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Tree Crops

October 3, 2017

Chestnut bud in spring day

For thousands of years, farmers have generally differentiated forestry and agriculture. Forests were either left alone or planted and maintained as a source of fuel and building material. In the best of cases, certain trees also offered forage for livestock and other farm animals. The farm fields were generally kept clear of any trees because farming was relegated to nothing more than the planting and harvesting of annual (mostly grain) crops.

The only trees acceptable to farming were fruit bearing trees, and these were usually planted on areas of the farm where the terrain was too steep or otherwise unfit for the tillage needed for annual grain crops. With the ever more obvious problems related to the annual tillage of the soil and annual agriculture in general, many people have begun to consider the possibility of growing trees as crops.

THE BEGINNINGS OF FOREST AGRICULTURE

The idea of growing trees as crops is not a new one. Indigenous cultures around the world have been growing and managing diversified, edible forest ecosystems (food forests, in permaculture jargon) for thousands of years. From the multi-story tropical food forests of Mesoamerica to growing evidence that large swaths of the Amazon Jungle were actually human-controlled environments, indigenous peoples around the world have long understood the benefits of tree crops and perennial agriculture systems.

From the western perspective, however, it was J. Russell Smith in the 1920´s who first began considering the idea of trees as crops. Smith´s seminal work was published under the title of “Tree Crops: A Permanent Agriculture” in 1929. In this book, he looked at several farming cultures around the world that, instead of relying on the annual tillage of the soil for grain crops, actually depended on carefully managed forest ecosystems that provided an abundance of edible foodstuffs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What We Sow is What We Eat

September 19, 2017

What We Sow is What We Eat

I am lying in a meadow high in the Rocky Mountains. The sun is warm and comforting. I watch the clouds, puffy white in the blue sky, but soon pull a cap over my eyes and enter that state where thoughts swirl through your head and you don’t know if you’re sleeping or not.

While I rest, Karen is looking for wild strawberries. She has a remarkable eye for them, and has found the delicate plants everywhere from along the ocean in Nova Scotia to the volcanic highlands of the Big Island in Hawai’i. She remembers as she is searching the hard labor of picking the tiny berries as a girl, gathering enough for her mother to make jelly. No easy task as I have learned when she finds a patch big enough for me to collect some too.

When all you have ever eaten are the overly large and often woody and tasteless strawberries sold in grocery stores, putting a wild one in your mouth is a revelation. A gift from the earth, sweet, tart, wonderful, perfect. They leave your fingers smelling like, well, strawberries.

We’ve found many fruits on our hikes. Strawberries, raspberries, blueberries, cherries sweet and sour, currants, huckleberries, apples, plums, even liliko’i (passion fruit), guava, lemons, and limes. Some like the berries grow wild. Others have flourished long after they were planted and then abandoned.

Seeing and tasting these gifts of nature can’t help but make you think of the foods most of us eat. Heavily processed and full of salt, hydrogenated oil, and high fructose corn syrup; loaded with chemicals; laden with pesticides; grown on factory farms; treated like any other mass-produced products, aimed for the market with costs per unit low and profits high.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

How Permaculture is the Perfect Match for Homesteading

September 18, 2017

HOW PERMACULTURE IS THE PERFECT MATCH FOR HOMESTEADING

WHAT IS PERMACULTURE?

“Permaculture is a philosophy of working with, rather than against nature; of protracted & thoughtful observation rather than protracted & thoughtless labor; of looking at plants & animals in all their functions, rather than treating any area as a single-product system.”

BILL MOLLISON

The term permaculture is a portmanteau of “Permanent” and “Agriculture”, and “culture”. It began with a focus on the production of a sustainable food system, but grew into so much more over time, encompassing economic and social systems as well. The movement is dynamic, all-encompassing and still growing to this day. It is a very simple idea that is spreading world wide. It is living holistically, in perfect harmony with nature. Any system that provides for its own energy needs, is inherently sustainable. This same concept can be extended beyond things like biodiesels and solar powers.

