Food & agriculture

Why would a fisher care about the forest? The person to ask is Shigeatsu Hatakeyama, an oyster farmer from Kesennuma in Japan’s Miyagi Prefecture. We can learn a great deal from Hatakeyama. He is one of those rare types of people who can see beyond the day-to-day preoccupation of how to make a living — in his case, with an oyster farm — and instead embrace the world around them.

Urban farmer. Heirloom. Food security. Methane digester. These are just a few of the terms you'll find in the Lexicon of Sustainability, a series of portraits that speak the language of a growing movement.

The most obvious and promising sign of the new agriculture is the leadership that women are taking in the movement. Women have always played the key role in farming but at least in the last two centuries in America, they have rarely gotten credit for it.

Now more than ever, leaders need to focus on what matters most - the long-term resilience of people and the planet - the High-level Panel on Global Sustainability urged in its report presented today to UN Secretary-General BAN Ki-moon in Addis Ababa.

The 22-member Panel, established by the Secretary-General in August 2010 to formulate a new blueprint for sustainable development and low-carbon prosperity, was co-chaired by the presidents of Finland and South Africa. The final report contains 56 recommendations to put sustainable development into practice and to mainstream it into economic policy as quickly as possible.

(excerpts from the final report)

- Put planet and its people at the core of sustainable development, urges report
- UN panel aims for 'a future worth choosing'
- UN paints bleak picture of sustainability
- U.N. pitches Rio+20 talks as a departure from political strife over climate change

But to connect with the plants is to connect with the rhythm of the year, to locate yourself in time and space. It is to connect with the neighbourhood you find yourself in and discover, that even though your world has apparently shrunk because of economics and peak oil, it has in fact grown hugely. It has by your attention to detail, brought memory, fragrance, belonging back into your life, as you notice the limes in the churchyard, the sage in the library garden, the butterburr along the highway. Each plant a small universe with its own story to tell, its own medicine to bequeath.

Every week during the growing season, my husband and I cart our family’s grassfed meats to market. We sell pork chops for $11 a pound; ground beef goes for $7.50. Every week, we meet someone who tells us the prices are too high. In fact, at those prices, the average net income for our family members has maxed out at $10 per hour. But part of our job is to hold our chins up and accept weekly admonishment for our inability to produce food as cheaply as it can be found in the grocery store.

For millennia, humans have been interacting closely with nature and building up a wealth of knowledge about effective use and management of local resources critical for securing food, clothing and shelter. As a result, sustainable production systems have emerged over history in many parts of the world, forming so-called “socio-ecological production landscapes” (SEPLs). These landscapes embody many aspects of the green economy concept and provide not only useful indications of how humans and nature have harmoniously interacted in the past, but also guidance on how to transition to sustainable societies built on green economies.

Kari Hamerschlag has a post up about the upcoming Farm Bill and its potential to move money away from large scale industrial agriculture and towards smaller producers. For most small farmers producing for local markets, the idea is heady - after all, the economics agriculture are tenuous for many of us - we get all of the burdens of regulation without any of the economies of scale that accompany large scale agriculture.

- How to run a PERMABLITZ!
- Ten lessons from the great cycling cities
- Cracking Open the Scientific Process (NYT on 'Open Science')
- De la cultura del 'pelotazo' a la inversión 'lenta' (Slow Finance)

-Sioux County, Iowa: Ground zero for U.S. farm boom
-Local Food and The Farm Bill: Small Investments, Big Returns
-UK needs scientific research into agroecology not GM
-How US Policies Fueled Mexico's Great Migration

Most of us dress ourselves each morning with garments that were grown, processed, designed and sewn by an anonymous supply chain. A combination of animal, plant, machinery, imagination, and technical skill came together to clothe you, but it is rare to have connection to any of these real life elements. It is the goal of one central Californian community's members to put a face on their wardrobes, and to uncover, develop, and build a new way of engaging with the textiles of their lives. A bioregional supply chain known as a Fibershed is being grown out of a region with a 150 mile diameter — the epicenter just north of San Francisco.

Animals are great to talk to. They can be trusted to keep any secret, will not point out to you embarrassing contradictions of logic in your arguments, and they never argue back. They just nod and keep on eating. They will only interrupt your flow of brilliant reasoning if they run out of food.

This is what I tried to explain to the New York Times reporter as I prepared my squash. Organic agriculture and sustainable agriculture are based on similar principles. They both used to be fuzzy ideas, but that is no longer the case for organic agriculture, which became more cut-and-dried with the introduction of national organic standards. Apparently she heard me say that organic agriculture used to be sustainable, but isn't always anymore.