Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sustainable agriculture needs to be integrated throughout the entire learning system if all our future farmers are to embrace the sustainability agenda. Young people are a sponge for information and what they are told now will impact on how they farm in the future.
“Food apartheid is a human-created system of segregations, which relegates some people to food opulence and other people to food scarcity. It results in the epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, obesity and other diet-related illnesses that are plaguing communities of color,” she explains.
My guess is that traditional mixed farming strategies will come into their own again if, as seems likely, we move towards a more energy and phosphate constrained future.
While it may sound old-fashioned, home milling could have the potential to redefine one of the world’s oldest processed foods—bread.
Today people are constantly bombarded by new diet trends and information on what is healthy and what is not, much of it contradictory. Within this debate, meat consumption is one of the current topics under scrutiny, with increasing calls for people to eat less.
Everywhere we look, whether in the Global North or Global South, we see people reclaiming an integral relationship with nature and each other through regenerative agriculture and regenerative community building strategies. Looking forward, there are many exciting intersections of regenerative agriculture and sustainability education to amplify.
The woodland we’ve planted has brought various tangible and less tangible benefits. Fruit and nuts, tree hay, wind and sun protection, privacy (which surely helped in our successful planning application for a dwelling), children’s dens, and wildlife habitat
In my book looking back at the time I managed the Toronto Food Policy Council, I identified gratitude as the major virtue of a food leader, and love for your little corner of the world, and a desire to make it better, as the ideal motivation for food activism.
The jury is still out on my 2017 gardening season, but I can definitely attest to the fact that vegetables will grow in round hay bales. This looks like my best gardening year ever, using raised “lasagna” or “keyhole garden” beds, cardboard/mulch/hay for potatoes, and the 4 X 6 round hay bales.
The storm last week was a whirling dervish that came through with such force that the windows and walls shuddered, the trees swayed, and at least one neighbor was left looking for the roof of his barn. It arrived as an unexpected guest, late last Saturday night.
Over the past century, generations of young people have turned their backs on city life to embrace small-scale farming and back-to-the-land ideals. The exact circumstances for each generation’s return have varied: the Great Depression in the 1930s, the Vietnam War in the ’60s and ’70s, and, more recently, the loss of ecosystems and biodiversity to … Read more
In 2011 Berman decided to take the plunge into expanding her vision of planting a new local food economy in Appalachia by turning her farm into a major educational endeavor. She launched the Allegheny Mountain Institute (AMI) in an effort to attract young people from throughout the country for six-month fellowships on her 550-acre mountaintop farm.
