Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
That’s the home Tanya Berry has made, in a rural community that endures—at least for now—because of people like her. Over those years, she has honed skills in farm work and the domestic arts, while serving as perhaps the most important fiction editor almost no one has heard of, married to one of the most important American writers almost everyone knows.
The Ecological Land Co-operative (ELC) was set up to address the lack of affordable sites for ecological land-based livelihoods. A life on the land is a dream for many, but one in which the barriers are high, and the ELC recognised that this needed to be addressed.
Don’t expect a whole lot of taste when you sit down to a plateful of commodities. That might be a fitting but unintended lesson for foodies who work through the new book by Eric Holt-Giménez. A Foodie’s Guide to Capitalism will reward a careful reader with lots of insights – but it won’t do much for the taste buds. While A Foodie’s Guide is lacking in recipes or menu ideas, it shines in helping us to understand the struggles of the men and women who work in the farms and packing plants.
The thin edge of the wedge has arrived in Whitemore, Tasmania. Got a letter in the mail the other day from the international seed company, Bejo, asking me not to save my own vegetable seeds – specifically beetroot and silver beet. What the shit? Bejo say that they are growing beetroots for seed somewhere in Tasmania – they say not where.
As I’ve mentioned, I recently visited Nicaragua as part of a research project on ‘Transitions to agro-ecological food systems’ that I’ve been involved with, conducted by the Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex. The research involved working with agro-ecological farmers in the UK, Senegal and Nicaragua, and the trip brought together some of the farmers and researchers from each country. In this post, I thought I’d offer a few informal reflections on the research, and the Nicaragua trip.
If we want to create sustainable, healthy systems to support us, we cannot rely on such a fickle friend as fossil energy for electricity generation to keep our sewage treatment systems running smoothly. Quite apart from the increasing potential for power cuts in a changing world, when conventional sewage infrastructure “runs smoothly” it is still heavily reliant on the constant use of electricity to convert biomass and nutrients into somewhat less polluting effluent before disposing to our rivers and coastal waters. Clearly in a world desperately in need of solutions that work, this needs to change.
This past spring, I joined 41 others in the project #OurField, co-invest in a crop. Together with a farmer, we decided what to grow, how to grow it and what we would do with the crop. #OurField is a co-operative grains movement seeking to shift our relationship with food and its production, and working to make the food system a fairer place for farmers.
For each person on the planet, about 1500 kcal of plants is used daily to feed animals. In return we get just some 500 kcal per capita per day in the form of animal foodstuffs. The 1000 kcal that is “lost” in this transformation would be enough to feed another 3 billion people. Isn’t it a no-brainer that we rather should eat plants than animals? One could think so. But the reality is a bit more complicated than that.
Around the globe, seed lending libraries have been sprouting up in public libraries. The seed libraries function very much like regular libraries, except instead of books, you check out seeds and bring them back once you’ve harvested them. These programs aim to improve access to seeds and preserve seeds for future generations. Seed libraries are just one way people can share seeds.
A new report from the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC) discusses the results of the 2017 National Young Farmer Survey. The number of American farmers is decreasing and their average age is increasing, as reported by the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). This survey examines the needs and challenges of young farmers to determine how to encourage a new generation of farmers.
We want a business that’s sufficient that pays our wage, pays the wage of the people that we employ, allows us to do all the things that we enjoy, but there’s still a huge opportunity for lots of other businesses operating all over the UK, like Grown in Totnes, to flourish in the same way. So yeah, it’s exciting.
You have to take the time to train yourself. You have to take the time to convince yourself or to test yourself in the profession, to dirty your hands in the soil and to really see what it’s all about. There is a lot of fantasy around these projects but there’s also a reality which is difficult. It can be absolutely incredible, but it can be a nightmare if it’s done without preparation, without a good human design, without a good design for the site.
