Food

Farm prices, food prices, and biofuels

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It’s worth noting that the energy content of the human food supply is about a sixth of the energy content of the human fuel supply (about 86 mbd of liquid fuels, equivalent to somewhere in the neighborhood of 120-130mbd of ethanol). This is the core problem with converting food to fuel – we are taking from a small pool to try to make up for deficiencies in a large pool, and we will have a much bigger effect on the level of the small pool than the bigger pool.

Gertrude Jekyll meets edible landscaping: The ornamental edible border

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Ok, you know about edible landscaping – you’ve replaced your burning bush with blueberries and your spireas with elderberries. You’ve trained that grapevine over the arbor. Now you are eying that space on your front lawn where the perennial border is (or should be or used to be or is in your head). You want flowers. You need flowers because they make you happy. Maybe you have to grow flowers there if you grow much of anything but grass, because of neighbors or zoning laws. Can you grow an ornamental flower garden that is totally edible? Yes. Yes, you can!

Good complexity, bad complexity

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Why then don’t complex agricultural societies, or the even more complex civilizations that they sometimes evolve into, rely on ecological complexity to solve problems? Because by their very nature they are committed to ecological simplicity. Their size, population density and social complexity are in most places the result of grain monocultures.

“Campesinos posmodernos” Agricultura orgánica y regenerativa en parcelas ejidales –una experiencia familiar en México

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This essay documents our five years as a “neorural” family, cultivating corn, beans and squash with organic methods on a small scale. This essay will perhaps inspire those who don´t have access to land, but nonetheless want to make themselves more self-supporting in the production of their food. Written primarily for the Latin-American context, this article honours the “cultural memory of a sustainable pre-industrial lifestyels, still present in the older generations. [Outline of the article in Spanish, photos, links to original and PDF]

Este ensayo documenta la historia de un proceso personal y familiar. Cuenta de nuestro acercamiento, como familia “neo-rural”, al cultivo de maíz, frijol, calabaza, con métodos orgánicos, en campos de cultivo a pequeña escala. Compartimos las experiencias que hicimos durante estos cinco años, estableciendo vínculos de trabajo y colaboración, con una familia campesina en la bioregión donde vivimos. Quizás este relato pueda servir de inspiración para quienes no tienen acceso a una tierra, pero si tienen la inquietud de aprender y hacerse más responsables de la producción de sus alimentos.

Ingredients of Transition: Strategic thinking

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Creating an Energy Descent Action Plan and/or the intentional relocalisation of a community will raise a lot of questions. How much arable land surrounds the settlement, how much food, fuel and fibre might it produce, what productive role might back gardens, allotments and new urban market gardens play? How much energy infrastructure is needed, and how much could realistically be installed? Failing to ask these questions will hamper attempts to think strategically about relocalisation.

Using traditional strategies to address water problems

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Global warming has likely already caused changes in the world’s climate by delaying monsoon seasons, causing less summer precipitation and creating longer breaks between rainy periods. One group of women in southern India is turning to traditional farming practices for immediate and sustainable answers to address these water problems.

In field and for food, the return of structural adjustment

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Africa is being measured for its land profitability potential. So are other regions in the political South. This process is part of the new structural agri-food adjustment programmes that are already in place in the developing South. It includes agri-investor friendly new industrial policies, the disinvestment by and withdrawal of government equity in profitable public sector enterprises, financial sector ‘reform’ that ushers in private banking and asset management.