Food & Water

School lunchrooms put planet and kids at risk

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If an alien species were to visit our school cafeterias at lunchtime, it might conclude that we don’t value the health and well-being of the most vulnerable members of our society—our developing children. Not only are our youth daily served low-quality processed products, they are inculcated, at a young age, to the factory-farm model at the heart of our worst environmental problems, namely water pollution, soil erosion, global climate change and fossil fuel depletion.

Farmers Go Wild

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Practitioners of wild farming, also called conservation-based agriculture, seek to reverse industrial agriculture’s devastating effects on wildlife by adopting farming methods that support nature. They envision a landscape where farms meld into the environment and mimic the natural processes that surround them. If wild farming sounds like organic farming, that’s because both are based on a similar vision: that farms should be managed as natural systems. Most wild farmers employ organic practices, like nontoxic pest management, composting, and crop rotation, all of which encourage biodiversity.

Community supported agriculture

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Wellington’s CSA offers a new model as a multi-stakeholder cooperative: it is currently the only New Zealand cooperative that exists for the mutual benefit of both consumers and producers. For growers, it seeks to create a return to help grow the farm, provide better farming resources, expand its own coverage, improve distribution mechanisms and promote the health values of producing food in this manner. The consumers appreciate the availability of nutritious healthy food, produced without leeching and destroying the land as modern industrial farming does, as well as the social benefits of working together voluntarily at the tasks involved in running their cooperative.

Skill sharing as a way of life

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Engaging in the reskilling/skillsharing aspect of transition has revolutionised my whole attitude towards life. As I say, I didn’t really notice it at first. It’s been cumulative and all-pervasive. Paying attention to my own skills and those of fellows-in-transition, which are dismissed or ignored in the mainstream discourse: the ability to hold a meeting where everyone’s included; communicating the experience of downshifting; learning to cook and eat differently; making space so solutions can emerge in the face of energy and financial constraints, using a chainsaw, making a rocket stove at the Transition Camp!

Ending “Farmer’s Wife” Syndrome

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We have used language to write women out of agriculture – out of its history, out of its present, engaging in the “housewifization” of real agricultural work. The implication that the farmer’s wife is not a farmer, and is thus knowledgeable about only kitchens and babies (as important as those things are) is a diminuation, an act of linguistic violence that erases the multiple competences of farm women, partnered or not.

From mountain to sea: A vision for the rebuilding of Tohoku

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Why would a fisher care about the forest? The person to ask is Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, an oyster farmer from Kesennuma in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. We can learn a great deal from Hatakeyama. He is one of those rare types of people who can see beyond the day-to-day preoccupation of how to make a living — in his case, with an oyster farm — and instead embrace the world around them.

At last, the plowgirl has arrived

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The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement. Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it.

My prices are not too high: A farmer fires back

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Every week during the growing season, my husband and I cart our family’s grassfed meats to market. We sell pork chops for $11 a pound; ground beef goes for $7.50. Every week, we meet someone who tells us the prices are too high. In fact, at those prices, the average net income for our family members has maxed out at $10 per hour. But part of our job is to hold our chins up and accept weekly admonishment for our inability to produce food as cheaply as it can be found in the grocery store.