Food & Water

Organics and Sustainability: Reflections on my New York Times Misquote

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This is what I tried to explain to the New York Times reporter as I prepared my squash. Organic agriculture and sustainable agriculture are based on similar principles. They both used to be fuzzy ideas, but that is no longer the case for organic agriculture, which became more cut-and-dried with the introduction of national organic standards. Apparently she heard me say that organic agriculture used to be sustainable, but isn’t always anymore.

Strategies for mobilizing our workforce towards urban agriculture with Michael Abelman

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How do we catalyze a movement of urban farmers throughout the country and throughout the developed world? Renowned speaker, activist, and urban farmer, Michael Abelman sits down with me to discuss the reasoning and strategy behind encouraging millions of people to become small plot farmers.

America’s health threat: Poor urban design

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In the 1990s, Richard J. Jackson had an epiphany while driving on the car-choked Buford Highway, on his way to his job at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta “I realized that the major threat was how we had built America,” he says. Dr. Jackson, who is now a professor and chair of environmental health sciences at the University of California at Los Angeles’s School of Public Health, has since become one of the leading voices calling for better urban design for the sake of good health.

Winter vitamins

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For thousands of years before refrigerators and packaged food, people across the world needed to make food last through the winter. Starches present no problem; dried, grains like wheat and rice can last decades. Vitamins, found in fresh plants and lasting only a short time in the body, present more of a challenge.

Luckily, there are several ways to get fresh vitamins all through the winter, first by fooling the vegetables, as it were, into thinking they’re not dead yet.

Food & agriculture – Jan 22

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– Salon on urban gardens: The future of food?
– Solutions Series Guides: chickens, greywater, rainwater harvesting …
– European banks fuelling food price volatility and hunger
– The Paradox of Cuban Agriculture
– Food as a Commodity

Rajasthan’s cutting-edge public policies to promote land commons

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If only the rest of the world could emulate the Government of Rajasthan in India in adopting public policies to promote the commons! As the Times of India reports “Rajasthan has become the first state in the country to have drafted a policy underlining the importance and the need to preserve and secure common land (commons) in rural areas.” There may be other such government policies around the world, but they are few and far between.  The Rajasthan policies are a real breakthrough.

As local as it gets: The Town of Ithaca Agricultural Protection Plan

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There was some good news on the local food security front this fall. One recent critical success was the election of antifracking candidates in several Tompkins County towns, which for the moment at least has challenged the claimed right of area landowners to extract short-term profits at the expense of the long-term health and agricultural productivity of local farmland. The other development was the November 2011 approval of the Town of Ithaca Agricultural and Farmland Protection Plan (AFPP) by the Ithaca Town Board and the preparation of similar plans for the Towns of Lansing and Ulysses.

Can a godless farmer be a good steward of the soil?

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I sort of envy Christians and Muslims because they believe in something so fantastically wonderful as an eternal life of utter bliss. I’ve tried to believe. Just can’t. Sorry. So anyway when I am asked to give a talk about farming at a private religious college or, horrors, in a church, I get nervous. If the inviters knew that I was a godless contrarian, would they really want me to speak?

Brewing better local economies with American craft beer

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And this change in American beer starts at home, or nearly so, as craft beer really is a “local beer” phenomenon. This shift in consumer preferences and support for local craft beer is perfectly representing in a nanobrewery start-up called Community Beer Works (CBW) in Buffalo, NY. The CBW founders are using Kickstarter, social media and other fund raising techniques to make their brewery “an integral part of our city and the neighborhood our brewery is located in. We are planning partnerships with local urban farmers and gardeners to create a network of hop gardens that can be used in specialty beers as well as to dispose of our grain in ecologically friendly, mutually beneficial manner. Our goal is to foster a sense of community and place, enriching our hometown through the production of damn good beer.”