I created this meme for my blog at The Call of the Land and felt it was also worth sharing with visitors to this associated Chiron Communications blog.
No No Nano: Community Food as Firewall
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.
The Future of CSA Farms: Podcast Conversation
Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) is an agrarian movement that arose in America starting in the 1980s. In an era of general farm consolidation and industrialization, CSA has continued to develop. By now there are many thousands of farms and many hundreds of thousands of households networked directly with local farms.
The initial vision of CSA arose in the context of wide recognition of the necessity for renewal of agriculture through its healthy linkage with the human community that depends on farming for survival. The vision united farmers and consumers in an agrarian relationship for the health of people and planet, and explicitly recognized the necessary stewardship of soil, plants, and animals: the essential capital of human cultures. CSA emerged as a web of relationships.
Recently I had an opportunity to engage in conversation about the movement and its future with two renowned CSA farmers: Jean-Paul Courtens of Roxbury Farm in New York, and Allan Balliett of Fresh and Local CSA in Shepherdstown, West Virginia.
My thanks to Allan for creating and hosting BDnow Podcast 017 (The Future of CSA), and to Jean Paul for sharing his experience and insight.
As it happens, I must demur on the matter of “foremost…philosopher,” which is a descriptor applied to me in the podcast. CSA farms arose as a community supported concept. “The idea of CSA was in the air in the late 1980s.” Many different people were contributing to the thoughts and practices, including Jan Vander Tuin, John Root, Jr., Andrew Lorand, Robyn Van En, Elizabeth Henderson, Anthony Graham, Lincoln Geiger, and Alice Groh. Trauger Groh – my coauthor on Farms of Tomorrow and Farms of Tomorrow Revisited – had a profound and eloquent grasp of farming and of the budding CSA vision. My role with CSA in those days, and ongoingly, has been not to philosophize, but rather to listen closely and then to write about what I learn.
#csa #organicfarmers #organic #agrarian
CSA Farm Book Goes Global
A pioneering book that helped spark the CSA farm movement in the United States has now been published in a German-language edition.
Farms of Tomorrow, the first book on Community Supported Agriculture (CSA), authored by Trauger Groh and Steven McFadden back in 1989-90 when they were neighbors in New Hampshire, has just been published in a German translation, Hofe der Zukunft.
Journalist McFadden, a resident of Lincoln, Nebraska for the last several years, is the author of 12 other nonfiction titles including Profiles in Wisdom, and The Call of the Land. The various editions of the farm book he co-authored with farmer and philosopher Trauger Groh have helped to catalyze the development of CSA in America.
CSAs are farms and food distribution systems that directly unite farmers and consumers in an agrarian relationship for the health of people and planet. Consumer households invest in shares of a farm’s harvest in advance, and the farm reciprocates with weekly supplies of fresh, clean locally grown food.
By now there are well over 8,500 CSAs in the USA, and many thousands more in other nations, including Canada, France, Australia, Israel, and China. The steady growth and development of these new farms in the USA has come through an era beginning in the 1980s when traditional family farms have continued to decline for a host of reasons, and to be swallowed by increasingly larger operations.
Farms of Tomorrow was published by the Biodynamic Farming and Gardening Association in English since 1990; the 2nd edition of the book, Farms of Tomorrow Revisited was published in 1998, with many new chapters including one by Marcie Ostrom on CSA coalitions. The book has also been published in Japanese, and Russian translations. Now, nearly a quarter century after the CSA farm book first came out, it’s available in a handsome new German translation, Hofe der Zukunft.
German farmer and scholar Wolfgang Stranz worked for over a year to translate Farms of Tomorrow, and to write a special new chapter for readers in Germany and Austria.
As Resurgence Magazine noted in a review, “it is rare to come across any practical farming guide that sets out, from its inception, a set of principles that embrace social, spiritual, and economic concerns on completely equal terms. The wisdom and clarity of philosophy are striking throughout.” CSA is a dynamic movement at the heart of agricultural renewal.
The German-language edition of the book, Hofe der Zukunft, is available here.
The English-language edition of Farms of Tomorrow Revisited, published by the Biodynamic Association, is available in print and for the Kindle ebook readers at Amazon.com, in print through Steiner Books, and for all Apple devices in the iBook and iTunes stores.
Farmer Geiger’s Thanksgiving Grace
I was there in New Hampshire a year ago in September 2012, just a few miles away when dairyman Lincoln Geiger was badly hurt by a trampling bull.
