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Food hunters of the urban jungle
Adharanand Finn, Guardian
Adharanand Finn learns how to live off the land as he joins foraging experts in search of free and wild food in the city
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Foraging for food in the countryside is undoubtedly scenic – pretty woodland trails, rambling hedgerows and open fields. But as more and more of Britain’s farms and fields are given over to monocultures, it’s the urban landscape which is yielding more wild, free and organic food – if you know where to look.
The gardens and allotments of the UK’s cities are support a huge variety of edible plants. Many of these scatter their seeds to the wind so that, for those in the know, beyond the garden or allotment boundaries lie untapped bounties.
Twin brothers Andy and Dave Hamilton have been foraging – in both towns and the countryside – for years, and are now sharing their knowledge in a day-long urban foraging workshop in Bristol.
Along our walk, which takes most of a sunny Saturday in October, we find chives growing among the grass in a playing field beside an allotment. Along a back lane, a raspberry bush escapes from under a garden fence, offering its delicious fruit to eagle-eyed passers by.
Having a keen eye is key to foraging. Even in seemingly hopeless, overgrown verges beside alleyways there are goodies to be found.
(28 October 2008)
Biochar’s Fractal Dimension
Albert Bates, The Great Change
In early September I traveled to Newcastle, England, to attend the second annual meeting of the International Biochar Initiative.
The conference drew together high ranking officials from the United Nations, international NGOs, appropriate technology experts from the developing world, commercial pyrolysis companies, foresters, agronomists, soil scientists, and others from 31 countries. We learned that you can actually make coal, carry it to Newcastle, and bury it in the ground, reversing the cycle begun by carbon-based capitalism 500 years ago.
… Biochar production systems demonstrated at the conference turned up to half the carbon in biomass or waste product feedstocks into bio-energy — producer gas or wood vinegar — with the remainder captured as a dense, fine-grain, porous char.
This differs from other forms of biofuels in that the carbon is not returned to the atmosphere, either as carbon dioxide from burning, or as methane from decomposition. It is transformed into an inactive form that remains in the soil for thousands of years.
Mixed with compost and/or artificial fertilizer and applied as a soil amendment, biochar improves the tilth, water retention capacity, fertility, and carbon sequestration of degraded soils. Agricultural gains of 880% have been reported, according to Johannes Lehmann, soil scientist at Cornell and chair of IBI.
Scientific understanding of biochar began with the discovery of Terra Preta (“dark earth”) soils in Brazil in 1867.
… I’ll be blogging more about this in coming months, in part because we have been experimenting with biochar at the Institute for Appropriate Technology and are starting to get some interesting results, in part because skepticism is still warranted and biochar alone is not a solution for the existential threats we face, and also in part because we are engaged in a large-scale bamboo-to-biochar initiative that, if successful, will create the first permaculturally-designed biochar-based town — 4500 completely carbon neutral homes near Chattanooga.
… What spurred me to pen my thoughts at this point was something Vandana Shiva said at a conference in Italy this past week. Real reform, she insisted, will happen when discussions move from the stratosphere to the soil, and when we find new, non-industrial ways of thinking.
The advantage that biochar offers is something similar to the advantage that fractal geometry conferred upon cell phone users a decade or more ago. The three dimensions of Euclidean space describe how most of us have been looking at the physical world for the past 2300 years. Einstein gave us a forth dimension, time, but it really only reinforced our “normal” way of relating to reality. It was still industrial thinking.
[description of fractals] … What all this has to do with biochar is in how the Terra preta soils actually work their magic. One gram of biochar has a surface area of 1000 square meters. The way it accomplishes this is through micropores, the crystalline-like surfaces formed, randomly and chaotically, during pyrolysis. Terra preta’s carbon sequestration process uses a fractal dimension.
In the soil, biochar’s cavities fill up with nutrient foodstocks for microbes, much like a kitchen pantry. The microbes move in, and pretty soon hyphae of fungi appear. The hyphae are a fast road for nutrients and moisture – a trade exchange route to plant and tree roots.
(29 October 2008)
Forget flowers, say I love you with vegetables
Deborah Bogle, Adelaide Now
IN TOUGH economic times, people turn to their gardens.
And instead of flowers and shrubs, the new trend is for vegetables and herbs.
South Australia’s largest wholesale seedling nursery has experienced a turnaround in its business over the past two to three years.
