy that will only further distort the market.

The contentious aftermath of the op/ed piece written by Whole Foods CEO John Mackey rejecting “Obamacare” shows no signs of abating. If you take a moment to read the piece, Mackey’s anti-government tone rings strong and clear. Sounding like a Tea Bagger, he wrote:

“A careful reading of both The Declaration of Independence and the Constitution will not reveal any intrinsic right to health care, food or shelter, because there isn’t any. This ‘right’ has never existed in America.”

As you probably know by now, Whole Foods shoppers tend to be more progressive and politically active, and many were stunned to find Mackey so badly out of synch with their perceived vision of what the store should stand for. Some disgruntled shoppers have even organized a boycott. (Facebook shows more than 30,000 folks have signed up for Boycott Whole Foods, while only 3,000 have joined DO NOT Boycott Whole Foods.) As Huffington Post reports, two unions have now joined the fray on the side of the boycott.

Whole Foods has long combined high prices for consumers with low wages for workers. Alternet reported last May that Whole Foods was acting a lot more like Wal-Mart than your local food co-op. Yes, they support fair trade products and let employees wear nose rings, but Sharon Smith wrote, “Somehow, Mackey has managed to achieve multimillionaire status while his employees’ hourly wages have remained in the $8 to $13 range for two decades. With an annual turnover rate of 25 percent, the vast majority of workers last no more than four years and thus rarely manage to achieve anything approaching seniority and the higher wages that would accompany it. If Whole Foods’ workers are younger than the competitions’, that is the intention.”

The boycott must be starting to bite, because now comes conservative David Frum blogging that he’s going to make sure to shop at Whole Foods on his way home, to show support for John Mackey. Frum also urges Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma, to organize an anti-boycott of Whole Foods. We have no response from Pollan yet, but in Frum’s antiverse, Pollan should find common ground with him on this issue because supporting sustainable agriculture means supporting higher prices for farmers, and somehow this will result if Whole Foods continues to gouge both consumers and workers alike.

In Frum’s tortured logic, farmers will fare better when sales go up as conservatives (who are always late to the party) begin to see the virtues of organic and fresh, local food and therefore start to shop at Whole Foods. But, letting his paranoia show through, Frum insists the problem for conservatives is that they won’t enjoy a warm welcome. “. . . too many liberals insist on regarding Whole Foods as something akin to a sect or club, where half the pleasure comes from blackballing new members.”

Did some outraged liberal slap him across the face with a bunch of organic kale on his last visit to his local Whole Paycheck, I mean, Whole Foods? Did a roving band of progressive customers ask to check his political credentials at the door? Where is this coming from?

Perhaps David’s brain misfires after too many years of eating pesticide-laden foods?

Glad to have you aboard the organic, local food movement, Mr. Frum, but I hope you don’t hurt yourself twisting yourself into a pretzel to defend a CEO so out of touch with his core customers. Why don’t you take a deep breath, sip some fair trade coffee and join with the majority of Americans in supporting reform of a health-care system that rations care by denying insurance coverage to 46 million of your fellow human beings.

The first challenge in preparing for a fall and winter harvest is to get your seeds to germinate if temperatures get too high. Johnny’s Selected Seeds has launched a newsletter that offers information on the germination temps required for a variety of different root crops and greens. For some crops, starting indoors is safest. Others can be seeded directly but, even in Michigan where the summer has been unusually cool and wet this year, you might need shade cloth to protect plants if temps spike into the high 80s again.

The second challenge if preventing your fragile seedlings from an early frost. That’s one reason the passive solar greenhouses called hoophouses are becoming so popular. Growing Wisdom with Dave Epstein and Johnny’s Selected Seeds collaborated on a series of videos. Click on the image below to watch one on using row covers.

