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Webinar Description:

For the local food movement to grow exponentially in your community, you must take your place on the front lines. To ignite a new level of impact, effectiveness, and scale, you must master the seven revolutionary steps of building a regional foodshed:

Making the transition from the global industrial food system to a highly localized regional foodshed is an evolutionary process of healing and regeneration that you can learn and align with. If you are serious about local food systems, and want to significantly increase the potency and legacy of your work, this webinar is for you.

In this 90-minute session, Michael Brownlee and Lynette Marie Hanthorn—long-time foodshed catalysts and founders of the Local Food Academy—will reveal:

– Why the local food movement has stalled, and how it can be re-ignited

– How regional foodsheds can become our society’s lifeboats to a regenerative future

– The seven practical steps towards becoming a leader of the local food revolution in your community

“A hundred years from now, everyone will be eating what we today would define as local organic food, whether or not we act. But what we do now will determine how many will be eating, what state of health will be enjoyed by those future generations, and whether they will live in a ruined cinder of a world, or one that is in the process of being renewed and replenished.” – Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute

About This Webinar:

This free, interactive webinar is limited to 100 participants, so please register early! If all spaces are filled, you will still be able to watch a live broadcast of this event on the Transition US Facebook page. However, only those who have registered in advance will be able to participate in polls and ask questions of the speaker.

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The great agricultural resettlement or the next chapter of the fall

March 13, 2018

The great agricultural resettlement or the next chapter of the fall

Here’s my own picture.

I am a farmer and that is where my world begins. What is an agriculture? I say it is a culture of cities, towns and villages, bridges, roads, canals, harbours – of trades’ people and the trades, which have been created by the specialised cultivation of fields. The industrial revolution was a revolution within agriculture – germinated by fossil fuels, so that today, nearly every culture on Earth is an agriculture. The farmer has a lot on her shoulders, because the greatest towering city, and all its goings-on, is utterly dependant on her crops – although in my Utopian picture, trades and pleasures of every kind bear their own egalitarian apportionment of the weight, so that the labours of fields gain new springs to their steps.

Farms disrupt natural systems. The more husbandries imitate and integrate with natural systems, so the less they disrupt – but still they will disrupt to some degree. Good husbandry reflects our ordered minds more than the complexities of nature. Nevertheless, it imitates, as best it can, the cyclic behaviours of organisms. The highest crop yield will be achieved by the closest integration. “You never enjoy the world aright, till you are clothed with the heavens and crowned with the stars”, wrote Thomas Traherne in the Seventeenth Century. To which the farmer pragmatically adds – and shod with soil fauna, shaded with green leaves, watered by clear springs and fed by lives we’ve fed in return.

I must note that true yield is output minus input – massive inputs massively reduce true yield, so that organic methods out-yield all others.

So, in attempting to do the best we can, we choose the least worst farming techniques. This is important to keep our humility and gratitude intact. It is also an important part of discussions on climate change. There have been outrageous claims of carbon sequestration (so-called negative emissions) by a variety of farming techniques, such as grasslands, or organically-managed lands – or regularly-felled woodland, or coppice. But the most these can achieve is a balance and that balance, given the flawed nature of all human practitioners is unlikely. As climate change accelerates and weather grows more unpredictable, so that balance will become still more unlikely.

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

Inefficient productivity or productive inefficiency?

February 6, 2018

Inefficient productivity or productive inefficiency?

New research demonstrates – again – how deceptive the concepts of productivity and efficiency are in agriculture. Huge increases in labor productivity and modest increases in land productivity are gained by a massive increase of use of external resources, while natural capital is depleted. Is that efficient?

There is a growing body of research measuring resource flows to better understand the impact of developments. It is argued that only if economic growth can become substantially decoupled from material use, waste, and emissions, it can be sustainable. By measuring total use of resources, the total social metabolism, of the economy and not just measuring one parameter, one can avoid being distracted by the fact that usage of one resource has declined, while others have increased.

A sub set of the metabolism of society is the agrarian metabolism which refers to the exchange of energy and materials between a given society and its agrarian environment. In the article The agrarian metabolism as a tool for assessing agrarian sustainability, and its application to Spanish agriculture (1960-2008) in ECOLOGY AND SOCIETY, January 2018, Gloria I. Guzman (Universidad Pablo de Olavide) and colleagues assess how the metabolism of Spanish agriculture has changed through the increased use of mechanization, irrigation, chemical fertilizers and massive use of imported animal feed, to mention the most important drivers.