The permaculture movement calls for many different things, different ways of planting and growing your foods. For example, it suggests using only plants that are planted only once, perennial crops, rather than things that need constant tillage. Tilling the ground is terrible for the soil. Along with that, permaculture encompasses the mantra of “working with, rather than against nature”. This is carried out by simple things, such as planting mashua under locust trees. Locust trees add nitrogen to the soil, while mashua needs a support structure to grow on. You won’t need to build a trellis for the vines, and the locust trees provide shade and protection for the vines while also serving as a nectar source for much-needed bees.

THE ORIGINS OF THE MOVEMENT

Bill Mollison, an Australian ecologist and professor, created the permaculture movement in the 1970’s. He was disgusted by the destruction of nature he saw going on around him, as his interests in nature and wildlife drew him into observing how natural systems work.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

All Food Is GONE! Violence Erupts On Caribbean Island Of St. Martin

September 12, 2017

All Food Is GONE! Violence Erupts On Caribbean Island Of St. Martin

water

Photo Credit: (New York Times) A woman in St. Martin carries a jug full of water.

Hurricane Irma ravaged the Caribbean islands last week and wiped entire islands off the map. Now that the food and water have been scavenged from every grocery store on St. Martin, people are resorting to violence.

The people obviously started with the grocery stores, scavenging what they needed for sustenance; water, crackers, and fruit. But according to the New York Times, by nightfall on Thursday, what had been a search for food took a more menacing turn, as groups of people (some of whom were armed), swooped in and violently took anything of value that was left. Things like electronics, appliances, and vehicles were all stolen.

The social fabric has begun to fray now that people are without the most basic of essentials: food and water. “All the food is gone now,” Jacques Charbonnier, a 63-year-old resident of St. Martin, said in an interview on Sunday. “People are fighting in the streets for what is left.” Residents of St. Martin, and elsewhere in the region, spoke about a general disintegration of law and order as survivors struggled in the face of severe food and water shortages, and the absence of electricity and phone service.

As reports of increasing desperation continued to emerge from the region over the weekend, governments in Britain, France and the Netherlands, which oversee territories in the region, stepped up their response. They defended themselves against criticism that their reaction had been too slow, and insufficient. Both the French and Dutch governments said they were sending in extra troops to restore order, along with the aid that was being airlifted into the region. –New York Times

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Crises That Have Come With Urbanization

September 12, 2017

THE CRISES THAT HAVE COME WITH URBANIZATION

One of the defining aspects of our current civilization and one of the most worrying trends of modernity is our urbanization as a species. When we take the long view of human history, it becomes obvious that for 99% of our history, we have been a rural people, the majority of us making our living off the land and in small, agrarian communities.

Though history (especially the last 2,000 years or so) has been written by the pens of the powerful. Concentrated in urban centers, our collective dependence on rural areas and the people who lived and farmed there was a stalwart of our survival.

According to recent studies, we have recently crossed the threshold of becoming a majority urban-dwelling species. Over half of our more than 8 billion people live in urban centers around the world and that number is only expected to increase in years to come. What does this mean for our collective survival? Is our urban-ness sustainable and desirable? How can we forge a healthy, ecological civilizational paradigm that is built around billions of people living away from the land where the most basic necessities of our survival are found and cultivated?

To begin with, we want to recognize and affirm that it is imperative for us as humans to reverse the trend of increasing urbanization. According to UN Habitat, every WEEK, close to three million people migrate from rural areas into urban areas. If this trend continues, the crises that come with urbanization will only propagate and magnify.

While we can construct sustainable urban spaces with the amount of people currently living in cities, we simply cannot continue to depopulate rural areas where the natural resources for our survival are found.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Visualizing The Future Of Food

September 11, 2017

Visualizing The Future Of Food

The urban population is exploding around the globe, and, as Visual Capitalist’s Jeff Desjardins explains below, yesterday’s food systems will soon be sub-optimal for many of the megacities swelling with tens of millions of people.

Further, issues like wasted food, poor working conditions, polluted ecosystems, mistreated animals, and greenhouse gases are just some of the concerns that people have about our current supply chains.

