Low-input sustainable agriculture is helping farmers store carbon underfoot Like everybody else, farmers talk a lot about the weather without doing much of anything about it – likely because there’s not much they can do. But after a decade of wild swings in weather patterns, crop prices and farm debt levels, some Canadian farmers are starting to look at ways…
Category: Farming
Open Pit Gravel Mine Tells Farmers to “Eat My Dust”
Although the Ontario election is still six months away, the surprise candidate for most polarizing issue likely to turn the political contest into an emotional cliffhanger has already come to the fore. A 6 billion tonne gravel “mega quarry” – second-largest in North America – has been proposed in what is now quiet farm and cottage country some 100 kilometers…
The Pillars of Cheap Food are Cracking
The worldwide price level of food is taking a great leap upward for the second time in less than five years. My bet is that this food price hike will match a rise in oil prices for wrenching impact on geopolitics, especially as the two are intimately connected. Food cannot be fertilized and shipped without imports of cheap fossil fuels,…
Is being vegan the only green option?
Join the discussion on how green and vegan issues relate; see my intro to the issues in this debate with PETA member Bruce Friedrich: http://www.newint.org/argument/2011/01/01/vegan-green-debate/
Northwest Territories Gardeners and Farmers Work Together For Local Food
Yellowknife and Hay River “We’re so far behind up here that we’re ahead,” Evellyn Coleman told me, explaining why her Territorial Farmers Association, the first in North America to consider accepting backyard and community gardeners as full members, was inviting me up to speak in the Northwest Territories. Just south of the Arctic tundra, where lichen and moss are the…
Stimulate This! Whole New Field of Vision for Farm Environmental Services
A newly-formed Ontario-wide coalition will work to convince governments to pay farmers for environmental services. That’s a promising sign a whole new environmental economy may be in birth, based on giving back to nature so it can lay more golden eggs. If the people concocting infrastructure investments that governments can sink taxpayers’ money into gave a thought to the enduring…