Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The piece of property on which my story takes place had evolved past neglect: it was simply abandoned to the forest. When we looked out the windows of our old home in the early years, we didn’t see fields onto which we could project agrarian dreams, but walls of vegetation that were wild and unwelcoming. If we wanted to make a farm, we would have to cut it into a forest.
I’ve been blogging for over six years under this ‘Small Farm Future’ moniker, without devoting much effort to defining what a ‘small farm’ actually is. So I thought I’d try to make at least some minor amends on that score in this post.
On May 8th the government will end its consultation period on a new agricultural policy for England. Revealingly, its policy document – called ‘Health and Harmony: The future for food, farming and the environment in a Green Brexit’– has more to say about the environment than either food or farming.
The ethos we’ve built around farming in the United States is broken. Rather than encouraging farmers to eliminate risk by diversifying their crops, pursuing sustainability, and embracing a proper scale, we’ve propped up a truly unsustainable style of production with subsidies and insurance programs.
For the local food movement to grow exponentially in your community, you must take your place on the front lines. To ignite a new level of impact, effectiveness, and scale, you must master the seven revolutionary steps of building a regional foodshed…
The good news is that we now have a better understanding of the platform (i.e. systems approach with a soil foundation) that we need to use. It will solve the economic and environmental problems of agriculture as well as the needs for nutrient dense food by our growing population.
While hunger is a prevalent form of malnutrition in developing countries, malnourishment can also be found far closer to home, here in the UK, where its impact is significant and increasing. NHS England calls malnutrition a “common problem”, affecting millions of people in the UK.
Agroecology is based on the idea that farms should mimic the structure and functioning of natural ecosystems. In ecosystems, there is no “waste”: nutrients are recycled indefinitely. Agroecology aims to close nutrient loops – returning all nutrients that come out of the soil, back to the soil.
Water activist Steve Tamar expected just a dozen students to show up to his citizen-science training at Maricao High School in western Puerto Rico this past October. Instead, the sweltering hot auditorium was packed with teenagers looking to help test the island’s water.
The following day, in Louvain-le-Neuve, Olivier de Schutter gave a presentation in which he used the term ‘Partner State’, his vision of the state getting alongside bottom-up community action, allowing the ideas and inspiration to rise up from below, and seeing their role as being to remove obstacles and to help things to flourish. My strong sense from everyone I spoke to in Liege was that that looks like the very model that is unfolding in Liege.
This is the complete farmer’s alphabet published over 2013 and reposted in 2018 today as a piece complete in itself for your enjoyment.
There are other clear commonalities between pilgrimage and farming, grounded in the idea that the land itself is holy and that our interaction with, and care of the land, is of great significance. Farmers understand the value of the natural capital found within the fields – its soil, sources of water and other resources are crucial to the health of the land and the endeavour of farming.
