Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Continuing a decade-long increase, global food prices rose 2.7 percent in 2012, reaching levels not seen since the 1960s and 1970s but still well below the price spike of 1974. Between 2000 and 2012, the World Bank global food price index increased 104.5 percent, at an average annual rate of 6.5 percent.
Actually, Jason Godesky is rather brilliant; his 30 Theses deserve a good look. He struggled mightily with defining horticulture and agriculture, did not quite get it right, but made a lot of good points. Can I do better? Or at least, can I come up with something that will enable us to communicate more clearly about these matters? With trepidation, I am giving it a shot. The purpose of this post is not to find the Right and Correct definition, but to untangle the definitional knots so that we can talk with one another and get somewhere.
In Agriculture: villain or boon companion, I argued that we sapiens have been cultivators since time immemorial, that a combination of foraging and cultivation is a sensible, durable way of life that has served us well, and that the “origin of agriculture” really is the intensification of cultivation that becomes visible in the archeological record.
Post Carbon Fellow Sandra Postel recently gave a talk on ‘Will We have Enough Water? Adapting to a Warming, Water-Stressed World’ for the Moos Family Speaker Series on Water Resources.
Today we see the woods as somewhere we go to walk the dog, where we have picnics and cycle rides. They have mostly become places of leisure where we take the kids to teach them about nature, gather some conkers and acorns and let them run wild for an hour or so.
Our society has become increasingly divorced from agriculture, and our assumptions about food and farming are too often based more on emotion or business interests than those of real, on-farm experiences and community decision-making about the food we raise and eat.
Over the coming decades, climate change is expected to pose major difficulties for one million maize and bean farmers in Central America.
