Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
This episode we welcome Ragan Sutterfeld of Felder School Farm, a school farm located in Little Rock Arkansas that is pioneering the way to get agriculture into our country’s schools. Topics of discussion include barriers to adoption, the agricultural calendar vs. the educational calendar, and agriculture in education. This idea can be summarized in five words: Turn the Schools into Farms. Now, let’s go out there and make it a reality.
-Pick-your-own vegetables to replace flowers in high street
-Permaculture Design is for Disaster Relief, Not Just for Gardens
-Sharon, the bounty!: A review of Astyk’s “Independence Days”
-Oilrigs should be used for homes in areas at risk of flooding, report says
-Growing Home—Urban Agriculture in Chicago
-Towns Rush to Make Low-Carbon Transition
Faith Carr, after working hunched over a desk for 35 years, ended up disabled. Exhausted after even more years of progressive political activism with no success, she turned her hand to her own backyard. The 25 square-foot herb garden turned into a homestead. Come the revolution, she’ll bring the eats.
-UK Cross-Government Food Research and Innovation Strategy
-Return to slop bucket as homes face ban on sending food waste to landfill
-It’s time to get back to the land
-Voodoo wasps that could save the world
-Groups ask U.S. to regulate shipping of commercial bumblebees
-The cricket that pollinates plants
-Bee decline linked to falling biodiversity
-The Vexing Bugs in the Global Trading System
Tractors have gone robotic too. This is good news for us wordsmiths, strange as that may seem. I happened to look inside the cab of one of the tractors that can drive itself across the field without benefit of clergy or anyone else. The cab resembled the console and cockpit of a 747 jet.. Right there beside the air conditioner was a stack of magazines, not all of them necessarily the kind you leave out on your living room coffee table. The farmer grinned sheepishly. “Gotta have some way to stay awake,” he explained.
-Emissions from UK food industry far higher than believed
-Poachers Arrive at Egg Farms
-Striking a bargain: With supply limited, state targets water demand
-Will Anyone Stand Up For American Industry?
-The Key to Local Food Systems’ Survival: Strong Community Support
‘Eco’ packaging
-Google defies Chinese censors after cyberattacks on Gmail accounts of activists
-Public Produce: Filling the Sidewalks with Fruit Trees
-As the World Burns
-Movie Review Friday: The Road
-A New Eden, Both Cosmic and Cinematic
-Photo Gallery: Homes for a Changing Climate
I get a lot of emails from people who want to get out of the city. Sometimes the reasons are really good ones – they don’t like cities or the ones they live in, but were drawn there by the promise of salaries and jobs, but now see other options opening up in rural areas or small towns. Maybe they always dreamed of land and space to be self-sufficient, or maybe it was a new dream – but now they want to explore it.
…Now I know that cultural assumptions, even well-established ones, can be overturned, which is why I am excited about State of the World 2010. It calls for one of the greatest cultural shifts imaginable: from cultures of consumerism to cultures of sustainability…It advocates rethinking the foundations of modern consumerism—the practices and values regarded as “natural,” which paradoxically undermine nature and jeopardize human prosperity.
-2020 vision: Second-hand Prius, anyone? Car use declines across Europe as society returns to medieval values
-America’s New Year’s resolution: Break our addiction to oil
-Retired, no, refired, yes: on call for collapse
-Portland ratchets up volunteer-led ‘tool libraries’ that lend tools for free
-Nine meals from anarchy
-Boiler scrappage scheme offers £400-off vouchers
Our food system faces many crises, among which is the steady increase in the average age of the North American farmer…Canada’s National Farmers Union (NFU) has maintained a strong youth focus throughout its history and at their 2009 annual convention held in Ottawa this past November, the Union’s Campaign for New Farmers was launched. This episode also includes an interview with Paul Nicholson about the global food crisis.