Today’s infographic from Futurism shows how food systems are evolving – and that the future of food depends on technologies that enable us to get more food out of fewer resources.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

What’s Your Plan B?

April 17, 2017

What’s Your Plan B?

Although Plan B includes a wide spectrum of options, these three basic categories define three different purposes for having an alternative residence lined up.

We all have a Plan A–continue living just like we’re living now.

Some of us have a Plan B in case Plan A doesn’t work out, and the reasons for a Plan B break out into three general categories:

1. Preppers who foresee the potential for a breakdown in Plan A due to a systemic “perfect storm” of events that could overwhelm the status quo’s ability to supply healthcare, food and transportation fuels for the nation’s heavily urbanized populace.

2. People who understand their employment is precarious and contingent, and they might have to move to another locale if they lose their job and can’t find another equivalent one quickly.

3. Those who tire of the stresses of maintaining Plan A and who long for a less stressful, less complex, cheaper and more fulfilling way of living.

The Fragility and Vulnerability of Highly Optimized Supply Chains

Many people are unaware of the fragility of the supply chains that truck in food, fuel and all the other commodities of industrialized comfort to cities. As a general rule, there are only a few days of food and fuel in a typical city, and any disruption quickly empties existing stocks. (Those interested in learning more might start with the book When Trucks Stop Running: Energy and the Future of Transportation.)

Most residents may not realize that the government’s emergency services are actually quite limited, and that a relatively small number of casualties/injured people (for example, a few thousand) in an urban area would overwhelm services designed to handle a relative handful of the millions of residents.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

This Region Of The World Is Being Hit By The Worst Economic Collapse It Has Ever Experienced

March 9, 2017

This Region Of The World Is Being Hit By The Worst Economic Collapse It Has Ever Experienced

The ninth largest economy in the entire world is currently experiencing “its longest and deepest recession in recorded history”, and in a country right next door people are being encouraged to label their trash so that the thousands upon thousands of desperately hungry people that are digging through trash bins on the streets can find discarded food more easily. Of course the two nations that I am talking about are Brazil and Venezuela. The Brazilian economy was once the seventh largest on the globe, but after shrinking for eight consecutive quarters it has now fallen to ninth place. And in Venezuela the economic collapse has gotten so bad that more than 70 percent of the population lost weight last year due to a severe lack of food. Most of us living in the northern hemisphere don’t think that anything like this could happen to us any time soon, but the truth is that trouble signs are already starting to erupt all around us. It is just a matter of time before the things currently happening in Brazil and Venezuela start happening here, but unfortunately most people are not heeding the warnings.

Just a few years ago, the Brazilian economy was absolutely roaring and it was being hailed as a model for the rest of the world to follow. But now Brazil’s GDP has been imploding for two years in a row, and this downturn is being described as “the worst recession in recorded history” for that South American nation…

Latin America’s largest economy Brazil has contracted by 3.6 percent in 2016, shrinking for the second year in a row; statistics agency IBGE said on Tuesday. It confirmed the country is facing its longest and deepest recession in recorded history.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Permaculture Kitchen Garden

January 29, 2017

Herb garten

PERMACULTURE KITCHEN GARDEN

Who doesn’t love cooking with fresh herbs? I love cooking with fresh ingredients. Using fresh cut culinary herbs and edible flowers is a really special thing. All growers know that from the time the plant is harvested you start losing flavor and nutrients. It’s important to get fresh-cut herbs if you want the most amazing flavor for you and your family.
Permaculture is such a heartwarming way to grow. You work with nature and then nature helps sustain you. We start at the soil and end eating these great herbs.

I start with these 6 bullet points that keep you on the right track.

• Placement- Permaculture makes things easy and efficient when it’s in an herb garden near the kitchen. The easier it is to collect the herbs, the more often you’ll use them. If you have a kitchen window, put the herb garden there. If you don’t have a kitchen window, as long as it’s easily accessible while you’re cooking, you’ll likely use the fresh produce.

