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Who eats local food?

December 11, 2020

Who eats local food?

The question of who eats local food is a tricky one to pin down.

There is first the question of what constitutes ‘local food’ – if you’re a farmer raising grass-fed beef or lamb in Wales that you then sell across country, most people would say that’s local enough; but what if you sold across the UK? How about the local jam producer that sells locally at farmers’ markets in their region but buys in fruit from Spain to make the jam? It’s something of a conundrum. You’ll also find that distance is yet another variable – many would agree that ‘local’ in the UK is within 50 miles, but in a big country like the US, food 500 miles away can also be ‘local’. So, it’s complicated and to a certain extent, how we define it may be idiosyncratic and particular to how each individual feels about the food they are eating.

‘Local food’ also suffers from an image problem – it’s assumed to be niche, more expensive and the purview of the upper middle-classes. A number of years ago, food critic Jay Rayner had a notable go at farmers’ markets, touting them as selling ‘over-priced fare’ as a ‘status symbol’, angering Welsh food producers. But ‘local food’ isn’t what many people posit it is – I know, because I’m a local food producer. While my evidence is inevitably anecdotal, I know we feed a diverse range of people. We run a box scheme serving well over 100 households and also do a weekly producer’s market in Newport, Pembrokeshire. The people who buy from us are anything but uniform in terms of their demographic make-up – I say this because we know a lot of our customers…

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

A global movement for localised food and farming: The beginning of agriculture in Europe

December 3, 2020

A global movement for localised food and farming: The beginning of agriculture in Europe

Image: Kelly Reed, Reconstructed Neolithic house at Sopot, Croatia

The world we inhabit today has changed dramatically since we first began farming thousands of years ago. Yet the challenge to provide food security to all is not new and has been a common struggle throughout our past. By looking back, we can see how things have developed and use our knowledge to think in different ways and open up new possibilities for the future of our food system.

This blog starts at the beginning, when early immigrant farmers moved into Europe from southwest Asia, gradually replacing and assimilating mobile hunter-gatherers who lived in this region. A new sedentary farming lifestyle provided greater control and stability over food supplies, which in turn allowed people to have more children and join together in larger, denser communities. This global movement allowed for demographic expansion of people across the globe, the formation of denser villages and eventually cities, and ultimately the accumulation of wealth and the formation of political and craft specialties. These features enabled the development of early states and empires, which engaged in increasingly more complex food procurement activities at varying scales across the globe.

How did the advent of farming change the scale of food production in Europe?

Agriculture originated in several small hubs around the world. The earliest started in the Fertile Crescent, a region of southwest Asia that includes parts of modern-day Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. The factors that drove people to first settle in one place and then more intensively focus on a few wild resources is widely debated, but between 15,000 and 12,000 years ago early Natufian people started to adopt a handful of key behaviours, notably sickle harvesting, grain grinding, seed saving, seed sowing, and tilling (e.g. Arranz-Otaegui et al. 2018)…

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

The Quiet Resilience of Willowbrook Farm

November 29, 2020

The Quiet Resilience of Willowbrook Farm

Willowbrook Farm is a fifty-acre plot near Oxford on which the Radwan family grows vegetables and rears chickens, cows and sheep to produce ethical and sustainable Halal meat. Throughout the tumult of the pandemic, this farm’s small-scale model lent it incredible resilience; while much of the UK’s food system was disrupted, Willowbrook, the UK’s first Halal and Tayyib farm (meaning a farm where Muslims can be assured that their meat has been reared according to ethical principles & which has been slaughtered in accordance with Islamic scripture), sustained a steady supply of meat to its customers, thanks to its deep roots in an established local and faith-based network. As they closed the farm’s gates to its usual visitors at the start of the lockdown, the Radwans had time for deep reflection, and a chance to finish ongoing projects, without having to worry about massive income loss.

COVID-19 has raised significant questions about meat production, and Lutfi and Ruby Radwan have added their voices to the chorus of environmental campaigners, scientists and animal welfare advocates arguing that the pandemic is a direct result of industrial-scale meat production.

