My essay on a bit of word play (consilience enhances resilience) – and the words’ relevance for Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) – has been online for some time at Mother Earth News. The linking words in this simple rhyme are worth remembering and applying.
For your consideration:
A meme I created this morning with a short quote from the books I co-authored with Trauger Groh:
In addition to the blog you are checking out right here on my Chiron Communications website, I maintain another blog entitled The Call of the Land. You’re invited to check it out
The Call of the Land expresses the urgent call of the land as I and a host of other listeners hear it and comprehend it.
In particular The Call of the Land explores positive creative responses to the call that we might have an abundance of clean food and heal the profoundly distressed environment in which we and our children dwell.
Over the last decades many thousands of people in all parts of the world have come to recognize in Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) a vehicle for approaching land, food, labor, environment and community in a healthier way.
Now – in an era with increasing shadows of environmental catastrophe – it’s time to expand exponentially the CSA vision and reality.
The opportunity is before us to establish hundreds of thousands of CSA farms in nations around the world, and to thereby employ a proven, egalitarian model to address the radically changing circumstances in our environment, climate, economics, and social relationships.
By way of background: as a journalist I’ve been writing about CSA since its inception in the USA in the late 1980s. With Trauger Groh, I’m co-author of the first books on CSA: Farms of Tomorrow and Farms of Tomorrow Revisited. My other books include The Call of the Land, Profiles in Wisdom, Classical Considerations, and the epic nonfiction saga of contemporary America, Odyssey of the 8th Fire.
Awakening Community Intelligence sets out the vision and sounds is a call to action.
The book is available now in both print and ebook formats from Amazon.com. It’s also in wide range of eBook and Smartphone formats from Smashwords.com, and for all Mac devices in the iBookstore.
Three seed ideas were among the many elements that underlie the actions of the first CSA farmers who in 1985-86 established new ways of farming in America. Those ways have emerged in subsequent seasons to yield as many as 10,000 contemporary community supported farms (CSAs) in cities, suburbs, towns, villages and churches across the land.
Photo by Maggie Mehaffey
The CSA model has proven to be a natural for adaption and innovation. Many latter-day CSAs, however, have overlooked or bypassed some of the seed ideas as they have established a wide range of variations on the CSA theme. Yet the seeds of the initial CSAs remain viable, perhaps even more so in our era of profound global change. They were explored in the book on CSA that I authored with Trauger Groh, Farms of Tomorrow. And they are freely available to anyone who chooses to cultivate them.
Alice Bennett Groh is part of the founding group for the Temple-Wilton Community Farm, in New Hampshire. In November, 2014 when she spoke at a Peterborough Grange ceremony to honor CSA pioneers, she put her focus on three of the seed ideas that helped community farms to become established in the USA and to grow.
With eloquence and economy of language, she told of how her husband Trauger Markus Groh partnered with Anthony Graham and Lincoln Gieger to cultivate new thinking, and thereby to initiate their highly productive, economically sustainable, and environmentally radiant Biodynamic farm on rocky, rolling hills flanking the Souhegan River…
The rest of the story in follows freely on my blog for Deep Agroecology: The Call of the Land.
On one of my other blogs, The Call of the Land, I’ve just published the following story. To read the rest just follow the link. – Steven M.
No No Nano: My Macro-Objections to
Micro-Machinations of Industrial Processed Food
“To be interested in food but not in food production is clearly absurd.” – Wendell Berry
Steadily, stealthily, corporations are driving the goodness of natural life itself from our food, and cleverly – though unwisely – infesting it with dim bits of microscopic material substance that are obscured from human awareness. I object. Wholeheartedly.
Just as synthetic chemicals, manufactured additives, irradiation, and then genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have been corporately imposed upon processed food, now a micro-invasion of nanoparticles is gaining momentum. Patented lab-created nanoparticles are even penetrating the realm of organic food, as the USDA’s organic program chooses to do nothing.
The rest of the story is here.
Evrett Lunquist and wife Ruth Chantry, parents of five children, own and operate Common Good Farm in Nebraska. They produce for a CSA and the market: herbs, vegetables, free-range eggs, grass-fed beef, and pork. Photo courtesy of Open Harvest Coop Grocery.
On December 7, 2011 the USDA’s National Organic Program (NOP) inadvertently violated its own policies and released the name of a Nebraska man who had accurately reported a farmer who was flouting the legally binding organic rules.
In so doing, the NOP unleashed upon Evrett Lunquist a multi-year plague of legal pleadings, and a barnload of legal expenses to defend himself.
