Food & Water

Resilience or death: Preparing our farms for the end of agriculture (…as we know it)

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No civilization has ever faced the agricultural challenges confronting us over the coming decades. Ever. And if we can pull it off – wherever we CAN pull it off – it will necessarily be with an agriculture of maximum resilience; an agriculture that can get knocked down and stagger back up again and again and again. So let’s do this.

Why such a lack of common sense about dogs?

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The kind of society that thinks its okay to let dogs lick children on the lips is the same society that wants to tell farmers how to raise livestock. Granted that some farm practices are unnecessarily cruel to animals and need to be changed, the kind of mind that allows face-licking dogs should be humble enough to listen to what farmers have to say too about animal care. I have dehorned calves, docked lambs, castrated pigs, scraped maggots out of a sheep’s hide, punctured a hole in a bloated cow with a pocketknife to save its life, and watched my wife sew up animal wounds with darning needle and thread. I will be blistered for saying this, but I must stand by my experience. Animal pain and discomfort is not like what humans feel.

Free energy does not occur in nature

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It’s not just that what we generally think of as free energy doesn’t occur in nature, but also that free energy does occur in the everyday lived environments of people in industrial nations, which we might thus say are unnatural. So what are instances of free energy that we experience in our lives, and why do they matter?

Urban agriculture isn’t new

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In fact, it’s been around since 3,500 BC when Mesopotamian farmers began setting aside plots in their growing cities. In a review of urban agriculture throughout modern history at a symposium at Dumbarton Oaks in Washington, D.C., a diverse set of academics and designers ranging from historians to landscape architects discussed how the practice has evolved over the ages, often been highly ideological, and continues to be loaded with meaning. Organized by professor Dorothee Imbert, ASLA, chair of the master’s of landscape architecture program at Washington University in St. Louis, the conference looked at why urban agriculture is such a hot topic among the public and designers now but also hoped to put the current interest in a broader context. As Imbert said, “the inter-relationship between food and the city has a long history.”

Food’s critical path: review of “A Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country” by Peter Bane

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Peter Bane’s big idea here is not entirely original — Toby Hemenway, David Holmgren, and even the UN Rappoteur on Human Rights have written about it — but it is timely and Bane describes it with greater depth and practical guidance. The big idea is that creation of 21st century garden farms at all scales and in all locations — horticulture not agriculture — provides a serious, necessary challenge to 20th century factory farms.

Peak Moment 211: The straight poop on sustainable farming

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Innovative farmer Joel Salatin says sustainable agriculture requires both perennials (like native grasses) and herbivores (like cattle) to build soil. Mimicking patterns from nature, this maverick Virginia farmer rotates cattle followed by chickens into short-term pasture enclosures, where their poop fertilizes the earth. His new book Folks, This Ain’t Normal is a critique of the industrial food system, and envisions a future where humans are participants in a regenerative, sustaining community of abundance

Fermentation: to infinity and beyond!

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Fermented foods are a huge part of food preservation, a bigger part that most of us know. I think sometimes we underestimate fermenting as a means of keeping things alive because it doesn’t hold foods entirely in seeming stasis as canning or freezing do (yes, canned and frozen foods degrade too), which is what many of us really want. But what fermented foods do really well is work with the seasons to keep food cyclically – they are the ultimate preservers gift for people who want to be regularly engaged with their dinner.

Sandor Katz’s new book The Art of Fermenation is astonishingly comprehensive and fascinating. Besides the incredible history, recipes, cool pics of the microorganisms you are playing with, ideas for experimentation and socio-culture of food, there is Katz’s basic manifesto – we are not better off, safer, healthier or happier when we hand off the tools of food production and preservation to others.