It has been quite a while there has been no posting on this forum from the Administrator. This is because Earthbox has been engaged in so many activities.

We are back with full force, Watch the space.

Yours

Maxwell Mkhwanazi

General Manager

We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” FDR said in 1937, in the midst of the Great Depression. “We know now that it is bad economics.” We learned this all over again after the collapse of Lehman Brothers, the shame of subprime mortgages and the brazen Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff. But even amid the Great Recession of 2009, people have been trading in their SUVs for Priuses, buying record amounts of fair-trade coffee and investing in socially responsible funds at higher rates than ever before. What we are discovering now, in the most uncertain economy since FDR’s time, is that enlightened self-interest — call it a shared sense of responsibility — is good economics. (Read TIME’s interview with President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama on service.)

America has always been a great laboratory of social innovation, from Ben Franklin’s creation of the volunteer fire department and the lending library to the rise of online collectives like Wikipedia and Facebook. Usually it has been an invention, some innovation in commerce — the car, the lightbulb, the television — that has changed how we interact with one another as well as how we think of ourselves. We are again entering a period of social change as Americans are recalibrating our sense of what it means to be a citizen, not just through voting or volunteering but also through commerce: by what we buy. There is a new dimension to civic duty that is growing in America — it’s the idea that we can serve not only by spending time in our communities and classrooms but by spending more responsibly. We are starting to put our money where our ideals are.

According to a new TIME poll, more than 6 in 10 Americans have bought organic products since January. Lots of us have bought an energy-efficient lightbulb too. And it’s not just the nature of the product but also its provenance that’s prompting us to buy. Of the 1,003 adults we polled this summer, 82% said they have consciously supported local or neighborhood businesses this year. Nearly 40% said they purchased a product in 2009 because they liked the social or political values of the company that produced it. That’s evidence of a changing mind-set, a new kind of social contract among consumers, business and government. We are seeing the rise of the citizen consumer — and the beginnings of a responsibility revolution.

See TIME’s special report on community service.

This is a new idea in a nation where our most iconic economist, Milton Friedman, wrote in 1970 that a corporation’s only moral responsibility was to increase shareholder profits. Since 1995, the number of socially responsible investment (SRI) mutual funds, which generally avoid buying shares of companies that profit from such things as tobacco, oil or child labor, has grown from 55 to about 260. SRI funds now manage approximately 11% of all the money invested in U.S. financial markets — an estimated $2.7 trillion.

Corporate America has discovered that social responsibility attracts investment capital as well as customer loyalty, creating a virtuous circle. With global warming on the minds of many consumers, lots of companies are racing to “outgreen” one another, a competition that is good for their bottom lines as well as the environment’s. The most progressive companies are talking about a triple bottom line — profit, planet and people — that focuses on how to run a business while trying to improve environmental and worker conditions.

It’s a new way of looking at a concept as old as the Republic. Ever since colonists in Boston refused to buy British tea, Americans have wielded their economic clout as a weapon against — and, sadly, sometimes for — social injustice. In the U.S., the power of the purse is the most democratic power of all. The Quaker notion of doing well by doing good — popularized by Ben Franklin, the patron saint of social entrepreneurs — predated the predatory capitalism of the Gilded Age. Its revival is due in part to an Obama effect: as a presidential candidate, Barack Obama relentlessly touted green products and industry and preached the idea that profits and principles are not mutually exclusive. His election was both a cause and an effect of this sense of social responsibility: his candidacy capitalized on this evolving mind-set, and he has done more than anyone else to advance it. “I think our campaign was an expression of people wanting to be engaged and involved in different ways,” Obama said in an interview in the White House this month. “They wanted to be part of something larger than themselves.”

