Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Will hi-tech save agriculture from its otherwise intractable problems? Certainly technological stakeholders want it to appear so, as digitisation increases both in the fields and in the policy documents and future plans for the sector.
A good stint at home cooking should be a prerequisite for anyone who’s a city food policy practitioner. Home cooking deserves to be on the front burner of good food policy.
Silicon Valley meets Hollywood. That is the best description of how we will get food in the future if we would believe the impressive number of food tech start-ups which will produce food without soil or animals. But few of them deliver on their exaggerated promises.
Let me begin by saying that we leftists do often struggle with the issue of the environment. One member of our tribe recently told me proudly on Twitter that the left was ‘against nature’ (yes, really), and it’s true that historically we’ve had a bit of a thing about trying to keep the messy world of the natural, the organic and the rural at arm’s length…
At farms like Cosechas Tierra Viva in Las Piedras, run by Eduardo Burgos and Franco Marcano, where they grow kale, arugula, green beans, and eggplant for local farmers’ markets, the storm kicked them into high gear. Just a month after Maria’s landfall, they converted the farm to run exclusively on solar energy and shifted their irrigation system’s source to rainwater.
In addition to fighting specific environmental encroachments, the Nation is bracing for climate change by building cultural resilience—especially by preserving and adapting its food heritage.
The Land Institute, based in Salina, Kansas, remains the only U.S.-based research institute devoted to developing perennial grains and multi-species farming systems — but institutions around the world have now joined the effort.
So Sue George organized her neighbors and created a legal document to protect her farm, and town, from the large-scale hog operations she said are destroying a way of life and polluting the environment.
One argument of One Size Fits None is this: it is time for agriculture to go beyond “sustainable,” the food and farming buzzword of the last decade.
On “Food Talk with Dani Nierenberg,” Paul Willis, founder of Niman Ranch Pork Company, and Elle Gadient, intern at Niman Ranch, talk about their love for humanely treated, free-range pigs and the farmers that raise them.
Now here’s the thing. Adaptation cannot be fabricated or master planned, period. I believe it to be an essential truth that adapted systems can only emerge or be generated iteratively, in an ongoing dance between a system’s form and its context.
Greater action to address the root causes of air pollution from the agricultural sector is needed. To face the growing environmental crisis caused by nitrogen pollution there needs to be a fundamental shift in the way that we produce food.
