“A local food and farming revolution is already underway, as citizens across Boulder County are quietly beginning to completely rebuild our local foodshed,” says Michael Brownlee, “Catalyst” for Transition Colorado, a Boulder-based non-profit organization which is launching a county-wide EAT LOCAL! Campaign featuring a 10% Local Food Shift Challenge and Pledge.
“Why can’t you buy raw milk, ice cream with eggs in it, or home-made sausage?,” asks Salatin. “America’s food system, enslaved by a global corporate bureaucratic fraternity, offers less choice amid the perception of abundance. The only reason the framers of the U.S. Constitution and Bill of Rights did not guarantee citizens freedom of food choice was because they could not have conceived of a day when private treaty neighbor-to-neighbor food commerce would be demonized and criminalized.” In this call to grass roots food activism, Salatin seeks a Food Emancipation Proclamation, freeing citizens to opt out of the industrial food fraternity.
While watersheds outline the flow of water supplying a particular area, “foodsheds” outline the flow of food feeding a particular area. A foodshed is everything between where a food is produced and where a food is consumed—the land it grows on, the routes it travels, the markets it goes through, the tables it ends up gracing. The modern U.S. foodshed includes the entire world. Much of our food traverses the globe to reach our dinner table. In fact, food can often travel back and forth thousands of miles to different processing plants before it eventually reaches us…
The mission of the proposed Boulder County Farmer Cultivation Center is to provide space and programming to foster increased food production in our community. It will be an incubator for new farmers, farming and gardening techniques, and food related businesses.
…Undertaking the change of something as deep rooted as a community food system will require a careful and analytical planning process to insure success and efficiency. Ultimately, the end result of the planning process will be to develop a set of comprehensive, sustainable, and fair food and farming policies, and then to implement policy objectives via a strategic plan that is inclusive of diverse voices in our community. Achieving these goals can only be accomplished via a coordinated and thoughtful effort.
Our 10-year EAT LOCAL! Campaign for Boulder County takes a multi-pronged approach to increasing public awareness and involving members of our community in the critical work of rebuilding our local foodshed, economy, and relationships with each other and the beings with whom we share our nurturing ecosystem.
…In a nutshell, the key question for me is does GM make us and the natural world healthier and more food secure? Surely, if climate science teaches us one thing, it is the need for the application of the precautionary principle. If there is a significant chance that a particular course of action will have harmful effects, then it makes sense to avoid it, even if it isn’t 100% certain. Likewise, so much is as yet unknown about GM, and so much could go wrong that we are far better off, I would argue, giving it a very wide berth. I don’t feel the greens have got it wrong, and it would take a far more compelling case than that set out by Lynas to convince me that they have.
Since World War II, we have lost millions of farmers and tens of millions of acres of farmland and hundreds of billions of tons of topsoil and too many trillions of soil micro-organisms to count. We have filled our soil with chemicals and our stores with junk food. We have filled our portfolios with junk bonds and our heads with investments that we do not understand. Somewhere along the way, it seems, we all signed up for the 100 Million Cars In China Club and the 500 Million Twinkies Per Annum Club and the Trillionth McDonald’s Hamburger Club. Somewhere along the way, it seems, we handed our money over to Masters of the Universe, hedge fund managers and computer programmers.
…Most of us know in our bones that a sea change is coming in agriculture. But the biggest driver of that change is not going to come from the issues that I’ve mentioned so far. The biggest driver is going to be the increasing cost and decreasing availability of fossil fuels, especially oil. Because agriculture is so dependent on oil, the entire system is extremely vulnerable to oil depletion—and to oil price spikes. The situation brewing on the horizon regarding oil compels us to begin rethinking how we grow our food, and even how we eat.
…We have become dependent upon technology and synthetic inputs, subsidized by what was, until very recently, cheap oil, which facilitated not only the production of nitrogen fertilizer, but also the management of large-scale, mechanized farms and the energy-intensive system of processing and long-range transportation necessary to bring agricultural products to distant markets. Agriculture accounts for more than 20 percent of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions—all the more shocking when one realizes that recent science indicates that fertile soil is a potent carbon sink, holding the potential to play a significant role in remediating global warming.
To be sustaining and sustainable, agriculture must make the transition from an oil-based industrial model to a more labor-intensive, knowledge-intensive, localized, organic model. This means a radical reduction of fossil fuel inputs, accompanied by an increase in labor inputs and a reduction of transport, with production being devoted primarily to local consumption. What would an agriculture without fossil fuels look like? How could we get there?
It’s now undeniable that we must learn to reweave the fabric of fundamental connections and relationships that have been at the heart of human society from the beginning. We must learn to reconnect with the earth, with the seasons, with our biosphere, with each other. We must rebuild our relationships with those who live in our neighborhoods, with those who grow our food, with those who produce and sell the goods we need, with those who supply the services we require. And we must do it all locally as much as possible, rebuilding local living economies. Only through profoundly local living can we curtail our out-of-control consumption, end our contribution to global warming, and restore balance and sanity to our planet…
