Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
•Peak farmland" is here, crop area to diminish: study
•A Grocery Store For The People Planned For West Oakland Food Desert
•Blackpool to give free breakfasts to all primary school pupils
•How the Food Movement Is Gaining Strength
A spontaneous, largely under-the-radar blue revolution is gaining steam in sub-Saharan Africa and has the potential to boost food security and incomes for tens of millions of the region’s poorest inhabitants.
I have a hunch that the following scene happens only on one farm in the whole wide world so pay attention. You are driving down a two lane highway in Ohio when you pass a farmstead with a chicken coop in easy view through your windshield. In front of the coop stands a middle-aged woman with a kind of vacant air about her, cracking an egg on a fencepost and gingerly letting the white stuff ooze off onto the ground to separate it from the yolk. She tosses the shell back to the hens to eat. By now you probably have slowed almost to a stop because surely the poor woman has lost her mind from the hectic pressures of modern farming. She seems to be rubbing the yolk between the palms of her hand. A dog laps at the egg white drooling to the ground. By the way, she is also barefoot.
Tonight I sit in my bioshelter tending the woodstove to keep our winter garden warm on a frosty night. My oasis of green requires care and maintenance to stay healthy and productive. Through the long, cold December nights, we supplement the season’s meager sunlight with firewood to protect and nurture our plantings of hardy greens and tender herbs.
Ellen LaConte, author of Life Rules: Nature’s Blueprint for Surviving Economic and Environmental Collapse,will be posting a series of essays on her blog that explore the small but cumulative steps we might take toward the conversion of 20th century suburbs into sustainable communities in which post-collapse humans might survive and thrive. Today’s post is the first in this series.
If you have a roof, you should be collecting rainwater. It requires no “softener,” uses less soap, and is friendlier to work with than even the best water that has come into contact with the ground. Grandmother loved the softness of rainwater for washing her hair, and the country house always had a barrel — topped with some screening to keep out leaves — standing under eaves near the gutter downspout.
With a population of five million crammed on a landmass of just 715 square kilometres, the tiny republic of Singapore has been forced to expand upwards, building high-rise residential complexes to house the country’s many inhabitants. Now Singapore is applying the vertical model to urban agriculture — experimenting with rooftop gardens and vertical farms in order to feed its many residents.
Food prices are rising due to climate, peak oil and poor economy. Best time to start your city on Victory Gardens. Speech by Lamanda Joy to Great Lakes Bioneers tells how. With intro on food prices in Canada, UK, Australia, USA, clips from WWII garden propaganda.
It seems that when it’s time to go about reflecting on life as a farmer and modern-day homesteader, my mind wonders to the dreamy romanticism of the things on the farm that have very little to do with planting, hoeing, harvesting and washing. Instead, I get caught up in that all-consuming thought that so much of our toil and digging is wasted. Rather than worrying about pesky thoughts of debt and drought and diseases on the tomato vine, it might be easier (and superior) to spend my time letting the land feed us with what it already produces.
•Supporting Climate-Friendly Food Production
•When a Green Revolution Runs Out of Water
•Can Permaculture Transform Industrial Agriculture?
•A Genius Investor Thinks Billions Of People Are Going To Starve To Death — Here’s Why
•How one nonprofit pub is giving back, one pint at a time
•Are We Heading Toward Peak Fertilizer?
I just finished reading a pre-publication copy of Paradise Lot, by Eric Toensmeier and Jonathan Bates (out next year) that makes me wonder exceedingly about the meaning of what we refer to as “space.”
While researching the topic of sustainable agriculture for a paper, high school junior Rhian Moore came across the work of PCI Senior Fellow Richard Heinberg. Rhian reached out to Richard for more information on the topic. Below are Rhian’s questions and Richard’s brief responses. We think they make for a nice primer of sorts.
