What next for Industrial Ag? More toxic chemicals?
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.
Food & Water
Urban farms don’t make money – so what?
Over on Earth Island Journal, Sena Christian has an excellent, rigorously reported article about the tough economics of urban farming. She focuses on some of the more famous city farms of the Bay Area, where EIJ is based — City Slicker Farms, People’s Grocery — but she also discusses projects like Milwaukee’s Growing Power. And she finishes the piece with a farm I’d never heard of before: Greensgrow, in Philadelphia.
Water: Will There Be Enough?
For at least three decades, Americans have had some inkling that we face an uncertain energy future, but we’ve ignored a much more worrisome crisis—water.
Edible Landscaping: One Transition Step from Peak Oil
We are told that in the US, the food on our table has traveled an average of 1500 miles and consumed 9 calories of energy for each food calorie on our plate. In a time when “oil prices are likely to be both higher and more volatile and where oil prices have the potential to destabilize economic, political and social activity”[1], we need a way to mitigate the near certain risks of much higher impending food costs.
Peak Moment #172: The pee and poo show
Laura Allen gives an intimate tour of a home-built composting toilet in her Bay Area urban home. The nitrogen-rich composted “humanure” is used to fertilize the lush edible-food garden, and doesn’t waste precious drinking water like flush toilets. The co-founder of Greywater Action shows the throne-like toilet compartment whose distinctive feature is a urine diverter. Pee and poop are collected in separate containers beneath the toilet, and are accessed outside the house. Sterile pee is watered in at the base of plants, while poop is collected in barrels and aged for a year or more until it has composted fully. What a way to go!
Real Farmers Have To Be Real Smart
Even though I spend a lot of time growing stuff and raising animals, I am an unreal farmer. A real farmer spends about half the year farming and the other half up at the FSA office trying to figure out how to cultivate the government.
Resilient Gardening – Part II
Growing your own food can be a way to increase the security and health of your family in a world facing the multiple challenges of peak energy and resources, unpredictable and more severe climate, and financial uncertainty. At the same time, gardening may become more difficult due to the strange and shifting weather and uncertain consequences of peak oil. You can increase the resiliency of your garden in order to help deal with rapid changes in the economy, environment, and energy landscape.
Thoughts on Pollan’s food-movement essay
Pollan posits the existence of a social movement geared to transforming the food system. He emphasizes that it’s loose, internally conflicted, and nascent — but all the same, “one of the most interesting social movements to emerge in the last few years.” People have been talking about the “food movement” for a while, but I don’t think anyone has articulated its existence so clearly and in such an important publication.
Deep thought – June 2
-The Food Movement, Rising
-Economics and the nature of political crisis
-Being Realistic
-Educating for Democracy: What Motivates Children to Learn?
-Converging Crises: Reality, Fear and Hope
Government investigates resource shortages
The British government is making a review of current, ongoing global shortages of vital raw materials. This will go beyond the notion of peak oil to look at the supply of a series of key natural resources, following rises in commodity prices, food riots and accusations that various countries – particularly China and Japan – are beginning to stockpile important minerals in an attempt to protect their businesses from global competition.
Resilient gardening – Part I
Hail. Gale-force winds. Torrential rains. Blistering sun. Droughts. Late freezes. Flooding. Squash bugs, deer, squirrels, raccoons, tomato hornworms, spider mites. In any year, gardening can be a sheer exercise in will. With increasingly unpredictable weather, and zones that are already shifting North, it becomes almost an exercise in prayer.
Deconstructing Dinner: Whole Foods Market targeted by organic advocates/local food system development spotlight/carnivore chic
The U.S.-based Organic Consumers Association is the largest of its kind in the United States – representing thousands of supporters of organic food. Over the past year, the organization has taken a strong stance against grocery giant Whole Foods Markets, calling upon them to “walk their talk” and increase their support for organic products…In November 2008, farmer, entrepreneur and member of the NFU Kim Perry shared the successes to date and the actions taken within the region to generate support for a resilient local food system…A revisiting of our July 2008 interview with Toronto author Susan Bourette of “Carnivore Chic – From Pasture to Plate, The Search for the Perfect Meat”.
