Building resilient food and farming systems

Start Small – The Story of Bec Hellouin Permaculture Farm

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You have to take the time to train yourself. You have to take the time to convince yourself or to test yourself in the profession, to dirty your hands in the soil and to really see what it’s all about. There is a lot of fantasy around these projects but there’s also a reality which is difficult. It can be absolutely incredible, but it can be a nightmare if it’s done without preparation, without a good human design, without a good design for the site.

Organic Agriculture for 10 Billion People

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Organic agriculture can feed the world. The only question thereby being what “feeding the world” may mean. Today, it basically means high shares of animal products in diets and that a third of production is wasted. Projections for 2050 look similar. Does this make sense? No. And this is the entry point for organic agriculture to play a role in sustainable food systems and for contributing to food security.

Life All Around: The Joys and Challenges of Small Farming with Bill Parke & Blackview Farm

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Bill Parke of Blackview Farm, a pasture-based livestock farm that uses rotational grazing and Holistic Management practices, was nice enough to sit down with me and talk for a bit about the farming life.

Healthy Soil, Healthy Plants, Healthy People

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Healthy soil is so important for life on earth yet so poorly understood or appreciated.  Science and technology brought us the “green revolution”; chemical fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, supersized tractors, genetically modified crops adapted to life drenched with agricultural chemicals.  What is rarely apparent to most agricultural specialists is the damage this is causing the soil, basically turning it into ‘dirt’.

A Precautionary Tale: Excerpt

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As Günther and his cows wove their way through Laatsch, a beeping horn stopped him. He turned around, spreading his arms to slow the bovine promenade behind him, and let the car slip by before he and his cows stepped back into the main thoroughfare for their jaunt from the barn to pasture. The driver had Swiss plates and a business suit. Someone in a rush to make money, he surmised, while he headed out to his fields to seal his own financial fate in several plastic bags.

Saving Farmland for Future Generations

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Welcome to community-owned Huxhams Cross Farm set on the rolling hills of south Devon on the edge of the Dartington Hall estate. Secured by the Biodynamic Land Trust (of which more later), its 34-acres exemplifies human-scale farming in a world increasingly dominated by industrial farming.

Hurricane Maria Crushed Puerto Rico farms. This Activist Wants to Grow Resilience through Food.

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Obviously, we are still in the emergency relief situation, but food takes time to grow. And so we really, really need to see this as an immediate issue. How do we get farmers back to farming? How do we get a roof over their heads? How do we get them seeds? How do we get them tools? Because it takes a while to not only be happier, but to be more autonomous.

The Role of Imagination in Craft Brewing

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As much as I see imagination coming through in the beers that people are making, I see it coming through in the business models and the experiences that they’re offering.  To me this is still somewhat of a golden age in what’s possible from an imaginative standpoint in craft beer.

Vermont has Developed America’s Most Comprehensive Food Plan

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By many accounts, Vermont has developed the most comprehensive food system plan in the United States. How did Vermonters do it? We harnessed the power of networks to build trust, pursue new opportunities, and tackle long-standing problems across the state and have developed a comprehensive data collection, analysis, and visualization system for tracking progress and telling stories.

A Food Policy for Europe

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A ‘successful’ Common Agricultural Policy reform thus defined, however, can come and go without any meaningful progress in addressing the challenge of building sustainable food systems in Europe. The problem with the CAP is not only what it does, but what as an agricultural policy it does not and cannot do. Europe urgently needs a food policy (or a ‘Common Food Policy’). There are five key reasons why this shift is required, and why the time is now ripe for it to occur.

Eating Local in Bristol: Working Together

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One of the most encouraging things about the local food movement in Bristol is the strong networks that have been created across the city. From city-wide groups working to bring about policy-level change, to small collectives of growers working together, these are the people and projects working to produce good food in and around the city.

Saving George Monbiot

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George has been almost a lone voice in the mainstream British media putting the case thoughtfully and iconoclastically for radical, egalitarian and environmental alternatives to a status quo that’s so fawningly celebrated by the majority of his journalistic colleagues. But when it comes to his recent article enthusing about the advent of artificial meat as the welcome death knell for livestock farming…George, you’re scaring me, man.