Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Making the step from raw farm products to cans in a consumer’s pantry is not trivial. It takes more than access to equipment, it also takes business and marketing sense, relationships with area stores and restaurateurs and compliance with state regulations, to name a few.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Mark Shepard ‘s family permaculture farm in Viola, Wisconsin. Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees over the last 15 years on his 106 acre farm. Forest Agriculture Enterprises is known for its hazel nut, chestnut, butternut, nut pine and apple produce, scion-wood and value added products. Mark has a lot of wisdom on not only farm operation but also community and staff and intern economics.
-A Socially Conscious Way to Invest in Farmland: An Interview with Dr. Jason Bradford about Farmland LP
-Mushroom Abundance
-Growing Food Starts and Ends with The People
– “The Ultimate Roller Coaster Ride: A Brief History of Fossil Fuels” (Post Carbon Institute)
– “The Story of Electronics” (Annie Leonard)
– “Permaculture: The Growing Edge” (Starhawk and Donna Read)
– “The Economics of Happiness” (Helena Norberg-Hodge)
– “Collapsus” – what energy collapse might look like (interactive video)
In the same way the local food movement shifts its focus from out-of-season, long supply chain, high embodied energy foods towards more locally sourced, low impact foods rooted in the local region or ‘foodshed’, an emerging branch of architecture and construction examine similar transitions with building materials.
“An awful lot of what we’ve taken for granted about the future can’t continue,” says executive editor Sarah van Gelder of YES! Magazine, whose Fall 2010 issue is about people creatively building resilient families and communities. Publisher Fran Korten describes local food as an important avenue into a much larger vision of what we can become. Fran and Sarah discuss sources of real happiness that don’t destroy the planet, an upcoming issue of YES! Magazine on families, their weekly “YES! This Week” e-newsletter, and the YES! emphasis on helping people see possibilities and take action on positive initiatives.
– Bacteria Can Build Better Roads for Our Peak Oil Years
– The food storage secret our grandparents knew
– New $1.1 million program to create urban farms in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood
– First Canadian peak oil task force
– Transition Voice Covers Peak Oil, Zombies and Economic Crisis
The abandoned farmsteads shown here are not far from where I live. Such sad scenes are easy enough to find. They have been a part of the landscape of my life, grave markers of the agrarian culture that I love.
It’s been a long time coming, but the uber-significant Peak Oil issue has finally started to infiltrate the corridors of power. What they’ll do with this information remains to be seen…
America’s health care system is more expensive by 40–60 percent than health care systems in any other industrialized country (it makes up nearly half the health care budget of the entire world), but the results it produces are arguably the worst of the group.
Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon.
What accounts for the success of a few large-scale change movements (ending slavery, improving the status of women, reducing tobacco addiction and drunk driving) and the failure of almost all others?
