Good Food is Everybody's Business
Ever more Americans are becoming urban dwellers and access to good quality, reasonably priced food grown sustainably is more and more challenging. Food is grown using chemical-laden agricultural methods and travels longer distances to kitchen or table. We need to find ways to bring sustainable food production closer closer to home.
It was in India that Sir Albert Howard conceived and developed the scientific footing of “organic” agriculture. Today, a group school children in India have rediscovered what Sir Howard proved in his field trials there more than 75 years ago.
The highlight of the Tilth Producers of Washington Conference was the keynote delivered by professor Miguel Altieri of the Department of Environmental Science, Policy & Management, at the University of California. His specialty – agroecology — combines agriculture, the science of cultivating the land and raising livestock; with the principles of ecology, the study of the relationship between living organisms and their environments. Altieri began with a series of startling statistics proving that when measured in total output small scale indigenous agriculture is actually more productive than industrialized agribusiness.
The Cornucopia Institute, one of the nation’s leading organic industry watchdogs, is urging members of the USDA’s National Organic Standards Board (NOSB), in formal testimony, to vote to preserve the integrity of organic food and farming at its upcoming meeting in Savannah, Georgia.
Washington apple growers are in trouble! It was a late spring, a cool summer, a long damp fall, and the apple trees are covered with ripe fruit. Unfortunately, it’s late October and cold, wet weather is just around the corner. If those apples don’t get picked soon they’ll rot on the tree.
We offer the following interview with Devon Peña to highlight issues that are facing farmers across the US as well as around the world. Challenges like farm worker shortages – is it an immigration issue or worker welfare issue? Or corporate control by Big Ag, Big Food, and Big Org (as in organics)? Or commodity speculation by the world’s stock markets which is driving the cost of basic food stuffs beyond the reach of millions? Or factory farming that have mastered the “art” of growing and killing animals faster and on a larger scale than ever before? We’ll bring you information on all those issues this week, and we start with a “food commons.”
People like Will Allen and Erika Allen, his daughter, have been able to convince Chicago’s politicians that for-profit businesses like urban farms can be an economic engine, not just for the farmers and their employees, but for the city in the form of tax revenues. A well-functioning urban land use policy will allow small farms and food related businesses to put people to work, to generate income, and to pay taxes.
With an eye to the future, a federally-funded program is underway that is designed to help Americans eat healthier foods and fend off ailments stemming from obesity, including heart disease and diabetes by bringing together retailers, farmers, and consumers. Seattle’s Healthy Foods Here (HFH) program operates synergistically.