• Soil- Soil is the lifeline that connects your food to you. Love your soil and it will love you back. You want to have the best mulch you can find. If you don’t have good fluffy soil, there are a few things you can do. My first suggestion is a mini hügelkultur. Simply mark out the area you will need for the plants you want to grow. Dig out a 2-3-foot-deep trench, and fill it with tree limbs and sections of cut up logs. Fill the hole back in with the soil, cover with thick mulch, and then plant your herbs. It’s that simple. By the end of summer you will have a jungle of herbs.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Trumpocalypse? Suddenly Liberals Are The Ones Stockpiling Food, Guns And Emergency Supplies

December 24, 2016

Trumpocalypse? Suddenly Liberals Are The Ones Stockpiling Food, Guns And Emergency Supplies

Now that the shoe is on the other foot, many liberals all over America have suddenly become extremely interested in prepping. Fearing that a Trump presidency could rapidly evolve into a “Trumpocalypse”, a significant number of leftists are now stockpiling food, guns and emergency supplies. In fact, even though many had expected a sharp drop in gun sales following Trump’s victory, what actually happened is that fear of what is coming under Trump pushed background checks for gun sales to an all-time record high on Black Friday. The election of Donald Trump has awakened the left to a degree that we haven’t seen in decades, and some on the left are embracing hardcore survivalism without any apologies.

What is ironic about all of this is that on the other end of the political spectrum interest in prepping is probably the lowest that it has ever been in the history of the modern prepper movement. A couple of weeks ago, I wrote an article about how it was like “a nuclear bomb went off in the prepping community“, and nothing has changed since that time.

In fact, since I originally wrote that article we have gotten some hard numbers that show how dramatically optimism about the future has surged among those on the right.

Just before the election, CNBC’s All-America Economic Survey found that only 15 percent of all Republicans believed that the economy would improve over the next year, but after the election that number skyrocketed all the way up to 74 percent.

But among Democrats it is a different story altogether. That same CNBC survey found that optimism about the economy on the left fell by more than half after the election. At this point, it is sitting at just 16 percent.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

103 Survival Food Prepper Should Check In Their List in 2016

November 12, 2016

103 Survival Food Prepper Should Check In Their List in 2016

Although you may not know of any immediate dangers or emergencies, it is best to be prepared for something long before it presents itself. Often, when a disaster arrives, supermarkets will run out of food rapidly. In fact, typically grocery stores only have a maximum of three days of goods on hand before they run out, so it would be best to prepare now.

Below are 103 items a prepper should consider to have on your long term food storage list because they have a long-shelf life, have multiples uses and can be great for bartering. and should pick up during your next grocery store visit to hold in case of emergency:

How do we choose them?

Shelf Life.

When the world is not the same as we knew it now. Chances are there will be no one restocking the food at the nearby Walmart. One of the best bet is to store only food that can last for decent amount of time.

Bartering

Unlike in video games, cash does little but to use as artificial fuel to keep your campfire burning (not that it is of much use in that aspect as well). Ensuring that you have items on hand that are essential for survival will also mean that you have bargaining chips in negotiations as well.

Multi-Purpose

Food are not only used to nourish our bodies. Some food even rises up to special occastions when you couldn’t find any such as cleaning or antibiotics.

1. Back To Basics

These ingredients are those that should be on any survival food list because they are foods that are the foundation of many meals. That being said, many can be eaten alone if need be.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why human waste should be used for fertilizer

September 17, 2016

Why human waste should be used for fertilizer

[ At John Jeavons Biointensive workshop back in 2003, I learned that phosphorous is limited and mostly being lost to oceans and other waterways after exiting sewage treatment plants. He said that it’s dangerous if done incorrectly and wasn’t going to cover this at the workshop, but to keep it in mind for the future.

Fertilizer increase crop production up to 5 times per acre. To give you an idea of how important natural-gas (feedstock and energy to make it) fertilizer is, here are a few paragraphs from Yeonmi Park’s recent book “In order to live: A North Korean girl’s journey to freedom”:

“One of the big problems in North Korea was a fertilizer shortage. When the economy collapsed in the 1990s, the Soviet Union stopped sending fertilizer to us and our own factories stopped producing it. Whatever was donated from other countries couldn’t get to the farms because the transportation system had also broken down. this led to crop failures that made the famine even worse. So the government came up with a campaign to fill the fertilizer gap with a local and renewable source: human and animal waste. Every worker and schoolchild had a quota to fill. Every member of the household had a daily assignment, so when we got up in the morning, it was like a war. My aunts were the most competitive.