Geoff Prettejohn, of Living Colour Nurseries, said the business used to once “sell 70 to 80 per cent flowers. Now we’d be moving around 70 per cent vegies and herbs”.
There were a number of factors to explain the trend, he said, including high fruit and vegetable prices and the increasing cost of fuel.
Nursery and Garden Industry SA development officer Grant Dalwood said in the current economic climate people saw their gardens as a refuge, and buying a plant as an inexpensive treat. “When money is tight, people generally go back to the simple things, to buying a plant that might be worth $7 to $10 and spoiling themselves with that instead of buying a lounge suite or a washing machine,” he said.
(31 October 2008)
The Food Crisis and Gender
Katherine Coon, Foreign Policy in Focus
Statistics on the most recent global food crisis are well known. In the three years leading up to June 2008, food prices rose 83%. Although declining since, they are still 60% higher than in 2006. There is little prospect of returning to the cheap food regimes that characterized the world prior to 2005 anytime in the foreseeable future. So far, the food crisis has pushed an estimated 75 million people into chronic hunger since 2005.
Women and children, particularly girls, have been hardest hit by the food crisis. In part, this disproportionate impact is because women in poor rural communities have less access to resources, transportation, and communication networks. Any effective resolution to the food crisis — and to reinforce food security more generally — must incorporate an understanding of this differential impact on gender roles.
Rural Poverty
Most chronic hunger in the world is a failure of entitlement rather than supply. People within nations, and often nations as a whole, are unable to secure the income needed to produce or purchase enough food to meet their basic needs. Today, almost a billion people live on less than $1 a day and suffer from food insecurity.
… While rising food prices affect urban and rural poor alike, the impact on the rural poor is particularly devastating because of their geographic, economic, and political isolation. The productivity of small-holder farms is low in most of the world. This is due to the spread of trickle-down “market fundamentalism,” the political marginalization of whole regions within nations, and the widespread failure to understand the importance of small-holder farming systems to poverty reduction.
… Compared to men, women’s independent property rights, legal protections, and social networks are fragile and contested in much of the world. Women have less access to or control over resources, transportation, or communication networks than men. As a consequence, female-headed households are sometimes disproportionately among the poorest of the poor in rural areas. And because rural poverty, civil conflict, and HIV are exacting their toll in the form of migration, suicide, debilitating illness, and mortality among prime-age adults, households legally or de facto managed by women now comprise 30-60% of all rural households in parts of eastern and southern Africa.
… To the extent that day-to-day survival of female-headed households depends on selling labor to purchase food, fuel, and fertilizer, price spikes in these commodities can mean total destitution and starvation.
In married-couple households, women typically provide labor on husband’s farms — usually for market-oriented crops — while also providing childcare and running the household. In most places, the latter includes provision of water, fuel, and meals for the family, so women are ultimately responsible for family food security. In most traditional systems, men are normatively responsible for giving wives staple carbohydrates and income as their contribution to household food security and consumption. But long-term erosion of assets, productivity, and income among small-holders has led to crises in traditional norms and male gender identities, as increasing numbers of men are either unable or unwilling to provide enough food or income to tide their families over from one harvest to the next. When crops do come in, men frequently have to sell them to pay off debts and secure loans needed to plant the next season’s crops — leaving little in the way of either food or cash for family consumption.
… When women (and men) are empowered with modern training and technology needed to transform homesteads into sustainable, poly-culture farms, they improve their food security and resilience in the face of climate change and price fluctuations. Biologically based techniques for building soil fertility, minimizing pests, and harvesting rainwater help small-holders extend the growing season, improve yields, and increase profit margins by reducing dependence on purchased fertilizers and pesticides. Poly-culture farms provide multiple species of micro-nutrient rich plant and animal foods close to home, so households are not as dependent on volatile and hard-to-reach markets. When small-holders producing on intensive poly-culture farms form marketing groups to aggregate and sell their products, they are also able to make significant contributions to local, regional, and national markets — thereby improving resilience to climate change and price fluctuations in global food supplies of their countries as a whole.
Katharine Coon is a Foreign Policy In Focus contributor who received her Ph.D. in nutritional sociology from Tufts University. She works as a consultant, most recently in West and East Africa and Sri Lanka on gender, small-holder agriculture and HIV.
(31 October 2008)