That Sunday they airlifted him to a hospital in Boston to reckon with life-threatening injuries. But Lincoln’s spirit was strong and he moved through the wounds and the shock, and the many phases of recovery to come back to the land.
“I was given a new outlook on the world, Lincoln later explained, “by what I now call a form of initiation. My whole sense of reality shifted from an objective view of nature and the environmental movement, to a deeply caring heart-centered understanding.
“I now feel that the way to engage people to improve our world is with an intelligence that emanates through the heart. We need to ensoul nature and all its creatures and feel like guests, friends, or part of the familywhen in the presence of the forest or the garden or the herd. That is the attitude that comes from the warmth of the soul through the wisdom of the heart.”
From the very beginning Lincoln has been one of the core farmers at the remarkable Temple-Wilton Community Farm. One of the first two Community Supported Agriculture farms (CSAs) in America, it is still growing strong nearing thirty growing seasons.
In a blog post recounting his recent visit to the farm, Robert Karp of the Biodynamic Association noted that the Temple-Wilton Community Farm, “keeps showing the way” for thousands of other CSA farms across the nation and around the world.
A day-and-a-half before his fateful encounter with the bull, Lincoln came and sat beside me in the barn loft at Stonewall Farm Center, just west of Keene. He shared a grace with our conference of people talking about implementing greater food security for the Monadnock Region of New Hampshire.
Lincoln sat as part of a circle of 40 of us or so — all Twentyfirst Century agrarians alive with a sense of doing something foundationally important in the world. After dinner, to offer a blessing, he talked with us for about ten minutes.
He began by telling the story of how on a spring day he had climbed aboard the farm’s tractor and set about mowing the high fields. He never noticed the place in the deep grasses where a fawn lay hidden, and so to his dismay and anguish he found that the blades of his mower had badly injured the fawn.
Within two weeks he had hit four fawns and felt the deer were trying to teach him something monumental. “The day I hit the last fawn I was super alert to make sure there would be no accident. I stood on the tractor platform the whole time I was mowing. About a third into the 10-acre field I saw a deer standing about 200 feet from me. I stopped the tractor, got off and noticed that the deer was looking at me and then looked down and then back at me.
“I felt right away that she was standing by her fawn. I turned off the tractor and headed straight towards the deer. She ran away, I kept walking and soon there in front of me lay a beautiful fawn. I just stood with it for a while, then I called my dairy partner Andrew and our apprentice Sara to come to the field with a cage or something to hold the fawn while I finished mowing.
“I picked up the fawn, it was totally calm and carried it to the bottom of the field. Andrew and Sara came but had no cage, they brought it into the Forrest and let it go. I kept on mowing and just as I was finishing the last couple of swaths, as I look back, there it is with its hoof cut off an inch up. I cried out loud, turned off the tractor and picked it up in my arms again. My heart was broken so bad I can’t tell you. I brought my little friend into the forest, I knew it would never make it. I laid it on a large stone and crushed its beautiful head with a rock.
“Then I cracked open inside and screamed loudly for the world to hear our pain and our love,” Lincoln told me. Time went by. To bring some light and healing to all that arose with the death of the fawns, to respond give some beauty back to the world Lincoln wrote graces.
At Stonewall Farm a year ago, Lincoln spoke one of those graces aloud for the circle:
Thank you Earth so soft and strong
Thank you meadow filled with song
Thank you mountain, forest and stream
By you we rest and find our dream
Thank you creatures wild and tame
Your trust we love and hope to gain
Thank you for your milk and fleece
And for your meat that we may eat
Thank you root and leaf and seed
We’ll not forget your wondrous deed
You hold the earth
You catch the rain
You fill the world with air again
Thank you wind for bringing rain
Please help our friends who are in pain
For us who thirst and cry from hunger
Please bring hope, life and wonder
Thank you moon for guidance and grace
For heart bent flowers
With dew drop lace
Thank you sun as day begins
For golden light
By angel wings
With thankful hearts
and open hands
We ask to share your loving lands.
– Lincoln Geiger, Temple-Wilton Farm
As of Thanksgiving 2013, Lincoln writes: “I am well and full of living.” The Temple-Wilton Community Farm is also well and full of living, as attested to by yet another article about the farm’s place in the history and the destiny of the CSA movement, complete with some wonderful photos. The story – The First CSAs – is published on page 10 of the John Deere company magazine, The Furrow.
