Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Making the step from raw farm products to cans in a consumer’s pantry is not trivial. It takes more than access to equipment, it also takes business and marketing sense, relationships with area stores and restaurateurs and compliance with state regulations, to name a few.
I recently had the pleasure of visiting Mark Shepard ‘s family permaculture farm in Viola, Wisconsin. Mark has planted an estimated 250,000 trees over the last 15 years on his 106 acre farm. Forest Agriculture Enterprises is known for its hazel nut, chestnut, butternut, nut pine and apple produce, scion-wood and value added products. Mark has a lot of wisdom on not only farm operation but also community and staff and intern economics.
Despite the much-ballyhooed claim that ours is an “information society,” the industrial world is remarkably careless with the information available to it — and especially with that provided by nonhuman Nature. The simple act of saving the seeds from one’s own garden plants offers a way to tap into Nature’s information economy, and participate in a dance of communication that offers options more anthropocentric conversations too often leave out.
-A Socially Conscious Way to Invest in Farmland: An Interview with Dr. Jason Bradford about Farmland LP
-Mushroom Abundance
-Growing Food Starts and Ends with The People
“An awful lot of what we’ve taken for granted about the future can’t continue,” says executive editor Sarah van Gelder of YES! Magazine, whose Fall 2010 issue is about people creatively building resilient families and communities. Publisher Fran Korten describes local food as an important avenue into a much larger vision of what we can become. Fran and Sarah discuss sources of real happiness that don’t destroy the planet, an upcoming issue of YES! Magazine on families, their weekly “YES! This Week” e-newsletter, and the YES! emphasis on helping people see possibilities and take action on positive initiatives.
– Bacteria Can Build Better Roads for Our Peak Oil Years
– The food storage secret our grandparents knew
– New $1.1 million program to create urban farms in Cleveland’s Kinsman neighborhood
– First Canadian peak oil task force
– Transition Voice Covers Peak Oil, Zombies and Economic Crisis
The abandoned farmsteads shown here are not far from where I live. Such sad scenes are easy enough to find. They have been a part of the landscape of my life, grave markers of the agrarian culture that I love.
Local food is elitist! This trumpets from one paper or another, revealing that despite the growing preoccupation with good food, ultimately, it is just another white soccer Mom phenomenon.
On this episode of the podcast we are joined by Dr. Blair Orr. Dr. Orr is the director of the Master’s International Program at Michigan Technological University, and has worked for several decades in the areas of agroforestry, forest economics, and small holder tropical systems. We discuss the MI Program at MTU, changes and patterns in Third World agriculture, land tenure, low input mixed systems, increasing connectivity and migration in developing countries, the future of Haiti, and strategies for promoting development in tropical agriculture.
The oft-discussed 10,000 mile Caesar Salad, used to illustrate the degree to which our food system is drenched in fossil fuels, really is only a piker when it comes to the spaces that food can make you cover.
– 6 casualties of the world food crisis (cabbage in Korea, garlic in China, corn in the US…)
– Shutdown of two small cheesemakers raises doubts about food-safety legislation
– Global food crisis forecast as prices reach record highs
– Podcast on food security
– Interview with Vandana Shiva
– Food Security for Europe (online publication)
People who have caught on to the magnitude of the changes humanity faces in coming years typically describe their process of reaction as “preparation.” That is an adequate word, but incomplete, because it implies only a future focus. Preparation always looks forward, even when it takes appropriate action in the present. The danger in that is it can lead to a life that is forever deferred, waiting for a signal from some external source that it’s time to actually have what you have prepared yourself for.
