Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Funding freezes, grant terminations, program cancellations, and a woefully understaffed USDA have disrupted the programs and services farmers and rural communities rely on to build environmentally resilient and economically viable businesses.
We are long overdue for a return to growing our own food, and the farming club offers a promising way to reconnect with that tradition.
For a farming community that depends on seasonal consistency, climate change creates uncertainty at every stage of production.
Amid plantation monocultures and industrialized farms built to maximize production at the expense of social and ecological costs to the public, there are also many communities where the economy and ecology are not in conflict.
Let us call the bluff of industrial agriculture.
Understanding how food is produced can help consumers make choices that support healthier soil, water, pollinators, and communities.
Industrial agriculture relies on more than tractors and diesel. From synthetic fertilizers to depleted soils, the modern food system is deeply tied to fossil fuels, leaving farmers, ecosystems and food security increasingly vulnerable. Amid the polycrisis, we must rebuild food systems by valuing the natural world and supporting human communities.
Industrial agriculture transformed how the world eats after the Second World War. The gains were enormous, but so were the costs: depleted soils, monocultures, plastic pollution and growing dependence on fragile global supply chains.
Asking if the world grows enough food is the wrong kind of question. It leads to the wrong kind of answer. We don’t need to produce more food. We need to produce more farms: places where communities of living beings can thrive.
In the tradition of filtering air that we’ve polluted and treating water that we’ve sullied, we now have replacing minerals in soil that we’ve depleted because of industrial agriculture.
George has a long and heroic record of fighting for the environment. His latest campaign is to reduce the huge burden that farming inflicts on global ecosystems, by shifting much food production to high-tech “factory farming”. But he fails to see The Simpler Way solution.
Is farming a mistake? Up until a generation or two ago, you would find no people of any background who would make this assertion — even though we’ve been farming for thousands of years and presumably if it was a bad thing it might have occurred to someone else before now to say so.
