Food

Soils and souls: the promise of the land

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In the search for alternatives to our dead-end industrial agriculture system, Land Institute researchers are pursuing plant breeding programs in Salina, KS that just may be the key to post-oil farming. In late September, the Institute’s 2010 Prairie Festival began with three talks – by poet/novelist Wendell Berry, economist Josh Farley, and biologist Sandra Steingraber. The three were telling the story of how sin brought us to this place, how we must redefine success if we are to atone, and how essential that change is for our own safety. I left the barn that day with one revelation burning in my brain: While evil lurks in many places, it is most concentrated in fossil fuels.

Deconstructing Dinner: Produce to the people

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Deconstructing Dinner has long been exploring the many ways through which farmers, businesses, organizations and communities are accessing food using new and innovative models. On today’s broadcast we hear more of those examples shared as part of the March 2010 panel – Produce to the People, hosted by the San Francisco based CUESA.

Food & agriculture – Oct 10

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– Scientists and Soldiers Solve a Bee Mystery
– Wes Jackson On The Need To Reinvent Agriculture
– It Pays Not to Cultivate GM Crops, Survey Finds
– Chaco deforestation by Christian sect puts Paraguayan land under threat

Pachakuti: Indigenous perspectives, degrowth and ecosocialism

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Indigenous movements have inserted concepts like ecosocialist and degrowth into the formal constitutions of the Bolivian and Ecuadorian states. Some call this movement the “Pachakuti”, a term taken from the Quechua “pacha”, meaning time and space or the world, and “kuti”, meaning upheaval or revolution. Put together, Pachakuti can be interpreted to symbolize a re-balancing of the world through a tumultuous turn of events that could be a catastrophe or a renovation.

Picking blackberries without bleeding to death

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Carol has stories to tell about picking blackberries. For her family in Kentucky, wild blackberries were a cash crop. Her mother would sally forth into the puckerbrush with her children every summer to pick them by the gallon. They sold the berries along with other produce from garden and orchard at local farm markets. The blackberry money was used to buy new school shoes.