At Farmscape, we are big fans of NPR’s new food blog The Salt and the quality reporting it has produced over the past few months. Yesterday, Dan Charles reports on the troubling environmental impact of food safety efforts in Northern California.
 

We'd probably like to think that clean, safe food goes hand in hand with pristine nature, with lots of wildlife and clean water. But in the part of California that grows a lot of the country's lettuce and spinach, these two goals have come into conflict.

Environmental advocates say a single-minded focus on food safety has forced growers of salad greens to strip vegetation from around their fields, harming wildlife and polluting streams and rivers.
 

On Tuesday, NPR’s All Things Considered aired a story by Dan Charles on community gardens. Most people, including myself, have strongly positive associations with community gardens and Charles’s take on them was surprisingly downbeat.

In particular, he focused on the decision that community gardens make between communally managing plots or allocating plots to individuals for their personal use. In indicting the communal management model, a George Mason professor cited the failure of a similar model to produce banner yields for the Soviet Union, while a veteran community gardener cited personal experience: “Our experience is, it’s an unequal participation, and an unequal sharing.”

A fun science fact: lightning strikes increase the quantity of nitrogen available to plants. And it’s not a trivial amount either; scientists estimate that lightning adds somewhere between 3 and 10 teragrams per year to soil. For context, that’s about 5% of the nitrogen that is naturally fixed in soils. Even given that two-thirds of plant-available nitrogen today is synthetically produced, that’s still quite a bit of nitrogen.

While nitrogen makes up 78% of the atmosphere, most of it is not available to plants because of its chemical composition. Nitrogen gas naturally occurs as N2, which forms a triple bond. Triple bonds are extremely strong, meaning they require a huge surge of energy to break, and lightning strikes with enough force that it’s able to separate the tightly linked nitrogen atoms. Once that bond is broken, some of the nitrogen atoms bond with oxygen atoms to form NO2 (nitrogren dioxide). These molecules eventually combine with other molecules to form HNO3, which is carried to the soil as part of rain, snow or any other form of precipitation. In my home state of Iowa, that includes hail, sleet, or a “wintry mix.”

A few other fun facts about lightning courtesy of USA Today:

• Lightning can reach 50,000 degrees Fahrenheit. By comparison, the sun is about 10,000 degrees, which makes it all the more unbelievable that people survive lightning strikes.
• The temperature of lightning is determined by scientists using spectrometers to identify color peaks of nearby gasses.
• A lightning bolt contains about 200 volts of electricity.

 Lightning photo from Flickr user Snowpeak. Creative Commons.

We are excited to announce that Farmscape has hired Moiri Fleming to be our urban farm architect. Before joining Farmscape, Moiri worked for four years with Van Atta Associates, an award-winning landscape architecture firm based in Santa Barbara.

Last month, Moiri collaborated with us to show Los Angeles that it was possible to elegantly incorporate food production within the new LA City Hall landscape, and her design won praise from LAist. Since then, she has worked with a half-dozen Farmscape members to provide elegant farm-forward designs.

If you or someone you know might be interested in Farmscape’s design services, please call us at 323-454-2888 or send us an email at info@farmscapegardens.com.

The Oscars are coming up fast, which means a second chance to see quality films that I missed the first time around. And, while I'm excited to see "Moneyball" and the animated shorts, the movie that I am most excited about right now is a new food documentary entitled "In Organic We Trust." The director, Kip Pastor, summarizes the critique that he levels against organic foods that share nearly as ugly a backstory as their conventionally grown counterparts:

More often than not, the organic spinach, cucumbers and strawberries at your neighborhood Safeway were grown on a monoculture mega-farm, in a field right next to the farm's pesticide-laden, non-organic crops, picked prematurely by the same exploited farm workers, and transported over huge distances by gas-guzzling, carbon-emitting, long-haul trucks to your supermarket produce aisle. The organic meat in the next aisle likely came from pigs, cows and chickens that were raised in overcrowded, waste-infested feedlots nearly identical to those of their "non-organic" relatives.

His argument echoes one that I made just over a year ago in arguing that "organic is not enough.” But like I did in that post, he stops short of dismissing organic certification as meaningless, pointing out that:

The USDA certification still carries significance and should not be abandoned. The "certified organic" label at the very least signifies to the consumer that the food was grown without the use of highly toxic chemicals.

Nevertheless, I still prefer the produce from my raised beds. It’s fresh, flavorful and grown by a happy farmer using methods that I can verify first-hand.