Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
I guess you could say trees are as family to me. They remain a part of my life wherever I go. When I was 17 I learned to work horses on the long line, and later, when I arrived at the Farm in Tennessee, fresh out of grad school, I put those skills to use snaking logs from the forest with a team of Belgian mares. I built a tent home for my bride on a platform of hand hewn oak logs acquired that way.
•How Google Earth Revealed Chicago’s Hidden Farms
•Cash for Hay Driving Thieves to Move Bundles
•A people’s buy-out of Britain’s farmland
•Enviro Crusader Turns Pro-GMO, Anti-Organic—And Anti-Logic
•The U.S. Will Again Produce More of the Nitrogen Fertilizer it Uses for Agriculture
While many of us hope our farmers market purchases are helping repair a broken food system, let’s face it: all the locally grown organic broccoli in the world will only get us so far. Our dollars are valuable to the farmers at the market, but the domination of the American foodscape by a few powerful corporate players continues to limit consumer choices while squeezing out small and sustainable farmers and food producers.
As climate change alters rainfall patterns and river flows, tensions are bound to rise between states and countries that share rivers that cross their borders. In the Rio Grande Basin of the American Southwest, that future inevitability has arrived.
The world record yield for paddy rice production is not held by an agricultural research station or by a large-scale farmer from the United States, but by a farmer in the state of Bihar in northern India. Sumant Kumar, who has a farm of just two hectares in Darveshpura village, holds a record yield of 22.4 tons per hectare, from a one-acre plot. This feat was achieved with what is known as the System of Rice Intensification (SRI).
For many of us, the word “guild” might conjure up images of medieval metal workers, Gothic guildhalls, and secret societies. Today, the guild is getting a modern makeover as lost arts like craft brewing, food preservation, and butchery make their way into the mainstream. In an increasingly industrialized food system, guilds give individual artisans a forum to share tricks of the trade, pool resources, and advance their crafts.
I tried to pull a sneaky little brag on all of you a few weeks ago when I used a photo of my woodpile on a post. The post wasn’t even about woodpiles exactly and I was, like, you know, uh, well, oh-by-the-way, pretending that I just happened to have this photo lying around and so I might as well use it.
In his newest book, Full Planet, Empty Plates, Lester Brown writes…"The U.S. Great Drought of 2012 has raised corn prices to the highest level in history. The world price of food, which has already doubled over the last decade, is slated to climb higher, ushering in a new wave of food unrest…."
Across the nation, a robust and inspiring local food movement is gaining momentum but faces critical challenges of overwhelming demand, limited production capacity, lack of infrastructure, and limited access to capital. Meanwhile, as the unsustainability of the industrialized corporate food system becomes increasingly evident, a global food crisis threatens to land on our own shores. Our communities are food insecure.
Transition initiatives have spawned a number of fascinating new enterprises, and in today’s post we’ll be looking at one of them you may not have come across yet, Hodmedod’s Great British Beans, which has emerged from work of Transition City Norwich and East Anglia Food Link. What follows is an interview with one of its founders, Josiah Meldrum.
• Storms on US Plains stir memories of the ‘Dust Bowl’
• The Battlefront in the Front Yard
• Congress Includes Awful 2008 Farm Bill Extension in Fiscal Cliff Deal
• Up to 50% of food is wated worldwide, report says
• Post-Prop. 37 Poll Shows the Future of GE Food Labeling is Alive, Well and Living in California
• Farmers Rally at White House to Protest Monsanto’s GMO Empire
A huge ‘dome of heat’ over Australia has broken temperature records, and this heat has been so intense that the Bureau of Meteorology has been required to create new colours for their charts, which had previously been capped at 50 degrees. Deep red has now been superseded by deep purple. Bush fires have been raging across the country – a sign of a warming world, the impacts of which are destined only to intensify.
