Farming

Richmond’s Black Leaders Dreamed Of Creating An Agrihood

October 6, 2024 Barry Greene, Jr, Next City. Resist! Farming, Food and Agriculture, inclusionary zoning, Richmond, Virginia, zoning

When Richmond, Virginia-based nonprofit Girls for a Change was offered a eight-acre parcel of land from a local benefactor, CEO Angela Patton knew the Black youth development organization could do something special for the neighborhood. “We were sitting on this property for a while trying to just figure out what would it be,” says Patton, who has lived in Richmond’s Bensley suburb for nearly two decades. “Would it be a summer camp for girls? Would it be a community center for the community? Would it be a women’s wellness center?” In 2021, Patton announced their plan to turn the vacant land into the Bensley Agrihood, a permanently affordable housing development featuring 10 affordable homes, four tiny homes, a wellness center and a 1.5-acre working community farm that would serve as an amenity for the neighborhood.

Pesticides Make Living In Farm Towns As Risky As Smoking

August 31, 2024 Shannon Kelleher, In These Times. Educate! Cancer, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Health Care, Pesticides, rural communities

People who don’t farm, but live in U.S. agricultural communities where pesticides are used on farms, face an increased cancer risk as significant as if they were smokers, according to a new study. The study, published July 24 in the journal Frontiers in Cancer Control and Society, analyzed cancer incidence data from nearly every U.S. county and looked at how that data corresponded to federal data on agricultural pesticide use. Researchers reported that they found the higher the pesticide use, the higher the risk for every type of cancer the researchers looked at. “Agricultural pesticide use has a significant impact on all the cancer types evaluated in this study (all cancers, bladder cancer, colon cancer, leukemia, lung cancer, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, and pancreatic cancer."

Farming While Black

August 29, 2024 Next City. Create! Black America, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Racial Justice

Once upon a time, 14%of farmers in the United States were Black. That was in 1910. But that number has dwindled. Today, Black farmers comprise less than 2% of all growers across the country. On this week’s episode, our host Lucas Grindley notes: “That's more than 14 million acres of lost land.” This loss, along with the discrimination and violence perpetrated against African-American farmers and the current movement of more Black people returning to agriculture and land stewardship, is the subject of the documentary “Farming While Black,” which was released in 2023. Mark Decena, the writer and director of the documentary, describes it as a Venn diagram of social justice, climate justice and food sovereignty.

Re-Farming And The Right To Plant

June 18, 2024 Chris Smaje, Resilience. Create! Environment, Farming, Land Conservation, Rewilding

The word ‘rewilding’ has had its day and now needs to slip gracefully into retirement. That, at any rate, is the polite suggestion I’m going to make in this post, which is the last in my recent mini-series on ‘wrecked’ land and what to do about it. It’s not that, for the most part, I object to a lot of the practical activities that are done in the name of rewilding by conservationists, land managers, farmers, ecologists and so on. In that sense, I agree with most of what Ian Carter says in this recent article, except for his concluding remarks endorsing the term. I got to thinking about this when I gave a Q&A talk recently and made a flippantly negative reference to the term while making the case for low-impact, peopled, agrarian landscapes.

Veganic Growing And Animal-Free Agriculture: The Path Forward

April 7, 2024 Jimmy Videle, LA Progressive. Create! Farming, Food and Agriculture, Sustainability, Veganic growing

Nature is complex. Her underground web is as intricate as her above-ground diversity. Below our feet, bacteria, microorganisms, mycorrhizae, and roots of perennial plants work symbiotically, absorbing and moving nutrients to wherever the need arises. Science has defined ecosystems and family groups, constantly updating our knowledge bank based on the most recent discoveries. However, this is the human interpretation of the natural world, but the way other animal species interpret it is likely different. While all species tend to follow the rhythms of nature, there is one that seems to go against her: ours, Homo sapiens.

Sequestering Carbon In Soils Isn’t Enough To Offset Livestock Emissions

February 3, 2024 Paige Bennett, EcoWatch. Educate! Big Ag, Carbon emissions, Carbon sequestration, climate crisis, Farming

A new study highlights the risk of depending on soil carbon sequestration as a way to offset the emissions produced from raising livestock. The study found that offsetting the methane and nitrous oxide emissions from the global livestock industry would require 135 gigatonnes (135 billion metric tons) of carbon stocks. According to the authors, that amount is nearly double the carbon stored in managed grasslands globally. Some regions would require an increase in carbon sequestration in the soil of up to 2,000% to match livestock emissions. The findings were published in the journal Nature Communications.

Carbon Farming: A Sustainable Agriculture Technique

January 14, 2024 John J. Berger, Resilience.org. Create! Carbon sequestration, climate crisis, Farming, Food and Agriculture

What if there were a way to safely pull billions of tons of carbon out of the atmosphere to substantially reduce or even eliminate global warming? What if this approach costs relatively little and could be used around the world? What if it also put billions of dollars in cash into the hands of countless working Americans and people worldwide? What if it even slashed fossil fuel consumption and made the world more resilient to climate stress? Well, it turns out there is a system that can do all that. It’s called carbon farming, and it just might be key to restabilizing the climate. In the process, it can revitalize rural economies while also producing healthier, more nutritious crops. And amazingly, it’s also low-cost, low-tech, and low-risk.