We are told again and again that modern agriculture and the Green revolution are wonders of efficiency and productivity. But when one look closer into the Spanish figures they give a different picture.

The researchers studied the use of external inputs such as nitrogen (N), phosphorus (P), potassium (K), carbon (C), and energy flows, as well as the “fund elements” that they sustain such as soil, biodiversity, and woodland. The results show that the growing use of external inputs has broken the equilibrium between land and biomass uses required by traditional farming and broken or made redundant internal loops of energy and nutrients.

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

Industrial Agriculture and the Agrochemical Industry

February 2, 2018

Industrial Agriculture and the Agrochemical Industry

The chemical-intensive industrial model of agriculture has secured the status of ‘thick legitimacy’. This status stems from on an intricate web of processes successfully spun in the scientific, policy and political arenas. It status allows the model to persist and appear normal and necessary. This perceived legitimacy derives from the lobbying, financial clout and political power of agribusiness conglomerates which, throughout the course of the last century (and continued today), set out to capture or shape government departments, public institutions, the agricultural research paradigm, international trade and the cultural narrative concerning food and agriculture.

Critics of this system are immediately attacked for being anti-science, for forwarding unrealistic alternatives, for endangering the lives of billions who would starve to death and for being driven by ideology and emotion. Strategically placed industry mouthpieces like Jon Entine, Owen Paterson and Henry Miller perpetuate such messages in the media and influential industry-backed bodies like the Science Media Centre feed journalists with agribusiness spin.

From Canada to the UK, governments work hand-in-glove with the industry to promote its technology over the heads of the public. A network of scientific bodies and regulatory agencies that supposedly serve the public interest have been subverted by the presence of key figures with industry links, while the powerful industry lobby hold sway over bureaucrats and politicians.

Monsanto played a key part in drafting the WTO Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights to create seed monopolies and the global food processing industry had a leading role in shaping the WTO Agreement on the Application of Sanitary and Phytosanitary Measures (see this). From Codex, the Knowledge Initiative on Agriculture aimed at restructuring Indian agriculture to the proposed US-EU trade deal (TTIP), the powerful agribusiness lobby has secured privileged access to policymakers to ensure its preferred model of agriculture prevails.

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

Farming for a Small Planet

January 12, 2018

Farming for a Small Planet

People yearn for alternatives to industrial agriculture, but they are worried. They see large-scale operations relying on corporate-supplied chemical inputs as the only high-productivity farming model. Another approach might be kinder to the environment and less risky for consumers, but, they assume, it would not be up to the task of providing all the food needed by our still-growing global population.

Contrary to such assumptions, there is ample evidence that an alternative approach—organic agriculture, or more broadly “agroecology”—is actually the only way to ensure that all people have access to sufficient, healthful food. Inefficiency and ecological destruction are built into the industrial model. But, beyond that, our ability to meet the world’s needs is only partially determined by what quantities are produced in fields, pastures, and waterways. Wider societal rules and norms ultimately shape whether any given quantity of food produced is actually used to meet humanity’s needs. In many ways, how we grow food determines who can eat and who cannot—no matter how much we produce. Solving our multiple food crises thus requires a systems approach in which citizens around the world remake our understanding and practice of democracy.

Today, the world produces—mostly from low-input, smallholder farms—more than enough food: 2,900 calories per person per day. Per capita food availability has continued to expand despite ongoing population growth. This ample supply of food, moreover, comprises only what is left over after about half of all grain is either fed to livestock or used for industrial purposes, such as agrofuels.¹

Despite this abundance, 800 million people worldwide suffer from long-term caloric deficiencies. One in four children under five is deemed stunted—a condition, often bringing lifelong health challenges, that results from poor nutrition and an inability to absorb nutrients. Two billion people are deficient in at least one nutrient essential for health, with iron deficiency alone implicated in one in five maternal deaths.²

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

The Mindset of Monoculture

November 15, 2017

THE MINDSET OF MONOCULTURE

Since the onset of the Industrial Revolution, it has been fairly easy to fall into the mindset of monoculture. The lure of big machines offering us power and control; making our lives easier in some senses, but more complicated in others; has led us into an all-encompassing embrace of the mindset and paradigm that made the modern-day world possible.