But long before Obama started talking about how green is the new gold, many corporations discovered that business was about a lot more than a profit-and-loss statement. At first, the corporate stance was defensive: companies were punished by consumers for unethical behavior. In the 1990s, companies like Nike and Walmart were attacked for discriminatory and unfair labor practices. People became alarmed about “blood diamonds,” or “conflict diamonds” — gems mined in war zones and used to finance conflict in Africa. More recently, consumers have become concerned about the sourcing of metals used in computers. The nexus of activist groups, consumers and government regulation could not merely tarnish a company but put it out of business. Companies also began to realize that just as some consumers boycotted products they considered unethical, others would purchase products in part because their manufacturers were responsible.

Some companies embraced the new ethos early on. In 1992, Gap developed sourcing guidelines for its suppliers, and in 1996 the company put in effect a code of conduct for them. Since 2004, Gap has been publishing information about the factories it uses and those it has stopped doing business with. Last year HP followed suit, becoming one of the first computer manufacturers to apply similar transparency to its global supply chain. Timberland now prints a detailed label for its shoes, noting on each pair the company’s material and energy usage.

None of this would have happened without consumer demand. Nearly half of Americans in our poll said protecting the environment should be given priority over economic growth — and this comes in the midst of a recession and historic unemployment. And 78% of those polled said they would be willing to pay $2,000 more for a car that gets 35 m.p.g. than for a similar one that gets only 25 m.p.g. Of course, consumers are doing their own doing-well-by-doing-good calculation: a more expensive car that gets better gas mileage will save them money in the long run — and make them feel good about it in the process.

Many companies are trying to reconfigure their DNA as profit seekers. Take Walmart. Once the poster child of corporate ruthlessness, a retailer whose business model of undercutting all of its competitors would have been applauded by Friedman, Walmart has resolved to change its way of doing business for the sake of the future of the planet. The company has required its suppliers to reduce packaging to protect the environment and is trying to boost sales of energy-efficient lightbulbs by giving them more shelf space and better placement in stores. In July it announced it is developing a sustainability index that will one day show consumers at a glance how green its products are. (The initiative will be run by a consortium, coordinated by academics and supported in part by companies such as Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo and General Mills.) But Walmart is far from perfect. While the company has made great strides on the environmental front, it still has a ways to go on the labor front, especially in ensuring fair treatment for the people in developing countries who work for its vendors.

Other companies are ratcheting up their responsibility commitments. Intel, the world’s largest chipmaker, says it plans to increase investment this year in energy efficiency that will help the environment and cut costs. Mars and Cadbury have unveiled plans to increase the amount of cacao they harvest from sustainable sources because it is good for the environment and will also relieve potential shortages in the future. The high-end stroller company Bugaboo just announced it is joining the multibrand (RED) campaign — think Gap, Apple, Bono — and will start contributing 1% of its total revenues to the Global Fund that helps AIDS programs in Africa. That’s 1% of Bugaboo’s revenues, not profits.

One question is, How much of all this is just shrewd marketing to give companies a halo effect? Participants in high-profile efforts like the (RED) campaign — which has raised $135 million in three years — have been criticized for spending a bundle on marketing. Meanwhile, a New York environmentalist named Jay Westerveld coined the term greenwashing for companies that spin their products as being more environmentally friendly than they really are. Chevron is among the firms that have been sued for greenwashing, accused of undermining a biodiesel project while attempting to enhance its green cred. (Chevron denied any wrongdoing.)

That’s one reason Walmart’s plan to standardize a sustainability index is so important. If companies are really improving their carbon footprint — and, one hopes, the way they treat their workers — in order to improve their image and engender consumer loyalty, isn’t that a net good thing? And if they are doing it exclusively to help their bottom line, so what? “I don’t care whether companies change for the love of the environment or because of their financial interest,” says Geoffrey Heal, a Columbia Business School professor and the author of When Principles Pay. “The most sustainable solution is to have companies responding to financial incentives rather than their own feelings.”

In other words, good stewardship is good business. A 2007 Goldman Sachs study found that companies with a strong emphasis on sustainability outperformed the market, often by a large margin. A recent PricewaterhouseCoopers report said companies that report sustainability data get better returns on their assets than those that don’t.

