Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Our society has become increasingly divorced from agriculture, and our assumptions about food and farming are too often based more on emotion or business interests than those of real, on-farm experiences and community decision-making about the food we raise and eat.
What is being called the world’s first solar-powered flour mill is now in operation at Frankferd Farms in Butler County, Pa…It dawned on me, thinking of Frankferd Farms, that what I have here is a solar and wind-powered corn dryer as well as a storage bin.
As farmers struggle to keep up with soaring demand for grain and soybeans, this ratcheting upward of food prices ensures that many of the 219,000 new guests at the global dinner table each night are facing empty plates.
To get a handle on the Promoting Local Food Act tabled in the Ontario legislature on October 4, it helps to know the difference between government support and government policy. If you choose door 1 and get support, you’re in luck. If you choose door 2 and get policy, that’s the booby prize.
Over the coming decades, climate change is expected to pose major difficulties for one million maize and bean farmers in Central America.
*Despite Protest, College Plans To Slaughter, Serve Farm’s Beloved Oxen
*A Simple Fix for Farming
*Iowa Farms Minting Millionaires as Rich-Poor Gap Widens
An important book argues that conservationists who focus on creating nature preserves are undermining their own cause. To truly protect biodiversity, environmentalists must support the global struggle of peasant farmers for human rights, land, and sustainable agriculture. In any discussion of biodiversity and species extinction, someone insists that overpopulation is the problem. More people equals more farms equals less wilderness equals more extinctions. Life is a zero-sum game: you can have people and farming OR wildlife and biodiversity, but not both.
A friend brought me a gift I never dreamed I’d ever see, or rather eat. A loaf of pawpaw bread. Just like banana bread but with pawpaws. Why didn’t I think of that?
*Big Tobacco lawyers target food industry
*How To Compost In Your Apartment
*Why Caring About Food Isn’t An Option, It’s a Responsibility
*Food price crisis: What crisis?
*New EU biofuel proposals inadequate, warns ActionAid
Since its founding in 1996, the Community Food Security Coalition has been the leading voice for people of color and the poor in a food movement that often marginalizes them in favor of well-heeled “foodies.” This summer, the coalition announced that 2012 would be its last year of operation. The announcement left those of us in the food movement reeling. Although the timing was not deliberate, it seemed fitting that a gathering about the future of the food justice movement, Food + Justice = Democracy, had been planned to take place just months after the coalition’s announcement.
One of the greatest gifts of Transition is rediscovering the simple joys of doing seasonal things together – cooking, cycling, swimming in the sea, having a picnic. They bring sense and meaning into everything we do. Nothing though is quite as delightful and satisfying as foraging – going out into the wild territories and finding stuff to bring home and eat.
In early October, the eco-village, Änggärdet, Sweden, hosted two days of Live Action Role-Play (LARP) along the theme of life 2016-2027, post peak oil and post economic collapse. Players got the opportunity to explore what various scenarios would be like, including being commaned into a work detail bu the military to harvest the last remaining potatoes by hand, and by joining a self-organised, worked-by-hand co-housing combi-farm.