The following abstract reports on the research findings entitled “Changes in transcript abundance relating to colony collapse disorder in honey bees (Apis mellifera)” by Reed M. Johnson, Jay D. Evans, Gene E. Robinson and May R. Berenbaum. (Copyright laws prevent from supplying the PDF of the full article.) The study explores the link between the expression of unusual ribosomal RNA fragments in the guts of honeybees and CCD; however, less clear is what is causing the RNA damage:

Colony collapse disorder (CCD) is a mysterious disappearance of honey bees that has beset beekeepers in the United States since late 2006. Pathogens and other environmental stresses, including pesticides, have been linked to CCD, but a causal relationship has not yet been demonstrated. Because the gut acts as a primary interface between the honey bee and its environment as a site of entry for pathogens and toxins, we used whole-genome microarrays to compare gene expression between guts of bees from CCD colonies originating on both the east and west coasts of the United States and guts of bees from healthy colonies sampled before the emergence of CCD. Considerable variation in gene expression was associated with the geographical origin of bees, but a consensus list of 65 transcripts was identified as potential markers for CCD status. Overall, elevated expression of pesticide response genes was not observed. Genes involved in immune response showed no clear trend in expression pattern despite the increased prevalence of viruses and other pathogens in CCD colonies. Microarray analysis revealed unusual ribosomal RNA fragments that were conspicuously more abundant in the guts of CCD bees. The presence of these fragments may be a possible consequence of picorna-like viral infection, including deformed wing virus and Israeli acute paralysis virus, and may be related to arrested translation. Ribosomal fragment abundance and presence of multiple viruses may prove to be useful diagnostic markers for colonies afflicted with CCD.

UPDATE FROM THE SCIENTIST: In an interview with study author May Berenbaum, she is quoted as saying that CCD is likely the result of multiple viruses, “We may not have the smoking gun, but we have found the bullet hole.” The study suggests that bees may be able to recover from one or two viruses, but an assault by three or four leaves them unable to survive.

Many people have questioned whether honeybees are being damaged by pesticides, but the specific markers that would have indicated pesticide damage did not confirm that allegation in this study.

In 2007, Wired magazine ran an article about how vertical farms could help feed an exploding world population. The article argues:

“[B]y 2050, Earth’s population will swell to 9 billion people. Feeding them — especially if they demand protein-rich Western diets — will require a doubling, even a tripling of global food supplies. But more than a third of our planet’s surface is already devoted to agriculture; there’s not much arable land left. Droughts, floods and soil depletion will only grow more destructive as climate change intensifies.”

The recent op/ed in the New York Times by vertical farm entrepreneur Dickson D. Despommier echoes and amplifies those concerns:

“Three recent floods (in 1993, 2007 and 2008) cost the United States billions of dollars in lost crops, with even more devastating losses in topsoil. Changes in rain patterns and temperature could diminish India’s agricultural output by 30 percent by the end of the century. What’s more, population increases will soon cause our farmers to run out of land. The amount of arable land per person decreased from about an acre in 1970 to roughly half an acre in 2000 and is projected to decline to about a third of an acre by 2050, according to the United Nations. With billions more people on the way, before we know it the traditional soil-based farming model developed over the last 12,000 years will no longer be a sustainable option.”

Dire warnings indeed. And the solution that Despommier proposes holds out the hope that we can build vertical farms in urban areas using hydroponic and aeroponic soil-free technologies. Despommier paints a pollution-free vision of these future farms where the water is recycled and the carbon footprint is reduced because tractors no longer go over the fields, while compacting the soil.

Despommier makes vertical farms sound appealing, and adding a roof garden wherever possible certainly makes good sense. But unanswered in this vision is how much of a burden the power requirements will put onto our planet, since we can only assume that the plants grown on interior floors will require some kind of grow-lights.

Unaddressed as well is that the bulk of our farmland in the United States is not used to grow fruits and veggies, but commodity crops such as corn and soybeans. How much longer can we justify raising corn for ethanol and high-fructose corn syrup that contributes to obesity when that land might better be put to use raising real food (fruits and veggies) for real people? And what makes us think that a population of 9 billion is sustainable? And what can we do, humanely and effectively, to reduce family size around the world?

Viewed through that prism, perhaps we do not have as much as a land shortage as a shortage of vision.