Food & Water

The Future of Urban Farming

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Sustainable and long-term change includes ongoing education. It also requires a strong mindset, one that not only asks and answers important questions, such as, “How did we get here?” and “Where are we going?” but also envisions a new path and future of what is possible. What would it mean if nearly 100% of your home waste was turned into soil that grew most of your food? And what if this became true for you and for more than half your neighbors? I am humbly optimistic that this is what is next for urban farming.

Confused Indeed

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I had high expectations on the report Grazed and confused, developed under the lead of Tara Garnett from the Food Climate Research Network. I have been impressed by her previous research on many aspects of the food system and her capacity to go further than using lifecycle analyses to provide the Truth. Unfortunately this report doesn’t live up to my expectations. At all.

How Craft Brewers Are Embracing New Water Technologies

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The exploding craft beer movement is taking on the challenges of a water-constrained world and improving conservation and efficiency in production. Some are even experimenting with using recycled water in their brews.

Growing Future Farmers

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If we want to eat a sustainable healthy diet, then locally grown, chemical-free vegetables are an essential component. But who is going to grow that healthy, tasty veg? There is a worrying dearth of training opportunities in the UK for people interested in becoming ‘growers’ – and it leaves the reality of sustainable food production with a doubtful future.

The Woman Beside Wendell Berry: The Most Important Fiction Editor Almost No One Has Heard Of

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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.

How does a Multistakeholder Co-op Work?

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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.

Super-Size that Commodity

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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 Tasmania

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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.

Campesino a Campesino: a Trip to Nicaragua

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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.

Permaculture Sewage Treatment – First Aid and Future Proofing for our Rivers and Seas

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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.

Do you Dare to Crop Share? #OurField Grows

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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.

Are Pigs Eating our Food?

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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.