Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Literature is about the deep stories that we tell ourselves, about the paradigms by which we structure our understanding of the world we live in. These deep stories are the framework by which we tell ourselves why we do what we do.
Agriculture is one of those deep stories that we live within, It is a story that we make and a set of practices and a way of life.
Early in 2019, we teamed up with textile artist Katie Berman and artist and designer Courtney Lockemer on the idea of organizing an art show utilizing hemp grown from the previous year’s field trial with local artists.
To put it another way, if you’d prefer to avoid harsh dystopias of involuntary rural simplicity in the future of the Pol Pot variety, then there’s a good case for working up some gentle utopias of voluntary rural simplicity right now, and trying to implement them.
There once was a farm that became an airport. So reads the first line of our modern fairytale, our religion for the age. It is also the promotional tagline chosen by the boosters of Pittsburgh’s airport, where a pair of signs sporting the slogan hang throughout.
Looking across the landscape, we see at least six key approaches to increasing soil carbon and so much more: integrating animals, rotating crops, building biodiversity with plantings like hedgerows, conserving soil with cover cropping, boosting soil fertility with fungal-dominated compost, and eventually finding methods for no-till cotton that do not depend on synthetic chemistry.
How can we engage in effective knowledge mobilization in wider processes of change working towards greater social justice and sustainability? To what extent can researchers play a role in co-producing and mobilizing knowledge in these processes of change with social movements and communities?
Most of us eat grains every day – in bread, cereals, biscuits or pasta. In recent years, with gluten intolerance on the rise, wheat has been getting bad press. But how much do you know about this grain that forms such a significant part of our diet, and how has the wheat we eat changed over the centuries?
The Sustainable Cotton Project began in 1996 and has concentrated on creating a high-quality cotton fiber in the US that’s free of the most toxic pesticides and herbicides. Though not certified organic, it’s eliminated the most dangerous chemicals, and helped farmers connect with manufacturers under the Cleaner Cotton™ branding.
Re-discovering how to cook and eat heritage barley – especially in the world’s biggest barley-growing nations of Europe, Australia and North America – could encourage farmers to grow special landrace heritage varieties. These could be grown in marginal climates and make a substantial contribution to ensuring global food security in the face of climate change.
The organic, no-till movement is gaining traction around the world, which is a very hopeful thing. It has a long way to go, however, mostly because of the stubborn belief in the primacy of the plow, which borders on the religious among many farmers. After all, we’ve been using it for nearly 5000 years!
The modern food movement took the shape it retains today during those 15 years from 1995 to 2010. Food movements were among the first to embrace the understanding that knowledge and wisdom had to move from narrow fields of specialization to comprehensive and open-ended searching.
I call this place-based textile system a fibershed. Similar to a local watershed or a foodshed, a fibershed is focused on the source of the raw material, the transparency with which it is converted into clothing, and the connectivity among all parts, from soil to skin and back to soil.
