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seedPOD: A “Wikiseedia” for the Future of Food and Farming
Alex Steffen and Sarah Rich, WorldChanging
Many people advocating a bright green future also strongly support local food systems. But learning what’s local and eating accordingly in the 21st century will be a lesson in perennial change, because as the climate changes, agricultural zones shift, and that means what’s local now may not be the same stuff that will grow well in your region in ten or twenty years. What’s more, in some regions of the world where subsistence agriculture provides a living for large numbers of people, fair, sensitive and smart help adjusting to new realities will need to be provided.
We recently were asked to imagine how new models and designs might help us address critical food-related sustainability issues. We chose to tackle this thorny problem of farming and gardening in a changing climate. Here it is, a speculative anticipation of what a model for tracking and trading local knowledge about farming and food in an open, global network might look like. We call it seedPOD. Think of it as a gedankenexperiment, an imagined toolkit to keep seeds moving, farmers thriving and communities fed in the face of massive environmental change. Perhaps it will trigger some interesting thinking out there: at very least, we hope you find it briefly diverting.
SeedPOD includes programs both online and on-site which allow farmers to share their own observations of their land and crops, to advise one another on cultivation strategies for introducing a “new native” species, to save seeds and preserve biodiversity, and to establish a community of peer teachers who can guide each other through the adaptation process.
(28 April 2007)
WorldChanging posted another good piece on agriculture: Greening the Desert, A Step-by-Step Video:
This video tells the story of a seemingly impossible feat achieved by permaculture designer, Geoff Lawton, in which he trained a group of locals in the principals of permaculture, and together they transformed the “hyper-arid” land until it bore fruit, desalinated water, and created fertile ground which requires very little water to be productive.
Honeybee die-off threatens food supply
Seth Borenstein, Associated Press
Unless someone or something stops it soon, the mysterious killer that is wiping out many of the nation’s honeybees could have a devastating effect on America’s dinner plate, perhaps even reducing us to a glorified bread-and-water diet.
Honeybees don’t just make honey; they pollinate more than 90 of the tastiest flowering crops we have. Among them: apples, nuts, avocados, soybeans, asparagus, broccoli, celery, squash and cucumbers. And lots of the really sweet and tart stuff, too, including citrus fruit, peaches, kiwi, cherries, blueberries, cranberries, strawberries, cantaloupe and other melons.
In fact, about one-third of the human diet comes from insect-pollinated plants, and the honeybee is responsible for 80 percent of that pollination, according to the U.S.
Department of Agriculture
(3 May 2007)
Also at Common Dreams. It’s good to see the mainstream media on top of the honeybee story.
Farming Will Make or Break the Food Chain
Stephen Leahy, IPS
As the world population swells to nine billion by 2050, global biodiversity will be under extreme pressure unless new ways to grow food are developed, experts say.
An additional one billion hectares of wild lands — mainly forests and savanna — will be converted to food production fields by 2050. While this may provide enough food, it is likely to result in a massive decline in biodiversity, undermining ecosystems that provide vital services such as clean water and air, and capture carbon to slow the build-up of climate-altering gases in the atmosphere.
Sixty percent of the Earth’s ecosystems are in trouble right now, warned the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment report last year.
What state will they be in by 2050?
It depends how society decides to feed itself, says Louise Jackson of the University of California at Davis, and head of an agro-biodiversity task force at Diversitas, an international scientific organisation devoted to biodiversity research based in Paris, France.
“If all agricultural lands adopt the industrial, monocultural model, there will be enormous impacts on water and other essential services provided by diverse ecosystems,” Jackson told IPS.
(2 May 2007)
Also at Common Dreams.
