Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I love my garden tiller and when I was younger I loved it even more. But as I grow older I have to admit that when it comes to controlling weeds, the good old hoe is better than any cultivator. Tillers are good for loosening up the dirt in spring, or to smooth the soil after turning it over with a spade. And of course if you have really large plots to cultivate, the tiller is the better choice. For everything else I vote for the hoe.
With July Fourth coming up, you can expect to hear lots of discussion on the left and in the green community about how bad “independence” really is — no matter how cool you may think the Founding Fathers were.
– NYT: Small Farmers Creating a New Business Model as Agriculture Goes Local
– The Conversation: David Holmgren, co-founder of permaculture movement
– Factory-Fed Fish: Monsanto and Cargill’s Plan for the Ocean
– Mainstream India television show: Toxic Food – Poison On Our Plate?
– The Global Diabetes Epidemic, Brought to You by Global Development (new)
…food is not just a different way to toss your salad; it’s the reworking of a diet in the face of ecological and economic change. No matter how much the media and politicians deny climate change and peak oil, future cooks are thinking ahead, reworking their larders, gaining some knowledge, learning to glean, preserve, bake and grow. We’re prepping for the long term in our kitchens, knowing that the global industrial food system is highly unsustainable, unethical and unkind to man and beast. And that to use nearly 60 percent of the world’s agricultural land for beef production that accounts for less than two percent of the world’s calories is not the way forward.
I feel like getting naked and running though the streets, yelling eureka, eureka! By George, I think I’ve got it. And I wasn’t even looking. It all began a few days ago, when I started on a post about creating soil from scratch. A radical notion in its own right, to be sure. So let’s begin with the story there.
With the announcement of the surprising and remarkable fact that the obese now outnumber the hungry — both forms of malnourishment — we need to be looking deeper into our food system and the industry that has created a world that is stuffed and starved. In his recent books Raj Patel looks at this open secret and the battle between an increasingly aggressive industry and the social movements who are responding to this assault by reclaiming food sovereignty for their communities.
So here’s something we’ll try, and see if you find it useful. I was in Clitheroe recently in Lancashire, and chatted with a couple of people involved in Transition Clitheroe. I asked them what else Transition Network could do to support their work, were there materials we could produce that would help them? They said that in fact Transition Network put out so much stuff that they struggled to keep up with it, and that perhaps some kind of a digest would be useful….So I thought I would try today to do a digest of the key films, articles, projects and links out there, and see what you think of it and what’s missing. I thought we’d start with food…
A report released today by the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS), “Grade A Choice? Solutions for Deforestation-Free Meat,” found that if Americans shifted their diets toward less beef and more poultry or pork, they would protect their health, protect forests, and protect the planet by reducing carbon emissions. “Because of the way it is produced, the more beef we eat, the worse global warming gets.”
– Peak planet: Are we starting to consume less?
– Cuba, A Society In Motion (update on post-peak agriculture)
– Death by suburban sprawl: better urban planning will combat sedentary lifestyles
– Why are British children so unhappy?
As the world population climbs and water stress spreads around the globe, finding ways of getting more crop per drop to meet our food needs is among the most urgent of challenges. One answer to this call is drip irrigation, which delivers water directly to the roots of plants in just the right amounts. It can double or triple water productivity — boosting crop per drop — and it appears to be taking off worldwide.
Life is so much a matter of contrasts. Last week I wrote about a large scale farmer of several thousand acres who drives his computer 9 hours a day while his brother and hired help to the actual farming. In stark contrast, shortly after I talked to him, an old friend stopped by to tell me that, after nearly forty years, he was retiring from small scale dairying. He tried to be upbeat about it but I could tell that he was sad too. He will keep on farming his 200 acres and maybe raise a few steers. Old dairymen never die, they just quit milking cows.
At some point personal behavior changes aren’t enough. To become sustainable, we need large-scale investments, which require capital. How can we get access to the financial tools necessary to build a sustainable world? The answer may be through public banking, and one state, North Dakota, points the way.
