Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Nathanael Siemens wants to bring regenerative and organic cotton to the San Joaquin Valley. He spends his mornings just walking the fields, trying to figure out what to do next, how to overcome the challenges that he faces daily from weed control to irrigation to simply getting a hold of enough seeds.
When the Center for Humans and Nature set out to shape a question on farming, we asked Karen Washington and Leah Penniman if they would be willing to have a conversation about their work.
Imagine a canteen where chefs cook up diverse dishes from food produced with care for the planet, prepared in a low-energy kitchen that wastes nothing. Now chefs all over the world can get the support and the impetus they need to realise this sustainable food vision with help from a chef-driven resource that aims to make the world a better place.
Such an agrarian civilization will see no impending ecological doom but instead a future of steady processes and patterns with no need for faith in great technological inventions of salvation. Not a utopian world – surely grappling with problems of their own – but a wise culture; taking the lessons of a past society bent on ever-more for ever-more’s sake to heart and respecting limits.
The daily tasks may seem menial, but as Hannah puts it, “Being out there reinforces everything in life —having a hand in maintaining how things are.” The large plans and the small tasks are both a part of continuing the ranch’s legacy to see and treat the land as a whole.
There’s been a lot of discussion about the lack of grocery stores in neighborhoods east of the Anacostia River in DC in the past few years. But it hasn’t always been this way, and there are a lot of people working to ensure their neighborhoods have access to high-quality, affordable food again.
That is why I decided to write this book. I needed to understand why our leaders, after the wake-up call of a global food crisis, remained so blindly committed to business-as-usual policies that ignored the affordable solutions all around them. These solutions could help hungry farmers eat today while giving them the natural and financial resources that could allow them—and all of us—to eat tomorrow.
A cereal and beers are now being made with a new variety of perennial grain known as Kernza. Proponents say this marks a significant advance for a new agriculture that borrows from the wild prairie and could help ensure sustainable food production in a warming world.
With one stone, Abdellah Bounagua ensured his voice was heard. He was able to guide breeders like Filippo in their development of the varieties that will allow him, and other farmers like him, to prosper while the climate changes. That’s a big splash for such a small stone.
If we look at the whole board, we can see numerous opportunities to work together — across economic sectors, geographic locations, and local-to-national scales — to reduce emissions, create carbon sinks, restore healthy ecosystems, create jobs and local economic benefits, improve human wellbeing, and stop global warming.
“If people are serious about producing good, sustainable and healthy food with high animal welfare and environmental standards, whilst looking after rural communities, county farms have an important role to play.”
One standout issue this time was how much joy I felt (and others appeared to feel) on being in the field, gathering on the farm, and (especially) being in the field that had greater diversity. All this is missing from our results. The conventional measures we use aren’t particularly good at reflecting the process of research, which – in citizen science at least – is arguably so much more important than ‘results’.
