Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
The interesting and entertaining reactions to my recent post about destructive wildlife in the garden encouraged me to ponder the situation more closely. Pondering things closely always leads me to weird ideas. I am thinking about the possible return of the walled gardens of Victorian times. How do you know they didn’t become popular in the first place to keep out wild animals including humans?
Cooking with a Sun Oven is never easier than in the summer months, when the sun is intense and the days are long. Temperatures inside my Global Sun Oven can easily reach 350 degrees within around fifteen minutes, and so I can cook a wide range of dishes – sometimes several in one day.
Joel Salatin returns as a guest to discuss “ecological participation” – methods by which humans can create a much more resilient landscape than current mass agricultural practices allow for.
How many people could we employ if we radically change the way we farm?
What’s not to like about cutting the costs of a farm enterprise—and boosting its revenues? That, in effect, is Wichner’s pitch for the “beyond organic” farmland management system he plans to scale.
It’s easy to forget that every piece of our current infrastructure–roads, rails, runways, bridges, industrial plants, housing–was built with a certain temperature range in mind. Our agricultural system and much of our electrical generating system (including dams, nuclear power stations and conventional thermal electric plants which burn coal and natural gas) were created not only with a certain temperature range in mind, but also a certain range of rainfall.
In mid-May 2012, the United Nations Development Programme (the UNDP) released its Africa Human Development report for 2012. Entitled ‘Towards a Food Secure Future’, the report is unremarkable for its assessments and language – these have changed but little where Africa is concerned over the last 30 years – and is remarkable for the implications it contains concerning the agriculture and food focus to human development.
Peter Bane’s handbook, while not quite encyclopedic, is nothing if not authoritative. I can honestly say, without fear of exaggeration, that I hold my head a little higher as I stride about my miniscule fiefdom, now that I’ve read The Permaculture Handbook: Garden Farming for Town and Country.
The world is in serious trouble on the food front. But there is little evidence that political leaders have yet grasped the magnitude of what is happening. The progress in reducing hunger in recent decades has been reversed. Unless we move quickly to adopt new population, energy, and water policies, the goal of eradicating hunger will remain just that.
The news outlets love a good disaster, and we’ve all been informed daily of the mega-drought in the Midwest. Three quarters of the US corn crop is under drought. Corn prices are up over 50% in the last month, soybeans are up almost 30%, and the USDA says they are still assessing the damage. No rain in sight yet and when combined with record low carryover stocks, we’re probably looking at another record spike in prices. What I haven’t heard in the news is any discussion over whether we have other options to avoid these increasingly regular crop disasters.
In any attempt to comprehend a puzzle, or find a new path, the first requirement is to see, and comprehend, all the components. We wish to add a component, previously unknown, to your considerations.
The drought that is affecting much of the Midwest is scary enough but what makes me even more nervous is the way speculators in the grain futures market are sending grain prices gyrating all over the place as they bet on what will happen next. Betting on the future supply of food is risky business.
