Bryce Oates

HOMEGROWN Life: The Gift of Good Rain

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After months of waiting, worrying and hoping, the clouds finally arrived here at Yellabird Farm last week and brought us the long-sought gift of good rain. It was a great two days of slow and soaking moisture that the cracked soil guzzled up with gusto. Seven inches was the tally. And it has brightened up the spirits of all of us: man, woman, child, goat, chicken, cow, clover, oak tree, frog, songbird. The whole living community around here is crying out with joy.

Time to take inventory

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End of summer is a really good time to sit down and look at your preparations and your food storage and take inventory. What have you put by? What do you still need more of? What did you use over the last year? What did you have too much of? Whither from here? September is National Emergency Preparedness month, so now is the time to think — am I ready for the next crisis (do you even have to ask whether there will be one?)

How energy shapes the economy

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In the beginning, the Master Economist created the Economy. He created businesses large and small, consumers, governments with their regulation, and financial institutions of all types. And the Master Economist declared that the economy should grow. And it did grow, but only for a while. Then it stalled. Then He declared that stimulus of various types should fix it, and it did, for a while. Then He declared that if humans would just wait for a while, it would fix itself, but it wouldn’t.

Forest Gardens in Honduras make the best of two worlds

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The drought parching harvests in several of the world’s most productive food baskets is the summer’s hottest global food story. Eerily, it’s matched by the season’s hottest archeological finding, which comes across as a cautionary tale…History seems to be repeating itself for the second of the western hemisphere’s great empires entirely dependent on a food supply centered around corn and an energy system bent on deforestation…But what I saw in Honduras confirms there is life after plantation-style fields of corn.

The next President’s inaugural speech (if only…)

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Once upon a time the United States was a global pioneer of democracy and justice. The founders of this great nation articulated a noble vision of inalienable rights — life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Times have changed. We have emerged from this presidential campaign with an ignoble vision of alienating wrongs — venom, vitriol, and the pursuit of pettiness. The campaign, including my campaign, dodged the most important issue of our era: coming to grips with the ecological reality confronting life on this planet. Today I pledge to make our nation once again the leader in solving economic, environmental, and social crises.

Sol Food Mobile Farm: Leading the food justice movement to your backyard

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The crew of Sol Mobile Farm is bringing new meaning to the term “food movement.” In June 2012, the team of four started on a sixth month trip. They would travel, they decided, from North Carolina, up the East Coast, over to the West Coast, down to the South, and then back again in a 57 passenger red school bus.