…The market has been around since the 1980s. The past five years have brought explosive growth to the market, but the growth has been thoughtful and measured so far. The nonprofit Boulder County Farmers’ Market, which runs the Boulder and Longmont markets, has for years added prepared food vendors and meat sellers and special events.
…Last fall we expanded our backyard food garden by about a fourth with a sheet mulch method of putting down cardboard directly on the lawn, then layering cow manure, horse manure, straw, amendments (powdered sea kelp, ground rock) and dead leaves into a foot-thick pile that slowly decomposed over the winter to form very nitrogen-rich soil. Before learning this method from Sandy Cruz, a permaculture teacher in the Boulder area, in past years we would purchase and haul in bags of potting soil and compost from the local nursery or Home Depot to expand our garden. No more of that!
…In a town where you can’t swing a reusable canvas shopping bag without hitting a restaurant touting its locavore credentials, Forage and its talented young chef, Jason Kim, have managed to take the concept of “locally grown” to a new extreme. The restaurant’s Home Growers Circle allows Los Angeles residents to trade produce from their backyard plots in exchange for credits at the popular restaurant.
…As I’ve said before, I don’t yet consider myself a farmer, but I’ll use myself as an example anyway. I have a demanding full-time job that I love, and I often spend my evenings and weekends tending to and experimenting with the things we’re growing. Someday we’ll get to the point where we have enough products to start selling them in addition to eating them. But will we have time to grow them and spend so many hours a week trying to find customers for them?
…If we could double, triple, or quadruple the organic carbon content of soils in the decades ahead, the benefits would be incredible. The productivity of the land would climb and soils’ ability to hold and attract moisture would increase dramatically. The ability of the land to support economic activities would diversify and expand. If the scale of the soil-creation project was large enough, then soil building, as much as any other program currently being considered, could help lower atmospheric carbon dioxide and create a more stable climate.
…How ready are we for this scenario? Short answer: we’re not ready now, but the transition could be accomplished, especially if we start preparing. The percentage of food produced locally would have to rise from 1 to closer to 100. This can be done not only by an expansion of local farming, but also by a rapid growth in urban horticulture. During both world wars, government in the U.S. sponsored a social invention called “victory gardens.” 20 million Americans responded to the call from the Department of Agriculture which made pleas to Americans to grow their own food. Gardens in yards, vacant lots, and parks supplied up to 40% of the produce eaten in the U.S.
…Several times a year, I get a ‘fresh batch’ of kids in my high-school chemistry classroom. Most of them come from an upper-middle class background and are thoroughly indoctrinated into the basic tenets of industrial civilization — material growth, technological progress, nature as merely a source of raw materials, novelty as virtue, etc. And in addition to imparting the general chemistry curriculum, I feel it is my obligation to both (1) tell them the hard truths about our civilization and its future prospects, and (2) outline a philosophy and practical steps that may improve our chances for a livable future. But both of these “extra” tasks are not without their challenges.
…This new way of procuring food, by direct connection with a local farmer, is called “Community Supported Agriculture,” CSA for short, a movement which sprouted in Europe and Japan in the 1960s, and took root in the U.S. in the early 90s. It’s also an old way of procuring food, that is, from neighbors who you know and trust. It works like this: Pay your farmer a set price at the beginning of the season (usually between $300 and $600) and for the next 20 weeks you will be provided with a variety of fresh vegetables, either right at your doorstep or for you to pick up at the farm.
West of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, coastal California is a hotbed of alternative agriculture. Eating locally is easy enough where the balmy climate affords a year-round growing season. Ironically, the same farms featured as local growers in a San Francisco market are featured in my mother’s New Jersey grocery store as “California Fresh.” “That’s because it snows in New Jersey,” explained my ever-patient mother. This I already knew, having grown up on the East Coast.
A newly produced UN Report rightly points out, among other things, that the western model of meat and dairy production simply won’t work on a planet of 9 billion people. The report, which quantifies the basic unsustainability of affluent societies and the challenges facing us in satisfying needs we’ve spent a century creating and can’t possibly actually fulfill, is generally a good one. But I do want to take issue with the underlying assumptions in the report, including the ones that lead the UN to the most controversial and media-attention gathering claim – that we need to move towards a universal vegan diet.
