I wish I had that tractor for the 3500 trees that we planted a few years ago Extreme Tree Planting – Trees for Earth from Peter Hill on Vimeo.
Category Archives: World
Allan Savory on climate change
Allan Savory of the Holistic Management Institute spoke recently in Ireland…the full video sat in my browser for a couple of weeks until the holiday madness subsided. Things have calmed down a bit, finally. Here’s an exerpted version Allan Savory – EXTRACTS – Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on Vimeo. Some thoughts and observations on
Carbon farms
With the Copenhagen climate talks stuttering along, it seems like past time to throw in some quick comments The effect of livestock on greenhouse gas emissions are often overrated, if not entirely exaggerated Pasture is part of the solution to the carbon issue Some farms are doing it right And the systems exist to fix the problem OK, seriously, I
Interviews
Our friend Clare was interviewed on KBOO recently along with Joel Salatin…quite a coup. I found it especially interesting to hear Joel talk about the massive gullies that were on his land when his family arrived there, since we are dealing with similar legacies of past land abuses. They talk about land, farm cooperation, and meat processing, as well as
Cowpooling
Wow, it’s been a long time since we posted. Spring will do that. Fortunately, Time magazine comes through with something, so we don’t have to. Their new issue has an article on buying beef by the quarter, conveniently, the same way we sell it. A surprisingly well done piece.
Joel Salatin on a forgiving food system
Joel Salatin is gearing up for the media push for the movie Food, Inc, which I read somewhere is going to be a combination of Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. That should be fun This is just a quick Chelsea Green clip of him speaking recently I’m a little skeptical of Joel’s energy analysis…tripling of energy prices would have
Want to know where your food comes from? Too bad…
The US Dept of Health and Human Services recently conducted a study on food source traceability (thanks to the Oregon Independent blog for the tip-off about this study), and found that they could only trace 12.5% of the items. Wow. To turn that figure around, they couldn’t identify the source of 87.5% of the foods they tried to trace. They
New farmers
In the vein of What is a small farmer, Yes magazine has a short profile of a series of new young farmers
Chicken Feed
Time to dredge up the past again. There’s been another surge of interest by several Oregon farmers to get into growing some of their own grain for feed. No wonder, as feed prices have more than doubled since we started doing chickens, and while the commodity insanity of the last year is taking a breather, there’s no reason to think
Vilsack, et al
Following up on my mention of the new USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Scott’s comment therein, there’s some additional, more promising news on Vilsack’s new tenure. This article talks about Vilsack’s newfound progressive take on the future of agriculture, acknowledging the importance of food to all Americans. Not so different than Nicolas Kristof’s call for a Department of Food, and
What is a small farmer?
To hear Senator Pat Roberts (R Kansas) tell it, a small family farmer: is about 5′2″…and he’s a retired airline pilot and sits on his porch on a glider reading Gentleman’s Quarterly — he used to read the Wall Street Journal but that got pretty drab — and his wife works as stock broker downtown. And he has 40 acres,
The fundamental rethink
In a fascinating convergence, Tim O’Reilly has a post up about Wendell Berry’s essay ‘In distrust of movements’. Fascinating because while Tim is a pretty visionary hi tech guy, you don’t often find that crowd crowing about the nitty gritty of our food system. That, plus the fact that he also mentions Dmitry Orlov’s recent work shows just how deep
Starting out
Starting out farming is getting to be a pretty popular pastime…between the cost of food, the rise of locavory, and the price of oil, there’s currently more demand for good, locally produced food than the market is able to supply. Folks on the PACSAC list even joke that they’d like to be on the list of full CSA’s, not looking