It’s not just big companies that are doing well by doing good. Increasingly, social entrepreneurs are starting companies rather than nonprofits, to capitalize on the power of the market to create public benefit. And some of these entrepreneurs are choosing to form “B Corporations,” a new corporate structure that requires enterprises to build into their foundation strong social and environmental standards for their operations. More than 220 companies, whose combined revenue tops $1 billion, have become B Corps since their certification began in 2007.

That’s an impressive start but still a small number. Not everyone in America embraces the idea of corporate social responsibility (CSR) or ethical consumerism. Only 59% of the 1,000 largest U.S. companies have publicly available environmental policies. Fewer than 8% of companies go to the trouble of having a third party verify their CSR reports, which many consumers don’t bother to read. As Jeff Swartz, CEO of Timberland and a leader in corporate responsibility, noted recently, “The vast majority of our consumers buy Timberland products because the shoe fits … not because we maintain a measurably higher standard of human-rights practice.”

Our poll found Americans divided pretty evenly into three categories we’re calling the Responsibles, the Toe Dippers and the Skeptics. The Toe Dippers embrace some of the ideas of responsible consuming but don’t act on many of them, while the Skeptics just think Friedman was right.

The Responsibles, however, are in the vanguard and represent 38% of Americans 18 and older, or about 86 million people. They are more likely than Toe Dippers or Skeptics to be female, married, African American and college-educated. They tend to be well-off but not wealthy, and they have done many things that people in the other groups haven’t, such as buying a household appliance on the basis of its energy rating or a product because they like the values of the company that made it. While they are particularly concerned about the environment, they are much more willing than the others to pay more in federal taxes to deal with social issues like universal health care. They do not fit neatly into any political category: a third are liberal, 37% are conservative, and 28% are moderate. They are younger than the Skeptics and more diverse and look more like what America will look like in 20 or 30 years.

These days, some companies are cutting back on their philanthropy but less so on their CSR initiatives. The only thing that has sunk lower than the public’s opinion of Congress during this recession is its opinion of business. Social responsibility is one way to get it back. Consumers too can make ethical choices. You may be stressed out by the economy, but your civic duty is starting to kick in at the cash register. Just don’t let it end there. — With reporting by Jeremy Caplan

Don’t forget to keep coming back to the news page to check whether perhaps you are the winner in the up and coming months as all the names are submitted monthly, with winners being excluded for a 12 month period from future draws.

Also check out the Forum and sign up as a member - it will be well worth the time and effort.

Until next time, wishing you all warm days and great growth.

The EarthBox Team

“In April 2005, the World Food Programme and the Chinese government jointly announced that food aid shipments to China would stop at the end of the year. For a country where a generation ago hundreds of millions of people were chronically hungry, this was a landmark achievement. Not only has China ended its dependence on food aid, but almost overnight it has become the world’s third largest food aid donor.

As noted in Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, the key to China’s success was the economic reforms in 1978 that dismantled its system of agricultural collectives, known as production teams, and replaced them with family farms. In each village, the land was allocated among families, giving them long-term leases on their piece of land. The move harnessed the energy and ingenuity of China’s rural population, raising the grain harvest by half from 1977 to 1986. With its fast-expanding economy raising incomes, with population growth slowing, and with the grain harvest climbing, China eradicated most of its hunger in less than a decade—in fact, it eradicated more hunger in a shorter period of time than any country in history.

While hunger has been disappearing in China, it has been spreading throughout much of the developing world, notably sub-Saharan Africa and parts of the Indian subcontinent. As a result, the number of people in developing countries who are hungry has increased from a recent historical low of 800 million in 1996 to over 1 billion today. Part of this recent rise can be attributed to higher food prices and the global economic crisis. In the absence of strong leadership, the number of hungry people in the world will rise even further, with children suffering the most.

