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Dig for Victory’ garden – rediscovering WW2 efforts in the UK
David Dubyne, North Devon News
Original: Dig for Victory’ garden for Barnstaple town centre
VOLUNTEERS will be asked to help turn a Barnstaple town centre garden into a Second World War-style “dig for victory” allotment plot, complete with 1940s tools, seeds — and bomb shelter.
Marines from Chivenor have been asked to help install an Anderson bomb shelter in the garden. Children from local schools will be urged to get involved in the project, called Their Past Your Future, which won a £10,000 government grant from the Museums, Libraries and Archive Council.
Julian Vayne, the Museum of Barnstaple and North Devon’s education officer, said the fenced-off area outside the museum will be cleared this winter and local people with memories of the Second World War will be invited to share their memories of the conflict.
Mr Vayne has bought a genuine Second World War Anderson shelter (four sheets of reinforced corrugated iron) for £50 on eBay. A section of the garden will be cleared and turned into a vegetable patch, with help from the pupils of Orchard Vale school.
He said: “Hopefully, by summer 2009, the shelter will be in and the traditional World War Two vegetable garden will be in. We are going to make sure the seeds are varieties that would have been used back then.
“We can also use the garden to talk about sustainability and peak oil and food production. It’s not just about the war.”
… Dig for victory! was the name given to a Government campaign which encouraged people to grow food and keep animals on allotments. Food imports were disrupted by German attacks on merchant ships and food rationing was also introduced.
(13 November 2008)
Ugly fruit and veg make a comeback
Vanessa Mock, The Independent
Wonky cucumbers and comedy carrots are staging a comeback thanks to a European Union decision to scrap stringent rules which stipulate that only the most perfect-looking produce adorns supermarket shelves.
Yesterday the European Commission abolished more than two dozen laws that have stipulated the look of Europe’s fruit and veg – including Brussels sprouts – for the past 20 years. Mariann Fischer Boel, the EU’s agriculture commissioner, led the crusade against the “ban on ugly” earlier this year, arguing that tons of food was being wasted at a time of rising household costs.
“This marks the new dawn for the curvy cucumber and the knobbly carrot,” Ms Fischer Boel said yesterday. “We simply don’t need to regulate this sort of thing at EU level. And in these days of high food prices and general economic difficulties, consumers should be able to choose from the widest range of products possible. It makes no sense to throw perfectly good products away, just because they are the ‘wrong’ shape.”…
(13 November 2008)
The Protein Pyramid
Editorial, New York Times
Per capita meat consumption more than doubled over the past half-century as the global economy expanded. It is expected to double again by 2050. Which raises the question, what does all that meat eat before it becomes meat?
Increasingly the answer is very small fish harvested from the ocean and ground into meal and pressed into oil. According to a new report by scientists from the University of British Columbia and financed by the Pew Institute for Ocean Science, 37 percent by weight of all the fish taken from the ocean is forage fish: small fish like sardines and menhaden. Nearly half of that is fed to farmed fish; most of the rest is fed to pigs and poultry.
The problem is that forage fish are the feedstock of marine mammals and birds and larger species of fish. In other words, farmed fish, pigs and poultry — and the humans who eat them — are competing for food directly with aquatic species that depend on those forage fish for their existence. It’s as if humans were swimming in schools in the ocean out-eating every other species.
The case is worse than that. When it comes to farmed fish, there is a net protein loss: it takes three pounds of fish feed to produce one pound of farmed salmon. This protein pyramid — small fish fed to farmed fish, pigs and poultry that are then fed to humans — is unsustainable. It threatens the foundation of oceanic life.
The report’s authors suggest that it would be better if humans ate these small fish, as many cultures once did, instead of using them as feed. That is one way of addressing the problem of net protein loss. The real answers are support for sustainable agriculture in the developing world and encouraging healthy, less meat-based eating habits as a true sign of affluence everywhere.
(10 November 2008)
The Southern Willamette Bean and Grain Project
Project Report Two (June-November 2008)
Dan Armstrong, Mud City Press
Context: The Southern Willamette Valley Bean and Grain Project is a small group of farmers and local food system advocates focused on rebuilding the regional food system and promoting food security in Oregon’s Willamette Valley. The project’s goals include: increasing the quantity and diversity of food crops that are grown in the Willamette Valley; evaluating deficiencies in the local food system infrastructure; building buyer/seller relationships for locally grown food (with an emphasis on staples); incorporating the culture of community into the fabric of the food system; and compiling resources on organic and sustainable agricultural practices specific to the Willamette Valley. As the name of the project implies, central to the task is stimulating the cultivation and local marketing of organically grown beans and grains to provide a foundation for year-round food resources in the valley.
The background, historic necessity, and overall strategy of the Bean and Grain Project is detailed in Project Report One of this report. Project Report One also tracks the progress of the Bean and Grain Project during the first five months of 2008. For the most part, this time was spent publicizing the intentions and philosophy of the project through community meetings with farmers, food distributors, food processors, and others concerned about food security issues. These meetings invariably also included a meal of locally grown beans and grain–a sure way of lifting communication to a higher level.
Harry MacCormack with harvested wheat.
Harry MacCormack, owner of Sunbow Farm outside Corvallis, Oregon, has provided much of the motivation and vision behind the Bean and Grain Project. He has been experimenting for three going on four years, growing varieties of beans and grains not historically found in the Willamette Valley. Working in close conjunction with Harry MacCormack is Willow Coberly, another Willamette Valley farmer. Willow and her husband Harry Stalford co-own American Grass Seed Producers, a large grass seed operation based in Tangent, Oregon. Due to Willow’s interest in organic practices and her belief in the need for increased food production in the valley, Willow and her husband have opened up portions of their grass seed acreage to the cultivation of grains and beans. The food production portion of their 9000-acre farm operation is known as Stalford Farms.
The work of the Bean and Grain Project is both ambitious in scope and somewhat controversial in application. As Harry MacCormack has written, “The beans and the red wheat are giant experiments which all the agricultural establishment have deemed impossible crops to be grown here as part of our local food shed. From my three years of experience, I would say that we haven’t yet proven them wrong, but we are a long way toward doing so.” In this sense, the Bean and Grain Project is an experiment in the rebuilding of a local food system, and there should be no minimization of the part played by the active farmers in this project, Harry MacCormack, Willow Coberly, and Harry Stalford. They have invested much energy and risk into what is really a cutting edge four-county (Lane, Linn, Benton, Lincoln) agricultural project.
(13 November 2008)
