Food

How to share land

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When looking through the lens of collaborative consumption or the mesh, it’s easy to see how many of our needs can be met through sharing with others to some lesser or greater degree. Surveying this communally inclined world, we find that our homes, cars, jobs, time, and more can easily be shared. Land is another asset that can and should be shared, one that is in high demand as rising food prices and the desire for healthy food blooms alongside the “Grow Your Own” movement’s current momentum.

How not to play the game

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A very large fraction of the alternative energy projects being proposed these days are large, expensive, and designed to perpetuate the specific technological and economic forms of the present. A very large fraction of the equivalent projects envisioned and tested during the energy crisis of the Seventies, by contrast, were small, cheap, and presupposed a significantly different way of dealing with concepts of energy, technology and wealth. The former may be more popular just now but the latter have much more to offer in the future into which our present actions are backing us.

Reducing food waste: Making the most of our abundance

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According to staggering new statistics from the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), roughly one-third of the food produced worldwide for human consumption is lost or wasted, amounting to some 1.3 billion tons per year. In the developing world, over 40 percent of food losses occur after harvest—while being stored or transported, and during processing and packing. In industrialized countries, more than 40 percent of losses occur as a result of retailers and consumers discarding unwanted but often perfectly edible food.

Can biomass help phase out coal?

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If biomass can help power plant owners ease away from coal faster, that is certainly a good thing. The Dominion announcement is particularly relevant given the number of planned plant retirements in the coal industry – there are currently 190 generators around the U.S. set to be shut down, and there’s a dwindling appetite to replace them with more coal.

Cereals, agroforestry and droughts: an interview with Martin Crawford

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Yields from arable crops in the East of the country, (which is where the main arable crops like wheat are grown in this country), are going to be down by at least 25% and maybe more, because the damage has been done. It can’t be recovered – it’s too late for that now. It’s not all fine now and it really shows that a spring like this, which seems to be becoming the norm…..for the last four years we’ve had pretty dry springs – not as dry as this one but it seems to be becoming a pattern.

Renouncing, reclaiming, rebuilding: The 3 steps of radical homemaking

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Yesterday I counted 85 spears of asparagus nudging their way up through the soil (Asparagus may be finished in some parts of the country, but we’re zone 4 here in cold upstate New York). I crawled along the row on my hands and knees, pushing aside clumps of rotted manure to reveal each spear. I ran inside and proudly reported the figure to my husband Bob. Then I called my mom, and told her, too. It took me longer to get this asparagus growing than it did to earn a Ph.D. I consider the achievement just as significant.

Backyard clotheslines and washboard secrets

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Friends smile wanly when they see my wife’s corrugated washboard in the sink. They wonder when we are going to go down to the “crick” and pound our clothes on the rocks. This is very funny, of course, but it reveals the modern ignorance about washing clothes that is becoming nearly universal. A washboard is still the cheapest and often the only way to get dirty clothes clean… buy one that is only rough surfaced. The ones that are only smooth-surfaced are no good for dirty clothes… and if the clothes aren’t dirty, well, throw them in the automatic washer. It does a real good job on clean clothes.

Radical homemaking, radically enriching

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When I finally got a copy of Hayes’s book, Radical Homemakers, I confess it wasn’t what I expected–rather than a serious, theoretically grounded critique of consumer culture, family life, and the structural obstacles that often stand in the way of adopting a simpler, more communal lifestyle, I found an often sloppily researched but nonetheless impassioned instruction manual-cum-rallying cry.

The nutritional resilience approach to food security

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Very few soils have a perfect balance of minerals. As a result, their fertility is limited and the crops grown on them cannot provide all the nutrients people need. As people can get food from elsewhere at present, these local deficiencies do not matter too much. However, if the option of filling one’s plate from all over the world disappears, human health will likely decline unless the missing minerals are applied over the next few years.

Praise be baling wire and binder twine

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In fact, the major hazard to life on our farm is old, rusting baling wire that somehow wanders off into the pastures to waylay mowers or end up in the rumens of livestock… my mower loves the stuff and can find a piece even if there is only one little strand in a ten acre field.

Medicine of the Heart

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This is a medicine story. And if I could tell you all the medicine stories I heard in my travelling days I would. Because those stories are about how life turns around just as you think it’s about to end. We need more than anything now these stories of restoration and regeneration because they hold an opportunity. If there is one theme that unites them all it is this: the transformation moment comes when you realise it’s not just about you.