Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In my vision we see farming as landscape management and food is based on the landscape diet, i.e. that you eat food from the landscape you live in. Communities are jointly deciding on major principles of how the landscape is managed and take responsibility for that farmers can do their job in a good way – and eat the stuff from that land.
Despite the warning signs — climate change, biodiversity loss, depleted soils and a shrinking supply of cheap energy — we continue to push along with an economy fueled by perpetual growth on a finite planet.We’ll need to reckon with this discrepancy.
Seven years ago, two sustainable horticulture students took a field trip to an organic farm in the U.K. and were shocked to see cauliflowers left in the field due to their irregular shape or size. In reaction, they founded Food in Community, which aims to tackle food waste, food poverty, and social isolation in Totnes, England, by connecting producers with food banks and other distributors.
In some places, people will subsist on animal husbandry or hunting and fishing, like the Maasai or Inuit; in others, tree crops will form the bulk of the diet. Densely concentrated farming will have to be used in some areas, where far more calories per acre will be needed than corn or wheat can provide.
We’re never going to reach net zero emissions in the U.S. by 2030, as the Green New Deal calls for, without a profound change, in fact a revolution, in our food, farming, and land use practices.
Incorporating the views of communities that are often at the bottom of the pyramid, and whose voices are rarely heard in sustainability strategies is key to their success. One such inclusive technology in Kenya is the Index-Based Insurance (IBLI), an innovative tool against drought losses in Kenya that seeks to cushion pastoralist communities from the frequent spates of drought…
As seed diversity plummets globally, securing varieties will likely become even more important. ICARDA counterparts and fellow genebanks in the Philippines, Afghanistan, and Iraq have been lost due to human interventions and natural disasters, making the success of ICARDA’s move from Syria even more commendable.
I think that agroecology can be the solution to many woes of forest communities in the southwestern part of Ethiopia for the reasons mentioned above and more.
What do we “get”? What is our gravity? What draws us together is the natural instinctive understanding that food is the staff, the stuff of life.
We won’t build a more diverse food system until we help people develop more diverse preferences. At the moment, our food system is suffering from lack of diversity both at the level of supply and of demand.
What might surprise many is that there is a tax haven sitting under everyone’s noses, here in England. It’s all perfectly legal and above board too. That tax haven is farmland.
How have we allowed the public debate to conflate 100% plant-based diets with saving the planet? And in so doing, how on earth has the humble cow come to have taken 90% of the flak for global warming?
