Building Community

Biofuels, transition and divergent visions of the future of farming

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It was fascinating to see the enthusiasm among the farmers for a more localised approach to farming. Perhaps the National Farmer’s Union should be figuring out how it can best support their wish to create and sustain local markets rather than continuing to focus on an approach whose benefits to the climate are questionable at best, and which at worst, would continue the erosion of soil, resilience and the local economies we will become increasingly dependent upon.

Organic art?

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Farming is itself an art and a whole lot more artists than you might imagine draw their early or late inspiration from it. And I don’t mean just sentimental, sugary, artsy-fartsy, pretty stuff about farming, but the guts of it, the tragedy and heartbreak a farmer must sometimes endure, as a true artist often endures, when he pits himself against the tyranny of greed and the indifference of nature to produce good food.

Food, culture, and sustainability in the gardens of ethnic Americans

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A new approach to gardening is highlighted in the book The Earth Knows My Name: “Just as you should never have a monocropped field, so you should never have a monocropped people. If we are going to think about diversity as the key to survival and saving the environment, I really think you can’t have biological diversity succeed without cultural diversity.”