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In the Zenù reserve, issues with the weather, climate or soil are spread by word of mouth between farmers, or on La Positiva 103.0, a community agroecology radio station. And what’s been on every farmer’s mind is last year’s record-breaking heat and droughts. Both of these were charged by the twin impacts of climate change and a newly developing El Niño, a naturally occurring warmer period that last occurred here in 2016, say climate scientists.

Experts from Colombia’s Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies say the impacts of El Niño will be felt in Colombia until April 2024, adding to farmers’ concerns. Other scientists forecast June to August may be even hotter than 2023, and the next five years could be the hottest on record. On Jan. 24, President Gustavo Petro said he will declare wildfires a natural disaster, following an increase in forest fires that scientists attribute to the effects of El Niño.

In the face of these changes, Zenù farmers are trying to revive traditional agricultural practices like ancestral seed conservation and a unique agroecology system.

Pictured: Remberto Gil’s house is surrounded by an agroforestry system where turkeys and other animals graze under fruit trees such as maracuyá (Passiflora edulis), papaya (Carica papaya) and banana (Musa acuminata colla). Medicinal herbs like toronjil (Melissa officinalis) and tres bolas (Leonotis nepetifolia), and bushes like ají (Capsicum baccatum), yam and frijol diablito (beans) are part of the undergrowth. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

“Climate change is scary due to the possibility of food scarcity,” says Rodrigo Hernandez, a local authority with the Santa Isabel community. “Our ancestral seeds offer a solution as more resistant to climate change.”

Based on their experience, farmers say their ancestral seed varieties are more resistant to high temperatures compared to the imported varieties and cultivars they currently use. These ancestral varieties have adapted to the region’s ecosystem and require less water, they tell Mongabay. According to a report by local organization Grupo Semillas and development foundation SWISSAID, indigenous corn varieties like blaquito are more resistant to the heat, cariaco tolerates drought easily, and negrito is very resistant to high temperatures.

The Zenù diet still incorporates the traditional diversity of seeds, plant varieties and animals they consume, though they too are threatened by climate change: from fish recipes made from bocachico (Prochilodus magdalenae), and reptiles like the babilla or spectacled caiman (Caiman crocodilus), to different corn varieties to prepare arepas (cornmeal cakes), liquor, cheeses and soups.

“The most important challenge we have now is to save ancient species and involve new generations in ancestral practice,” says Sonia Rocha Marquez, a professor of social sciences at Sinù University in the city of Montería.

...[Despite] land scarcity, Negrete says communities are developing important projects to protect their traditional food systems. Farmers and seed custodians, like Gil, are working with the Association of Organic Agriculture and Livestock Producers (ASPROAL) and their Communitarian Seed House (Casa Comunitaria de Semillas Criollas y Nativas)...

Pictured: Remberto Gil is a seed guardian and farmer who works at the Communitarian Seed House, where the ASPROL association stores 32 seeds of rare or almost extinct species. Image by Monica Pelliccia for Mongabay.

Located near Gil’s house, the seed bank hosts a rainbow of 12 corn varieties, from glistening black to blue to light pink to purple and even white. There are also jars of seeds for local varieties of beans, eggplants, pumpkins and aromatic herbs, some stored in refrigerators. All are ancient varieties shared between local families.

Outside the seed bank is a terrace where chickens and turkeys graze under an agroforestry system for farmers to emulate: local varieties of passion fruit, papaya and banana trees grow above bushes of ají peppers and beans. Traditional medicinal herbs like toronjil or lemon balm (Melissa officinalis) form part of the undergrowth.

Today, 25 families are involved in sharing, storing and commercializing the seeds of 32 rare or almost-extinct varieties.

“When I was a kid, my father brought me to the farm to participate in recovering the land,” says Nilvadys Arrieta, 56, a farmer member of ASPROAL. “Now, I still act with the same collective thinking that moves what we are doing.”

“Working together helps us to save, share more seeds, and sell at fair price [while] avoiding intermediaries and increasing families’ incomes,” Gil says. “Last year, we sold 8 million seeds to organic restaurants in Bogotà and Medellín.”

So far, the 80% of the farmers families living in the Zenù reserve participate in both the agroecology and seed revival projects, he adds."

-via Mongabay, February 6, 2024

In search of lost fruit: the explorers tracking down ancient trees before they are gone forever

These folks all hang out on a facebook group - North American Fruit Explorers! There’s actually lots of huge plant groups there, V hangs out in those circles.

We were part of a group buy for some of Eliza’s specialty mulberries but I gotta say, the plants had super fucked up root systems and most have not fared well. But she’s still doing very interesting work. A local plant friend of ours is doing Eliza’s tissue culturing.

sunflowers also have the quality of removing metals and toxins from soil theyre in and can be used for phytoremediation to decontaminate soil

For decades, First Nations people in British Columbia knew their ancestral homes—villages forcibly emptied in the late 1800s—were great places to forage for traditional foods like hazelnuts, crabapples, cranberries, and hawthorn. A new study reveals that isolated patches of fruit trees and berry bushes in the region’s hemlock and cedar forests were deliberately planted by Indigenous peoples in and around their settlements more than 150 years ago. It’s one of the first times such “forest gardens” have been identified outside the tropics, and it shows that people were capable of changing forests in long-lasting, productive ways.

