Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Since all that carbon in the ground below our feet originated in the atmosphere, the potential exists for soils to ‘soak up’ lots and lots of the excess CO2 contributing to global warming. In fact, degraded and carbon-depleted soils – which describe the majority of agricultural lands in America – could be ‘recarbonized’ to their original, pre-tilled levels which could have a huge impact on climate change.
To combat climate change, we must shift how we produce, distribute, consume, and dispose of food. To adapt to climate change, we must build agricultural systems that are resilient to disruption. The timeliness of this move was evident recently as a national coalition of farmers and ranchers endorsed the Green New Deal.
Nutrition education is one way that the Kañari people can put their children into a better world than the one they inherited. Not only will the world be moving toward better balance, the children will be prepared to continue and further that movement.
Perhaps as we move forward in this turbulent century, there is a place for soil-less agriculture to provide more than just expensive micro-greens. But where is the ecology in soil-less agriculture? This is what concerns me. Soil is a breathing, squirming, thriving, living thing.
Literature is about the deep stories that we tell ourselves, about the paradigms by which we structure our understanding of the world we live in. These deep stories are the framework by which we tell ourselves why we do what we do.
Agriculture is one of those deep stories that we live within, It is a story that we make and a set of practices and a way of life.
Early in 2019, we teamed up with textile artist Katie Berman and artist and designer Courtney Lockemer on the idea of organizing an art show utilizing hemp grown from the previous year’s field trial with local artists.
If problems are cyclical so are solutions. In an attempt to resolve the long-standing feud between ranchers and environmentalists, a small group of us decided in the late 1990s to find a ‘third way’ beyond the polarization. Our goal was to implement practical, on-the-ground goals through collaboration, not confrontation.
This year, my summer favorites like tomatoes, bell peppers, winter squash and cucumbers failed badly. This begs the question: What survives a drought? What thrives when the pasture grasses are baking and the thermometer sits at a hundred day after day?
In recent years, this remote pueblo of 400 full-time inhabitants in Jalisco, about two hours from Guadalajara, has stepped into the national spotlight, standing up to a total of eight governors in two different states over the years and taking their fight all the way to Los Pinos, the Mexican White House. If the townsfolk get their way, it will probably be the first time that a mega-dam will be dismantled before it is ever used.
To put it another way, if you’d prefer to avoid harsh dystopias of involuntary rural simplicity in the future of the Pol Pot variety, then there’s a good case for working up some gentle utopias of voluntary rural simplicity right now, and trying to implement them.
There once was a farm that became an airport. So reads the first line of our modern fairytale, our religion for the age. It is also the promotional tagline chosen by the boosters of Pittsburgh’s airport, where a pair of signs sporting the slogan hang throughout.
Looking across the landscape, we see at least six key approaches to increasing soil carbon and so much more: integrating animals, rotating crops, building biodiversity with plantings like hedgerows, conserving soil with cover cropping, boosting soil fertility with fungal-dominated compost, and eventually finding methods for no-till cotton that do not depend on synthetic chemistry.
