The Weblog
This page contains news, event information, and other items added by Ian and Adam, the resident farmers at Old 99. We send out a message every week, but most are set with a delete date about two weeks later. I archive some of the posts if they have content other than weekly availability of produce and meat.
You can send me questions too, which if they are of a general nature, I can post to this Old99 blog.
Old 99 farm Fri Mar 11 2015
Wow, I just gotta share this with y’all. A rise of 4/10s of 1% of soil carbon would result in the annual storage of 3.4 billion tonnes of soil carbon, countering the rise in atmospheric CO2. With suitable farming methods this is very doable, but farmers will need assurance from policy setters that they can benefit from changing their chemical dependent ways.
One of my ‘go to’ sites is Regenerative Agriculture and they’re hot right now. They are teamed up with the French in a program called 4P1000 Initiative, to meet multiple goals for improving human health, soil fertility, reducing carbon pollution and increasing food production. The Organic Consumers Association and IFOAM Organics International praised the French Government’s 4 per 1000 Initiative as the most important climate strategy to come out of the COP21 Paris Climate Talks.
Watch a video here on how the small scale intensive farmers can apply this thinking and earn a living.
Read more here. This is a report on how soil affects health of plants and in turn the humans that eat them.
A main vector for improving human health from this regenerative approach to agriculture is the soilfoodweb, the microbial diversity that exists in healthy soil.
A pediatric neurologist from NYC is quoted in the Mercola article, “Take a trip to the forest with your family … Community gardens are also wonderful. So are farmers’ markets. They expose children to fresh foods, which taste completely different. And it also exposes them to potentially healthy microbes through the traces of soil that might be left over on the fruits and vegetables when you buy them at a farmers’ market.” It’s because the diversity of microbes that our bodies, especially kids, are exposed to that strengthens our immune system against diseases. The journey of her child’s soy allergy led her to write the book “The Dirt Cure: Growing Healthy Kids With Food Straight from Soil.”