Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The World Banks long-awaited report on land grabs is out. I’ve not had time to study it — I only found out an hour ago — but here are some first impressions.
Most people who think of animals at all in the context of producing food at home think of livestock and not much else. To make an garden yield in the absence of abundant fossil fuels, though, many wild creatures need to be recruited to fill roles in the garden ecosystem. The Archdruid explains…
I am not a foodie, but I am very good at eating. Put a hamburger and plate of fries in front of me and I am an eating machine. I eat mostly for the satisfaction of not having to eat again for another four hours. This, as one of my writing teachers suggested, is how a dog views food, bypassing all the delights of the human senses for the sake of a satisfied stomach.
-How to Stem a Global Food Crisis? Store More Water
-Six Steps For Avoiding a Global Water Crisis
-Life and Death on the Colorado River
-Pakistan Flooding Because of Farms?
-Toxic dispersants in Gulf oil spill creating hidden marine crisis
-Gulf Doctors Advised to Learn to Treat Oil-Related Illnesses
-Oxygen drops near BP spill but no “dead zone”-US
-I was wrong about veganism. Let them eat meat – but farm it properly
-A benign extravagance
-The water footprint: the hidden cost of our meat consumption
In April 2010, more than 120 farmers’ groups and non-governmental organizations all across the world signed a statement declaring their opposition to the guiding principles endorsed by the World Bank, the FAO, IFAD and UNCTAD on “responsible” land investments.
This year’s favorite hideout is a pile of hay I put in the machine shed “temporarily” when rain was threatening and I didn’t have time to add it to the outside stack. The photo shows one of these hay pile nests (yes, those are old crosscut saws hanging on the wall behind the nest along with my broadcast seeder, called by some modern garden farmers a “hand-cranked thingie”).
An exclusive behind-the-scenes investigative report taking an in-depth look into alleged local food fraud. In May 2010, Deconstructing Dinner received a tip from a farmer in the West Kootenay region of British Columbia who alleged that a local business who sells eggs to 18 retailers and restaurants and who was marketing their product as being predominantly from their own farm, was not true. According to the tip, the “farm” was not a farm at all, and housed no chickens on the property!
Permaculture is one of the only ways home for humanity. If one believes in modernism, industrial agriculture and better living through chemistry read no further. However, if you feel something is not right about the way we live, read on.
To see how climate change will play out in the twenty-first century, look to the deaths and burning tyres in Mozambique’s ‘food riots’ to see what happens when extreme natural phenomena interact with our unjust social and economic systems.
When a friend lent me his copy of Masanobu Fukuoka’s The One-Straw Revolution (republished last year by the New York Review of Books), I was struck by one sentence in particular. Somewhere in the middle of this charming, eccentric book, one of the founding texts of natural, non-interventionist farming, Fukuoka asserts that “the one-acre farmer of long ago spent January, February and March hunting rabbits in the hills”. Later on, he says that while cleaning his village shrine he found dozens of haikus, composed by local people, on hanging plaques; but “there is no time in modern agriculture for a farmer to write a poem or compose a song”.
