Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Lyndsey Antanitis is the Veteran Farmer Program Coordinator at the Rodale Institute, an independent research institute for organic farming. She is a farmer, healthcare professional, and veteran with a passion for helping others and providing opportunities within organic agriculture.
Politicians who describe dams as “clean energy projects” are talking “nonsense” and rejecting decades of science, says David Schindler, a leading water ecologist. Former premier Christy Clark often touted the Site C dam as a “clean energy project” and Premier John Horgan has adopted the same term.
Just outside of Chapel Hill, 32 ethnic Karen, Chin, and Burmese immigrant families are transforming the 5-acre nonprofit Transplanting Traditions Community Farm into a haven that reminds them of the war-torn homes and farms they were forced to flee.
The urban agriculture programme in Antanarivo aims at tackling food insecurity through the creation micro gardens in low income neighbourhoods.
Generally, populism and its personification in figures such as Donald Trump and Nigel Farage has been presented in mainstream circles as a dangerous political turn, a threat to the established order of things, and not without good reason. But for those who’d like to replace the present global neoliberal economy with a more local, more equitable and more land-based or agrarian society there are overlaps with populism that raise a few questions…
Headquartered at the Werkshack in uptown, Oakland, GDS Cloth Goods is the design and production studio by Geana Sieburger. A vibrant environment filled with makers of all types, it allows Geana to do her often solitary work in the company of a creative community and independent makers who share her principals and motivations.
Real farming holds the promise to restore lost biodiversity to the rural landscape, preserve critically endangered breeds, sequester carbon, reduce exposure of plants and animals to antimicrobials, pesticides and antibiotics, and secure the future health and vitality of the soil. But there was one important element missing, and for a conference all about better food production, it was particularly striking. Flavour was absent from the discussion.
I wanted to connect as many ‘honey peoples’ as possible because I felt that they had been forgotten. The ‘bee custodians’, as I like to call them as opposed to beekeepers, had held the space for bees throughout our previous generations. And yet the hunter-gatherer is pitched at the bottom of the strata of livelihoods.
For residents of Cape Town, “Day Zero” is getting closer. That’s the day when taps in the drought-stricken coastal South African city are projected run dry, and its residents would be forced to head to police-guarded distribution sites to obtain their daily ration of water.
Local governments need to deal with food through the window of people issues – jobs, neighbourhood cohesion, neighbourhood rejuvenation, public safety, mental health, conviviality, the need for “third places,” immigrant welcoming, multiculturalism and interculturalism, community gardens, walkable shopping, farmers markets, school gardens, … the whole nine yards of city life.
The main lesson for grass farmers to take from Grazed and Confused is that soil carbon sequestration is not on its own sufficient to defend ruminants against the charge of climate villain. What is also required is a robust critique of the GWP methodology and its CO2 equivalent; and clear explanation to policy makers why “methane is a sideshow”.
Perhaps I should essay a brief report here on things I heard and learned at the 2018 Oxford Real Farming Conference that I attended a couple of weeks back. If I try to lay it all out in connected prose I’ll probably come grinding to a halt after about 5,000 words, so I thought I’d present it mostly in the form either of little news snippets or of one-sentence assertions…the latter being things I heard people say, or thoughts I had while listening at the conference.
