Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our weeds are just where they belong, in our fields, along our roads, in every compromised, degraded, or devastated ecosystem. Free food and medicine in our backyards. Essential for ecosystem restoration, perhaps they will also be essential for our future food and medicine.
Still, the wider issues concerning food, land and labour are important, and in view of the present historical moment on our farm and in the world it seems opportune to discuss them.
We will never approach resilience unless we wade into the vast pool of little-known and rarely used plants. This time of year, as many of you are buying seeds for the spring, consider devoting a piece of your land for experimenting with new crops and new varieties. Not all your experiments will work, but some might prove easier, healthier, more pest-resistant, tastier, or more suited to your particular patch of the landscape that what you are planting no
Here’s how I’d parse it: being a settler is going to be an increasingly common human experience in the future. Lasch teaches us useful things about the politics of settler livelihood-making, while Ghosh teaches us useful things about how settlers must avoid becoming settler-colonists.
To decolonize college campuses, BIPOC students, allies, alumni, and faculty are reintroducing Indigenous growing practices.
Underutilised crops (UCs) or forgotten crops are less common species, landraces, cultivars, or heritage varieties whose use, production, and consumption is currently limited.
On this Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by small-scale farmer Jason Bradford, permaculturist and documentarian Andrew Millison, regenerative agriculture activist Vandana Shiva, and regenerative farmer and educator Daniel Zetah to discuss the feasibility of a food system fully or mostly independent of fossil fuel inputs.
My little flock expanded in November 2013 when Bob told me about a ram lamb for sale from a Boreray flock in the Highlands that had started with sheep from Bob.
We have spent many years planning, building, and repairing the infrastructure to support multiple endeavors, to make the farm resilient, to create and sustain a place where the absence of one species simply indicates another cycle, unremarked in the larger scheme.
Because food is much more than a stomach to be filled, actions on the ground in France are focusing on the social barriers to local, healthy food for all.
Building new reciprocal relations to landscapes, where humans reconcile food production and biodiversity, represents a true alternative to environmental degradation.
So it’ll be a case of back to the future with mixed farming as a key component of the food system (not everywhere, because we’re talking local context, not one size fits all solutionism … but mixed farming in its endless local variants will loom large).