For thousands of years, we collectively labored away at a lifestyle that was completely vulnerable to the elements of nature. Months of hard work growing the crops we needed to survive could be wiped out in one fell swoop by an extended drought or an unmanageable pest problem. A simple bacterial infection could lead to death and citywide plagues were a common occurrence.

When the Industrial Revolution rolled around, we began to find that our vulnerability could be reduced through trusting in a paradigm that promised to control the natural world and direct it for our own use. All we had to do was trust that the masters of capital and wealth would continue to find ways to keep us on the path of progress and growth.

While the spoils of that growth have hardly been fairly shared and distributed, the vast majority of us have come to believe wholeheartedly in the industrial-capitalist growth paradigm which has reached every corner of the globe. From downtown Manhattan to the tiniest villages in Malawi, many of us have come to believe that the only viable path forward is through embracing a worldview and lifestyle that originated in Europe and has reached its most powerful manifestations in the United States.

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

Food as Medicine

November 14, 2017

Food as Medicine

Hippocrates said “Let food be they medicine, and medicine be thy food.” At the doctor’s office for my annual checkup I was asked to list any herbs I take and I thought “this should be interesting.” Sure, I take herbal supplements but what about all the fresh or dried herbs I cook with or drink as tea? What about Mediterranean herbs in spaghetti, garlic in hummus, basil in pesto, chamomile or mint tea? What about carrots, sweet potatoes and squash in navy bean soup to boost our immune system and fight off colds? I asked the doctor if I should list basil in pesto and was told “No, that’s food!” (along with a look that said I must be an idiot). Well isn’t that the point, that our food is our medicine!

I was watching T.V. and listening to the warnings of side effects from the medicine being advertised, and wondered why people consider the risk worth taking the medicine! Many food and drugs sold seem to cause health problems. There’s a phenomenon called ‘prescription cascade’ where one prescription causes side effects that require another prescription, which causes side effects that require another prescription, which causes side effects…. and well, you get the idea. Nice profit for drug companies and doctors who control the prescriptions.

Our industrial agriculture and food manufacturing practices are making food with lower nutritional value. Fresh minimally processed ‘whole’ food contains nutrients important for our health such as calcium, magnesium, potassium, iron, beta-carotene, vitamin B-complex, vitamin-C, vitamin-A, and vitamin K, antioxidants, soluble and insoluble fiber. Processed food has nutritional supplements added back in along with preservatives and artificial color and flavors, and many other food additives. We no longer think of food as medicine, or expect it to be medicine. We are more often concerned about the negative aspects, avoiding the unhealthy foods we shouldn’t eat. Plants have provided our medicine for most of human history.

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

No-Till Farming For Healthier Soil and Lifestyles

November 7, 2017

NO-TILL FARMING FOR HEALTHIER SOIL AND LIFESTYLES

Masanobu Fukuoka, the late Japanese farmer, developed a unique farming system he called “Natural Farming.” Trying to replicate what he saw in Nature, Fukuoka´s no till system allowed the soil to continually grow in fertility. Through the use of mulch and cover crops, this system effectively allows for continuous harvests of crop rotations, eliminates weeds and builds healthy top soil allowing for organic food production that is ecologically sustainable.

PROBLEMS WITH TILL AGRICULTURE

Farmers have been tilling the soil for 10,000 years. It is what exemplifies the occupation of those who make their living from the land. Tilling the soil allowed humanity to produce higher concentrations of food in one place giving rise to the denser populations of city centers and eventually the development of modern civilization as we know it. However, tilling the soil also brought with it a whole host of undesirable effects, including erosion and the loss of the microbial life of the soil. Some studies have linked the fall of major civilizations such as the Mayans of Mesoamerica to the over farming of the land which eventually led to a decreasing soil capacity.

By tilling the soil year after year, the microscopic life of billions of creatures in the top three inches of the soil is essentially killed off. What’s left over is a barren, lifeless medium incapable of offering the nutrients plants need to grow and offer us their fruit. Furthermore, the more we till the soil, the more we leave the precious humus that is the life-sustaining “skin” of our planet vulnerable to the elements of wind and rain. The erosion of top soil caused by tilling and the “baring” of the soil has led to soil compaction, loss of fertility, poor drainage, and problems with plant reproduction.