“Healthy animals can withstand environmental and health stressors; when their bodies and immune systems are functioning well, they are able to fight off a host of viruses and diseases,” Lufti said. It is only when the animal’s health is compromised, as happens in intensive meat production, that these illnesses are able to develop into a more dangerous form.

“The whole issue is actually an environmental issue,”’ he said. “You can’t separate the morals and the ethics, and you can’t keep seeking profit by stripping farming of any connection to sustainability and the land.”…

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

Farming as the Climate Changes: Molino de la Isla, East Pecos, New Mexico

October 26, 2020

Farming as the Climate Changes: Molino de la Isla, East Pecos, New Mexico

The world is facing a climate crisis and the changes this brings are dramatically impacting farmers across the world. As temperatures rise and rainfall becomes increasingly unpredictable, production is dropping and businesses are struggling. However, in the United States, climate change still divides opinion. Many still question its scientific validity, including the President who said climate change was ‘an expensive hoax’ and pulled the US out of the Paris Agreement.

However, in opposition to those climate-deniers, there are passionate and engaged people across America who are desperately working to keep us within the two-degree Celsius limit. In light of that division, we wanted to talk to farmers across the US to understand how they view climate change and what steps (if any) they were taking to address it.

The SFT will run this series over the coming months, featuring a diverse range of American farmers. This week we interviewed Ralph Vigil who runs Molino de la Isla in northern New Mexico. Molino de la Isla Organics is an organic farm created to promote and to protect the acequias of Nuevo Mexico through organic agriculture, regional marketing and consumer education for the socio-economic benefit of local communities. The acequias are an organised system of waterways for agriculture and there are over 100 throughout the state. Molino de la Isla runs a CSA veg share scheme and works with young people to preserve traditional agricultural practices.

What are your biggest concerns about climate change and its effect on your farm in particular?

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

A Small Farm Future: Excerpt

October 22, 2020

A Small Farm Future: Excerpt

Culture Crisis

This is the crisis of modernist culture – the ability to create ourselves as individuals and protect ourselves from the vicissitudes of the non-symbolic world, set against the ability to alienate ourselves as individuals and offload the consequences of our self-creation onto other people (including future people) and the non-symbolic world. In view of the other crises we face, the only convincing way I can see of transcending this crisis is to start making ourselves as individuals in less materialised ways that are more engaged with the Creation, the non-symbolic world, around us. The small farm future I describe is the most convincing form I can see that transcendence taking.

One reason the prospect of a small farm future sits awkwardly with modern culture is that it flouts a sense of progress. Small-scale agriculture was what people did in the past, but we’ve now progressed beyond it. It’s hard to shake off this view because when we think about history through the lens of modernity we tend to use spatial metaphors with binary moral overtones. We move forwards, upwards or onwards, we lift people up out of poverty, we support progressive ideas and we don’t look back – but when we do, we see backward societies where a lot of people farmed.

In one sense, such objections are easily dealt with. A small farm future needn’t be the same as a small farm past. We don’t have to go back. But that’s not quite good enough, because the culture of modernity involves a sense of radical rupture with the past, and a wholly new destiny for humanity – a destiny that’s regarded as better than everything that went before it, largely because people quit farming, left the countryside and got busy with their modernist life projects.

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

On the efficiency of my scythe

September 26, 2020

On the efficiency of my scythe

The time is nearly upon us when the feature-length version of my musings here will be released upon an unsuspecting world – A Small Farm Future (the book) will be available from 15 October in the UK and 21 October in the US. Various launch events are in the offing, and I’ll be gearing the blog for a while to come to riffing on various themes from the book. So watch this space…

Meanwhile, I have one final bit of outstanding business to attend to before turning my attention to the book – though in many ways this post serves as well as anything as an introduction to its themes. Whereas my last couple of posts addressed the politics of an agrarian localist future, this one addresses farm scales, styles and technologies in such a future. Again, it comes in the form of a critical engagement with a specific individual, in this case grower and small-scale farmer Seth Cooper, who I debated with a little while ago online. I promised I’d respond further to some of his points, hence the present post. Apologies if my excerpting of his comments and interpolation of replies seems combative (I’m going to try to stop doing this kind of thing!) – hopefully it will also be illuminating, and my thanks to Seth for drawing out this discussion.

