Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
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.
More and more Greeks move away from the cities and start over as farmers. A beekeeper, an olive farmer and a mushroom grower tell us their stories. The seminars offered at the Syngrou Ranch – home of the Athens Institute of Agricultural Sciences – are in high demand, proving that agriculture is trending in Greece.
That’s an easy one for me— burning off the asparagus patch in the early spring. Just something about lighting up the new growing year.
I am not against genetic modification but only against the way that herbicide manufacturers are using it to justify patenting any plant in nature that interests them and then, in my opinion, trying to use the patents to gain unfair monopolies in the food and farm economy.
I never did learn to go with the flow. I just got old and had to.
This week’s guest on Sea Change Radio, author Dean Kuipers, explores how farms get the money they need to grow the food we eat.
Archeologists have been, in my opinion, far too eager to brand cultures as farmers on flimsy evidence.
Farmers perform one of society’s most essential functions, yet farming is one of the most undervalued and endangered professions in the United States