“It’s very creative and sort of unique work,” says University of Kansas, Lawrence, plant ecologist Kelly Kindscher, who was not involved in the research. “Many of us know there are historical imprints on the land, but tend to dismiss Native Americans and Aboriginal people globally in terms of their impact.”

Because these wild-looking forest gardens don’t fit conventional Western notions of agriculture, it took a long time for researchers to recognize them as a human-created landscape at all. Many ecologists argued until recently that such islands of biodiversity, seen also in Central and South America’s tropical rainforests, were an accidental and fleeting byproduct of fire, floods, or land clearing. Without constant maintenance, ecologists assumed, the “natural” forest would quickly take over.

To show that the forest gardens were the result of human activity, Simon Fraser University historical ecologist Chelsey Geralda Armstrong first identified village sites near the city of Vancouver, Canada, and two closer to Alaska that local tribes were forced to abandon in the late 1800s.

In search of lost fruit: the explorers tracking down ancient trees before they are gone forever

These folks all hang out on a facebook group - North American Fruit Explorers! There’s actually lots of huge plant groups there, V hangs out in those circles.

We were part of a group buy for some of Eliza’s specialty mulberries but I gotta say, the plants had super fucked up root systems and most have not fared well. But she’s still doing very interesting work. A local plant friend of ours is doing Eliza’s tissue culturing.

"Although methane is harmful in its effect on our climate, a new study of the greenhouse gas shows that its effects are not as intense as previously thought.

The biggest sources of methane gas emissions come from coal, oil, and gas development, although emissions from agriculture is probably the most heavily publicized.

As the planet absorbs heat from the sun, it would naturally radiate this long-wave energy back out into space. But greenhouse gasses trap the heat inside the atmosphere, causing ‘the greenhouse effect’.

Scientists at the University of California-Riverside have now found that methane also absorbs short-wave energy, which, through the creation of cooling clouds, actually cancels 30% of its own heat (the heat which the gas has created in the greenhouse effect).

Specifically, it creates more low-level clouds that offset the short-wave energy from the sun and fewer high-level clouds which increase the outward radiation of long-wave energy from the Earth.

“This has implications for understanding in more detail how methane and perhaps other greenhouses gases can impact the climate system,” said Robert Allen, UCR assistant professor of Earth sciences. “Shortwave absorption softens the overall warming and rain-increasing effects but does not eradicate them at all.”

They also found, as Allen says, that methane cancels 60% of increased levels of precipitation predicted under global warming models—yet more good news for cities and towns around flood zones.

For a number of reasons, this could be a revolutionary discovery. The EPA says that methane’s greenhouse effect is 34 times that of CO2.

Using the U.S. as an example, methane accounts for only around 10% of the nation’s emissions. The lifespan of a methane molecule in terms of its harmful affect on climate is around 9 years.

This means that methane emitted 9 years ago is no longer causing a greenhouse effect. By contrast, the greenhouse effect of CO2 molecules is more than 1,000 years.

For years, climate scientists have known that methane was a critical greenhouse gas for humanity to target, but now we can create more accurate models that reflect how methane is 30% less harmful than we thought and it counteracts 60% of its own harmful rain effects."

-via Good News Network, 3/28/23

The study was published in the renowned journal Nature, and there's a full open access copy here!

So it’s only about 20 times as bad for the environment as carbon dioxide, rather than about 80 times.

“How do you supercharge vegetation growth for a reforestation project? Bring in the microorganisms.

That’s the finding from a new study, which shows that incorporating a microbial community of fungi, bacteria, algae and archaea into ecosystem restoration can accelerate plant biomass production by 64% on average.

Researchers say this application holds plenty of promise for restoration work in Southeast Asia, where large swaths of once-forested landscapes have been degraded for large-scale agriculture.

Soil microbiome like fungi carry out a critical task known as soil transplant, moving soil and associated microbial communities from one location to another. But they’re often overlooked in conservation and restoration efforts, said study lead author Colin Averill, a senior microbial and ecosystem scientist at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology, or ETH Zürich.

“When we think to plant a tree, we never think to ‘plant’ the microbiome, right? But what if we did?” Averill told Mongabay.

To find out how big a role the microbiome plays in ecosystem restoration, Averill and colleagues from ETH Zürich, the Czech Academy of Sciences in Prague and Vrije Universiteit in the Netherlands pored over the date from 27 restoration projects that incorporated microbial restoration.

Their study, published in the journal Nature Microbiology, found that across all the restoration works, there was an average of 64% increase of plant growth. In one case, plant growth was stimulated by 700%.

The study shows that incorporating the microbiome in managed landscapes like farmland and forestry concessions has the greatest potential. This is because managed landscapes account for the majority of human land use, covering half of the global habitable land surface.

But by introducing microbial communities, these agricultural and forestry plantations [and monocultures] that are currently devoid of biodiversity could become reservoirs of it, Averill said.

