Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
For the last four years, The SFT has been working on the Global Farm Metric (GFM) – a harmonised measure of sustainability that has the potential to unite food system stakeholders, such as farmers, retailers and banks across the globe and re-situate agriculture as a solution to climate change, biodiversity loss and declining public health.
There are Black Swans that you can’t do anything about because you don’t know they’re going to happen; but the Grey Swans are predictable – not in their dimensions or timing exactly; but we know there’s going to be another food price crisis, a catastrophic climactic moment of some sort, or energy problems: things like this are going to happen.
I don’t really want to go looking for arguments with anyone working broadly within alternative agriculture, permaculture or human-centred economics – though I’ve learned the hard way that people have different judgements about the boundary between ‘looking for discussion’ and ‘looking for arguments’.
“Innovation” is ubiquitous as a way to describe beneficial societal change. Yet, the innovation language is deeply tied to a technology-centric and top-down ways of thinking that shackles the imagination and limits the pathways for change.
Civilisations have tried to dominate chaos with order for centuries, in a false dichotomy of biblical proportions. Greater diversity wants to exist. Perhaps our role is not to impose order, but to steward complexity.
What is the value of a life? What is the consequence of a death? Is there a right way to kill? What is the best way to live?
Because there is no other option and no better deal for the natural capital, soil, biodiversity and climate. Our task is to accelerate this transition and to avoid doing even more damage.
What is needed are a high humus content and an active soil life. However, it cannot be the task of agriculture to “capture” greenhouse gases caused by industrial production and permanently store them in soils.
I’m going to continue my theme from my last post about organic fertility in future farming, picking up on a few of the very interesting comments that people made in response to it.
I discuss various aspects of so-called ‘alternative’ agriculture at some length in Chapter 6 of A Small Farm Future, and I don’t intend to retrace many of those steps here. But there’s a couple of further things I do want to say in this blog cycle. Here, I’ll focus on organic farming.
It is time to rediscover the roots of our resilience by grounding land policy in collective action and democratic forms of land politics. That’s according to a new report led by Transnational Institute. T
While there are many environmental and ethical reasons to criticize industrial forms of livestock production, there are no valid reasons to shun the rearing of livestock in general.