After his name was released in response to a request under the Freedom of Information Act, the man who correctly reported the violations, Biodynamic farmer and part time inspector Evrett Lunquist, was sued for $7.6 million in a Nebraska Court by Paul A. Rosberg, the vengeful farmer who had violated organic rules. Later in the proceedings, International Certification Services was added as a defendant.
After more than 18 months of tedious hearings and a numbing cascade of motions filed by the plaintiff, Lancaster County Judge Paul D. Merritt finally in August 2013 issued a summary judgment dismissing the case.
After the expensive ordeal of defending himself against the allegations unleashed by the NOP’s procedural error, Lunquist, who followed the letter of the law acting as a private citizen when he initially reported the violations, had racked up more than $43,000 in legal expenses. While he received no support or acknowledgement of responsibility from the NOP, he and his family did find generous support from their church and their community. I have previously reported on this case both here and here.
This convoluted case calls into question the ability of the USDA and its National Organic Program (NOP) to stand behind citizens and inspectors who report violations of organic standards. Consequently, the case has sent a palpable chill through America’s network of organic inspectors, and may thereby compromise consumer confidence in the integrity of the USDA’s “Certified Organic” label. Meanwhile, another kind of food certification — Certified Naturally Grown — is emerging….
The rest of this story is on my blog for The Call of the Land. – Steven M.
When I heard about the historically feeble wheat crop of 2013 I began to look around again in the realm of world food production, and once again to connect dots. The sad state of the wheat crop in America’s Central Plains is happening right in my back yard of Nebraska, so that’s what captured my attention again. But the wheat tribulations of the Heartland are but part of far larger story about world food production with far greater implications for local food production.
Anyone paying attention to news about world food production should have snapped to attention by now, and should be motivated for action to promote, develop and expand local food production systems. That’s just common sense. The pattern of the news about food and farms is a steady concerning drumbeat, a thumping call to attention.
Yet further rigorous international studies released this week declare that the world is lurching towards an agricultural crisis, with crop production falling behind rates needed in coming decades.
In one case, in a follow up to the United Kingdom’s Climate Change Risk Assessment, a just released official report stated that climate change abroad would have a more immediate effect than climate change at home. Taking the most reasonably optimistic view possible, the report states that the UK is likely to be hit by increasingly volatile prices of many food commodities as the climate is disrupted.
Global production of many key foodstuffs is concentrated in a just few countries. Those countries are likely to suffer increasing episodes of extreme weather. As a consequence, the report states, the biggest threats are shortages of particular items, increased volatility in food prices in general, and constricting protectionist measures over food.
Threats from climate change overseas appear an order of magnitude higher than domestic threats, the report’s authors told BBC News.
Those same events would, naturally, also impact the economy, food supply, and the cost of food in North America, and elsewhere. Like it or not, we are all one planet. That’s an inescapable fact of life in 2013.
The paper regards climate change not only as fact, but as a multiplier of other threats. “Already price volatility of resources is the new normal,” the authors told BBC News. “This only looks as though it will get worse.”
Meanwhile, arising from the Southern hemisphere, another report warns that famine and its ancient, aggravating companion, war, are becoming an increasingly likely part of Australia’s future as the world struggles to feed itself.
“Clearly, the world faces a looming agricultural crisis, with yield increases insufficient to keep up with projected demands,” according to authors of the report. ”We have no time to waste.”
Shortages and rising prices are creating a double whammy: families struggling to put food on the table, while at the same time governments in the US, Australia and elsewhere are cutting back on food support and other social welfare programs.
In concert with obvious climate concerns is the political-corporate context. America’s Green Shadow Cabinet has just formally opposed the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) as an assault against food sovereignty. According to the Cabinet’s analysis, the trade agreement – now under secret international negotiation — places the profits of multinational companies ahead of the food security needs of individual nations.
TPP promotes not local, but rather export-oriented food production. In its analysis, the Cabinet found that its passage will increase global hunger and malnutrition, alienate millions from their productive assets and resourcesof land, water, fish, seeds, and technology and, thwart generations of accumulated cultural knowledge.
“Food sovereignty is the right of peoples to control their own food and agriculture…to guarantee the independence and food sovereignty of all of the world’s peoples, it is essential that food is produced though diversified, community based production systems.”
