A Lack of Water: How Food Producers Survive
We should be prepared for worsening conditions, if we do not act now to encourage farmers and growers to become more resilient to drought.
Food & Water featured
Farming for the Long Haul: Excerpt
We need farmer- controlled advocacy organizations that are constantly alert to our particular needs as small farmers, engaged in creative adaptation to a changing agricultural reality.
This City Made Access to Food a Right of Citizenship
To begin to conceive of the possibility of a culture of empowered citizens making democracy work for them, real-life stories help—not models to adopt wholesale, but examples that capture key lessons. For me, the story of Brazil’s fourth largest city, Belo Horizonte, is a rich trove of such lessons.
How London is Setting a New Standard for Market Cities
Why are cities like Barcelona and London investing in markets as critical infrastructure? Because they recognize their ability to strengthen local economies, promote physical health and sustainability, and foster deep social connections in the communities they serve.
Edible Acres at Powell Gardens Feed and Educate Students to Chefs
Approximately 45-minutes drive from Kansas City, Powell Gardens’ Heartland Harvest Garden is America’s largest edible landscape, providing the perfect backdrop for culinary events and education. It’s a place where 60 students capped off a recent visit by helping to make salsa and where a two-year-old CSA is in full swing.
A Taste of Palestine: Cultivating Resistance
On this culinary tour with a twist, we travelled the West Bank meeting farmers and food producers, eating in local restaurants and with families in refugee camps and Bedouin villages. Heartening and heart-wrenching in equal measure, the ten days spent exploring Palestinian food culture showed a people with a deep love for the land and the food traditions that come with it.
Treading Water
It is what that word “fragility” represents that most scares me, keeps me awake at night. Its implications ripple out and shake history, culture, and that larger unknown, our sheltering climate
Connected Critics: Branding for A People-Centered Food System
Connected critics argue from the edge, but not from the outside. They do not burn constitutions. They offer amendments.
UN Backs Seed Sovereignty in Landmark Peasants’ Rights Declaration
On December 17, the United Nations General Assembly took a quiet but historic vote, approving the Declaration on the Rights of Peasants and other People Working in Rural Areas, by a vote of 121-8 with 52 abstentions.
The Dark Side of Innovation for Family Farmers: Reflections on an International Symposium on Innovation
This post explores rapid rise to prominence of the term ‘Innovation’ within agricultural development, and presents some reasons why it is an inadequate framework to address the deep injustices in contemporary food systems, especially as they relate to family farmers and other small scale food producers.
Spotlight on Urban, Vertical and Indoor Agriculture
Should food be grown in cities? If so, how? These questions have a long history, with the last few hundred years taking in the Garden City movement where towns were designed to include homes, industry and agriculture, the ‘Victory Gardens’ of the First and Second World Wars and, more recently, the food miles debate.
Bison are Back, and That Benefits Many other Species on the Great Plains
Today some 500,000 bison have been restored in over 6,000 locations, including public lands, private ranches and Native American lands. As they return, researchers like me are gaining insights into their substantial ecological and conservation value.
