NewPage's Latest on Paper Podcast Features Maria Rodale

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NewPage Corp., Miamisburg, Ohio, USA, has announced a new On Paper podcast series episode featuring Maria Rodale, chairman and CEO of Rodale Inc., a leading multimedia company with a focus on health, wellness, and the environment. As the author of four books, including the recently released Organic Manifesto: How Organic Farming Can Heal Our Planet, Feed the World, and Keep Us Safe, Rodale has won numerous awards for her leadership in ensuring a healthy environment for future generations.

In this On Paper episode, Rodale shares her extensive research and family business's documented history as an organic pioneer, to illustrate why chemical-free farm systems are important to healthy environments and strong economies. Discussing recent trends in organic including small company startups, younger female farmers entering the field, and big businesses developing organic product lines, Rodale notes that organic is ready for the big time, adding "It's where the action is."

While organic may be where the action is today, for Rodale Inc., understanding the relationship between the health of earth's soil and people's health is a part of the company's rich history. Almost 30 years ago, Rodale's father started a side-by-side comparison of organic versus chemical agriculture, entitled the Farming Systems Trial, the results of which garnered attention from scientists around the globe. With On Paper, Rodale shares, "Organic farming is more productive, more profitable, more fuel efficient. And the surprise finding (from the Farming Systems Trial) was that organically farmed soil actually sequesters huge amounts of carbon, which means that it actually is one of the primary solutions to global warming."

Rodale Inc.'s commitment to studying and responsibly cultivating earth's resources continues today in two new programs that NewPage is a partner in, titled "Tree as a Crop" and "eco4 the planet." The "Tree as a Crop" partnership is designed to educate farmers and small forest landowners about the environmental, social, and economic rewards of properly growing and harvesting trees as a crop. "eco4 the planet" is a demonstration project on a working farm designed to implement "Tree as a Crop" by teaching communities to plant organically grown trees, to promote new sources of local economic and environmental sustainability.