* * * *
In the context of all these dots of information about world food production, and many others, local food production emerges as not just wise and beneficial for a host of reasons, but also imperative.In my own life I think not just of my backyard vegetable garden as one wee element of local food production, but also of our local food coop, Open Harvest, which now nearing 40 years of operation. Open Harvest is an active market agent buying food from over 110 organic, sustainable farms ranged around Nebraska’s capital city of Lincoln, and then selling that food at reasonable cost. Just participating in a local food coop as one of thousands of member-owner makes a huge difference in the push to develop local production systems.
There are hundreds of other proven pathways open now for the development of our local food systems, ranging from local farms, CSAs, coops, farmers markets, community kitchens, farm-to-school programs and other community agrarian initiatives. If you are paying attention to world food production, you will recognize that it is time now to be active in local food production, something both wise and increasingly imperative.
The Call of the Land – Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century
In the context of the rapidly changing farm and food environment, Norlightpress author Steven McFadden has written a greatly expanded 2nd edition of The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century.
The new edition is an effective way for people to learn about and to teach food security. It’s loaded with model after model of ways for families, neighborhoods, communities, schools, and churches to meet the challenge of caring for the land and providing an ample supply of clean food.
The acclaimed 1st edition of The Call of the Land was named one of the Best Books of 2009 by Food Systems Network NYC. The 2nd edition, far more comprehensive, is making a deeper, wider, and even more positive impression.
The Call of the Land is an excellent outreach tool for schools and farms to help educate and build community support. The more the community knows about what sustainable agrarian initiatives are doing for the land, for food, and for life, the more strongly the community will stand in support.
While no single remedy meets the many challenges to our food and farms, hundreds of positive, creative options are already in place. This book sets them out plainly and powerfully. Every household, library, church, and school should have a copy.
The Call of the Land illuminates the paths forward, revealing a range of models to establish a sustainable agrarian foundation for the fragile high-tech, digital-wave culture emerging so dynamically in our world. We have commenced a transition the likes of which few are prepared for, but to which we all can respond with intelligence.
The book gives voice to a swelling chorus of millennial agrarians who are working in cities, suburbs, countryside schools, churches, companies, and campuses to create a clean, secure, sustainable food system as a healthy foundation for the dynamic, high-tech culture that is emerging.
deep agroecology, #deepagroecology
Chiron’s Cave. Listen to the Call of the Land. Learn about deep agroecology.
The unavoidable challenge of the 21st Century is to respond creatively and wholeheartedly to the urgent call of the land. Our survival depends upon our response. With community and creativity we can bring about environmental repair, economic security, and social renewal. This is the call of the land.
The Call of the Land is also the title of one of my books, a response to that call. The book also sets out a forthright description of essential survival-level relationships with the web of life that demand our attention, our intelligence, and our will.
The book describes a wide range of models – creative 21st Century agrarian responses – to the urgent call of our land. The full title of the book tells the story – The Call of the Land: An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century – 2nd edition.
The book is concise in the realm of theory theory, and long on actual, practical working examples to show a broad range of possible creative, positive responses. The Call of the Land is loaded with model after model of ways for families, neighborhoods, communities, schools, and churches to meet the challenge of caring for the land and providing an ample supply of clean food.
My blog for Deep Agroecology & The Call of the Land expresses the urgent call as I and a host of other listeners hear it. In particular it explores positive creative responses to the call of the land, that we might have an abundance of clean food and heal the profoundly distressed environment in which we and our children dwell.
DEEP AGROECOLOGY
As 2020 unfolds, I’m pleased to steadily announce publication of my new book: Deep Agroecology: Farms, Food, and Our Future. Click on the covers below to learn more, or to purchase a copy.
A Basic Call to Consciousness: Still Resounding.
Food Coops 2012: Growing Strong.
Fate of the People is Linked to the Fate of the Land: Wendell Berry.
Humane Husbandry: Nebraska Tries to Blaze a Trail
Latter Day Luther Nails Troubling Thesis to Doors at GMO Farm Citadels
Outside the Box, But Inside the Hoop:
Community Farms (CSA) at the Turn of the Millennium.
Rivulets of Revelation Flow from Two Farm & Food Conferences
Community Farms in the 21st Century
(2-part series on the history & development of CSA in the USA)
Dig Deeper ~ CSA Farms and Aggregators Thresh Things Out
(Rodale’s New Farm Magazine, Summer, 2015)
++ About 200 substantive articles and growing on my blog Deep Agroecology ~ The Call of the Land.
deep agroecology, #deepagroecology
Time of Transition: Flowers of Possibility
Sparks for the 8th Fire: a podcast
What are people for? What are farms for?