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

The Seeds of Agroecology and Common Ownership

October 10, 2017

The Seeds of Agroecology and Common Ownership

The increasingly globalised industrial food system that transnational agribusiness promotes is not feeding the world and is responsible for some of the planet’s most pressing political, social and environmental crises. Localised, traditional methods of food production have given way to globalised supply chains dominated by transnational companies policies and actions which have resulted in the destruction of habitat and livelihoods and the imposition of corporate-controlled, chemical-intensive (monocrop) agriculture that weds farmers and regions to a wholly exploitative system of neoliberal globalisation.

Whether it involves the undermining or destruction of what were once largely self-sufficient agrarian economies in Africa or the devastating impacts of soy cultivation in Argentina or palm oil production in Indonesia, transnational agribusiness and global capitalism cannot be greenwashed.

In their rush to readily promote neoliberal dogma and corporate PR, many take as given that profit-driven transnational corporations have a legitimate claim to be custodians of natural assets. There is the premise that water, seeds, land, food, soil and agriculture should be handed over to powerful, corrupt transnational corporations to milk for profit, under the pretence these entities are somehow serving the needs of humanity.

These natural assets (‘the commons’) belong to everyone and any stewardship should be carried out in the common interest by local people assisted by public institutions and governments acting on their behalf, not by private transnational corporations driven by self-interest and the maximization of profit by any means possible.

The Guardian columnist George Monbiot notes the vast wealth the economic elite has accumulated at our expense through its seizure of the commons. A commons is managed not for the accumulation of capital or profit but for the steady production of prosperity or wellbeing of a particular group, who might live in or beside it or who created and sustain it.

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

Farming for a Small Planet: Agroecology Now

April 27, 2016

Farming for a Small Planet: Agroecology Now

The primary obstacle to sustainable food security is an economic model and thought system, embodied in industrial agriculture, that views life in disassociated parts, obscuring the destructive impact this approach has on humans, natural resources, and the environment. Industrial agriculture is characterized by waste, pollution, and inefficiency, and is a significant contributor to climate change. Within so-called free market economics, enterprise is driven by the central goal of bringing the highest return to existing wealth. This logic leads inexorably to the concentration of wealth and power, making hunger and ecosystem disruption inevitable. The industrial system does not and cannot meet our food needs. An alternative, relational approach—agroecology—is emerging and has already shown promising success on the ground. By dispersing power and building on farmers’ own knowledge, it offers a viable path to healthy, accessible food; environmental protection; and enhanced human dignity.

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

The Problem of Agriculture

October 8, 2015

The Problem of Agriculture

This is an excerpt from the new book Plain Radical: Living, Loving, and Learning to Leave the Planet Gracefully, published by Counterpoint/Soft Skull, which tells the story of Robert Jensen’s intellectual and political collaboration with teacher/activist Jim Koplin.

I was born and raised in North Dakota, a rural state with an economy that historically has been dependent on agriculture, but I knew virtually nothing about the hard work of farming—nor did I understand the way farming creates ecological crises—until I met Jim Koplin. At that time, like most people who labeled themselves as an environmentalist, I thought in terms of pollution in human communities and the need for wilderness preservation. Farming was, well, just something farmers did, not an ecological question. One of the most important contributions Jim made to my education was exposing me to a critique of the increasing industrialization of agriculture, which led me to recognize that there is no solution to environmental problems without facing the problem of agriculture.

That phrase—the problem of agriculture, instead of problems in agriculture—is taken from Wes Jackson, who points out that our species’ fundamental break with nature came roughly 10,000 years ago when we started farming. While gathering-hunting humans were capable of damaging a local ecosystem in limited ways, the shift to agriculture and the domestication of animals meant humans for the first time could dramatically alter ecosystems, typically with negative consequences. While there have been better and worse farming practices in history, soil erosion has been a consistent feature of agriculture, making agriculture the first step in the entrenchment of an unsustainable human economy based on extraction.

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

Joel Salatin: The Pursuit Of Food Freedom

June 29, 2015

Joel Salatin: The Pursuit Of Food Freedom

A right worth fighting for

Sustainable farming activist Joel Salatin and author of Everything I Want To Do Is Illegal returns this week to talk about the importance of a basic human right: to choose what to eat.