Dealing with this problem requires addressing the long-term trends leading to growth in demand for food outpacing growth in supply. One key to the threefold expansion in the world grain harvest since 1950 was the rapid adoption in some developing countries of high-yielding wheats and rices (originally developed in Japan) and hybrid corn (from the United States). The spread of these highly productive seeds, combined with a tripling of irrigated area and an 11-fold increase in world fertilizer use, tripled the world grain harvest. Growth in irrigation and fertilizer use essentially removed soil moisture and nutrient constraints on much of the world’s cropland.

Now the outlook is changing. Farmers are faced with shrinking supplies of irrigation water, a diminishing response to additional fertilizer use, rising temperatures from global warming, the loss of cropland to nonfarm uses, rising fuel costs, and a dwindling backlog of yield-raising technologies. At the same time, they also face fast-growing demand for farm products from the annual addition of 79 million people a year, the desire of some 3 billion people to consume more livestock products, and the millions of motorists turning to crop-based fuels to supplement tightening supplies of gasoline and diesel fuel. Farmers and agronomists are now being thoroughly challenged.

The shrinking backlog of unused agricultural technology and the associated loss of momentum in raising cropland productivity are found worldwide. Between 1950 and 1990, world grain yield per hectare climbed by 2.1 percent a year, ensuring rapid growth in the world grain harvest. From 1990 to 2008, however, it rose only 1.3 percent annually. This is partly because the yield response to the additional application of fertilizer is diminishing and partly because irrigation water is limited.

This calls for fresh thinking on how to raise cropland productivity. One way is to breed crops that are more tolerant of drought and cold. U.S. corn breeders have developed corn varieties that are more drought-tolerant, enabling corn production to move westward into Kansas, Nebraska, and South Dakota. Kansas, the leading U.S. wheat-producing state, has used a combination of drought-resistant varieties in some areas and irrigation in others to expand corn planting to where the state now produces more corn than wheat.

Another way of raising land productivity, where soil moisture permits, is to increase the area of multicropped land that produces more than one crop per year. Indeed, the tripling in the world grain harvest since 1950 is due in part to impressive increases in multiple cropping in Asia. Some of the more common combinations are wheat and corn in northern China, wheat and rice in northern India, and the double or triple cropping of rice in southern China and southern India.

The spread in double cropping of winter wheat and corn on the North China Plain helped boost China’s grain production to where it rivaled that of the United States. Winter wheat grown there yields 5 tons per hectare. Corn also averages 5 tons. Together these two crops, grown in rotation, can yield 10 tons per hectare per year. China’s double cropped rice annually yields 8 tons per hectare.

Forty years ago, North India produced only wheat, but with the advent of the earlier maturing high-yielding wheats and rices, wheat could be harvested in time to plant rice. This wheat/rice combination is now widely used throughout the Punjab, Haryana, and parts of Uttar Pradesh. This practice yields a combined 5 tons of grain per hectare, helping to feed India’s 1.2 billion people.

A concerted U.S. effort to both breed earlier maturing varieties and develop cultural practices that would facilitate multiple cropping could substantially boost crop output. If China’s farmers can extensively double crop wheat and corn, then U.S. farmers could do the same if agricultural research and farm policy were reoriented to support it.

Elsewhere, Western Europe, with its mild winters and high-yielding winter wheat, might also be able to double crop more with a summer grain, such as corn, or with a winter oilseed crop. Brazil and Argentina have an extended frost-free growing season that supports extensive multicropping, often wheat or corn with soybeans.

In many countries, including the United States, most of those in Western Europe, and Japan, fertilizer use has reached a level where using more has little effect on crop yields. There are still some places, however, such as most of Africa, where additional fertilizer would help boost yields. Unfortunately, sub-Saharan Africa lacks the infrastructure to transport fertilizer economically to the villages where it is needed. As a result of nutrient depletion, grain yields in much of sub-Saharan Africa are stagnating.

One encouraging response to this situation in Africa is the simultaneous planting of grain and leguminous trees. At first the trees grow slowly, permitting the grain crop to mature and be harvested; then the saplings grow quickly to several feet in height, dropping leaves that provide nitrogen and organic matter, both sorely needed in African soils. The wood is then cut and used for fuel. This simple, locally adapted technology, developed by scientists at the International Centre for Research in Agroforestry in Nairobi, has enabled farmers to double their grain yields within a matter of years as soil fertility builds.

