From the law of the minimum to soil health
A more than hundred year old focus on easily available nutrients has led farming astray. Instead, nutrient availability is to a large extent an emergent property of healthy soils.
Food & Water
C-wrecked: agrarian transition as politics, Part 1
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post.
Târ y donc a tori – Lessons on the Subversive Nature of Transmission, from a Stubborn Welshman
To transmit is to empower – as many people as possible to be trained to become farmers; as many people as possible saving and adapting seeds to their own conditions.
N-fertilizers have changed how we farm, what we farm and what we eat
While the links and mechanisms are not totally apparent, the introduction of synthetic fertilizers broke most of the links between the land, the animals and the people. This separation has many results and impacts on what we eat.
How nitrogen fertilizers changed the food system. Part 1.
Nitrogen (N) is on the one hand an essential nutrient for all life forms and the building block for proteins, and on the other hand a pollutant causing many negative environmental and human health impacts.
The Indigenous Growers Reviving Hemp’s Deep Roots
From the banks of Wounded Knee Creek to the White Earth reservation, this spring, more seeds will be planted for the New Green Revolution. Bringing life back to the soil is work, but these farmers are doing it. Fields of dreams, indeed.
Eating at the Old Growth Table
At the Old Growth table, we honor the ingredients as the wisdom keepers they are. And we humbly nod to the Ancestors who have kept our birthrights and lifeways intact.
Barefoot Biodynamics: Excerpt
An immediate halt to chemical fertilizing and returning to the use of compost instead would turn degeneration into regeneration.
The methane ruminations
Methane belching by grazing ruminants should not be seen as “emissions” that have to be mitigated.
Dr. Seuss and the weight-loss drug craze
The chemical soup we live in every day is a major cause of chronic disease including obesity that no weight-loss drug can address.
Cooking Sections’ Singular Stew of Art, Activism, and Local Food
What impresses me about Cooking Sections’ art and activism is their ability to show that climate change is not something distant and abstract, something that politicians and experts will somehow take care of. The CLIMAVORE work shows that climate is utterly personal and local.
Cultivating Beauty
I think the reason that gardeners and small-scale farmers have such passion about their calling is that their deepest needs are satisfied. I am calling it beauty but it is more than that. It is fullfilling a longing.