Good Food is Everybody's Business
Using wikis and digital fabrication tools, TED Fellow Marcin Jakubowski is open-sourcing the blueprints for 50 farm machines, allowing anyone to build their own tractor or harvester from scratch.
And that’s only the first step in a project to write an instruction set for an entire self-sustaining village (starting cost: $10,000). Call it a “civilization starter kit.”
Join us for the event here (a slide show). The more things change the more they stay the same! School lunch, when I was growing …
The year did not start off well, we were going to have to find a new home for Bob, the Old English Sheep Dog. My attempts to mollify his aggressive behavior toward the sheep were a total failure. The defining moment came when he broke his heavy chain, and was chasing ewes through deep snow drifts in late January. This was just unacceptable, the ewes were due to start lambing in late February. One of them, “BoPeep,” died as a result. Bob had to go!
Michael Pollan calls her one of his food heroes. Barbara Kingsolver credits her with shaping the history and politics of food in the United States. And countless others who have vied for a food revolution, pushed organics, and reawakened Americans to growing their own food and eating locally consider her both teacher and muse. Joan Gussow has influenced thousands through her books, This Organic Life and The Feeding Web, her lectures, and the simple fact that she lives what she preaches. Now in her eighties, she stops once more to pass along some wisdom—surprising, inspiring, and controversial—via the pen.
The Chaya plant offers extraordinary attributes as a food crop: potential year-round yields; highly nutritious; tasty; productive; minimal pest or disease susceptibility; tolerant of diverse growing conditions; easily propagated; perennial; handsome foliage; fragrant flowers that attract butterflies, moths and bees; useful forage for domestic animals. On the minus side… it is freeze-tender; its leaves should be cooked rather than ingested raw; it has but few cultivars, and their relative merit and behavior are practically undocumented. Overall, more people should know about, and grow, Chaya — hence this article.
Boarded up store fronts are a common sight in small towns across the heartland. But many rural communities are coming together to save their heritage and their towns. In the small Colorado town of Walsh, townspeople and farmers crafted a plan to keep the town’s grocery story alive and profitable.
Urban farming is grabbing headlines from Los Angeles to New York and everywhere in between. Everyone from retiring baby boomers to twenty-something hipsters are getting excited about growing their own food. What fewer people realize is that urban agriculture has a history that stretches back thousands of years, and that in many places in the developing world, people are producing a significant portion of their fruits and vegetables inside cities. Plant This Movie, then, will highlight the successes of urban farmers around the world and will also serve as a public policy film to ignite the debate around this vital topic.
I had bred for early lambs, so by the end of February lambing was done. I wanted to hit the early July market, as in recent years that had been the best market. There would be a slightly over 100 head of ewes and lambs on pasture. There would have been more, but I sold 25 of last years’ ewe lambs to another sheep producer, and only retained 3 for our flock.
