Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Mark Shepard of Viola, Wisconsin speaks to organic farmers about his permaculture farm, his experiences and techniques in modeling agriculture after natural, 3-dimensional ecosystems using tree and shrub agroforestry, keyline water management, rotational grazing, and more.
Both political parties and both capitalism and socialism spout lots of support for “small business.” Maybe this is where we can bring the country back together again. But I put quotes around “small business” because the Census Bureau and the Small Business Administration have exceedingly murky notions about what “small” means.
The danger that the decline of bees and other pollinators represents to the world’s food supply was highlighted this week when the European Commission decided to ban a class of pesticides suspected of playing a role in so-called “colony collapse disorder.”
• The Trouble with Biofuels: Costs and Consequences of Expanding Biofuel Use in the United Kingdom
•Dance of the Honey Bee
•The benefits of alternative farming methods
•A Brief History of Our Deadly Addiction to Nitrogen Fertilizer
•Connecting the Dots: the Big Permaculture Picture
•YFF: Using the Sun to Empower Women and Help Family Farmers
•International Day of Peasant struggles
•Why Saving Seed and Growing Organic Food is a Powerful Weapon Against Corporate Tyranny
•Why farmers still struggle when food prices rise
Growing plants, particularly for food, and particularly in community, is a big part of the Transition experience and ethos. Many people in transition are active permaculturists. At the very least, most of us want to eat plants grown organically from good seed.
I’ve been advancing my guerilla gardening efforts recently, with a significant new raised bed now beautifying my nature strip, as seen in the featured picture. I thought in this post I could provide a brief overview of how to build a cheap raised bed, either for use on your nature strip or in your front or backyards. This overview might seem a bit basic for the handy builders among you, so I direct this post to those who are beginning their journey into guerilla gardening and urban agriculture.
As soon as we begin using the word “farming” again, all of the implicit associations with farming begin to reemerge in our shared thoughts and language
Sandor Katz lives a couple hours across Tennessee from us, so on a delightful April weekend we decided to spend four days attending his Wild Fermentation Intensive. Sandor is quite the celebrity these days — after profiles in The New York Times Magazine, The New Yorker, and Michael Pollan’s new book, Cooked, Sandor’s own encyclopedia, The Art of Fermentation, still in hardcover, has galloped through several printings for Chelsea Green. Readers of Resilience will find scores of references to Sandor over the past few years, as sustainability bloggers have come to recognize the importance of fermentation to sustainability.
"The only good aphid is a dead aphid" used to be my mantra. I would walk up and down rows of plotted trees, spraying the plants with Metasystox, oblivious to the risks to my own health. I didn’t bother with rubber gloves, a mask, or even rubber boots, leaving my skin exposed to this toxic pesticide. With the lid to the pesticide sprayer not properly sealed, Metasystox leaked down my back. Dizzy with nausea, I passed out. This was my harsh introduction to pesticides. It was also the last time I ever used anything toxic on my crops.
From Chapter 4 (Energy) of the latest Resilience guide, ‘Rebuilding the Foodshed’. This is a heck of a chapter…If you eat food, grow food, use energy, create energy, or make waste, you’ll find yourself fascinated.
There is little disagreement that urban farming translates into increased access to local, sustainable, and healthy food, and that this is a very good thing. But how is it done? What are the success stories of urban farming? And what exactly is a “foodshed?”
If you could boil our global problems down to seven words, they might be these: we don’t see where stuff comes from.
