Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
– The unusual uses of urine
– NYT on Peak Coffee: Heat Damages Colombia Coffee, Raising Prices
– Decline of Honey Bees Now a Global Phenomenon, says UN
– US farmers fear the return of the Dust Bowl
– The world food crisis” the squeeze on purchasing power
For millions of rural women and their families in developing countries, rights to agricultural land and forest resources are critical determinants of their well-being and their security against destitution. Not only can such property rights enhance individual welfare, they can also strengthen livelihoods for the most vulnerable and help conserve forests that are of global importance as carbon sinks and sources of biodiversity.
As all of you know who have spent the better part of your working life hitching and unhitching stuff, when you are alone you must bring the tractor to a dead stop at the exact right place, get off, and because you never are in the exact right place, pull the implement forward or the tractor backward the inch or so necessary with brute, hernia-causing strength. No tractor yet made, even on perfectly level ground, will stay put exactly where you stop it for hitching.
– UN: Eco-Farming Feeds the World
– Eco-Farming Could Double Food Output of Poor Countries, Says UN
– NYT’s Mark Bittman: Sustainable Farming Can Feed the World?
– Report submitted by the Special Rapporteur on the right to food
A local diet can reduce energy use somewhat, but there are even more effective ways to tackle the problem. Single-minded pursuit of local food, without consideration of the bigger picture, can actually make things worse from an energy perspective.
In an odd sort of way, Hurricane Katrina helped to make New Orleans an incredible laboratory not only for understanding the role and importance of a city’s food system but for recognizing the importance of food as an essential tool for community building.
Ok, you know about edible landscaping – you’ve replaced your burning bush with blueberries and your spireas with elderberries. You’ve trained that grapevine over the arbor. Now you are eying that space on your front lawn where the perennial border is (or should be or used to be or is in your head). You want flowers. You need flowers because they make you happy. Maybe you have to grow flowers there if you grow much of anything but grass, because of neighbors or zoning laws. Can you grow an ornamental flower garden that is totally edible? Yes. Yes, you can!
It’s worth noting that the energy content of the human food supply is about a sixth of the energy content of the human fuel supply (about 86 mbd of liquid fuels, equivalent to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-130mbd of ethanol). This is the core problem with converting food to fuel – we are taking from a small pool to try to make up for deficiencies in a large pool, and we will have a much bigger effect on the level of the small pool than the bigger pool.
Organic will be the conventional agriculture of the future, not because of wishful thinking or because it is the right thing to do, or because of some universal truth revealed from on high.
Why then don’t complex agricultural societies, or the even more complex civilizations that they sometimes evolve into, rely on ecological complexity to solve problems? Because by their very nature they are committed to ecological simplicity. Their size, population density and social complexity are in most places the result of grain monocultures.
– In New Food Culture, a Young Generation of Farmers Emerges
– Peak Phosphorus: Is there enough for biofuels at scale?
– The Future is Organic (but it’s more than organic) – report from plant scientist
– (GMO) Alfalfa and Our Future
This essay documents our five years as a “neorural” family, cultivating corn, beans and squash with organic methods on a small scale. This essay will perhaps inspire those who don´t have access to land, but nonetheless want to make themselves more self-supporting in the production of their food. Written primarily for the Latin-American context, this article honours the “cultural memory of a sustainable pre-industrial lifestyels, still present in the older generations. [Outline of the article in Spanish, photos, links to original and PDF]
Este ensayo documenta la historia de un proceso personal y familiar. Cuenta de nuestro acercamiento, como familia “neo-rural”, al cultivo de maíz, frijol, calabaza, con métodos orgánicos, en campos de cultivo a pequeña escala. Compartimos las experiencias que hicimos durante estos cinco años, estableciendo vínculos de trabajo y colaboración, con una familia campesina en la bioregión donde vivimos. Quizás este relato pueda servir de inspiración para quienes no tienen acceso a una tierra, pero si tienen la inquietud de aprender y hacerse más responsables de la producción de sus alimentos.
