Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We’re putting together a national network, RENHASSA, to show what our alternatives are today. The whole peasant sector is coming together to tell everyone about the policies we want. Our mission is to advocate for Haiti to be sovereign with its food and to promote national production.
They are determined to believe, along with their university and USDA partners, that they are controlling erosion simply because they quit using moldboard plows and use no-till planters. The pretension reaches hilariously ludicrous proportions.
In the first post of this series, I mentioned my initial encounter with winemaking and wine drinking on an island in Lake Erie, after which I read anything and everything I could find about wine. One of the first books I read was Leon D. Adams’ The Wines of America, a book long since out of print. While reading it, I was very surprised to learn that Ohio was once the leading wine producing state!
The Chief Executive Officer of insurance giants Lloyds is warning that the world is facing a “period of deep uncertainty” over the decline of fossil fuels – and may soon be coping with $200-a-barrel oil.
In a world where energy supplies are much more constrained than most international agencies assume, it is almost certain that refrigerated shipping will be too costly and energy intensive for many people – thus, the industrialized and centralized meat industry that we’ve created is not likely to be a long term success.
The new way of procuring food, by direct connection with a local farmer, is called “Community Supported Agriculture,” CSA for short, a movement which sprouted in Europe and Japan in the 1960s, and took root in the U.S. in the early 90s. It’s also an old way of procuring food, that is, from neighbors who you know and trust.
The storyteller usually concludes by saying, with all due solemnity, that this is how farmers in the good old days learned to put little sleds under their watermelons so that fast moving vines would not ruin the fruit while dragging it over the ground.
Mahatma Gandhi is widely regarded as the father of the Indian nation, which he was. But the founding of the nation was not his only aim. He was, as he freely admitted, using India to demonstrate to the whole world how nonviolence could change history. The swell of mostly nonviolent revolutions that has followed in the last 30 or so years would seem to indicate that his bold scheme worked.
-Energy Use in the US & Global Agri-Food Systems: Implications for Sustainable Agriculture
-Advisers walk out in fury over £500,000 GM food PR exercise
-UN urges global move to meat and dairy-free diet
-Incredible Edible: Supporting Food Independence in Todmorden, England
-Fossil-Fuel Use and Feeding World Cause Greatest Environmental Impacts: UNEP Panel
-San Quintín and Brackish-Water Farming
-GM lobby helped draw up crucial report on Britain’s food supplies
When we were still in Seattle, preparing for this project, a few friends asked if this was a tour of ‘yuppie urban farm projects.’ Isn’t that who participates in the urban farm? they generalized.
As people throughout the Western world are increasingly seeking to reconnect with their food, there’s a lot to be learned from the many peoples who have long maintained these dynamic relationships between their sustenance and the earth. Ethnobiologists research these very relationships through a scientific lens and it’s a field of study bringing together many disciplines like anthropology,ecology and conservation to name just a few.
Agricultural producers are being hit with yet another rising input cost plus a lot of decision making uncertainty surrounding the emergence of superweeds immune to Roundup.