Our debate focused in large part on the kind of tools and equipment appropriate to farming, small farming in particular, so I’m going to go with that in this post – but hopefully it’ll work obliquely as an entry into wider issues. Even more specifically, we talked about the virtues or otherwise of the scythe.

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

To Be Farming and Fortunate

September 2, 2020

To Be Farming and Fortunate

Photographed by Paige Green

To arrive at Fortunate Farm, you have to drive along the California coast, either north or south, passing some of the most epic viewsheds to be seen on Coast Highway 1. The farm is hours away from any major city, and just south of Fort Bragg, a small fishing town and tourist destination where the land meets the Pacific Ocean. Here the water and sky melt into each other, in a gleaming marriage of silver light.

Any road to get to this part of the Mendocino coast involves twisting turns through gorgeous and ancient old-growth redwood forest. Still, according to farmer and co-owner Gowan Batist, “We’re in the middle of everywhere if you think about it.” She explains, “we’re equidistant from Arcata to the north, the Bay Area to the south, and people come here from Davis and Sacramento to the east when they’re trying to escape the heat… we aren’t close, but we are on the way to everywhere people go in Northern California.”

Wherever you go, there you are. At Fortunate Farm, the farm is at the center of its own universe, the center of its own community, the center of the Northern California coastline.

If a farm is a living organism, the farmer is wedded in a deep relationship to it. The land, the domestic and wild animals, the plants and microorganisms, the weather patterns, and water/mineral/elemental cycles make up its living system, and the farmer is there to tend to it. It’s a relationship of care, an emotional relationship, and financial relationship, similar to a marriage, similar to a family.

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

The return of home-grown cereals

August 27, 2020

The return of home-grown cereals

Our daily bread was for centuries the product of a community-oriented and collaborative food system.

The Book of Exodus recounts the tale of the Hebrew slaves, who in their haste, fleeing for their lives from Pharoah’s Egypt, had no time for their bread to rise and so carried it upon their backs. Now, Jewish communities around the world remember that story, recalling their time in bondage, by eating unleavened bread during the Passover festival.

Bread is intrinsic to cultural knowledge for people the world over. In Britain, even relatively recently, bringing in the harvest would have been a community enterprise, different members of the village taking on roles from cutting or reaping to putting the sheaves into stooks to dry.

Sustainable grain

Bread can be so much more than a pillowy, processed loaf of sliced white, a vehicle for sandwich fillings. Fresh bread can be a revelation: richly satisfying, full of nutrition and bursting with flavour, inviting you to slather a slice with something at least as tasty. As part of a regenerative food network, it can speak volumes on cultural sharing, economic fairness and the joy of breaking bread together.

I’ve been involved in the Welsh Grain Forum with miller Anne Parry at Felin Ganol watermill for some years. We’re working with farmers, millers and bakers to help get good home-grown food into more Welsh kitchens. We’re seeing a move back to collaborative food systems with modern ecological approaches and on a more regional, and we believe, a more resilient, reliable and relatable scale.

Right up until World War II, Wales was covered in cereals. Grains were grown right across the country. Old reference maps show Wales pockmarked with many small arable fields (detailed in brown).

Anne says that in her village of Llanrhystud there would, at one time, have been four grain mills. Now, hers is the only one.

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

Lack of Wild Bees Causes Crop Shortage, Could Lead to Food Security Issues

August 2, 2020

Lack of Wild Bees Causes Crop Shortage, Could Lead to Food Security Issues

Bees are responsible for pollinating key crops like apples, and their decline now threatens crop yields. Pikist

Without bees, future generations may not be able to identify with adages like, ‘An apple a day keeps the doctor away.’

