Land as Insurance, Part 3: The Role of Farms
Imagine if there was a corporation or co-operative that you could own shares in. The purpose of this corporation would be to hedge against certain classes of black swans.
Food & Water
A How-To Manual For Growing A Community
In the small township of Port Medway on Nova Scotia’s South Shore, Annabelle Singleton and Debra Melanson, their husbands, and their staff have made The Port Grocer into the heart of the community.
Food Values: What We Choose to Eat and What We Throw Away
However, the very core of the problem and the largest component of food waste is at the consumer level, which means the food wasted every day when each person buys, uses, and throws away food, based on how we live and what we value.
Wild Oat Hollow Farm: Breeding Vitality
A lot of typical agriculture doesn’t work this way or focus on what’s actually happening to the land or paying attention to seeing what’s going on around you. When you have healthy animals and healthy land you also improve healthy wildlife.
Self-Build Commmunities in Farming
L’Atelier Paysan is a French cooperative that works with farmers to design machines and buildings adapted to the specific practices of small farm agroecology. In addition to distributing free plans on its website, L’Atelier Paysan organizes winter self-help training sessions, during which farmers train in metalworking and build tools which they can then use on their own farms.
A Farm Breviary: Lauds
One step in front of another and a life of daily cycles becomes a decade, a century, a millennium, a billion years. It’s not for my intelligence to know the duration.
Small-Scale Farming Could Restore America’s Rural Towns
There is nothing inevitable about the demise of rural America. Nothing inevitable, that is, if we turn away from the extractive model of corporate agriculture and the trade deals and subsidies that support it and instead reestablish the small- and medium-scale farming and ranching that can support sustainable prosperity.
Energy in the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex
If we trim energy use in the manner I’ve described above, we can reduce per capita energy use in the Peasant’s Republic of Wessex by a little more than half its present value – down to around 1.3 kW per capita.
Beyond Wetiko Agriculture: Saving Ourselves from the Soil Up
Do you think you or your loved ones will live 60 more years? If so, you’ll be around to witness the end of food production on the planet. Unless, that is, we become conscious of the crisis and evolve.
Rebel Ventures: Youth-Run Business Delivers Healthy Snacks to Schools
Youth-powered Rebel Ventures is a nonprofit social enterprise in West Philadelphia creating “healthy deliciousness” in the form of healthy, affordable foods for schools.
Marketing Sustainable Livestock Products: A Pasture for Life perspective
I am convinced that the Pasture for Life standards, with the support of the Pasture-Fed Livestock Association, provide for truly sustainable livestock production. I am reassured in this by our PFLA farmers.
An English Wendell Berry?
There’s a new collection of Wendell Berry’s essays available, edited by Paul Kingsnorth of Dark Mountain fame, which was reviewed by premier league literary hack DJ Taylor in last week’s Guardian Review. Taylor’s review entertained me, because his reaction was quite similar to mine when I first read Berry in the 1990s…
