Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Headquartered at the Werkshack in uptown, Oakland, GDS Cloth Goods is the design and production studio by Geana Sieburger. A vibrant environment filled with makers of all types, it allows Geana to do her often solitary work in the company of a creative community and independent makers who share her principals and motivations.
Real farming holds the promise to restore lost biodiversity to the rural landscape, preserve critically endangered breeds, sequester carbon, reduce exposure of plants and animals to antimicrobials, pesticides and antibiotics, and secure the future health and vitality of the soil. But there was one important element missing, and for a conference all about better food production, it was particularly striking. Flavour was absent from the discussion.
Local governments need to deal with food through the window of people issues – jobs, neighbourhood cohesion, neighbourhood rejuvenation, public safety, mental health, conviviality, the need for “third places,” immigrant welcoming, multiculturalism and interculturalism, community gardens, walkable shopping, farmers markets, school gardens, … the whole nine yards of city life.
The main lesson for grass farmers to take from Grazed and Confused is that soil carbon sequestration is not on its own sufficient to defend ruminants against the charge of climate villain. What is also required is a robust critique of the GWP methodology and its CO2 equivalent; and clear explanation to policy makers why “methane is a sideshow”.
Perhaps I should essay a brief report here on things I heard and learned at the 2018 Oxford Real Farming Conference that I attended a couple of weeks back. If I try to lay it all out in connected prose I’ll probably come grinding to a halt after about 5,000 words, so I thought I’d present it mostly in the form either of little news snippets or of one-sentence assertions…the latter being things I heard people say, or thoughts I had while listening at the conference.
Early trade was about ecological adaptation, transporting essential food or other essential goods to a places where they were lacking. Very little in present international trade is based on that. Instead, trade in itself creates shortages.
The Lemon Tree Trust is a United Kingdom-based nonprofit organization which facilitates greening innovation and urban agriculture in refugee camps in Iraq, Uganda, and Jordan. “People are arriving with almost nothing and are literally making home, so the garden becomes representative of a space that people have control over, some ability to be creative, and a space to just be in after they’ve undergone this process of forced migration,” says co-founder Mikey Tomkins.
But when it comes to food, we continue to believe that what you see, touch, hear, smell and taste is all that you get. Thankfully, food cannot be digitalized. But quite a bit short of that, I believe we need to do something to make ourselves more mindful about food’s unseen powers.
It is possible to feed more than 9 billion people with organic production methods with a small increase in the required crop acreage and with decreased greenhouse gas emission. But this assumes considerable reduction in food wastage and in the quantities of feed grown to animals.
Many of us would like to shop ethically and in line with our values when it comes to buying meat. But while this might sound like a simple thing to do, in practice it can be a complicated web of labels, terminology and increasing confusion.
When a young person talks to me about his dreams for a good life, my first instinct is to interrupt, to tell him the planet has determined that our good life is no longer viable, dreams or not. Instead, I tell him about lambs. The promise of birth and death and birth again. I believe in both narratives, and I don’t want to burst his bubble, so I tell only the one story.
People yearn for alternatives to industrial agriculture, but they are worried. They see large-scale operations relying on corporate-supplied chemical inputs as the only high-productivity farming model. Another approach might be kinder to the environment and less risky for consumers, but, they assume, it would not be up to the task of providing all the food needed by our still-growing global population.
