Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sacred Cow: The Case for (Better) Meat by Diana Rodgers and Robb Wolf is a book (and forthcoming film) challenging what has become conventional wisdom: that regardless of how it is raised, beef is bad for the planet.
A half hour from El Paso, TX, lies a small, young town that is piloting a creative local food program to help keep residents fed and encourage entrepreneurship—all while focusing on native plants that grow quickly and cheaply.
Essentially, we have a dishonest food pricing system and if this was corrected, sustainable farming methods would more than hold their own economically.
If ever there was a year to learn to save seed, I think this is it. So many people planted coronavirus gardens this spring that many seed sources ran out.
Any farm project considering the integration of industrial hemp as a market crop should be prepared for a 5-10 year incubation period in determination of crop yield and profitability. On the fiber side, a few acres of the crop will be processed into hurd-free, long staple fiber following best practices learned and iterated over the previous four years.
Rediscoveries of forgotten or discarded ideas about plant growth—such as that truly healthy plants can thwart soilborne and airborne pathogens, as well as insect pests, and provide significantly higher levels of nutritional value—are the inspiration for a new model for tending gardens and farm fields.
The use of cover crops allows farmers to protect their soil before and after they harvest annual crops so that the ground is always covered. Cover crops are a sustainable technique, as they build healthy soil and conserve water, but could they help fight food insecurity?
In the UK, farming is the least diverse profession, with 98.6% of farm managers and holders being white British. The events of the last few months have brought these conversations to the forefront and we have realised we need to act now if this is going to change.
A cohort of actors including philanthrocapitalists, aid agencies, governments, academic institutions, and embassies are all working to make this narrative a reality. They talk about transforming African agriculture but what they are doing is creating a market for themselves cleverly couched in a nice sounding language.
Who produces our food and what they are paid should be much higher on the agenda of discussions about resilience in food systems, for the sake of society and the environment.
My book A Small Farm Future: Making the Case for a Society Built Around Local Economies, Self-Provisioning, Agricultural Diversity, and a Shared Earth is now hurtling on its final trajectory to land on Planet Earth mid-October.
The Nature of Fashion’s bold and necessary lens for holistic material analysis is not fully applied to the proposed vision for increasing fiber production through the expansion of “biosynthetics” via fermentation of microorganisms, including genetically engineered microorganisms.