To increase biodiversity and enrich these managed landscapes, it’s important to avoid using single species or very low-diversity, non-native soil organisms at a large scale, Averill said.

The study notes an increasing number of microbial inoculant companies advocating for just this on the argument that it could improve crop yields. But the mass application of a single species could lead to a loss of genetic and ecological diversity, and is unlikely to account for ecosystem-specific requirements, the study says.

It instead recommends using locally sourced, native and biodiverse communities of soil organisms as these can promote biodiversity in managed landscapes without limiting crop yields.” -via Mongabay, 1/5/23

Queued this one to my main by accident. Whoops! Anyway, here you go

World Soil Day

German Farmer Grows Fruit under Solar Power Equipment

good news everybody

Innovative Project Is Growing Crops Beneath Solar Panels in Kenya

The world's most unwanted plants help trees make more fruit

Kleiman compared mango trees at a local farm in Homestead, Florida. One plot of trees had weeds growing around them. The other plot was maintained and weed-free.

The pollinators preferred the trees with the weeds. In turn, the trees benefitted and produced more mangos. In fact, there were between 100 to 236 mangos on the trees with weeds, compared to between 38 to 48 on the trees without weeds.

Kleiman points out findings apply to mango trees, but also to all of the roughly 80 percent of flowering plants of Earth, including fruit trees and all flowering vegetable plants like tomatoes, beans, eggplants and squash. She also hopes this information can help farmers save time and money, as well as reduce the use of chemical pesticides.

I guess it improves the draw for bees and pollinators because there's more there? I wonder if this would have a similar effect if instead of simply weeds, it was other plants in general, especially those that flowered? Regardless, this is pretty damn interesting.

Oh yeah. For example in Japan it is traditional to keep a little patch of forest in lands that were cleared of it. They are called Guardian Forests and serve a bit of a spiritualist purpose, said to be where the local god manifests:

Studies on them have shown that maintaining this patch of local nature increases crop yields in nearby fields. They increase biodiversity, which help pollinators, but also do things you don’t expect immediately - For example, the birds that roost in them help eat rats and mice that may eat crops. By maintaining this natural space, we get helped in many ways, not all obvious Simply put, biodiversity attracts more biodiversity, and helps nature overall - Including the nature we like to eat. That could be local weeds, or old forests, or whatever else, but it seems as though the central point is that you want some parts of the environment to remain a little natural and wild so they may support that which naturally occurs in the region

For the past 64 years, Jim Enote has planted a waffle garden, sunken garden beds enclosed by clay-heavy walls that he learned to build from his grandmother. This year, he planted onions and chiles, which he waters from a nearby stream. It’s an Indigenous farming tradition suited for the semi-arid, high-altitude desert of the Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico, where waffle gardens have long flourished and Enote has farmed since childhood.

“They are the inverse of raised beds, and for an area where it is more arid, they’re actually very efficient at conserving water,” said Enote, who leads the Colorado Plateau Foundation to protect Indigenous land, traditions, and water. Each interior cell of the waffle covers about a square foot of land, just below ground-level, and the raised, mounded earthen walls are designed to help keep moisture in the soil.

Similar sunken beds for growing food with less water have been used globally in arid regions, arising independently by Indigenous farmers, including across distinct Pueblo tribes in the Southwest. “When you have ecological equivalents you often have cultural equivalents,” said Enote. As climate change deepens, he sees this tradition as one of many ways to adapt while building food security and sovereignty.

https://arstechnica.com/science/2021/10/shepherds-can-cash-in-on-their-sheep-grazing-around-solar-panels/

Published Oct. 24, 2021.

Excerpt:

“The increase in solar production has environmental benefits, but it can come at the price of diminished agriculture production. That’s why there’s a growing interest in finding ways of combining ag and solar production in one place. For Todd Schmit, an associate professor of agribusiness at Cornell University, this means bringing out the sheep […]

The sheep get fed, the farmers get paid, and the solar producers have their vegetation managed without using mowers and weed whackers—which can sometimes struggle to reach beneath the panels and use fossil fuels—or herbicides. This industry has been expanding in New York state since 2017, according to a report by the American Solar Grazing Association (ASGA). The report notes that the Empire State currently has 900 acres of solar energy-producing land being grazed. But there’s still plenty of room to grow” (Johnson).

“When a rooftop has a green cover, comprised of plants in raised beds, tables, or trellises, it shades the apartments on the upper floor, preventing overheating, especially in buildings that lack proper insulation, as is often the case in informal settlements. Rooftop gardens also reduce the heat that concrete structures absorb throughout the day and then re-emit at night, keeping cities cooler overall.

In Jeddah, Saudi Arabia, one of the world’s hottest cities, a study showed that indoor air temperatures in buildings with rooftop gardens were as much as 12 degrees Fahrenheit cooler than those without gardens, even during the warmest hours of the day. That saves on energy, too, which can have knock-on environmental effects. Research also shows that even relatively small rooftop gardens can reduce surrounding air temperatures by more than half a degree Fahrenheit”