About Raul Adamchak
Raoul Adamchak has been farming organically for thirty years. He has served as the president of the board of California Certified Organic Farmers and worked as a farm inspector for them as well. Raoul was one of founding partners of Full Belly Farm, a large, certified organic farm in Yolo County. He is presently the Farm Manager at the UC Davis Student Farm where he teaches students organic vegetable production skills in order to grow and sell 9 acres of mixed fruits and vegetables. He is the co-author, with his wife Pam Ronald, of Tomorrow’s Table: Organic Farming, Genetics, and the Future of Food. Raoul has a MS in International Agricultural Development from UC Davis.
In this presentation, Raoul Adamchak describes approaches used by organic farmers that can help the process of feeding the hungry be more sustainable. This can be done through the use of farming systems that include integrated pest control strategies coupled with practices that improve soils. He develops the idea that new, improved-seed technologies will function more sustainably in this type of farming system, and that this is critical to public acceptance of these technologies. Positive and negative examples of these ideas are provided.
Adamchak, farmer manager of UC Davis student farm, argues in this lecture how sustainable agriculture must implement organic thinking in order to reduce agricultural erosion, pesticides, and pollution will aid the methods necessary to feed 9 billion people by 2050. National organic standards which include, but are not limited to, the preventive practices of crop pests, weeds, and diseases can be significant to the increase of produce and food grown on existing land. To reduce agricultural erosion, crop rotation and crop nutrient management practices to remove disease vectors, weed seeds, and habitat for pest organisms is the most sustainable way to maintain rich soil. Pest problems may be controlled through mechanical or physical methods including the augmentation or introduction of predators or parasites of the pest species, which have no effect on the crop itself. What is important about controlling pests is that the grower is directed to use different methods of agriculture, where he/her can apply synthetic or minerals to help control the crop but only if other methods didn’t work.
Disease management practices which suppress the spread of disease organisms includes the application of non synthetic biological, botanical, and mineral inputs. In addition, soil management practices include the cultivation to maintain or improve the physical, chemical, or biological condition resulting in erosion reduction. Globally, the amount of fertilizer used in the US has created 200 dead zones in the Mississippi River from fertilizer runoff which increases algal blooms and reduces the amount of oxygen in the water. In order to reduce nitrate pollution while thinking organically, we first must reduce synthetic nitrate applications, improve nitrogen use on plants, create systems to remove nitrate as it leaches from fields, and use crop rotation to remove remaining nitrate levels in the soil. In addition, the use of recycling animal and urban green waste is necessary to to improve water penetration, and yields while simultaneously throwing away biological products. Organic thinking means integrating controls such as the preservation and augmentation of natural enemies of pests, crop rotation, crop diversity, resistant varieties, resistance strategies, pesticides as last resort. Organic farming is unlimited. It can help make agriculture more sustainable while feeding the hungry and equally distributing food to every person in the planet by 2050.
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Created with images by wobogre - "nature landscape field" • wobogre - "nature landscape field" • skeeze - "farmer tractor agriculture"