Good ol’ food and farming – Nov 11
-A Socially Conscious Way to Invest in Farmland: An Interview with Dr. Jason Bradford about Farmland LP
-Mushroom Abundance
-Growing Food Starts and Ends with The People
Food & Water
The vision thing – Nov 10
– Bacteria Can Build Better Roads for Our Peak Oil Years
– The food storage secret our grandparents knew
– New $1.1 million program to create urban farms in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood
– First Canadian peak oil task force
– Transition Voice Covers Peak Oil, Zombies and Economic Crisis
Abandoned
The abandoned farmsteads shown here are not far from where I live. Such sad scenes are easy enough to find. They have been a part of the landscape of my life, grave markers of the agrarian culture that I love.
Is the local food movement elitist?
Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon.
Peak Moment 184: YES! Ready for anything
“An awful lot of what we’ve taken for granted about the future can’t continue,” says executive editor Sarah van Gelder of YES! Magazine, whose Fall 2010 issue is about people creatively building resilient families and communities. Publisher Fran Korten describes local food as an important avenue into a much larger vision of what we can become. Fran and Sarah discuss sources of real happiness that don’t destroy the planet, an upcoming issue of YES! Magazine on families, their weekly “YES! This Week” e-newsletter, and the YES! emphasis on helping people see possibilities and take action on positive initiatives.
Agroinnovations #110: Mixed, low-input smallholder systems
On this episode of the podcast we are joined by Dr. Blair Orr. Dr. Orr is the director of the Master’s International Program at Michigan Technological University, and has worked for several decades in the areas of agroforestry, forest economics, and small holder tropical systems. We discuss the MI Program at MTU, changes and patterns in Third World agriculture, land tenure, low input mixed systems, increasing connectivity and migration in developing countries, the future of Haiti, and strategies for promoting development in tropical agriculture.
Round the world in four seasons
The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover.
Food & agriculture – Nov 7
– 6 casualties of the world food crisis (cabbage in Korea, garlic in China, corn in the US…)
– Shutdown of two small cheesemakers raises doubts about food-safety legislation
– Global food crisis forecast as prices reach record highs
– Podcast on food security
– Interview with Vandana Shiva
– Food Security for Europe (online publication)
A world made by hand needn’t wait
People who have caught on to the magnitude of the changes humanity faces in coming years typically describe their process of reaction as “preparation.” That is an adequate word, but incomplete, because it implies only a future focus. Preparation always looks forward, even when it takes appropriate action in the present. The danger in that is it can lead to a life that is forever deferred, waiting for a signal from some external source that it’s time to actually have what you have prepared yourself for.
My kids eat snails
It is not so important to me that my kids can explain the significance of a locavore diet at their age. But I do want them to know what food is supposed to taste like when it is a product of a healthy ecosystem. I want them to experience what their bodies feel like when they are nourished in a way that is in harmony with the Earth.
Reflections on our daily bread, and bees, and chicken poo….
-Brenda Palms Barber, The Promised Land (audio interview)
-Fowl energy: Chicken poo lights Gloucestershire town
-Bio-Agriculture – a Solution to Climate Change
Ingredients of Transition: Ensuring land access
Promoting the idea of local food production and the rollout of urban agriculture, whether in the form of market gardens, allotments or back gardening, will clearly struggle if no land is made available to make it possible. Many settlements, even if they are built to a high density, will have both land within them that could be used, and also land around them. Ensuring secure access to this land will be vital.
