Food & Water

China beefs up alternatives to industrial agriculture to improve food security

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China’s agricultural development in recent decades has contributed to the country’s increase in food security and reduction in poverty. However, the country continues to face persistent rural poverty in fragile agroecological regions, increasing socioeconomic inequality, feminization and aging of the agricultural workforce, environmental degradation, and erosion of biodiversity…Farmers, led by women, have organized new local organizations for technology development, seed management, and market linkages.

Yet another look at winter grazing

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Over the years I have become very intrigued with the idea of grazing livestock year-round in the north, even though I have found as many negative things to say about the idea as positive. My thinking has been that wild cud-chewers and horses make it through winter just fine unless they become over-populated, so why not cows and sheep?

A food system that needs citizen Occupation (and farmers!) – Feb 28

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-Before the Food Arrives on Your Plate, So Much Goes on Behind the Scenes
-Big Food Must Go: Why We Need to Radically Change the Way We Eat
-We are the 2 Percent: Occupy our Land, Occupy our Food
-“American Meat”: Not Just Another Food Documentary

Zurich: Adventures in urban relocalization

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As the guest last week of Zurich University of the Arts I set the following task to a group of sixteen masters students: “Create the plan for a social harvest festival that will reconnect Zurich with its natural ecosystems and grassroots social innovators.”

The idea was to demonstrate, in practice, and at a city-wide scale, how to combine the low-energy design principles of permaculture, with the metabolic energy of social innovation.

Cold comfort. Review: The Winter Harvest Handbook

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These days, looking to future resilience often means looking backward, to when families and communities did more things themselves. Prepping old school style is the key to peak oil not hitting quite so hard in your own life. That’s why vegetable gardening needs to become a four-season activity for resilience-minded preppers.

Triumph of the generalist: Reading the farming/homesteading encyclopedias

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These overview books on starting up a smallholding/homestead/small farm/urban sustainable oasis are often the first books any of us come to, precisely because we need that encyclopedic breadth so badly – eventually we may need to know more about growing melons or delivering a calf or butchering a rabbit or canning pickles – in fact, most of us end up with specialist books on all these things. But at first the best of these books give you a picture of the whole range of the work you are entering into – and that’s what a lot of us need.

How do you find a million more farmers?

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Let’s not be shy about the matter; the dominant picture of agriculture in this country is pretty grim. Set upon the foundations of unequal land distribution, the expansion of neo-liberal policies into agriculture since the 1950′s have accounted for a halving of agricultural employment, the systematic industrialisation of farming techniques, the consolidation of larger farms and the tightening of corporate control on food markets. We have been left with an economy in which new entrants to farming can expect to pay up to £10,000 an acre for land but receive less than 10% of the money spent on food by consumers.

Surviving the Collapse – Possible Strategies (Review of Fleeing Vesuvius, Part 4)

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Parts 3 and 4 of Fleeing Vesuvius, “New Ways of Using the Land” and “Dealing with Climate Change,” focus mainly on local and national strategies for reducing fossil fuel use (both to conserve fossil energy and reduce carbon emissions).

Soil: From Dirt to Lifeline

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Fred Kirschenmann has been involved in sustainable agriculture and food issues for most of his life. He currently serves as both a Distinguished Fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture at Iowa State University, and as President of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture in Pocantico Hills, New York. He is the author of a book of essays which track the development of his thought over the past 30 years; Cultivating an Ecological Conscience: Essays by a Farmer Philosopher, published by the University of Kentucky Press. In this TedX talk given at the Glynwood Institute for Sustainable Food and Farming, he tells us what good soil has to do with producing good food.