
Brad Masi
According to the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the past decade is the first in more than fifty years that has actually witnessed a net gain in the number of reported farmers. Since 2002, almost 300,000 farms have begun operation, representing about 13 percent of all farms nation-wide. The majority of these new farms share several characteristics—smaller acreage, more diversified, operated by younger farmers and targeting local markets.
Many of these new farms confront a common challenge—degraded land and eroded topsoil. In rural areas, many farms have a history of invasive plowing, a lack of off-season cover-crops and compaction from heavy equipment that lead to poor soil conditions. In urban areas, land has frequently been stripped of topsoil, is heavily compacted, and contains old foundation stones and other urban debris.
Every new farm has to have a strategy for restoring topsoil, which provides the natural capital necessary to acheive a viable farm enterprise. For example in 2001, the 70-acre George Jones Farm and Nature Preserve in Oberlin began to transition from corn and soybean production to a more diversified farm that combined habitat restoration with the provision of food for local markets.
The soil at the farm faced significant compaction resulting from the loss of soil organic matter, a lack of worms and other soil micro-organisms, and historic use of heavy equipment. During the first couple of years of production, the young farmers joked that they would be better off starting a pottery business utilizing the heavy clay soils. As a result, production yields were severely limited during the first few years of operation.
Over time, the farm employed a wide-range of strategies to improve topsoil, eventually leading to a viable farm operation that supplies food to the college dining halls and a number of other local markets. The strategies included incorporation of municipal leaf mulch, cover-cropping, rotation of chickens and other livestock, and use of vermicompost—food waste processed by worms.
At present the Oberlin community is engaged in a broader, community-wide initiative to build on this example by converting urban wastes generated by the college, residents and local businesses into productive inputs for local agriculture.
As a part of the Oberlin Project, an effort to transition away from fossil energy dependency, the community is currently considering a mix of techniques and strategies aimed at solidifying the links between organic waste and the productivity of local farms. Options that could be considered by any community of any size, include:
• Commercial/Municipal Scale Composting—Large-scale composting systems involve a centralized facility that accepts large volumes of food waste and processes it into compost that can be sold or, in some cases, donated to area farms. These systems can provide employment opportunities, but can also be capital intensive and costly to establish and maintain.
• Vermicomposting—Vermicomposting feeds food and organic waste to worms who produce worm castings- nutrient rich compost. Vermicompost systems can cover a variety of scales, from restaurant basements to greenhouses or open fields on a farm. They can be managed at a commercial-scale or maintained by an individual farmer or business owner.
• On-Farm Composting Options—Dairy or livestock farms can work in partnership with municipalities or landscape companies to mix wood mulch or leaves with manure generated by their operations to produce compost that can be used to fertilize fields or support vegetable or grain production on other parts of the farm.
• Waste-to-Energy—Bio-digesters facilitate anaerobic composting (composting without oxygen), which releases methane as a by-product. The methane can be burned directly to produce fuel for cooking or heat for a greenhouse. Methane can also be stored and run through a generator to produce electricity.
Bio-digesters can include large-scale systems which can process large amounts of waste or can be scaled at the home or individual farm scale.
This year, the Oberlin community will be assessing these different options with the goal of creating a viable community composting system that utilizes waste to spur the growth of the community’s local food economy.
Even though it’s a small town, Oberlin spends more than $17 million per year on food. Present local food efforts between the college, student coops and local businesses circulate more than $1 million in the local economy.
Finding a way to more effectively collect, distribute and process the abundant organic wastes of this small town can go a long way in improving economic opportunities in the local food system.
Think about the potential of similarly engaging larger cities with urban farmers or rural farms in the surrounding countryside.
Follow Oberlin’s community process and learn more about options for your own community, by visiting www.neofoodweb.org.
The growing Texas solar industry is offering a safe harbor to unemployed oil and gas professionals amidst the latest oil and gas industry bust, this one brought on by the novel coronavirus pandemic, the Houston Chronicle reports.