Crop yields for key crops like apples, cherries and blueberries are down across the U.S. because of a lack of bees in agricultural areas, a Rutgers University-led study published Wednesday in The Royal Society found. This could have “serious ramifications” for global food security, reported The Guardian.

The scientists wanted to understand the degree to which insect pollination, or lack thereof, actually limits current crop production. Surveying 131 locations across major crop-producing areas of the U.S., they found that five out of seven crops showed evidence of “pollinator limitation” and that yields could be boosted with full pollination, the study said.

“The crops that got more bees got significantly more crop production,” said Rachael Winfree, an ecologist and pollination expert and the senior author of the paper, reported The Guardian. “I was surprised, I didn’t expect they would be limited to this extent.”

The research further noted that pollinator declines could “translate directly” to decreased production of most of the crops studied and that wild bees “contribute substantially” to the pollination of most studied crops.

Declines in both managed honeybees and wild bees raise serious concerns about global food security, the study said, because most of the world’s crops rely on pollinators.

Bees and other pollinators like bats and birds underpin the global food system, but their populations are dwindling due to human activity including settlement building, pesticide use, monoculture farming and climate change. This is part of what many are calling the “insect apocalypse,” a precipitous decline in insects across the globe.

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

Do we need farmfree food?

May 5, 2020

Do we need farmfree food?

Because of how badly we humans have treated soils and animals and how we destroyed bio-diversity, it is understandable that people are looking for other ways of producing food. The food tech sector hosts legions of entrepreneurs (mostly with background in the IT sector) seeking venture capital and researchers looking for grants to “disrupt” a sector which they claim is archaic. Most of them are based on the view that farming in general, and livestock farming in particular, is inefficient and wasteful. The environmental journalist George Monbiot writes in an article in the Guardian titled Lab-grown food will soon destroy farming – and save the planet.

“Eating is now a moral minefield, as almost everything we put in our mouths – from beef to avocados, cheese to chocolate, almonds to tortilla chips, salmon to peanut butter – has an insupportable environmental cost. But just as hope appeared to be evaporating, the new technologies I call farmfree food create astonishing possibilities to save both people and planet. Farmfree food will allow us to hand back vast areas of land and sea to nature, permitting rewilding and carbon drawdown on a massive scale.

“One of the promising initiatives mentioned in the article is the Finnish company, Solar foods. It claims that it has found a way to commercially produce hydrogen oxidized bacterial protein from electricity. The technology is actually known since the 1960s and has not taken off because of the prohibitive costs. In a research article, co-written by the founders of Solar Foods as late as 2019, it is concluded, that only the cost of energy required to produce microbial protein is higher than the price of soybeans, even if capital and other operational costs are not taken into account.

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

In Praise of Short Supply Chains

April 16, 2020

In Praise of Short Supply Chains

As the coronavirus pandemic affects every area of the food supply chain, the ORFC team find out how Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), box schemes and others working with shorter supply chains are responding to the sudden huge demand for their supplies.

For many people farming, growing or producing food in the UK, the date of March 16th will be etched on their memory forever. This was the first of the daily press conferences given by the government in response to the coronavirus crisis and the date that Boris Johnson recommended the public no longer visited pubs or restaurants. It was also the day the great British public really understood we were facing a crisis of such enormity that our normal food supply chains could be affected and started looking for alternatives, fast.

Within days, CSAs, box schemes, independent and alternative food suppliers received thousands of enquiries. CSAs used to attracting a dozen or so new members a year had so many people wanting to sign up they were forced to close their books. The bigger box schemes like Shillingford Organics in Devon doubled their customer base while the Riverford website received 43 million impressions in one week. Meanwhile, others who supplied the catering and restaurant business were left with no customers at all and had to find new ways to distribute their food. One week later, the country was in lockdown and farmers, and food producers had been officially named as “key workers”—i.e., one of the most important groups of people in our society.

