Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
To love the farming in a global economic context that writes its economic bottom line in diesel is not only a hard thing, but a conflicted thing. I can’t claim to have extracted myself from those dismal economics but my good fortune is that, on the ground and on the page, at least I’ve found some opportunities to try.
Guess how many commercial organic growers you can find within 10 miles of Manchester? A measly two, for a city of over a million people. That’s simply not good enough, you will agree.
I promised a turn to more practical matters, and since the discussions under both my last two posts somehow managed to turn, as all discussions should, from global politics to market gardening, let’s have a think about the latter. Especially because I recently received a query from some start-up market gardeners asking some interesting questions about the business side of it, which struck me as good material to share in a blog post and hopefully elicit some other people’s responses.
It was suggested to me recently that I might like to pen some thoughts on Jean-Martin Fortier’s book The Market Gardener1. And indeed I would. Here they are.
More and more, Millennials, myself included, are demonstrating a renewed interest in farming and gardening, but many of us don’t exactly know where to get started.
For some years now, author and farmer Jean-Martin Fortier has lived rather comfortably with his family entirely off the proceeds of their market garden in Québec, Canada.
As land prices soar, and the average age of farmers continues to climb, we desperately need new farmers, or risk having nobody to feed us in the future.
I’m not surprised that Permaculture hasn’t caught on with mainstream food growers.
