For several months now we've been pondering and reading and pondering about food and farms and air quality and water quality and human health and the climate crisis. We believe key factors can be found in these reports:
- Farming Our Way Out of the Climate Crisis
- Barriers For Farmers & Ranchers to Adopt Regenerative Ag Practices In The US
- Building Bioregional Food Systems Post-COVID 19: The Northeast Healthy Soil Network & the power of regional food system reform consortium work
- Duluth Citizens' Climate Plan: Food and Agriculture Actions
commodity corn: answer or problem?
Photo by J. Harrington
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And, because we are a recovering planner, we feel obligated to share the American Planning Association's knowledge base resources on:
This morning we managed to confirm at least part of the value proposition behind organic food, which is a central element of many of the food system improvements needed:
- Human health implications of organic food and organic agriculture
- Mayo Clinic: Organic foods: Are they safer? More nutritious?
No doubt there are those who will continue to claim organic, local / regional is too expensive and unnecessary in a global economy. There are also a distressing number of anti-vaxxers claiming vaccines are unsafe or unnecessary. Having read, or at least skimmed, the preponderance of the linked material, we believe the current industrial agriculture system is responsible for overproducing at least as much harm as good. It needs to be replaced or transformed into something better suited for maintaining healthy humans and human communities in a healthy environment. There are several legislative proposals at the federal level which help move US in that direction. One example is Representative Chellie Pingree's [D-ME-1] Agriculture Resilience Act [H.R.5861]. (Full disclosure: we haven't read H.R.5861 carefully enough to be sure if it incorporates what we believe is an appropriate level of performance requirements.) There is also Senator Booker's Farm System Reform Act of 2019 [S. 3221 (116th)]. With enough public interest and pressure, food system transformation will not be left like the weather (climate) where everyone talks about it but no one does anything about it.
Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front
by Wendell Berry
Love the quick profit, the annual raise,vacation with pay. Want moreof everything ready-made. Be afraidto know your neighbors and to die.And you will have a window in your head.Not even your future will be a mysteryany more. Your mind will be punched in a cardand shut away in a little drawer.When they want you to buy somethingthey will call you. When they want youto die for profit they will let you know.So, friends, every day do somethingthat won’t compute. Love the Lord.Love the world. Work for nothing.Take all that you have and be poor.Love someone who does not deserve it.Denounce the government and embracethe flag. Hope to live in that freerepublic for which it stands.Give your approval to all you cannotunderstand. Praise ignorance, for what manhas not encountered he has not destroyed.Ask the questions that have no answers.Invest in the millennium. Plant sequoias.Say that your main crop is the forestthat you did not plant,that you will not live to harvest.Say that the leaves are harvestedwhen they have rotted into the mold.Call that profit. Prophesy such returns.Put your faith in the two inches of humusthat will build under the treesevery thousand years.Listen to carrion — put your earclose, and hear the faint chatteringof the songs that are to come.Expect the end of the world. Laugh.Laughter is immeasurable. Be joyfulthough you have considered all the facts.So long as women do not go cheapfor power, please women more than men.Ask yourself: Will this satisfya woman satisfied to bear a child?Will this disturb the sleepof a woman near to giving birth?Go with your love to the fields.Lie easy in the shade. Rest your headin her lap. Swear allegianceto what is nighest your thoughts.As soon as the generals and the politicoscan predict the motions of your mind,lose it. Leave it as a signto mark the false trail, the wayyou didn’t go. Be like the foxwho makes more tracks than necessary,some in the wrong direction.Practice resurrection.
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