N-wrecked
The way that humans have messed with the Earth’s carbon cycle rightly figures as planetary eco-problem No.1 in public debate, but the way we’ve messed with its nitrogen cycle probably ought to get more attention than it does.
Food & Water featured
Letter from the Farm: Strong Roots for a Surer Future
Investing in a small family farm is much more than an economic consideration: it can help to revitalise an entire village. Rural communities are rooted in multi-generational family farms.
After Cape Town will a breakdown of confidence bring ‘Day Zero’ to Mexico City and Bogotá?
As climate change proceeds apace, more and more cities will face serious water shortages. Will they be able to cope?
You are what you eat
Soils and human health are both very complex systems and the systems are dynamic, which means that it is very difficult to establish a direct causality between the use of nitrogen and any, positive or negative, effects on human health.
C-wrecked: agrarian transition as politics, Part 2
Making too big a deal about the specific commodity in a given place – such as sheep in upland Wales – risks missing the bigger picture of a general overproduction in the global agricultural and wider economy. But if we really want to name the culprits in these wider economies, pride of place would have to go to fossil fuels, cereal grains and grain legumes.
The concentrated ills of concentrated agribusiness
In his highly readable book, Frerick describes the businesses of barons who dominate seven sectors of the US food industry. In the process he illuminates much in recent American history and goes a long way towards diagnosing environmental ills, socio-economic ills, and the ill health of so many food consumers.
From the law of the minimum to soil health
A more than hundred year old focus on easily available nutrients has led farming astray. Instead, nutrient availability is to a large extent an emergent property of healthy soils.
C-wrecked: agrarian transition as politics, Part 1
An advantage of the transition to agrarian localism is that it depends very little on new technologies, and almost entirely on politics – hence my subtitle for this post.
Târ y donc a tori – Lessons on the Subversive Nature of Transmission, from a Stubborn Welshman
To transmit is to empower – as many people as possible to be trained to become farmers; as many people as possible saving and adapting seeds to their own conditions.
N-fertilizers have changed how we farm, what we farm and what we eat
While the links and mechanisms are not totally apparent, the introduction of synthetic fertilizers broke most of the links between the land, the animals and the people. This separation has many results and impacts on what we eat.
How nitrogen fertilizers changed the food system. Part 1.
Nitrogen (N) is on the one hand an essential nutrient for all life forms and the building block for proteins, and on the other hand a pollutant causing many negative environmental and human health impacts.
The Indigenous Growers Reviving Hemp’s Deep Roots
From the banks of Wounded Knee Creek to the White Earth reservation, this spring, more seeds will be planted for the New Green Revolution. Bringing life back to the soil is work, but these farmers are doing it. Fields of dreams, indeed.
