Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
With the Green New Deal, social movements and our representatives in Congress have the chance to transition away from our harmful and polluting industrial agriculture model to a system that is healthy, just, and works for everyone.
Regenerating soil to change the piece of the planet where you live is possible at multiple scales. It might be a city yard like ours, rooftop garden, community garden, or working farm. Add up these efforts, and we can restore fertility to degraded soils, end hunger, and pull some carbon from the sky.
If current trends continue, rural America will soon be owned by a handful of families and corporations who will run their empires remotely with driverless tractors and poorly paid staff.
While the subject of this story is what we may call biocultural, eco-culinary, or reciprocal restoration, it is quite often enabled through a social process that has been called either community-based restoration, collaborative conservation, or cooperative collaboration.
In terms of money and the flow of capital through complex securities, millisecond computer trades, and financial institutions that are Too Big To Fail, trillions means mind-numbing. In terms of microbes and life in the soil, trillions means teeming.
A recent report from the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) confirms that the current food system isn’t sustainable neither for the environment nor for our health. Organic agriculture, conservation farming and agro-ecology are key technologies for a transition to a sustainable food system, which also has to shun artificial nitrogen fertilizers.
Squashes and pumpkins are great because they’re easy to grow, are a low input/ high output crop with very low maintenance and watering, and most importantly because they provide a good winter survival food.
For many of us who actually live along the U.S.-Mexico border, the “Mesquite Manifesto” addresses economic and climate problems by building up industry around the native tree.
Bavaria’s remarkable campaign to save the bees can give us all cause for optimism. Where politicians failed to protect the environment and put corporate profits first, Bavarians stood up
We need stop focusing on what we eat, and start focusing on how the food we eat is produced. Then we can move towards a sustainable, healthy farming system that provides for all people and doesn’t destroy the planet and its inhabitants in the process.
While few people yet realise it, we actually need to encourage increased production of grass-fed meat, since the most effective way to restore our degraded arable soils and wild pollinators is to re-introduce grass and grazing animals into cropland rotations.
Joel Salatin is an internationally known author, farmer and advocate for what he calls “emotionally, economically and environmentally enhancing agriculture.”
