Biofortification: The latest technical fix for depleted soils
In the tradition of filtering air that we’ve polluted and treating water that we’ve sullied, we now have replacing minerals in soil that we’ve depleted because of industrial agriculture.
agriculture
Silage and the silence of the corncrake
Dublin, Ireland. We are seeing the first good days here, leading up to the golden days of mid-summer, and I’ve been talking to elderly friends here in the Irish countryside about what they used to do when the sun shone. The answer, of course, was that they made hay. When farmers heard the cry of … Read more
The Straight Story on Farming
As it was in the beginning… farmers need protection from those who have taken privileges, not protection by the military might of those privileged marauders. The least we could do is get the story straight.
Is Farming the Problem?
Is farming a mistake? Up until a generation or two ago, you would find no people of any background who would make this assertion — even though we’ve been farming for thousands of years and presumably if it was a bad thing it might have occurred to someone else before now to say so.
From Pornography to Agriculture: Challenging Hierarchy
Whatever the future of this broken world, today we can attend to the work of repair and restoration. That does not require hope in what is to come but, rather, a belief in our ability to manage our lives without hierarchy and a faith in each other’s capacity for mutuality.
Surveying Archaeologists Across the Globe Reveals Deeper and More Widespread Roots of the Human Age, the Anthropocene
Not everyone is sure that today’s industrialized, globalized societies will be around long enough to define a new geological epoch. Perhaps we are just a flash in the pan – an event – rather than a long, enduring epoch.
Others debate the utility of picking a single thin line in Earth’s geological record to mark the start of human impacts in the geological record. Maybe the Anthropocene began at different times in different parts of the world.
Mosquito-Flavored Popcorn, or What Climate Scientists Are Getting Wrong (Episode 8 of Crazy Town)
Did you know that we can lose half our food supply and it won’t matter? That’s because agriculture is only 3% of GDP, so there’s no need to worry about the effects of climate change on farming. Or so says the latest genius to win the Nobel Prize in economics.
“Which species are we sure we can survive without?” Revisited
We have eliminated the species around us with reckless abandon and without concern for whether we can survive without them. An alarming new study suggests a rapidly accelerating decline in worldwide insect populations. Can we survive without the insects of the world?
Is a key ingredient humans need to live about to run short?
Phosphorus is a key ingredient in modern fertilizers and essential for all living organisms. Will we have enough to feed the world in the decades to come?
Is Climate Change Taking the Food from Our Mouths?
Tis the seaso‘n when food is on most of our minds. What if next year or the year after some of that food was no longer available or even edible?
Agriculture and climate change: Is farming really a moveable feast?
There is a notion afoot that our agricultural production can simply migrate toward the poles in the face of climate change as areas in lower latitudes overheat and dry up. Few people contemplate what such a move would entail and whether it would actually be feasible.
The Return of the Peasant: or the History of the World in 10½ Blog Posts. 2.
But how did we get from the Palaeolithic foraging of my last post to the very apogee of mixed agrarianism shown in the picture? I’m glad you asked. To answer it, I need to go to way back when and return to my main historical thread by looking at some of the tensions within…