Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Having other income streams than farming is not only because you can’t live on small scale farming (you can’t) but also a way to allow you to run the farm according to your ideals rather than to the dictates of the market, banks or the government. A “day job” can in that way strengthen the autonomy or at least the feeling of autonomy
There are plenty of books and websites telling you how forest gardens should work. I am more interested in how they do (and sometimes don’t) work, and in the people who are working in and with them.
It didn’t take long before I realized that the social component of being a smallholder was more important to understand their situation than various economic theories, and that the way they farmed often was quite rational if one considered their total situation and not looked at farming as an isolated commercial enterprise.
Farming is a science but it is also an art. There is no one book, one philosophy, one six-week course which can teach that.
The water from our well is fresh and invigorating to drink. It does not have the chemical taste of mains tap water nor its ‘flatness’. Also, we are fortunate that we live in a region of high ground, and the surrounding soil has not been subject to modern farming (chemical treatment) for many decades.
Vermont is proof that humans can localize food, as well as most of our other basic needs, and still live very well.
There is nowhere in the industrialised world where food is produced sustainably. The only place where that happens is the non-industrialised world where the main 2 energy inputs are forms of renewable energy – human and animal muscle power.
An appeal by the Founding Farmers of EARA to join us in our journey to farm for regeneration and advocate together to re-root Europe towards a prosperous future.
We have the option to utterly divest, and build CARE based opportunities outside the current system. Which is what CARE-HOME-FARM is. It’s a model, which we hope to test and explore in real life, for an inter-sufficient community.
For communities, preparing for these future risks requires learning from past floods but also recognizing that future storms may produce flooding that goes beyond the scale of anything seen before.
A master gardener and co-founder of the SEED association for the preservation and use of the region’s traditional seed varieties, Frank Adams has long been involved in the legislative battle waged by seed savers to gain recognition for the necessity and specific nature of their work.
But for sure we’ve got to do something different to avert the present suicidal and ecocidal course of our food system. I’ve made the case in my two recent books for agrarian localism as the best something different option.
