Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Despite growing enough food to feed to entire world, almost a billion people are now hungry — one in seven of the global population — and, according to Oxfam International, conditions are getting worse and the number of acutely malnourished children has risen for the first time this decade.
Out here in the Farm Belt, it’s hard to do much other than beat the same drum again and again (and again). It’s hot. It’s dry. Nothing is growing. We’re running out of water. And there is no sign of change on the horizon.
-New San Francisco legislation will jump-start urban farming
-Soil Microbes Help Save Plant-growing Input Costs
-Help Us Weave the Food Web!
The interesting and entertaining reactions to my recent post about destructive wildlife in the garden encouraged me to ponder the situation more closely. Pondering things closely always leads me to weird ideas. I am thinking about the possible return of the walled gardens of Victorian times. How do you know they didn’t become popular in the first place to keep out wild animals including humans?
Cooking with a Sun Oven is never easier than in the summer months, when the sun is intense and the days are long. Temperatures inside my Global Sun Oven can easily reach 350 degrees within around fifteen minutes, and so I can cook a wide range of dishes – sometimes several in one day.
Joel Salatin returns as a guest to discuss “ecological participation” – methods by which humans can create a much more resilient landscape than current mass agricultural practices allow for.
How many people could we employ if we radically change the way we farm?
What’s not to like about cutting the costs of a farm enterprise—and boosting its revenues? That, in effect, is Wichner’s pitch for the “beyond organic” farmland management system he plans to scale.
It’s easy to forget that every piece of our current infrastructure–roads, rails, runways, bridges, industrial plants, housing–was built with a certain temperature range in mind. Our agricultural system and much of our electrical generating system (including dams, nuclear power stations and conventional thermal electric plants which burn coal and natural gas) were created not only with a certain temperature range in mind, but also a certain range of rainfall.
In mid-May 2012, the United Nations Development Programme (the UNDP) released its Africa Human Development report for 2012. Entitled ‘Towards a Food Secure Future’, the report is unremarkable for its assessments and language – these have changed but little where Africa is concerned over the last 30 years – and is remarkable for the implications it contains concerning the agriculture and food focus to human development.
Peter Bane’s handbook, while not quite encyclopedic, is nothing if not authoritative. I can honestly say, without fear of exaggeration, that I hold my head a little higher as I stride about my miniscule fiefdom, now that I’ve read The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country.
The world is in serious trouble on the food front. But there is little evidence that political leaders have yet grasped the magnitude of what is happening. The progress in reducing hunger in recent decades has been reversed. Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that.
