Restoring Water to Arid Lands: Rethinking Dams and Soil in the MENA and Global South
Why water scarcity is not a climatic inevitability, and how nature-based solutions can rebuild life in landscapes under stress.
Food & Water featured
Oxford Real Farming Conference 2026 – Deeper and wider ways of engaging with the land
Among other things, the Oxford Real Farming Conference shows that there’s more to the movement than mere conventionalisation. The movement is doubling down—it’s attempting to deepen its understanding of the world. And there’s no time like the present for that.
Do cows raze the land?
Unfortunately, the extremely simplistic narrative that plants are good and animals are bad has been given far too much prominence in the public debate. For sure, industrial livestock production has a number of serious flaws, but so does industrial crop production.
Notes From An Old Farmer: Revitalizing Our Rural Communities
There is a new energy among our younger citizens to seek a more meaningful life in the country. Now is the time to take advantage of their new-found passion to live and work in a rural community.
The winners take the most
From 2018 to 2020, the top four seed and agro-chemical firms controlled 60-70% of the global pesticides market, and 50-60% of the $45 billion global seed market. How did this happen?
By the Rivers of Babylon: debating agrarianism with Tom Murphy
There’s nothing much we can do about this world-as-it-might-be symbolic capacity we have, simultaneously humanity’s blessing or genius and also our curse. Writing, farming and so on were not the cause of our malaise but the result of it.
When Water Decides: Securing National Ambitions through the Hydrological Cycle
As long as water is treated as a problem to be drained rather than an ally to be welcomed, it will abandon us when we need it most and strike when we are least prepared.
Permanent Agriculture Part 1: Tree Crops
Almost one hundred years later, Smith’s original ideas for planting a two story agriculture remain inspired—planting crop trees on challenging and depleted land. Trees can do most of the heavy work when it comes to feeding the inhabitants of our planet and repairing our land.
How Breaking — and Repairing — the Water Cycle Shapes Our Climate Future
In arid and semi-arid regions, retaining rainfall where it falls is not an ecological luxury. It is a prerequisite for long-term water security, climate stability, and social resilience.
Ireland | Feeding Ourselves, breaking new ground for the local food movement
Farmers, following a bodhrán deftly drummed by Talamh Beo’s Fergal Anderson, brought themselves and their produce from their farms, telling a little of their stories of who they are, what they do, and how they do it. They stood front and centre, and it centred us too.
Growing the Nourishment We Seek
The garden is a profoundly simple setting for reconnecting with the earth, with one another, and with ourselves.
Managing Water Differently: Algeria Facing Hydrological Extremes
What if, in Algeria, water were no longer seen solely as a scarce resource to exploit or a threat to control, but as an ecological and economic capital to preserve and develop?
