Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We are causing irreparable damage to the planet: we need to use our food buying power to support producers who are not causing it. It’s an incredibly empowering thing to do as a citizen; to use your money to support a more sustainable food future.
The Community Action Partnership of Ramsey & Washington Counties (Community Action) Head Start Program worked with the Hmong American Farmers Association (HAFA) and the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy (IATP) to launch the first Farm to Head Start initiative in Minnesota in 2014.
In today’s world, we can choose what I’ll call the neo-local choice. For the first time in history, it really is a choice. It’s not imposed by old technologies that offered no alternatives but the food at hand.
In the process of changing our habits we change the way business does business. The majority of the consumption of resources is done by the world’s most developed economies.
With the Green New Deal, social movements and our representatives in Congress have the chance to transition away from our harmful and polluting industrial agriculture model to a system that is healthy, just, and works for everyone.
Regenerating soil to change the piece of the planet where you live is possible at multiple scales. It might be a city yard like ours, rooftop garden, community garden, or working farm. Add up these efforts, and we can restore fertility to degraded soils, end hunger, and pull some carbon from the sky.
It’s time for us to wake up and practice direct democracy – to join with others to stop further corporatization and regain control over our commons, our communities, our cultures and our economies. Because if we don’t, who will? Masahiko Yamada and the new citizens’ movement in Japan have come up with a few tricks we can learn from.
If current trends continue, rural America will soon be owned by a handful of families and corporations who will run their empires remotely with driverless tractors and poorly paid staff.
While the subject of this story is what we may call biocultural, eco-culinary, or reciprocal restoration, it is quite often enabled through a social process that has been called either community-based restoration, collaborative conservation, or cooperative collaboration.
In terms of money and the flow of capital through complex securities, millisecond computer trades, and financial institutions that are Too Big To Fail, trillions means mind-numbing. In terms of microbes and life in the soil, trillions means teeming.
A recent report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) confirms that the current food system isn’t sustainable neither for the environment nor for our health. Organic agriculture, conservation farming and agro-ecology are key technologies for a transition to a sustainable food system, which also has to shun artificial nitrogen fertilizers.
Squashes and pumpkins are great because they’re easy to grow, are a low input/ high output crop with very low maintenance and watering, and most importantly because they provide a good winter survival food.
