Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Sustainable agriculture needs to be integrated throughout the entire learning system if all our future farmers are to embrace the sustainability agenda. Young people are a sponge for information and what they are told now will impact on how they farm in the future.
A better understanding of the pathways to positive change will help show, even more, what urban food policy can do to change the food system and where it can have the most impact.
True believers in high tech disruption are having a heyday trumpeting out forecasts based on the positive and inevitable transformation to be caused by a takeover of a modestly-sized food retailer, Whole Foods, by Amazon, which a short time ago had a 0.8 per cent penetration of the $800 billion US grocery market, and even less in Canada and the UK.
“Food apartheid is a human-created system of segregations, which relegates some people to food opulence and other people to food scarcity. It results in the epidemic of diabetes, heart disease, obesity and other diet-related illnesses that are plaguing communities of color,” she explains.
My guess is that traditional mixed farming strategies will come into their own again if, as seems likely, we move towards a more energy and phosphate constrained future.
“Our people survived genocide in part because of [traditional] foods and medicines,” Beck says. “And because our elders are passing away and global warming is changing how our environment functions, now is a significant time to capture elders’ knowledge and our own community’s history.”
While it may sound old-fashioned, home milling could have the potential to redefine one of the world’s oldest processed foods—bread.
Today people are constantly bombarded by new diet trends and information on what is healthy and what is not, much of it contradictory. Within this debate, meat consumption is one of the current topics under scrutiny, with increasing calls for people to eat less.
Standing in the shade of some blossom filled apple trees, conversation turns to the wonders of fungi. “I got really intrigued by them, and the more I’ve read and learnt, the more I realise how critically important they are to the entire ecosystem,” Patrick muses. “They’re the ones doing all the recycling, they create soil, they live inside plants…. They’re very very weird and slightly magical things!” he points out with a grin.
Everywhere we look, whether in the Global North or Global South, we see people reclaiming an integral relationship with nature and each other through regenerative agriculture and regenerative community building strategies. Looking forward, there are many exciting intersections of regenerative agriculture and sustainability education to amplify.
Building off one another’s enthusiasm, the Irwins describe their model of ranching that pulls from agrarian traditions of the past and present to create diverse, resilient agricultural systems that are the engines for ecosystem restoration for our future.
On a recent Saturday afternoon, a group of volunteers in the northern Montana city of Great Falls met in the local library to package seeds for their newly formed seed exchange, and to share their passion for gardening and food security.
