Food & Water

What it looks like when food grows everywhere

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Today I’d like to share a map with you…It is a map of the town of Guildford (or Guldeford as it was then) in 1793. Regular readers will know I love a good map, and I have spent a fair while poring over this one. There are a couple of things I love about it. Firstly, it is the most amazing piece of draughtsmanship. It is a thing of extraordinary beauty in a way that Googlemaps can only dream of. The way its laid out, the calligraphy, the attention to detail, are beautiful in a way very few people could recreate today. But what is so extraordinary, upon closer inspection, is how it captures what it looks like when food grows everywhere. Think of it, if you like, as Incredible Edible Guildford, circa. 1739.

How resilient is the food system?

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Given industrial food’s dependence on petroleum, it’s easy to conclude that peak oil poses a serious threat to our food supply. And it’s likewise easy, given the importance of food in our lives, to conclude that making food peak-oil-resilient is one of the first things to worry about. So it’s a nice surprise to hear permaculturist extraordinaire Toby Hemenway argue that food is in fact the last thing to worry about.

“Peasant Farming Can Cool Down the Earth”

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As Chavannes Jean-Baptiste points out in the interview that follows, climate justice and the proliferation of false solutions to the climate crisis, such as “Climate Smart agriculture,” carbon markets, and REDD, are a primary concern for La Via Campesina. La Via promotes food sovereignty, Chavannes says, not only to resolve the food crisis, but also the climate crisis.

Greener Pastures with Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin

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Joel Salatin doesn’t mind being called a communist. Though the self-described “Christian-conservative-libertarian-environmentalist-capitalist-lunatic farmer” has a penchant for stockpiling adjectives, Salatin actually defies labels left and right…He’s also a veritable celebrity–having been catapulted into the national spotlight thanks to Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma and dubbed the “High Priest of the Pasture” by the New York Times–but he betrays no bravado as he chats with me over the phone from his home in Swoope, Virginia.

If you want more local food, stop criminalizing family farmers

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This government crackdown on family farmers is absurd given the current sordid state of our food/farm system and the urgent need to relocalize agriculture for the sake of our health, as well as that of the planet. Study after study has shown that the most dangerous food is usually that which has endured the most processing and traveled the furthest.

Hail, The Mighty Pocketknife

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Time was, a farmer would feel naked without a pocketknife in his bibs. Even today, it is the handiest tool of all. There is always a bale twine to cut, a splinter in the skin to remove, a fingernail to trim, a scion to be grafted, a hoof to be cleaned, a pig testicle to be removed, a marshmallow stick to be sharpened, spark plugs to be scraped clean of carbon, an apple to peel, a hide to skin, a seed potato to cut, a lid to pry open, a beer bottle cap to pop off, string holding a sack closed to sever, a hole to be poked in fabric or rubber. It would be fun to hold a contest to see who can come up with the most uses for a pocketknife on the farm.

Occupy sustainability: the 1% is blocking the transition to a renewable energy economy

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A sustainable world that works for the 99% is possible, if we can respond to climate change, economic injustice and resource depletion at the same time. The transition to a renewable energy economy can be a valuable frame for that discussion. Just as the financial elites brought about the economic crisis, they are blocking the renewable energy transition to reap more profit from their fossil fuel investments. Because of fuel depletion as well as climate change, further delay may prevent a successful transition. Social justice and sustainability advocates can blow the whistle on the 1% for this issue too, and collaborate to speed up the transition locally.

Winter in Maine

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MARCH 21, 2008. The calender says spring is here, twelve hours of sunlight, seed catalogues, almost empty woodshed. Outside, Mother Nature will have none of it…

FAST FORWARD TO DECEMBER 22, 2011. We’ve just had our warmest November on record. The woods and fields are brown and unfrozen….

The perennial search for perennial grains

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Why perennial grains? Primarily to eliminate the fuel, fertilizer and herbicide required for planting, cultivating and growing plants which must be seeded each year – also known as annual crops. And of course there are other reasons why staying out of the pasture would be a good thing – with topsoil loss being chief among them. Essentially all of our current grain crops – wheat, corn, oats, barely, rye, millet – require seedbed preparation, weed control and fertilization in order to become established and yield a crop – all within a few months. The hope is that perennial crops, while they might yield far less, would require a lower energy investment per pound of food produced.

So, what’s the status on this perennial grain effort?

It takes a village to raise a vegetable

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“Farmers need a shitload of support,” says Amy Lounder, an organic farmer who runs Avon River CSA (community-shared, or community-supported, agriculture) in Centre Burlington, N ova Scotia. “And not just financial support but support in a lot of different ways, like support in information, of learning how to problem solve.”