Soil Security

Congratulations Alicia!

Girl Scout troop member, Alicia Randall, won first place in the Pasadena MLK Community Coalition Art Contest for Middle School. She created a piece highlighting soil health using watercolor paint and pen. To interpret the theme, "What are you doing for others?", she created a montage of events--one with a girl working in a garden bed, another with two people exchanging vegetables (both wearing masks), and another showing a person giving food to someone who looks to be living in a tent. She also added pictures representing the troops work with Planet Earth Observatory and Mentor Garden, the fava bean root (cover crop) and carrot (harvest crop). Alicia's art will be featured on the MLK website for the remainder of the year.

George Washington Carver

This post was written by Juniper Russo on February 5, 2019 ·

George Washington Carver wasn’t the guy who invented peanut butter, even though you were taught that in school.

What he ACTUALLY did was much, much more important. In the post-war South, the economy and environment were in absolute shambles. The soil throughout the Black Belt was exhausted and eroded from centuries of over-farming cotton. Freedmen were left hungry and destitute after being emancipated without reparations, and poor whites weren’t doing well at all, either. There was an epidemic of scurvy, starvation, and anemia.

Carver was famous for “working with peanuts” but peanut butter isn’t the big deal here. It was Carver who discovered that legumes can enrich soil with nitrogen and prevent erosion, and peanuts are a high-calorie, high-protein food. He cultivated specific strains of peanut that thrived in the most barren land in the South and promoted their use.

He also studied dozens of other plants, fine-tuning the exact needs and benefits of each variety, and found ways that the poorest farmers could actually IMPROVE, rather than EXHAUST, their soil and could actually feed their families. He taught thousands of people how to heal the wounds that slavery had left on the land and on the economy.

So peanut butter... no, not really. A paste preparation was one of the methods of preparing peanuts that he promoted, but it had existed among indigenous Central Americans for centuries and it really wasn’t his greatest accomplishment.

I think it’s time to remember George Washington Carver not as the reason you have Jif, but as the reason that starvation didn’t kill half the population of the Southeast.


Kiss the Ground

By regenerating the Earth’s soils, we can balance the climate, replenish the water supply, keep species off the extinction list and better feed the world. Regenerative agriculture, which offers an economically viable virtuous cycle of healthy soil, plants, water and skies, in stark contrast to the vicious cycle of industrial agriculture, which relies on additives, pesticides and government subsidies and depletes the land at unsustainable levels. Source: 'Kiss the Ground' review: A hopeful Netflix climate doc (latimes.com)

Living Soil

Living Soil tells the story of farmers, scientists, and policymakers working to incorporate agricultural practices to benefit soil health for years to come. Farmers share a story as unique as the soil they manage with a shared theme that resonates throughout the film: Our soil is a special resource we should all cherish and strive to protect.

King Corn

Two recent college graduates travel to Iowa to investigate the role that corn plays in an increasingly complicated and dysfunctional American food industry. After planting their own small crop of corn and tracing its journey through the industry, they are alarmed to discover that corn figures in almost everything Americans eat. The consequences of this are examined through interviews with various experts and industry insiders, providing a balanced look at this American agricultural issue.