Farmland LP: Investing In Sustainable Farmland
Over the past few years, we’ve tracked the success of Farmland LP, a family of funds created to increase the economic yield of farmland through sustainable farming practices.
Food & Water
Forging Permaculture Hand Tools, Part 2
The use of hand tools is one of the definitive characteristics of our species. We even go so far as to define our preindustrial past by ages of hand tool technology: stone, bronze and iron.
The 2016 Garden: What the Rabbits Taught
Once again, it’s time to look at the lessons that the garden and its residents taught me during the past year. You can check this post for basic information on how I listen to what the garden tells me and how to conduct a dialogue with your own garden.
The Future of Farm Subsidies: What Really Matters to Farmers?
Behind all that lay a sense that in farming, we face one of the mysteries of life: how food is conjured from the soil, in an alliance with the natural world – with all its challenges of weather, pests and diseases – to support the human race in its most basic need. Farmers are at a crucial intersection between human demand and the integrity of the biosphere on which we are absolutely dependent.
Forging Permaculture Hand Tools, Part 1
The magic of fire and hammer is truly transformative and I am marvelled by it every day that I work at the forge. An abandoned railroad spike is reborn as a hori hori and a truck’s leaf spring becomes a heavy duty trowel. This marvellous process has been around for millennia and it still appeals to many
Conclusion to Inquiry Circuit # 1
The focus of this initial circuit has been the popular practice of defining permaculture design as, above all else, a process of assembling elements into whole systems.
Regenerative Agriculture: Our Best Shot at Cooling the Planet?
Soil is the second biggest reservoir of carbon on the planet, next to the oceans. It holds four times more carbon than all the plants and trees in the world.
Snow Day
The wind is gusting in a low whistle outside my study, blowing snow on the front porch. The mercury reads 15 and it’s still a couple of hours until sunrise. Today’s to-do list has been written: Deliver hay and carry out the usual farm chores. Set up heaters in the livestock watering tanks. Castrate and vaccinate calves, then move cattle to their winter pasture up in the back forty. Dig postholes for the new hog enclosure and set posts in concrete. And, of course, attend to any newborn lambs that may have been born overnight.
Reflections on a Sheep’s Vigil
I said I’d swear off blogging for a month, but I thought I’d just drop by to note the appearance on the Dark Mountain Blog of my review of 2016, called ‘A sheep’s vigil’. And, since I’m here, I might as wIell sketch a little bit of extra context for that piece.
Glyphosate: Unsafe On Any Plate?
In November, a very concerning report — Glyphosate: Unsafe On Any Plate — was released by The Detox Project and Food Democracy Now!, raising the alarm of the high levels of glyphosate in the US food supply and the (deliberate?) low levels of awareness of its associated health risks. Dave Murphy, executive director of Food Democracy Now!, joins us this week to explain the finding of this new report on the world’s most-used herbicide (more commonly known by its retail brand: Roundup).
Gene Logsdon, 1932 – 2016
But along with these, 2016 also saw us lose an agrarian outside the world of Permaculture, that somebody being the aptly named Contrary Farmer, Gene Logsdon.
Tales of Agri-Resistance
There is nothing quite like the smell of the brewing of Arabic coffee prepared on burning olive branches, just pruned during the olive harvest. The smell of heil (cardamom) cooked in coffee, and the aroma of the burning wood, are almost as delicious as the day’s first cup sipped atop the dry limestone walls that separate the terraces of the wadi (valley).
