Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For much of the farming community in the northern hemisphere, January is a time to engage in conversation and share ideas and so we headed to the eighth Annual Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC)…
But while a proliferation of food waste apps hope to combat the problem through technology, FoodCycle is tackling it by serving up hot meals to those who need it — along with providing a place for diners to build community and face-to-face friendships.
Consumers increasingly care about where their food comes from, how it is produced and how it impacts their health. This is generating demand for sustainable food and has enabled the recent resurgence of small-scale farming that produces environmentally sound and ethical produce.
I take the point Joe Clarkson made – at root, this blog is supposed to be about farming. The trouble is, the shape of farming is driven by politics (we’ll know that agrarian populism has succeeded when and if it’s the other way around…) so inevitably writing about farming involves writing about politics.
Speaking for myself (not Cindy), my urge and motivation for moving to the farm 17 years back, and the desire to document it, had more to do with wishing to relearn what it was like to be a resident. Or, as Wes Jackson would phrase it, to be native to this place.
Wayne Roberts looks at all the ways local food webs are already growing, ready to become the Next Big Thing in creative disruption.
Comments received online and by email, in response to Emily Franklin’s recent article Milk: The sustainability issue raised three questions about the use of soya in dairy farming, to which the SFT did not have ready answers. Richard Young has been investigating, and he’s come up with some unexpected facts.
While several conventional conservation practices applied to corn-soybean fields can reduce nutrient loss, converting annual crop acreage to perennial biomass crops would be far more effective.
Recently I had a chance to chat with Diego Footer from Creative Destruction, formally known as Permaculture Voices, on a podcast series featuring “honest, hard conversations about farming, business, and life with those trying to make a living doing something that they love and dealing with life in the process.”
About 20 percent of crops in the Czech Republic (and up to 30 percent in Germany) never make it to our plates – all because of norms that determine size, shape and color of fruits and vegetables. “But since food doesn’t always grow uniformly, it has to be sorted,” says Strejcová. And this sorting often happens right on the fields during harvest time.
Parthiban is not the only one to recognize the high value of pollinators in improving the crop production, which in turn improves the quality of life, nutrition and well-being of the Indian people.
Pretty Prairie, home to 650 people on the southern Kansas plains, is a one-well town. And that well is giving the town fits. The 30-meter-deep (100-foot) borehole draws water from a slice of the Equus Beds aquifer that has shown increasing levels of nitrate, a chemical that can be deadly for infants.