Despite local advances, the overall loss of momentum in expanding food production is unmistakable. It will force us to think more seriously about stabilizing population, moving down the food chain, and using the existing harvest more productively. Achieving an acceptable worldwide balance between food and people may now depend on stabilizing population as soon as possible, reducing the unhealthily high consumption of animal products among the affluent, and restricting the conversion of food crops to automotive fuels. It also calls for a concerted effort to raise water use productivity, similar to the gains achieved for land use, and to stabilize climate to avoid crop-withering temperatures and more frequent droughts. These efforts combined can help put us on the path to ensuring enough food for all.”

Source: GO Media: - Written by Earth Policy Institute - Image credit: a paulchu shot at Flickr

CONGRATULATIONS to Ms. Pumla Mabaso who is the lucky winner of the June Draw. Your award winning EarthBox kit is on its way to you and we wish you many days of happy gardening with it.

Don’t forget to keep coming back to the news page to check whether perhaps you are the winner in the up and coming months as all the names are submitted monthly, with winners being excluded for a 12 month period from future draws.

Also check out the Forum and sign up as a member - it will be well worth the time and effort.

Until next time, wishing you all warm days and great growth.

The EarthBox Team

All logistical operations will be based from the new distribution centre and its location means it is more easily accessible for the end user to collect their EarthBoxes should they wish to do so. We will also be running our training workshops from this centre and will have a number of EarthBoxes on display as part of our ongoing R&D program.

Our new address is Unit 4 , 80 Schooner Road, Laser Park, Honeydew - just behind Ferreiras Hardware off of Beyers Naude.

We are looking forward to meeting all our clients that come out that way so if you are in the area, why not pop in for a cup of coffee and a discussion around the EarthBoxes, you are more than welcome at any time. 

Until then, Happy growing

Jonathan Norton (Head of Operations)

We at EarthBox-Africa- are very lucky to have managed to add Ms. Lerato Thoka to our management team. She is positioned as the new Sales Manager but will also be involved in all other aspects of the business.

Lerato comes to us from a legal background but  has a passion for making a difference with her life, and to the lives of others, and recognized this need within herself.

She is a wonderful addition to our team bringing with her a strong drive to get the EarthBox out to as many people as possible and a level enough head to understand what this takes. Lerato is more than capable of doing what it takes to make this a reality. 

We are sure that with her added energy and enthusiasm, we will be better able to reach more people on the continent who so desperately need this tool to grow their own nutritious crops.

Best Wishes

Jonathan Norton (Head of Operations)

Hi there,

Our forum has officially gone live on the website and has been developed for you, the user, to post your questions, success stories, stumbling blocks, recipes, photos and all other items you may wish to discuss.

Please feel free to look around the forum and use it to make contact with other EarthBoxers. It was created for you and we hope you will find it to be an enjoyable, informative and fun way of discussing anything to do with the EarthBox and the products that you may grow in it.

Enjoy and most of all, Have Fun

We will regularly monitor the posts and replies on the board and will assist in answering any questions where possible.

Jonathan Norton  (Head of Operations)

We will be posting articles of interest and updates on new EarthBox gardens on this page along with the name of the monthly lucky winner of a complete EarthBox starter kit starting from June. The winner will be announced at the end of each month, so remember to come back regularly.

Please send us your comments and suggestions and we will continue to endevour to give you the most informative and enjoyable “surfing” experience we can.

Also remember to keep  a look out for our Forum which is close to completion and which will also be a lot of fun and a great source of information.

If you are already the owner of the award winning EarthBox, or you are about to become a fellow “EarthBoxer” and are thinking outside the box, then we wish you Happy Growing and please let us know about your success stories.

Best Wishes

Jonathan Norton (Head of Operations)