Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Dave Haferd sees his farm with eyes that are 200 years old. He knows every foot of its 180 acres, on top and underneath. Walking across his land, he discourses endlessly and joyfully upon almost any rock, post, tree, clod, weed, or building that his eye falls upon.
Chickens given roosts in urban backyards
Coffee next in line as biofuel source
Universal Food Stamps? If the Industrial Food System No Longer Provides Cheap Food, What Are We Keeping It For, Anyway?
Swiss caviar, saffron, tea …
Food lessons from the Great Depression
Group seeks to augment local food supply
UK: We’re wasting too much water
Green revolution stalls on cheap oil
Farming pesticide ban ‘too far too fast’
Even today, as the peak oil age arrives, fire fiddling can be once more a practical skill, even an art. Everyone knows that fireplaces are not efficient home heaters— most of the heat goes up the chimney. But a master fire fiddler can get twice as much heat out of a fireplace as a beginner.
Expert on BBC: Food needs ‘fundamental rethink’
African community gardens contribute to food security
Graze the Roof, a rooftop garden in San Francisco
A food agenda for Obama
It was a gas (Haber-Bosch process for fertilizers)
Fresh eggs, finances and fun: families flock to keep hens
Fill ‘er up with human fat
Food, fuel and fiber? The challenge of using the earth to grow energy
Obama buys the biofuel hype
New Michigan law allows animal carcasses to be used to make energy
Small Farm Biochar Kiln awarded funding
Wildman forages for food in Central Park
A national renewable ammonia architecture (“Fully half of all human protein comes from man-made ammonia”)
“… what followed in the wake of the tornado during the next three weeks was just as awesome as the wind itself. In that time — three weeks — the forest devastation was sawed into lumber and transformed into four big new barns. No massive effort of bulldozers, cranes, semi-trucks, or the National Guard was involved. The surrounding Amish community rolled up its sleeves, hitched up its horses and did it all. Nor were the barns the quick-fix modern structures of sheet metal hung on posts stuck in the ground. They were massive three-story affairs of post-and-beam framing, held together with hundreds of hand-hewn mortises and tenons.”
As I sip my morning espresso, I have a brief moment of longing for an earlier time when I could make my stovetop coffee quickly on a gas burner. It takes a lot longer using this electric one. Little did we know that gas was right behind oil in peaking. Fortunately we finally have plenty of solar-produced electricity and, once again, access to coffee. So it’s a minor inconvenience, but just another reminder of things we used to take for granted.
Most dire of all was that within three days of the halt to trucking, the grocery stores were out of food. Looking back at historical records it is clear that, while shocking, this was no surprise. Community-based organizations had been warning of this exact possibility for years. Nowadays we have buffers and resiliency built into our systems, but that was not the case in 2009.