EcoWatch Daily Newsletter
This month, a new era began in the fight against plastic pollution.
- Historic Agreement on Plastic Pollution Reached by 180+ Countries ... ›
- U.S. Leads the World in Plastic Waste, New Study Finds - EcoWatch ›
- EU Bans Exporting Unsorted Plastic Waste to Poorer Countries ... ›
Trending
Sweden's reindeer have a problem. In winter, they feed on lichens buried beneath the snow. But the climate crisis is making this difficult. Warmer temperatures mean moisture sometimes falls as rain instead of snow. When the air refreezes, a layer of ice forms between the reindeer and their meal, forcing them to wander further in search of ideal conditions. And sometimes, this means crossing busy roads.
- San Antonio, Texas Unveils Largest Highway Crossing for Wildlife in ... ›
- Wildlife Crossings a Huge Success - EcoWatch ›
Heatwaves are not just distinct to the land. A recent study found lakes are susceptible to temperature rise too, causing "lake heatwaves," The Independent reported.
- Climate Change Will Be Sudden and Cataclysmic Unless We Act Now ›
- There's a Heatwave at the Arctic 'Doomsday Vault' - EcoWatch ›
- Marine Heatwaves Destroy Ocean Ecosystems Like Wildfires ... ›
By Aaron W Hunter
A chance discovery of a beautifully preserved fossil in the desert landscape of Morocco has solved one of the great mysteries of biology and paleontology: how starfish evolved their arms.
The Pompeii of palaeontology. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<h2></h2><p>Although starfish might appear very robust animals, they are typically made up of lots of hard parts attached by ligaments and soft tissue which, upon death, quickly degrade. This means we rely on places like the Fezouata formations to provide snapshots of their evolution.</p><p>The starfish fossil record is patchy, especially at the critical time when many of these animal groups first appeared. Sorting out how each of the various types of ancient starfish relate to each other is like putting a puzzle together when many of the parts are missing.</p><h2>The Oldest Starfish</h2><p><em><a href="https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/216101v1.full.pdf" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Cantabrigiaster</a></em> is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. It was discovered in 2003, but it has taken over 17 years to work out its true significance.</p><p>What makes <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> unique is that it lacks almost all the characteristics we find in brittle stars and starfish.</p><p>Starfish and brittle stars belong to the family Asterozoa. Their ancestors, the Somasteroids were especially fragile - before <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> we only had a handful of specimens. The celebrated Moroccan paleontologist Mohamed <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.palaeo.2016.06.041" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">Ben Moula</a> and his local team was instrumental in discovering <a href="https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0031018216302334?via%3Dihub" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer">these amazing fossils</a> near the town of Zagora, in Morocco.</p><h2>The Breakthrough</h2><p>Our breakthrough moment came when I compared the arms of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> with those of modern sea lilles, filter feeders with long feathery arms that tend to be attached to the sea floor by a stem or stalk.</p><p>The striking similarity between these modern filter feeders and the ancient starfish led our team from the University of Cambridge and Harvard University to create a new analysis. We applied a biological model to the features of all the current early Asterozoa fossils in existence, along with a sample of their closest relatives.</p>Cantabrigiaster is the most primitive starfish-like animal to be discovered in the fossil record. Aaron Hunter, Author provided
<p>Our results demonstrate <em>Cantabrigiaster</em> is the most primitive of all the Asterozoa, and most likely evolved from ancient animals called crinoids that lived 250 million years before dinosaurs. The five arms of starfish are a relic left over from these ancestors. In the case of <em>Cantabrigiaster</em>, and its starfish descendants, it evolved by flipping upside-down so its arms are face down on the sediment to feed.</p><p>Although we sampled a relatively small numbers of those ancestors, one of the unexpected outcomes was it provided an idea of how they could be related to each other. Paleontologists studying echinoderms are often lost in detail as all the different groups are so radically different from each other, so it is hard to tell which evolved first.</p>