Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
There are many answers, and maybe none are completely right. But some of them are better than others. You find something that works for you and your land because you kept working at it. That is what most advice leaves out, and that is where the real work is.
To be clear, a sustainable farmer does not grow food. With adequate nutrition from the soil, with energy from the sun, and moisture from the rain, plants do all the growing by themselves. And animals grow by acquiring the energy and nutrition from plants.
As I’ve emphasized repeatedly here, the fundamental problem isn’t the contextual distinction between farming and foraging. It’s the way that predatory states exploit both. But now we need to find more resilient, local, stress-tolerant strategies.
It is time to examine how we live, where we live, where we draw the line. We can take our anxiety and move it into action. We can plan and protect ourselves. And, amazingly, wonderfully, saving rainwater is something every one of us can do. It’s time.
If we and our descendants succeed in realising this new green Earth, I think it will result from ordinary people sharing and distributing what they need locally to generate renewable communities oriented to practical livelihood.
It is essential to re-connect food to the land and the process of farming. This will give food an enhanced value not only as a supplier of energy and essential nutrients, but also as a source of meaning and experience of the land, of the living and of the people producing food.
I don’t think anything is more important than challenging the notion that ‘they’ will solve the current poly-crisis and keep people safe and fed via existing and new technologies, economic policies and political negotiation. They won’t. It’s time for ordinary people to try to do it for themselves.
Water, through its progressive scarcity, is redrawing the map of vulnerabilities and powers. Countries that make its management a factor of internal cohesion and regional cooperation will be better equipped for the decades to come.
Ravmed’s story is not just about wheat. It is about people who refused to let their heritage disappear, who safeguarded what their ancestors handed down, and who continue—season by season—to plant a future rooted firmly in the past.
There are simpler, healthier paths we can take. With instability in more than our climate systems, it is time to examine where we live, where we draw the line.
We are putting the concepts mentioned into action, experimenting to see if new scales and ecosystems are possible. This creates hyper-local, context-led action held gently by a wide boundary systems view and strongly held duties of care. We cannot wait to start producing our own tangible, hold-in-your-hand, outputs.
When farmers, researchers, designers and policymakers work together, farms and bio districts can become true laboratories of resilience – capable of regenerating ecosystems while shaping fairer and more adaptive governance models.
