Food and farming reads of 2021
We share some of the most interesting reads from the past year, on everything from toxic weedkillers to bringing back beavers.
Food & Water
Collective Farming, Community and Connection
In France, collective farms are quite common (known as a Groupement Agricole d’Exploitation en Commun, or GAEC). Social issues on the farm are central to farming in a collective set-up. But these farmers are also keen to look beyond the farm to build community and connection.
Lugh’s Blessing
We have a need of skills. We are too much enamored of the tools we’ve made. We believe these tools have freed us from hard labor, hand labor, back labor; but it seems to me that we are working harder than ever.
How can Australian agriculture and land management adapt to climate change in a way that promotes Indigenous leadership and sustainable development?
Through adopting a proactive, climate-oriented and environmental justice focus in its agriculture, land management and water management policies, Australia has the potential to manage the significant pressures of climate change.
Power to the Elites? Multistakeholderism and the UN Food Systems Summit
In theory, encouraging dialogue between various parties is a good thing. In practice, multistakeholder processes often fail to recognise that not all stakes are the same.
Commons and households in a small farm future
To what extent does the peasant way inherently impose certain kinds of social structure, to what extent can we now exercise different choices over those structures, and how might peasant societies of the future differ from or resemble ones of the past?
Bristol Bites Back | Fruits & Roots of Radical Resilience in South-West England
We can learn from the communities in and around Bristol who are defying top-down challenges by coming together at local level. Radical approaches to resilience are more important than ever, and bearing fruits for the grassroots.
Cooler, Cleaner Megacities, One Rooftop Garden at a Time
Gardening on a rooftop is more than just a clever use of limited space, though. Rooftop gardens have substantial positive effects on air pollution and city temperatures.
Greed and Its Offsets
In the face of these pressures there remains a dogged belief amongst many in the farming community that the purpose of agriculture is to produce food. A growing number of consumers are keen to buy high quality local food, produced through sound husbandry (as agroecology used to be called).
Creating an enabling policy environment for farmers
The application of True Cost Accounting can be used to re-establish farming systems that operate within planetary boundaries and produce food in harmony with nature across the globe.
The Collective, The Individual and the Big Man: A Note on Small Farms, Racism and the Media
I wannabe a voice as best I can for those tried and tested strategies of innumerable small-scale and peasant farmers down the ages who for the most part never left a script, never had a book to sell, a big idea or a guru to promote, but who I believe have nevertheless still left much from which people today can learn.
Eric Kampe: Green Things Farm Collective
Eric Kampe shares experiences and perspectives on launching a small farm enterprise with a focus on both personal values and farm economics.
