Washington D.C. eatery Sweetgreen hosted its fourth annual Sweetlife festival last weekend, with big-name acts like Lupe Fiasco, Girl Talk, and headliners the Strokes. The sustainable music festival grew exponentially from 750 people in its Dupont Circle store’s parking lot last year to more than 16,000 people at Merriweather Post Pavilion, despite the consistent rain.

“This started as a block party in our parking lot and got considerably bigger this year, with a new venue and bigger name bands,” said Jonathan Neman, one of Sweetgreen’s three founders. “Music is a big aspect [of our brand] and something we love personally, so it’s a great avenue for us to reach customers and show you can throw a festival in a sustainable way.”

The company partnered with O-Power, an energy efficiency and smart-grid software company, to calculate the event’s carbon footprint and offset it through means like an on-site activation with guests riding bicycles to create energy. Additionally, Sweetgreen worked with Charm City Hospitality, Eat to the Beat, and Applegate Farms to overhaul the concession stands and serve only organic meat in its burgers, hot dogs, and other sandwiches and wraps.

Along with the move, Sweetgreen sold tickets for the first time, with $55 providing general admission to the first-come, first-serve lawn seating and $100 getting you into the V.I.P. area to the left of the stage (which sold out). Sponsors like Stoneyfield Farms and PopChips provided complimentary snacks to guests. Additionally, table tennis company Joola sponsored a gaming area with multiple ping-pong tables that remained occupied throughout the day. Nearby on the grass, AFR Event Furnishings created a lounge area with multiple groupings of heavy-duty red plastic club chairs and rattan sofas with cream couches.

The festival raised funds for the Jamie Oliver Foundation, a charity that promotes healthy eating.

—D. Channing Muller for BizBash

One of the planet’s biggest sports and entertainment presenters, AEG, has announced a strategic partnership with Reverb, an environmental nonprofit organization that provides comprehensive, custom greening programs for the music industry while conducting grass-roots outreach and education with fans around the globe. Together, the AEG 1EARTH program and Reverb will partner on research to quantify the impact of live concerts and events while also developing resources that will help educate tour managers and producers about simple actions they can take to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, waste, and water and energy usage.

In support of this partnership, AEG divisions such as AEG Live (world’s second largest concert promotions organization), AEG Facilities (operators of more than 100 venues) and AEG 1EARTH will also join the Green Music Group coalition founded by Reverb to promote large-scale greening in the music community.

“We in the music industry have a tremendous opportunity to improve our environmental impact through common standards and guidelines as well as shared information and best practices,” said Adam Gardner, Reverb co-founder. “This partnership not only underscores the commitment of the AEG 1EARTH program and their live concert division, AEG Live, but because of their expertise in facilities management, live entertainment, sports management and programming, they are well-positioned to encourage others in the industry to do the same.”

AEG 1EARTH and Reverb will co-develop a research-based Live Event Impact analysis with a newly developed framework and metrics to capture the energy and waste impact of live events and set benchmarks for quantifying improvement. This analysis will be conducted over the course of the 2011 Live Music touring schedule and will include on-site consulting with venue operations managers as well as independent verification.

“We believe we have a responsibility to address the environmental impact of our live events and, partnering with Reverb, feel we have the opportunity to not only implement tools and strategies that reflect this but also encourage the entire industry to tackle in concrete ways,” said Randy Phillips, president and CEO of AEG Live.

In addition, AEG 1EARTH and Reverb will conduct educational greening sessions at select AEG owned or operated venues and with AEG Live promoters to develop a toolkit of actionable sustainability opportunities to minimize the impact of Live Music operations. To further this goal, AEG will also collaborate with the Green Music Group to develop industry wide greening guidelines and standards.

“As a founding member of Green Music Group, I am excited to see industry leaders such as AEG joining the effort to change the environmental impact of the music community,” said Stefan Lessard, bassist of Dave Matthews Band. “It is key to have everyone working together to achieve maximum results.”

In November, 2010, AEG launched its AEG 1EARTH program, sustainability report – an industry first –and commitment to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions, solid waste and water usage at all of its owned and managed facilities worldwide, including STAPLES Center, Nokia Theatre, L.A. LIVE, The Home Depot Center and Ontario’s Citizens Business Bank Arena, by at least 20 percent by 2020. “We have set ambitious goals to reduce waste and improve energy efficiency by 2020,” said Jennifer Regan, Global Sustainability Director, AEG. “In order to reach these goals, it will be critical that we collaborate with people and organizations that are on the cutting edge of bringing sustainability solutions mainstream. Working with Reverb and the Green Music Group will allow us to strengthen our environmental performance in tangible ways.”

