Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
Earlier this year I worked with the UK Agri-foods for Net Zero Network (AFN for short) to help them develop a set of scenarios about the future of food production and consumption. The purpose of the scenarios was to stretch their thinking around the types of research that could help to accelerate the transition of the sector to Net Zero.
Informed by the knowledge that leather originated in food systems, I aimed to explore how that connection could influence my work as a designer. I decided that in order to find answers to my questions, I’d need to follow it as a product from the field and confront its transformation into food and fibre.
If we start instead by attending to aspirational values — such as equity, empowerment, and respect and reciprocity with the natural world — we will better see the long-term transformative potential of solutions we already have in hand to build food systems that are more sustainable, regenerative and just.
The EU Horizon 2020 FRAMEwork project is supporting a transition to biodiversity sensitive farming by uniting farmer clusters and citizen observatories to protect sensitive ecosystems while ensuring food security.
Our weeds are just where they belong, in our fields, along our roads, in every compromised, degraded, or devastated ecosystem. Free food and medicine in our backyards. Essential for ecosystem restoration, perhaps they will also be essential for our future food and medicine.
Still, the wider issues concerning food, land and labour are important, and in view of the present historical moment on our farm and in the world it seems opportune to discuss them.
We will never approach resilience unless we wade into the vast pool of little-known and rarely used plants. This time of year, as many of you are buying seeds for the spring, consider devoting a piece of your land for experimenting with new crops and new varieties. Not all your experiments will work, but some might prove easier, healthier, more pest-resistant, tastier, or more suited to your particular patch of the landscape that what you are planting no
Here’s how I’d parse it: being a settler is going to be an increasingly common human experience in the future. Lasch teaches us useful things about the politics of settler livelihood-making, while Ghosh teaches us useful things about how settlers must avoid becoming settler-colonists.
To decolonize college campuses, BIPOC students, allies, alumni, and faculty are reintroducing Indigenous growing practices.
Underutilised crops (UCs) or forgotten crops are less common species, landraces, cultivars, or heritage varieties whose use, production, and consumption is currently limited.
On this Reality Roundtable, Nate is joined by small-scale farmer Jason Bradford, permaculturist and documentarian Andrew Millison, regenerative agriculture activist Vandana Shiva, and regenerative farmer and educator Daniel Zetah to discuss the feasibility of a food system fully or mostly independent of fossil fuel inputs.
My little flock expanded in November 2013 when Bob told me about a ram lamb for sale from a Boreray flock in the Highlands that had started with sheep from Bob.