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

Applying Food Forest Growing to Farms

January 15, 2020

Applying Food Forest Growing to Farms

Beyond Garden Scale

Gardeners know too well the feeling of overwhelm when facing a new landscape. The seemingly infinite possibilities brings up the question, “Where do I start?”. Fortunately, there is a process we can use to answer that, it’s called permaculture design.

From Food Forest to Farming Dreams

Some of you might remember a special place in Holyoke Massachusetts called Paradise Lot. This garden is still one of my favourite places in the world! That’s right, Paradise Lot continues to attract visitors who enjoy the explosion of perennial vegetables, rare and unusual fruits, a unique story, and backyard scale permaculture in action.

Along with Eric Toensmeier, and many other friends, Paradise Lot was my first big garden design challenge. The question of “Where to start” defined our early process. Thank goodness, at the time, Eric and Dave Jacke were writing a book called “Edible Forest Gardens”, and our garden became the case study. The garden is where I learned many key design strategies: The Problem is the Solution; Constraints Focus the Design; What Was, Plus What Is, Could Be; Watch Out for the Red Gazebo and many other principles.

I lived, breathed and ate that garden for thirteen years. During that time a new thought seed was planted. The beginnings of a vision of what a garden like this could be beyond one-tenth of an acre. This idea didn’t hold my thoughts very strongly, but it did take root. Then, by around 2012, when my wife was pregnant, and we enjoyed the bounty and success of a thriving food forest, global climate change impacted our lives.

America loves the idea of family farms. That’s unfortunate. By Sarah Taber

November 14, 2019

America loves the idea of family farms. That’s unfortunate. By Sarah Taber

Preface. As declining fossil fuels force more and more people back into being farmers, eventually 75 to 90% of the population, it would be much better for this to happen with family farms than gigantic mega-farms with workers who are slaves in all but name. This essay offers an alternative, collaborative worker-owned farming that has already been proven to work..

* * *

Taber, S. 2019. America loves the idea of family farms. That’s unfortunate. nymag.com

Family farms are central to our nation’s identity. Most Americans, even those who have never been on a farm, have strong feelings about the idea of family farms — so much that they’re the one thing that all U.S. politicians agree on. Each election, candidates across the ideological spectrum roll out plans to save family farms — or give speeches about them, at least. From Little House on the Prairie to modern farmer’s markets, family farms are also the core of most Americans’ vision of what sustainable, just farming is supposed to look like.

But as someone who’s worked in agriculture for 20 years and researched the history of farming, I think we need to understand something: Family farming’s difficulties aren’t a modern problem born of modern agribusiness. It’s never worked very well. It’s simply precarious, and it always has been. Idealizing family farms burdens real farmers with overwhelming guilt and blame when farms go under. It’s crushing.

I wish we talked more openly about this. If we truly understood how rare it is for family farms to happen at all, never mind last multiple generations, I hope we could be less hard on ourselves. Deep down we all know that the razor-thin margins put families in impossible positions all the time, but we still treat it like it’s the ideal.

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

Dutch Farmers in Mass Revolt Against Green Fascism

October 2, 2019

Dutch Farmers in Mass Revolt Against Green Fascism

Demonstrators cause huge traffic jams in backlash against threat to livestock production.

Thousands of Dutch farmers descended on the Netherlands capital to protest against onerous environmental restrictions that threaten their livelihoods.

The demonstrations were sparked after the coalition government proposed that “Dutch livestock farming should be slashed to meet commitments on reducing nitrogen emissions,” reports Dutch News NL.

Farmers traveled to the Hague in their tractors, causing tailbacks in excess of 620 miles and huge traffic jams around and in the city.

Farmers are protesting in the Netherlands and it is now the biggest traffic jam we’ve ever seen, thousands of tractors are driving on the highways right now #boerenprotest is even worldwide trending on twitter right now

Some protesters also used their tractors to demolish fences that been put up by the government.

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

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