Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
And like the wild geese in my oldest, Eli’s favorite poem, I can feel the tang of winter coming. When you live on a farm, and when you eat with the seasons, winter is always coming in a way – I order my Thanksgiving turkey in February, order the seeds potatoes for my Chanukah latkes just a month or so after we finish eating them, thin our autumn’s apples in June, plant the beets and kale we’ll eat in December in July.
Peak Oil, loss of diversity, species extinction, conspiracy, oil spills, food insecurity …. the problems that we face seem to increase both in size and complexity every day. However we can simplify all of these global issues and emphasize three primary concerns.
How many slick tricks have you learned about farming and gardening more or less by accident? My favorite example happened because of laziness.
In 1998, tobacco was Kentucky’s top cash crop…Major changes swept over the tobacco industry that year when it was pressured to compensate states for the public health costs associated with smoking as part of the National Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement. Kentucky received a payout of $3 billion over a 25-year period…Kentucky leaders opted to allocate $1.7 billion of its $3 billion share to agricultural development, and much of it went to support small-sized farms. This was thanks to a small but highly effective grassroots organization of family farmers and their allies, the Community Farm Alliance (CFA), which helped to ensure that much of the money devoted annually to agriculture would benefit small-sized farms directly…
I am hopefully now only days from handing in the PhD I have been doing, the closing stages of a gruelling marathon. I posted a couple of weeks ago the contents and the layout of the thesis, which is called Localisation and Resilience at the Local Level: the case of Transition Town Totnes (Devon, UK). I thought you might like to see a section of it, to give you a flavour. Apologies to regular readers that this is written in a far more academic style than you might be used to here, but hopefully you will find it useful and relevant. It comes from a section looking at the relocalisation of food, and draws from the different research I did.
On this part II of the series, we listen to segments from a one-on-one interview with Nancy Turner of the University of Victoria. Nancy is one of the most well-known ethnobiologists in Canada and Deconstructing Dinner’s Jon Steinman sat down with her in the community of Tofino to learn more about what ethnobiology is, why the field is an increasingly important one to pay attention to, and what we all might learn from the many indigenous peoples who ethnobiologists work with.
Ten days ago I spent a weekend in the northern rain teaching people how to mow grass with a scythe. I’ve been using a scythe for four or five years, though it’s only in the last year or so that I’ve got any good at it. I began using one because I wanted to cut the grass in my orchard without using smelly, noisy, petrolly power tools, and also because I had come across the great Simon Fairlie and his persuasive addiction to these ancient and mesmerising tools.
What is the difference between soil and dirt?
Soil is alive. Dirt is dead. A single teaspoon of soil can contain billions of microscopic bacteria, fungi, protozoa and nematodes. A handful of the same soil will contain numerous earthworms, arthropods, and other visible crawling creatures. Healthy soil is a complex community of life and actually supports the most biodiverse ecosystem on the planet.
-Permaculture in Malaysia
-Biomass Britain: do fields of energy crops spell an end to grazing livestock?
-A More Feminine Food System: Farmer Jane (a Book Review)
-Filming Haiti’s Food Crisis and Grassroots Movement for Sustainable Agriculture (VIDEO)
-Is the Next Global Food Crisis Now in the Making?
After a vivid and thoughtful discussion of the organic farming practices and the positive effects of a strong local economy that has in many ways rejuvenated the town of Hardwick, Vermont, the host, Robin Young, asked a pricelessly dense question: “but can sustainable farming really feed us all?” The thoughtless presumption of the question is that unsustainable farming might possibly be a better approach, that we ultimately have any choice but to follow sustainable practices, at least if we wish to sustain our civilization.
Much of the content of Deconstructing Dinner revolves primarily around the practice of agriculture; from examining the downsides and challenges of current agricultural systems to the opportunities and alternatives to those challenges. However, most of those alternatives that we examine are ‘agri’cultural alternatives, and so from time to time it’s important to step back and deconstruct that very focus… asking the question; “Are ‘agri’cultural alternatives an adequate response if they’re rooted within that same ‘agri’cultural box”? On this episode we listen to a talk Toby Hemenway delivered in February 2010 when he suggested that ‘sustainable agriculture’ might very well be a misnomer.
Food production is moving toward decentralization, and that is good news. With all the toxins and varmints and contrary weather and disintegration of the economy, our best bet, maybe our only bet, is to spread out the risks of food production to the largest number of people possible and that is happening.