“Remember not to poop in school! Wait to do it here!” my aunt in Kowon told me every day.

Whenever my aunt in Songnam-ri traveled away from home and had to pop somewhere else, she loudly complained that she didn’t have a plastic bag with her to save it.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Monsanto and Bayer: Why Food and Agriculture Just Took a Turn For The Worse

September 17, 2016

Monsanto and Bayer: Why Food and Agriculture Just Took a Turn For The Worse

defotoberg | Shutterstock.com

News broke this week that Monsanto accepted a $66 billion takeover bid from Bayer. The new company would control more than 25 per cent of the global supply of commercial seeds and pesticides. Bayer’s crop chemicals business is the world’s second largest after Syngenta, and Monsanto is the leading commercial seeds business.

Monsanto held a 26 per cent market share of all seeds sold in 2011. Bayer (mainly a pharmaceuticals company) sells 17 per cent of the world’s total agrochemicals and also has a comparatively small seeds sector. If competition authorities pass the deal, the combined company would be the globe’s largest seller of both seeds and agrochemicals.

The deal marks a trend towards consolidation in the industry with Dow and DuPont having agreed to merge and Swiss seed/pesticide giant Syngenta merging with ChemChina, a Chinese government concern.

The mergers would mean that three companies would dominate the commercial agricultural seeds and chemicals sector, down from six – Syngenta, Bayer, BASF, Dow, Monsanto and DuPont. Prior to the mergers, these six firms controlled 60 per cent of commercial seed and more than 75 per cent of agrochemical markets.

Alarm bells are ringing with the European Commission putting its approval of the Dow-DuPont deal temporarily on hold, and the US Senate Judiciary Committee is about to hold hearings on the deal due to concerns about consolidation in the industry, which has resulted in increased seed and pesticide prices.

In response to the Monsanto-Bayer merger, US National Farmers Union President Roger Johnson issued the following statement:

“Consolidation of this magnitude cannot be the standard for agriculture, nor should we allow it to determine the landscape for our future. The merger between Bayer and Monsanto marks the fifth major deal in agriculture in the last year…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle

July 17, 2016

Toxic Wheat, GMOs and the Precautionary Principle

Ben Shahn Daughter of Virgil Thaxton, farmer, near Mechanicsburg, Ohio 1938Recently, I posted a two-tear old article on facebook.com/TheAutomaticEarth that was shared so many times it seems to make sense to use it for an Automatic Earth article as well. The article asks how toxic the wheat we eat is – or Americans, more specifically-, and why that is.

But first I would like to touch on a closely connected issue, which is Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s ‘war’ on GMOs. Taleb, of Black Swans fame, has been at it for a while, but he’s stepped up his efforts off late.

In 2014, with co-authors Rupert Read, Raphael Douady, Joseph Norman and Yaneer Bar-Yam, he published The Precautionary Principle (with Application to the Genetic Modification of Organisms), an attempt to look at GMOs through a ‘solidly scientific’ prism of probability and complex systems. From the abstract:

The precautionary principle (PP) states that if an action or policy has a suspected risk of causing severe harm to the public domain (affecting general health or the environment globally), the action should not be taken in the absence of scientific near-certainty about its safety. Under these conditions, the burden of proof about absence of harm falls on those proposing an action, not those opposing it. PP is intended to deal with uncertainty and risk in cases where the absence of evidence and the incompleteness of scientific knowledge carries profound implications and in the presence of risks of “black swans”, unforeseen and unforeseable events of extreme consequence.

[..] We believe that the PP should be evoked only in extreme situations: when the potential harm is systemic (rather than localized) and the consequences can involve total irreversible ruin, such as the extinction of human beings or all life on the planet.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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