In past podcasts, he’s described the challenges facing farmers who want to grow organically. This week, he sheds light on the additional challenges consumers face in getting access to quality produce and meats.

The bottom line is our industrial system (or, as Joel puts it, the “fraternity”) seeks to protect itself and its existing revenue streams. Research is commissioned to discredit the claimed benefits of organic farming. FDA nutrition guidelines favor the mono-crops grown by factory farms, despite mounting evidence these guidelines are not in the public health’s interest. Pesticides and herbicides are used in ever-greater amounts. Distribution infrastructure doesn’t enable small-scale delivery trucks (which most organic farms use) to plug into it. For those not living in an area concentrated with small farms, being able to identify and purchase healthy food options is difficult.

Joel recommends we elevate “food freedom” to the same status as we demand for other core personal liberties like public safety and legal equality:

We need to celebrate and energize the public to defend the freedom to acquire the food of our choice from the source of our choice. This whole orthodoxy thing we’ve been talking about is militating right now against being able to choose for ourselves the kind of fuel we want for our own bodies. I look at this whole food freedom effort as rectifying something that was missed in the Bill of Rights. We’ve got the right to own a gun, the right to assemble, the right to worship, the right to speak, the right to be secure in our persons without a search warrant. There are all sorts of wonderful rights. But we did not get the right to choose our food.

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

Back in time: Retracing the path to diversity

May 28, 2015

Back in time: Retracing the path to diversity

Industrial bread production is based on speed, scale and uniformity. To supply this system, industrially grown grain is limited to a few, highly controlled varieties. But greater diversity would make grain crops more adaptable and therefore more sustainable in the long run. How are some plant breeders, farmers, millers and bakers retracing the path to ancient, diverse grains that will see us eating healthier, tastier bread into the future?

All grain was once grass

Some 10,000 years ago, hunter gatherers began to eat different grasses to supplement their diet of berries, nuts, meat and fish. Over time, they domesticated some of these grasses through careful cultivation. In his book Six Thousand Years of Bread, H.E. Jacob describes how early man transformed the “wild grain into a domestic animal”. So began thousands of years of humans working with the environment to grow grain that could adapt to different climates and soils. However, with the onset of industrial farming in the early 20th century ‘ancient grains’, as they are now called, and the knowledge developed with them, became a thing of the past.

Diversity creates stability

Dr Philippa Ryan is an archeobotanist at The British Museum who specialises in studying ancient grains and understanding why some varieties might have been forgotten or lost while others were encouraged. At the Oxford Food Forum | Future of Food’s recent conference, she spoke about how Sudanese farmers have an historic capacity to adapt to changes in climate, technology and the economy. This resilience is due in large part to their diverse use of established grains such as pearl millet, sorghum, barley and wheat, which have been adapted over time.

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

Honeybee Collapse is the Result of Their Enslavement in Industrial Monocultures

May 26, 2015

Honeybee Collapse is the Result of TheirEnslavement in Industrial Monocultures

As you may have noticed, last week the media was once again filled with yet another round of collapsing honeybee stories, this time the coverage being about the loss of 42.1 percent of hives in the US over the past year, the second largest die-off on record.

As has been the recurring case though, thanks in part to beekeepers making splits with their hives (creating two hives out of one, in short), hive numbers have actually increased this year in comparison to last year’s. This doesn’t however mean that the honeybees’ health is improving, a quote in the Washington Post giving a bit of the backstory.

What has emerged is a complex set of pressures on managed and wild bee populations that includes disease, a parasite known as the varroa mite, pesticides, extreme weather and poor nutrition tied to a loss of forage plants.

Well, yes and no. While Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is fortunately not being singled out this time as the sensationalist bogeyman, the beating around the bush still goes on, effectively clouding over the overarching issue (their poor nutrition is tied to more than just a loss of forage plants, while the “disease” they must deal with is more than just another checkbox on a list). In short, the core of the problem afflicting the majority of honeybees is that they are confined to living out their lives amongst fields of monocultures in the industrial agricultural system.

For starters, with the creation of monocultures encompassing hundreds and sometimes thousands of acres, farms are no longer able to provide the living environment necessary to maintain honeybee colonies, and in many cases even wild pollinators.

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

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