Food

Forest Gardens in Honduras make the best of two worlds

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The drought parching harvests in several of the world’s most productive food baskets is the summer’s hottest global food story. Eerily, it’s matched by the season’s hottest archeological finding, which comes across as a cautionary tale…History seems to be repeating itself for the second of the western hemisphere’s great empires entirely dependent on a food supply centered around corn and an energy system bent on deforestation…But what I saw in Honduras confirms there is life after plantation-style fields of corn.

(Almost) everything you could want to know about the 2012 Transition Network conference

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A little over a week to go until the Transition Network conference 2012, and it is all getting very exciting. The idea here is to put some flesh on the bones of what looks set to be our most stimulating conference yet. Although things are still being finalised, here’s what we know so far…

Study: Extreme weather hammers global food system

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A new report released Wednesday says that the full impact of climate change and extreme weather events on global food prices is being underestimated and warns that without a more acute understanding of how global warming threatens agricultural systems and economies, governments will be unable to prepare for future disasters.

Sol Food Mobile Farm: Leading the food justice movement to your backyard

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The crew of Sol Mobile Farm is bringing new meaning to the term “food movement.” In June 2012, the team of four started on a sixth month trip. They would travel, they decided, from North Carolina, up the East Coast, over to the West Coast, down to the South, and then back again in a 57 passenger red school bus.

Weeds that like a sip of Roundup now and then

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First the glorious days of advanced farming brought us corn stalks that eat tractor tires. Now there’s a weed that likes to drink weed killers, especially Roundup. Recently Palmer amaranth “completely overran” most of the soybean test plots at Bayer CropScience’s test plots in Illinois, in the words of DTN/Progressive Farmer editor, Pam Smith, despite having an arsenal of herbicides thrown at it. She describes some of the plots as “forests of pigweed.” I shouldn’t joke about this because it really is a serious problem, but I just can’t help it.

Peak Moment 217: Portland’s backyard fruit – from waste to feast

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“We look forward to a time when we’re really able to harvest all of the fruit trees in the city that aren’t being fully utilized,” envisions Katy Kolker, founder and executive director of Portland Fruit Tree Project. Volunteer groups harvest trees whose fruit would otherwise go to waste. Half of the fruit goes to neighborhood food banks, and the remainder goes home with the volunteers….From harvesting 8000 pounds of fruit in 2008 to three times that in 2010, this growing project is bearing fruit and benefitting thousands.

The weather may not be the problem

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Weather-related contrasts are occurring here in my own Ohio backyard where it barely rained at all from May to August. Close to our farm stand two cornfields just across a narrow road from each other. One has nearly normal corn and the other (in one of the photos) has drought-stricken corn. I know personally both farmers who planted these two fields and both are very competent. The soil in both fields is the same. Fertilizer applied was about the same. Rainfall was the same. This contrast appears all over the county, all over the state, all over the Corn Belt. What is going on here?

Great Real Food

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They say, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Well, our food system is broken, and it does need fixing…fast. The cogs of the 21st century global food system turn, but are in need of (sustainable) oiling to help transition smoothly towards a viable and secure food future. The Real Food Store in Exeter, Devon, is helping to unstick some of the global food system problems at a local level.

Urban Minds

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In Extraenvironmentalist #48 we speak with archeologist Paul Sinclair about the Urban Mind project. Paul discusses a new field of archeological research that is discovering the role of urban gardening throughout history and during wartime in ancient cities…Donnie Maclurcan of the Post Growth Institute tells us how we can start building a post-growth world…Last of all, John Michael Greer joins us to answer listener questions and to talk about David Korowicz’s FEASTA study, Trade Off: A Study in Global Systemic Collapse.