Op Ed: Loaves and Fishes
Even in a short time – just the last few years – the shellfish industry in Washington State has deteriorated because of bad management and pollution. We can’t afford to let this gross negligence continue.
Category: Food Systems
Puget Sound Shellfish at Risk
By the time the first settlers reached the small spit of land that was ultimately to become part of Seattle Washington in 1850, the Olympia oyster population on the Pacific coast was already beginning to be over harvested. And in the early 1900s, poor water quality in Puget Sound threatened to finish it off. Puget Sound shellfish are at risk again.
Growing Your Own – Time to Get Gardening!
It’s the end of March, thank goodness! We won’t have winter much longer, though right now summer seems like years away… Even in the middle – or late winter – gardeners dream about their gardens as they pore over the dozens of plant and seed catalogs that have arrived in the mail. How else do we get through these last weeks of cold, slush, rain, and grey days?
Spring Floods – The Farmer’s Dilemma
Farmers in the Snoqualmie Valley share a common awareness that although they have the potential to supply a great deal of the nearly insatiable demand for local and organic food, the future of farming in the valley is dismal. Why? The answer, in a single word, is flooding.
Student Farmers in Liberia Get Back to the Soil and Into the Classroom
There was a time before Liberia’s civil wars when agriculture was an integral part of the education system. Ten years after the end of the wars, the majority of Liberians live in poverty, depend on agriculture as a livelihoods, and grow their own food for survival. That’s changing.
Women Hold Up Half the Sky*
Many women in farming have had to develop their own production techniques, their own farming methods, and even their own animal breeds and bloodlines. And in the US, we’ve seen women become experts, teaching other young women to farm, and leading the food movement in small livestock production equal to or even beyond the contribution of academics with little or no field experience. We highlight four women farmers raising small livestock (one of whom has retired after 44 years of sheep farming) to recognize the commitments they have made to what is essentially “women’s work” – that is, small ruminant husbandry.
What Is ‘Farming?’
Double speak by the media is distorting the very identity of “farmer” for the average American. In fact, most of our food production – the food chain we’ve become so dependent on and can’t do without – is controlled by only a half dozen “chemical corporations.” What is a farmer? A farmer is NOT a global chemical corporation!
Peas and Beans and Lentils, Oh My!
Lentils (those tiny little legumes often displayed in the “healthy grains” section of the supermarket) are not commonly on the dinner plate in most American …