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Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In former times slaughterhouses, bakeries, breweries and dairies were small, numerous and more or less evenly distributed across the country. Today they are big and located in only a few places. They are hubs with many long transports going to and from them. This is a consequence of the relationship between the cost of energy versus the cost of labor.
KrisCan visits Eric Toensmeier in his Holyoke, Massachusetts home garden that was transformed from a bleakly barren backyard into a thriving oasis of year-round, productive perennial fruits and vegetables.
This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food – what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
Leaves are one of nature’s most miraculous creations. They tie it all together. They rise from the ground, reach to the sky, and bring life to the Earth. Leaves do many good things—manufacture food for trees and other plants, use the sun’s energy to transform carbon dioxide into carbohydrates, and decompose water (H2O) into oxygen and hydrogen.
Relax, fellow farmers and gardeners. From now on everything is going to come up roses and sunshine. A magical and mysterious soil has been discovered deep in the Amazon (roll of drums, please) that will double and triple your yields and grow tomatoes as big as basketballs.
Attitudes toward food change constantly, and perfectly edible food that is shunned in one era might be highly prized in another.
Energy Bulletin ran this excellent piece from the New York Times on a crisis facing Mongolian Goat Herders who are attempting to deal with unstable world markets, climate change and overgrazing. I was fascinated by the clear way that the author of the piece lays out the vicious circle that they’ve entered into, and I was struck by how useful an example it is of the kind of ecological vicious circle that we face all the time…
Oatmeal is a healthful food and now there’s an easier way to grow and process your own. The problem has always been the hulls which grip the groats so tightly that getting them off is difficult.
Humans must create paradise or they cannot live on the planet Earth. Paradise here is described as a human community that lives in perpetuity and in peace on one place on the earth, over many generations.
This is a preliminary attempt to explore the relationship between the current predicament facing humanity arising out of an exploding population facing planetary resource limitations, in other words known as overshoot, and the psychology of work inherent in the human species.
A Field Study of Personal Rapid Transit (PRT) in Shanghai
-The Dirt on Climate Change
-HomeGrown
-Open University Transition Films Now Embedded Here Too…
-Seed behemoth Monsanto stumbles into antitrust trouble
-Weather no obstacle for Pittsburg garden
-How a Hoop House Can Extend the Growing Season
-Copenhagen: peasant farmers can save the planet
-Getting at the roots of unsustainable U.S. ag policy
-Copenhagen could lead to increase in intensive farming
-Meet the Milk
-Where Industry Once Hummed, Urban Garden Finds Success
