Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I’d like to share with you my three favourite tools to use in the garden. These tools are used the most often and get the most work done in the shortest time. Generally I prefer hand tools to powered ones because they’re quiet, they don’t emit noxious fumes, and I can work up a sweat.
“The most important thing,” Huw says, “is doing something you love.”…“More than anything,” he says, “I just want people to get out there and grow food.”
For much of the farming community in the northern hemisphere, January is a time to engage in conversation and share ideas and so we headed to the eighth Annual Oxford Real Farming Conference (ORFC)…
Here, we will explore some proactive steps community members can take when entire neighborhoods have fallen into a state of decline — as is the case in many working class communities across the country.
But while a proliferation of food waste apps hope to combat the problem through technology, FoodCycle is tackling it by serving up hot meals to those who need it — along with providing a place for diners to build community and face-to-face friendships.
Consumers increasingly care about where their food comes from, how it is produced and how it impacts their health. This is generating demand for sustainable food and has enabled the recent resurgence of small-scale farming that produces environmentally sound and ethical produce.
I take the point Joe Clarkson made – at root, this blog is supposed to be about farming. The trouble is, the shape of farming is driven by politics (we’ll know that agrarian populism has succeeded when and if it’s the other way around…) so inevitably writing about farming involves writing about politics.
Speaking for myself (not Cindy), my urge and motivation for moving to the farm 17 years back, and the desire to document it, had more to do with wishing to relearn what it was like to be a resident. Or, as Wes Jackson would phrase it, to be native to this place.
Following on from a public meeting held in Bristol to discuss the role of livestock in future farming systems, the Sustainable Food Trust held a conference on the 24th and 25th November to take the conversation from theory to practice.
Wayne Roberts looks at all the ways local food webs are already growing, ready to become the Next Big Thing in creative disruption.
Comments received online and by email, in response to Emily Franklin’s recent article Milk: The sustainability issue raised three questions about the use of soya in dairy farming, to which the SFT did not have ready answers. Richard Young has been investigating, and he’s come up with some unexpected facts.
Though the high-level side-by-side comparisons I shared in the last post have their place, it would feel inappropriate to reduce each of the design process treatments we looked at in the last post to only one column in a table.
