Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
When I started volunteering this winter as a garden science teacher with Washington Youth Garden, entering one 3rd-grade classroom every week to help instill knowledge and enthusiasm by the children for the wonders of nature, I had no idea that this experience would inspire me to initiate a national call for Universal School Gardens.
What if future leaders became sensitive to local environmental and social issues before stepping into leadership roles? Tanya Narath describes nine day-long events in the Leadership Institute for Ecology and the Economy’s program: Students visit a watershed for ecological context; tour an organic farm (sustainable agriculture); take a walking tour from which students’ urban design ideas are presented to the mayor; explore social issues like racial injustice, homelessness, and poverty; consider water ecology, local economy, transportation and land use. (www.ecoleader.org).
Every year, I try to transform more of my property from unproductive Bermuda grass to productive fruits and veggies. This year, I want to transform the desolate, wind-swept, 7 x 40 grass strip between our driveways (mine and my neighbors) into a luscious food forest…
-The Spotless Garden
-Seed trends – food gardening, pickling
-Impressed by a Possible Future
-Health: the challenge of improving nutrition
-Small family farms in tropics can feed the hungry and preserve biodiversity
-Jonathan Safran Foer: the truth about fish farming
-Scientists unite to combat water scarcity; solutions yield more crop per drop in drylands
-Potatoes, Not Just Pistons, Take Root in Detroit
-She Farms
-New Investments in Agriculture Likely to Fail Without Sharp Focus on Small-Scale ‘Mixed’ Farmer
Last week I attended the annual conference of the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association (OEFFA), spending the day signing and selling books and gabbing with people. Those of us who remember the early days of OEFFA were stunned and jubilant at the overflow crowd. … There was something electric in the air. I could feel it. At meetings of industrial farmers these days, the talk is fairly bleak, but here, among new farmers and gardeners with a hundred new ways to produce food and sell it locally, the people just seemed to glow with optimism.
At the recent Soil Association conference in Birmingham a couple of weeks ago I cornered Mike Small of the Fife Diet and asked him a few questions about what is happening in Fife. Their work has huge implications for Transition, as well as offering some fascinating insights into the practicalities of the relocalisation of the food system.
For all of its ecological baggage, synthetic nitrogen does one good deed for the environment: it helps build carbon in soil. At least, that’s what scientists have assumed for decades. If that were true, it would count as a major environmental benefit of synthetic N use…Well, that logic has come under fierce challenge from a team of University of Illinois researchers led by professors Richard Mulvaney, Saeed Khan, and Tim Ellsworth.
One almost expected to see a Monsanto executive among the honored guests and presenters at the 19th annual Farming for the Future Conference held Feb. 4 – 6 in State College, Pa. After all, the St. Louis-based agri-giant was recently named “Company of the Year” by Forbes magazine. And in its well-funded advertising campaign that strategically targets such media outlets as National Public Radio, Monsanto proclaims itself to be the very champion of sustainability.
Taken together, California’s dairy cows produce more than 100,000 tons of manure every day. Rocha and his fellow dairy farmers put all those cow pies to good use—as fertilizer for the fields that grow the corn that feeds their herds. It’s a perfect closed-loop system, except for one big problem: nitrogen.
-Prince Charles Tells Us to Get Woolly Again
-Farmer changes to whiter Lleyn sheep to get better price for wool
-US Consumer Watchdog Says Shoo to Bamboo Textiles
-Fashion Week Launches, What does green fashion really mean?
Even for staunch proponents of U.S. biofuel policy, it is hard to argue that the current subsidy on grain ethanol serves the purpose it was designed to serve. With ethanol mandates now in place in the form of the Renewable Fuel Standard (RFS), there is a mechanism – with penalties for non-compliance – to ensure that gasoline blenders use the mandated amount of ethanol. Maintaining a subsidy on top of a mandate would be like paying people to obey the speed limit.