To kick off this partnership Reverb will be helping support local volunteer opportunities for AEG employees and communities for Earth Day in over 15 major markets. In addition, AEG and L.A. LIVE will be hosting an environmental fair from noon to 5p.m. PDT on Friday, April 22, at the L.A. LIVE sports and entertainment district anchored by STAPLES Center and Nokia Theatre.

According to the United Nations, the answer is Yes.

The hold out for many of those that cling to conventional farming has often been that it will be impossible for organic farming to feed the world. It’s more expensive and the crops aren’t as strong, right? Wrong. This is far from the truth according to a new UN study reported on Civil Eats.

According to the report, Agro-ecology and the Right to Food, organic and sustainable small scale farming could double food production in the parts of the world where hunger is the biggest issue. Within five to 10 years we could see a big jump in crop cultivation.

“We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations,” Olivier De Schutter, UN Special Rapporteur on the right to food and author of the report, said in a press release. “The solution lies in supporting small-scale farmers’ knowledge and experimentation, and in raising incomes of smallholders so as to contribute to rural development.”

While this makes perfect sense, we’ve been led to believe from the factory farming industry and especially GMO heavy weights like Monsanto, that GMOs and conventional crops are what’s necessary to feed the world. In fact, the opposite is true. Small scale farming, according to the report, can serve to create self sustainability amongst those in rural poverty.

Empowering Farmers and Creating Jobs

The genetic diversity within smaller organic and sustainable farms improves nutrition within small communities and builds a more resilient food system. Instead of depending on huge amounts of one crop, more diverse agriculture means that if one harvest goes bad as a result of climate and weather then other crops may take its place. This is good in the short and long run.

This empowers farmers and creates jobs where before there were none. According to Civil Eats, “[o]f 57 impoverished countries surveyed, for example, yields had increased by an average of nearly 80 percent when farmers used methods such as placing weed-eating ducks in rice patties in Bangladesh or planting desmodium, which repels insects, in Kenyan cornfields. These practices were also cost effective, locally available and resulted from farmers working to pass on this knowledge to each other in their communities.”

This article was originally written by Sara Novak for Planet Green. Click here to view the original article.

At a recent meeting of the UN Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), experts called for greater investment from both public and private sectors to increase smallholder productivity. To combat soaring food prices, UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Senior Economist Jamie Morrison said that, “Particular attention is needed to increase smallholder productivity growth and to their increased integration into markets.”

It’s been twenty-five years since a well-meaning music producer threw together a bunch of megastars to record the now ubiquitous humanitarian torch song, Do They Know it’s Christmas. Bob Geldof’s Band-Aid raised millions of dollars with the compelling chorus of “Feed the World,” but over the last two decades, global interest in those hungry people has plummeted: agriculture’s share of global development aid has dropped from 7 percent to 4 percent since the song debuted, even though most of the world’s poor and hungry people depend on agriculture for their livelihoods.

The famine-stricken Ethiopia that inspired the song in the 1980s remains hobbled by food shortages today: some 23 million people in the Horn of Africa are at risk for starvation, according to the World Food Program, which delivers food aid around the world. The global recession and a recent spike in food prices aren’t helping, either; the United Nations reported recently that the number of hungry worldwide has crested 1 billion.

The sheer number of hungry people isn’t the only reason we must raise our standards for success. Because agriculture makes up such a large percentage of the planet’s surface, and touches our rivers, air, and other natural resources so intimately, the world can’t tolerate some of the unintended-and counterproductive-consequences of how we farm and produce food. And farmers everywhere, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, will need crop varieties and whole new approaches to farming that help them deal with drought, extreme heat and increasingly erratic weather.

Hopefully, our collective understanding of how to “cure” hunger has matured enough over the last twenty-five years to recognize that solutions lie not only in shipping food aid, but a new approach to agriculture that nourishes people and the planet. One of us has been traveling in Africa for the last two months, visiting farmers, agricultural research centers and other sources of innovation. There is no shortage of innovative and winning ideas on the continent.

In the spirit of reflection and renewal that comes with the conclusion of yet another year, here are four recommendations for farmers, agribusiness, politicians and other agricultural decision-makers to consider as they make their New Year’s resolutions.

1. Move beyond seeds.

The vast majority of global investment in agriculture is aimed at seeds. But we’ve neglected the environment in which the seeds grow-that is, the soil, nearby trees, livestock and the rest of the farm, not to mention the food processors, roads and other pieces of the food system that gets the crop to market and onto tables.