The Gulf Islands Food Co-Op

October 6, 2023 Each For All, Grassroots Economic Organizing. Create! Cooperative, Farming, Food Security, Mutual Aid

The Gulf Islands Food Co-op was created in 2018 to foster inter-island co-operation and develop new resources and practical supports for food producers and consumers on Galiano, Mayne, Pender and Saturna islands (the Southern Gulf Islands SGI). The co-op’s main goals are to help sustainably increase island food production, food security and resilience by encouraging the growing and purchasing of local food. Its initiatives range from educational programs, such as “healthy soils and regenerative agriculture,” to sharing of local resilient seeds, supporting an Indigenous Venison/Deer workshop offered by The Galiano Conservancy Association, bulk buying of farm supplies, setting up free tables for producers at local markets and supporting growers donating to local food banks.

In A New Climate Reality, Community May Be A Farmer’s Greatest Resource

September 1, 2023 Ellyn Lapointe, Sierra Club. Organize! climate crisis, Cooperative, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Vermont

The 10th of July had been a typical day at work for Caroline Hauser until she received an urgent email from the Intervale Center and its farms. They were calling for volunteers. The Intervale Center, a nonprofit farming cooperative in Burlington, Vermont, was bracing for intense rains and flooding forecasted to hit in the next 24 hours. It needed all hands on deck to harvest everything they could before disaster struck. Hauser messaged her manager to say she needed the day off. Hauser has been a Burlington resident since 2015 and a regular volunteer at the Intervale Center since 2019. She and her husband are summer and winter CSA members—she estimates that 80 to 90 percent of their food comes directly from the Intervale’s seven organic farms.

Book Review: Saying No To Ecomodermism

July 2, 2023 Jason Bradford, Resilience. Educate! Ecomodernism, Energy, Farming, Food Security

One of my pet peeves is ecomodernism. Ecomodernist authors have a knack for adeptly elucidating the polycrisis, and then offering nothing useful for dealing with it. Even if you are unfamiliar with the terms ecomodernism/ecomodernists, you are likely aware of their schtick, as it has come to dominate contemporary environmentalism. It is a groovy eco-philosophy that tells mostly urbanized, highly educated, white-collar folks that although the Earth is in danger, their lifestyles are not. Perfect for inserting a do-gooder vibe into political and business circles, and then fundraising.

California’s ‘Local Food Producers’ Hope New Label Will Boost Support

June 13, 2023 Naoki Nitta, Modern Farmer. Create! California, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Food Sovereignty, Local Economy

Despite offices being closed, Sundays are the busiest day of the week at the Marin County Civic Center. Located half an hour north of San Francisco—and within a couple of hundred miles of California’s many agricultural regions, including the Sacramento and San Joaquin valleys and the North and Central coasts—the Sunday Marin Farmers Market is the third largest among the state’s 655 open-air greenmarkets. On busy weekends, crowds of locavores routinely swell to 15,000. “Customers come from all over,” says Gha Xiong, owner of Xiong Farm. He’s one of nearly 150 regional farmers, ranchers and food purveyors who set up Sunday shop in the sprawling parking lot, in clear view of the Prairie-style dome and spire designed by Frank Lloyd Wright.

The Transition Care Farm With Room For All

May 27, 2023 Chris McCartney, Resilience. Create! Education, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Transition Town

It all started with four people from a small Transition group and a derelict former farm site. Four people, an old farm, and an idea to grow a bit of food, maybe teach local kids about nature. Today, Greenslate community-run farm is a hive of community activity, with hundreds of people visiting, volunteering and learning each month. It’s home to rescue and heritage animals, a social enterprise cafe, drug recovery service, a community project incubator, a men’s shed and Rhiannon Jones, one of those founding four Transitioners and today, project co-ordinator who lives on the bustling site.

The Evolving Movement For Agricultural Worker Rights

May 12, 2023 Lucia Athens, Next City. Organize! Farming, Food and Agriculture, History, Worker Rights and Jobs

Labor organizing has experienced a resurgence of late for many service workers, but not so for agricultural workers. Through the collective impact efforts of many individuals, from many walks of life, California’s Agricultural Labor Relations Act of 1975 was passed, the first of its kind in the US to protect farmworker rights. Adopted at the height of the United Farm Workers movement led by César Chávez, it served as a vehicle to galvanize their Union, empowering tens of thousands of workers who realized the potentiality of organizing for the first time. Unfortunately, the promise of that law was never realized and progress since then has been a mixed bag.

Sutton Community Farm And The Politics Of Community Agriculture

December 12, 2022 Rohan Rice, Resilience. Create! Agroecology, Farming, Food and Agriculture, Global South

The UK farming sector is in the middle of an existential crisis. As a consequence of leaving the EU’s Common Agricultural Policy, the Conservative government has had to draft a new agricultural support scheme to either match or replace the direct payments received by UK farmers from the EU. What will replace this scheme has been the subject of heated debate for years. Most probable is the Environmental Land Management Scheme (ELMS). ELMS would offer ‘public money for public good’, meaning that farmers would receive payments if they could prove their farm was engaging in beneficial environmental practice, such as rewilding a section of their land. The scheme has its detractors across the political spectrum, yet to-ELMS-or-not-to-ELMS is a sideshow for much of the British public.

The System Is Causing Food Crisis, Not The War

August 19, 2022 Adele, Consortium News. Educate! Farming, Food and Agriculture, Structural Violence, Zambia

Worsening harvests, infertile soil and increasing food poverty are affecting the majority of small farmers across the globe, especially in the Global South. But the climate and food crises are not isolated phenomena. They are the result of a global capitalist system – and a neoliberal agenda – that has prioritised big corporate agricultural profits over people and the planet. “Most farmers can no longer produce adequate food for their families,” says Vladimir Chilinya. “Profit-making entities control our food systems… including the production and distribution of seed.” Chilinya is a Zambian coordinator for FIAN International, an organisation that campaigns for the democratisation of food and nutrition.

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