Talks
Over the years I’ve had the privilege of working with groups both large and small from coast to coast, and abroad. I’ve spoken at conferences, workshops, and seminars, as well as in banks, insurance companies, hospitals, forests, farm fields, fire houses, bookstores, churches, libraries, and colleges.
My gift is to offer audiences inspiration and empowerment by speaking about visions and practical ways to realize them, grounded in expertise and experience.
Contact ~ Steven McFadden
Click here for more information.
Wise elders say that we have only this generation
to come into a harmonious, inter-connected way of living,
or our human family will be extinct!
I invite you join me and
my colleague Brooke Medicine Eagle
for an amazing, complementary gathering of wisdom keepers
beginning November 16th:
RETURNING TO EARTH ~ BECOMING FULLY HUMAN
Moving Through Current Challenges into
Thriving, Sustainable, Respectful Life
focusing on empowering you with
real, workable, sustainable solutions
for our current personal and global challenges.
To register for this free summit, please follow this link.
Sample Talks and Workshops offered by Steven McFadden
The Call of the Land: Deep Agroecology ~
Our relationships with the earth, with our local environments, and with our food are being actively challenged. Agroecology and deep agroecology are intelligent, sophisticated, and effective ways to meet and to transcend those challenges, establishing a clean, healthy foundation on the earth for our food and for the next evolutionary step of humanity. We can respond wisely and decisively to the chaos in our climate and culture, for the present and for future. My talk on The Call of the Land offers facts, experiences, ideas, and ideals leading to the well-being and upliftment characteristic of deep agroecology.
Tales of the Whirling Rainbow ~
Gather round to hear true, dynamic tellings of some of the key multicultural, multifaith myths and mysteries of the Americas, and to consider how those legends may resound helpfully in real time. They are stories worth knowing.
The ominous reality of hate-mongering and cultural division are symptoms of a deeper crisis of meaning and purpose. Because these stories arise from the deepest roots of the Americas, the Tales of the Whirling Rainbow can be of high service as we pass through the present cultural and environmental tempest.
Odyssey of the 8th Fire ~
It is my honor to be able to sound a drum, to offer flowers, to take a place in a circle, and to relate the true, epic saga of a multicultural band of pilgrims who made a prophetic journey walking from the Atlantic to the Pacific under the dramatic sky sign of the Whirling Rainbow, and the sure guidance of traditional keepers and spiritual elders of North America. Through this saga, and interactive telling, we may engage the elders’ great and generous giveaway of understandings about our land, and our lives together upon the land.
Celebrate Santa Fe’s Community Farms
– Meet Your Ambassadors to the Earth –
If you love clean, fresh, local food, then you will want to head to the Farmer’s Market on April 17, 2018 to Celebrate Santa Fe’s Community Farms, an early evening educational get together. The public is cordially invited to join with some of Santa Fe’s pioneering community farmers and authors to sample, delicious, healthy local foods, and to explore visions of how Santa Fe can become more food secure and food healthy.
The first annual Celebrate Santa Fe’s Community Farms event is set for Tuesday evening, April 17, from 5:30-7 PM at the Farmers Market on Paseo de Peralta. Donations to help defray costs are welcome.
Learn about what’s happening with local community farms, and engage with dynamic agrarian visions of what is possible for the Santa Fe community.
Sponsored by Beneficial Farms CSA, the early evening celebration will feature samples of local food, and several short presentations from local farmers and authors, including Thomas Swendson of Beneficial Farms, Mark Nelson of Synergia Farm, Steven McFadden (author of Farms of Tomorrow, and The Call of the Land), and also (other speakers ? This list is all male. We should invite a woman to speak. Who?). Tejinder Ciano of Reunity Resources will fill us in on the destiny of the historic Santa Fe Community Farm at San Ysidro Crossing.
You are cordially invited to join with your Santa Fe neighbors to Celebrate our community farms, and to explore the possibilities for supporting our local farms, increasing our local food security and food health, and helping to strengthen community.
Reiki Training – I’ve been practicing and teaching the art and discipline of Reiki hands-on complementary healing for almost 40 years. I offer Reiki training classes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Everyone can learn Reiki healing, and everyone is welcome. Certificates awarded. You must complete Reiki I before taking Reiki II. For more information or to register, click here.
Odyssey of the 8th Fire – June, 2015 marked the 20th anniversary of the first steps along the Odyssey of the 8th Fire. To celebrate it, journalist Steven McFadden will sound the drum, tell the tale, and show an 8th Fire film relating the fundamental wisdom teachings of North America.