Consider that in sub-Saharan Africa, the region of the world where the greatest percentage of people are hungry, just 4 percent of the farmland is irrigated (compared with 70 percent in Asia). In parts of Kenya, Tanzania and Mali, the hundreds of thousands of farmers using inexpensive, locally made water pumps have seen incomes double and triple, because they can grow a greater range of crops, over a greater share of the year, and are protected from losing entire crops to drought.

2. Cut the slack in the system.

Instead of focusing simply on increasing production, what about making better use of what we already produce? It turns out that a shocking 30 to 50 percent of what’s harvested in poorer nations spoils or is contaminated by pests or mold before it reaches the dinner table.

There’s no new seed variety in the pipeline that promises anything like a 30 to 50 percent boost in production. But simple fixes can go a long way. In Nairobi, Margaret Njeri Ndimu has started selling her goats’ milk in plastic bags sealed with candle wax. She learned this simple process through a training program provided by the Mazingira Institute; the bags make it easier to manage and sell her milk, allowing her customers to purchase small quantities of the perishable milk in portable containers. Similar practices can be used by other urban milk producers in cities all over the world.

3. Go local (and regional).

Just as important as the techniques that farmers use is to what extent the farmers and farm communities control those techniques. Locavores in the United States and Europe argue the benefits of a more decentralized food system, and solutions for hunger will often be rooted in harnessing local crop diversity, building up locally owned infrastructure, and developing regional markets.

In Kampala, Uganda, Project Disc is working with Slow Food chapters to catalogue and revive neglected indigenous foods and foodways that can help inject diversity into diets and into farmers’ fields. At the World Vegetable Center in Tanzania, researchers are working with farmers to breed vegetable varieties that don’t need costly fertilizers and pesticides, use less water, are locally appropriate, and raise farmer income. Mr. Babel Isack, a Tanzanian tomato farmer, advises staff at the Center about tomato varieties that best suit his needs, including those that depend less on chemical sprays and have a longer shelf life.

4. Position Farms on the Frontline of Climate Change.

Agriculture is the human endeavor likely to be most affected by a changing climate. But it turns out that agriculture, livestock grazing and forestry-responsible for nearly one third of global greenhouse gas emissions-is also the only near-term option for large-scale greenhouse sequestration. In fact, a combination of farming with perennial crops and grasses, cutting nitrogen fertilizer use and managing manure better, reducing erosion, and enriching soils with organic matter could offset one quarter of global greenhouse gas emissions.

According to Dr. Frank Place, of the World Agroforestry Centre in Kenya, several million farmers in sub-Saharan Africa are using leguminous trees and shrubs that are grown along with or before or after crops. This technique can improve soil, double or triple the yields of the subsequent crop, and eliminate the need for artificial fertilizers. These trees also lock two to three times the carbon into the soil as a typical corn crop.

All of these measures hold untapped potential for boosting global food production, strengthening rural communities, rebuilding ecosystems, and reducing poverty and hunger. And in contrast to “band-aid” shipments of food, the lasting solutions will involve farmers and food communities working together to feed themselves.

This article was originally written by Danielle Nierenberg and Brian Halweil for the Worldwatch Institute. Click here to view the original article.

It’s official: Solar-powered irrigation systems can boost food and income levels in rural Sub-Saharan Africa, according to a new study. Irrigation is known to reduce poverty in Asia, but the success of the technique was not well documented in Sub-Saharan Africa.

The team, from Stanford University, analyzed solar-powered drip irrigation systems – which use photovoltaic pumps to deliver groundwater to the surface – in arid Benin, where most farmers rely on a  3-6 month rainy season and irrigate by hand. The solar system in question was a project of U.S.-based Solar Electric Light Fund – SELF – which “designs and implements sustainable energy solutions for enhancements in health, education, agriculture and economic growth in the developing world.”

Solar pumps were installed in two villages. Compared with villages using hand irrigation, the pumps led to more vegetables being produced and farmers earning more money.

Vegetable intake increased by 500-750 grams per person per day -equivalent to 3-5 servings of vegetables – during the rainy season in villages with solar systems, and people in control villages ate 150 grams more, suggesting that extra vegetables grown in the two villages were being sold in local markets.

“This study thus indicates that solar-powered drip irrigation can provide substantial economic, nutritional and environmental benefits,” wrote the authors.

This article originally appeared in SciDev.net. Click here to view the original article.