Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Pretty Prairie, home to 650 people on the southern Kansas plains, is a one-well town. And that well is giving the town fits. The 30-meter-deep (100-foot) borehole draws water from a slice of the Equus Beds aquifer that has shown increasing levels of nitrate, a chemical that can be deadly for infants.
It doesn’t really matter what we decide to call it – mob grazing, rotational grazing or paddock grazing – they all essentially mean very similar things.
What I mostly want to do on this site over the next few months is resume exploring the alternative world of my Peasant’s Republic of Wessex. But there’s a case for taking a step back, putting that exercise into a wider context, and laying out something of a programme for the year – especially in the light of some comments I’ve recently received. So that’s what I’m going to do here.
Frank Morton has been breeding lettuce since the 1980s. His company offers 114 varieties, among them Outredgeous, which last year became the first plant that NASA astronauts grew and ate in space.
While it is clear that global trade play a major role as a driver of destruction of biodiversity there is no way “consumers” in the US or other developed economies can be expected to take responsibility for the effect on biodiversity of their consumption.
The most recent turn in the UK dairy crisis is the rejection of milk by young people, replaced by alternatives such as soya or almond milk. David Dobbin, the chief executive of United Dairy Farmers has described this as a “demographic time bomb”.
Over the past few years, we’ve tracked the success of Farmland LP, a family of funds created to increase the economic yield of farmland through sustainable farming practices.
Once again, it’s time to look at the lessons that the garden and its residents taught me during the past year. You can check this post for basic information on how I listen to what the garden tells me and how to conduct a dialogue with your own garden.
Behind all that lay a sense that in farming, we face one of the mysteries of life: how food is conjured from the soil, in an alliance with the natural world – with all its challenges of weather, pests and diseases – to support the human race in its most basic need. Farmers are at a crucial intersection between human demand and the integrity of the biosphere on which we are absolutely dependent.
The focus of this initial circuit has been the popular practice of defining permaculture design as, above all else, a process of assembling elements into whole systems.
Soil is the second biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. It holds four times more carbon than all the plants and trees in the world.
I said I’d swear off blogging for a month, but I thought I’d just drop by to note the appearance on the Dark Mountain Blog of my review of 2016, called ‘A sheep’s vigil’. And, since I’m here, I might as wIell sketch a little bit of extra context for that piece.