This one-time evening event – Odyssey of the 8th Fire – is set for Thursday evening, June 25, 2015 , 7-9:30 PM at the Unitarian Church of Lincoln, 6300 A St. Lincoln, Nebraska. The Odyssey is free, although the storyteller will “throw a blanket” to cover costs.
Storyteller McFadden will relate the true tale of a great prophetic pilgrimage from the Atlantic to the Pacific which began precisely 20 years ago — a pilgrimage which remains suspended in mystery. The journey began in the east at the Atlantic sea, then the pilgrims walked for eight months across the Heartland, fading at the Pacific’s Western Gateway.
In the unfolding of this true tale, learned elders of all nations make a great and generous giveaway of the teachings they carry for human beings.
If you’d like to sit in the circle and hear the story, you can join the Facebook events page for Odyssey of the 8th Fire.
Watch the trailer for the film at this link: http://imagicapictures.com/_movies/Trailer_8th_Fire.html
Millennial Agrarians Rise to Meet ‘Grim Vision’
An authoritative new study sets out a grim vision of what lies ahead: climate change will cause shortages and violence, provoking much of civilization to collapse.
This blunt warning is the heart of the 2009 State of the Future study from the UN’s Millennium Project. The report, which will be made public in August, is based on the input of 2,700 researchers, and backed by a range of organizations including UNESCO, the World Bank, and the US Army.
According to the report, “The scope and scale of the future effects of climate change – ranging from changes in weather patterns to loss of livelihoods and disappearing states – has unprecedented implications for political and social stability.”
The immediate problems are rising food and energy prices, shortages of water and increasing migrations “due to political, environmental and economic conditions,” which could plunge half the world into social instability and violence.
The report suggests the threats could also engender wise and healthy responses. “The good news is that the global financial crisis and climate change planning may be helping humanity to move from its often selfish, self-centered adolescence to a more globally responsible adulthood…Many perceive the current economic disaster as an opportunity to invest in the next generation of greener technologies…and to put the world on course for a better future.”
What is good and healthy and helpful?
Reading the stark forecasts from this report put me in mind – thankfully — of someone I knew and admired, the late Leon Secatero of the Canoncito Band of Navajo, To’Hajiilee, New Mexico. Whenever Leon would hear pronouncements of inevitable doom, he would acknowledge the potential, then respond calmly.
In one of our conversations back in 2005, Grandfather Leon spoke with me about the future. “The journey we are beginning now is for the next 500 years. What will be the sacred path that people will walk over the next 500 years? Even in the midst of all the changes taking place and all the things falling apart, we are building that foundation now. That’s something important for us to remember and to focus on. If we don’t do it, no one else will.
“All anyone needs to do is look around,” Leon said. “We have been destroying nature systematically for many decades. Now nature is destroying us with winds and storms and earthquakes and volcanoes. All that was known a long time ago. The elders have been telling us for years that this would come. Now it’s here and it’s hurting us.
“We need to take a close look at this and then really come to terms with ourselves,” Leon said. “To move ahead into the next 500 years we must leave some things behind or they will contaminate or even eliminate the future. We cannot go forward if we keep destroying the earth. But we must also ask, what is good and healthy and helpful? Those good things can be part of our foundation, part of our pathway into the next 500 years…”
There is a growing cohort of people who are actively asking these questions, and responding creatively. I have come to think of them as the Millennial Agrarians, and they got a nod of acknowledgement this week from USA Today.
In the story, reporter Elizabeth Weise wrote “Agriculture specialists say there is a burgeoning movement in which young people — most of whom come from cities and suburbs — are taking up what may be the world’s oldest profession: organic farming.
“The wave of young farmers on tiny farms is too new and too small to have turned up significantly in USDA statistics, but people in the farming world acknowledge there’s something afoot.
“For these new farmers, going back to the land isn’t a rejection of conventional society, but an embrace of growing crops and raising animals for market as an honorable, important career choice.”
In the face of the grim vision described by the researchers involved with the State of the Future report, these Millennial Agrarians are an embodiment of hope. We are going to need millions more people – perhaps as many as 80 to 100 million more – to face what is happening in our world, and to respond intelligently to the call of the land.
(For more on this theme, including many more creative responses, see my blog at The Call of the Land.).
Global Food Crisis: so far a silent tsunami
Two reports this week underscore the need for families, neighborhoods, and communities to take action this year to ensure their ongoing food security. Because evidence for this need is mounting, I am cross-posting this entry from my agrarian blog, The Call of the Land. That site reports not only on the calls arising from the land, but also on innovative and sustainable ways people are responding.
The first report is somewhat longer in term. The head of the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), acknowledged on Monday that global food production is already under strain from the global credit crunch and must double by 2050 to head off mass famine.
Jacques Diouf said that the unfolding global food crisis pushed another 40 million people into hunger in 2008. That brought the global number of undernourished people to 973 million last year out of a total population of around 6.5 billion, he said.
“We face the challenge now of not only ensuring food for the 973 million who are currently hungry,” Diouf said, “but also ensuring there is food for nine billion people in 2050. We will need to double global food production by 2050.”
Diouf warned the global economic crisis was already undermining efforts to tackle food insecurity. The credit crisis makes it harder for farmers to get loans to buy materials and equipment to grow crops.
“This silent tsunami is completely unacceptable,†Diouf said of the mounting global food crisis.
Meanwhile, of more immediate concern, consumers may soon be paying even more as they chase a shrinking supply of fresh and frozen vegetables. According to news reports, many California farmers have started abandoning their fields in response to a crippling drought.
California’s sweeping Central Valley grows most of the country’s fruits and vegetables. But this winter thousands of acres are turning to dust as the state hurtles into the worst drought in nearly two decades. The consequences of the drought will soon impact store shelves and consumer wallets.
The credit crisis, ongoing instability in the realm of oil prices, the drought, and other mounting conditions make it important now – this year – for citizens to take steps to implement local and sustainable systems of food production.
The Call of the Land
by Steven McFadden
I have recently initiated a new blog: The Call of the Land – An Agrarian Primer for the 21st Century.
If you have an interest in food and matters agrarian, I invite you visit the blog, which I will develop steadily in the years ahead. I set out my reasons for doing so in one of my initial posts.
Amplifying the Call
Our land, farms and food require immediate attention from everyone who recognizes what is so rapidly unfolding. Prices rising, supplies dwindling, crops mutating, population growing. An agrarian revolution is essential to our survival.
Agriculture is the foundation of our civilization. We must have it. Everything else depends on our meeting the primary needs of clean food and clean water. This state of affairs is a blessed necessity, for it interweaves our human souls with the soul of the earth. It is also a key to a successful future, for agriculture can serve as a basis for the wholesome renewal of our overall relationship with the earth.
Food and farms are in the ongoing thrall of a blitzkrieg of mutations, both negative and positive. Because agrarian matters are of such fundamental importance, impending matters of finance, transport, petrochemical supply, climate stability, environmental health, water supply, food availability and composition, necessitate—right now—a clear, visionary look at matters agrarian.
Our current approach is, bluntly, unsustainable, and the harsh consequences are now plain. As a matter of survival – while food prices rise and supplies dwindle — we must find wise ways to evolve. That evolution must take place swiftly, and it will require the involvement of almost all of us. A few farmers struggling the vortex of change cannot alone take care of us all. That has become an inescapable fact for anyone who follows agrarian news.
Just four months ago a major UN environment report (UNEP) concluded that our Earth is reaching the point of no return. The speed at which mankind is using and abusing the Earth’s resources is putting humanity’s survival at risk, the team of scientists said. They collectively issued an “urgent call for action.â€
Meanwhile, geologists are now debating whether they should add a new epoch to the geological time scale. They call it the Anthropocene – the epoch when, for the first time in Earth’s history, humans have become a predominant geophysical force.
Perhaps the major factor of this “force†is modern industrial agriculture. On a massive scale it is poisoning and eroding the soil, draining water supplies, polluting the environment, and radically altering the genetic character of our planetary vegetation and livestock, as well as our diets and our perhaps our destiny.
While there may be no single remedy for the many challenges we face, there are many possible positive paths. With diligence we can construct a map for some of those paths, showing how a sustainable agrarian foundation can serve our brilliant yet fragile high-tech culture both nationally and globally.
For me a core ethical necessity in regard to our land and food is to strive in all endeavors to enhance the health and the regenerative capacity of the Earth. To support our farms so that, rather than being major sources of pollution, they are instead oases of environmental health, radiating this vitality out widely, and producing an abundance of clean food.
I intend this blog to amplify the call that is arising from our land. As Jack London put it in his classic novel, “The Call of the Wild,†we face a moment of truth.
– End –