Permaculture: Farms for the Future

Below is an excellent and beautiful film by a woman farmer about the future of farming. I guarantee the 48 minutes it takes to view will be well worth it. Even though the film has not been easy to access, it is provided here by http://www.permaculturevisions.com/links/

Enjoy... and leave a comment afterward!

Restructuring the Food System

"I grew up on a 1950's vintage poultry farm. Back then here in New Jersey there were thousands of small poultry farms with a few hundred to a few thousand birds. Every evening we would collect eggs and the whole family would be in the basement washing candling grading and boxing eggs in 30 dozen crates that we shipped to a co-op.

You might be surprised to know that this nightly ritual was repeated in millions of households across the United States. Everybody was small scale, everybody made a little money, nobody got rich or dominated over anybody else. Every county had small feed mills, poultry vet services, and spent bird haulers who shipped birds to soup canneries. The system worked, the supermarkets and food processors were always supplied with eggs.

It was all over by 1970. How did it end? the same way it always ends, somebody got greedy and wanted to dominate the industry in the good honorable guise of progress and efficiency. They destroyed the infrastructure and the system collapsed then they moved on to conquer the broiler, cattle and hog farms. It doesn't have to be this way.

Sadly we have an entire generation of adults in America that never knew a time when corporations did not dominate commerce. When little people work together they have more power than you can imagine."

Bob
Sunny Meadow Farm
Bridgeton, NJ
permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org

Hands That Feed

A documentary film called Hands That Feed has begun filming. The movie will explore the agricultural collapse in Haiti, it's role in the post-earthquake food crisis, and the emerging grass root development models that seek to restore Haiti's food supply and environment. It will focus both on permaculture and sustainable agriculture rural development projects, and hopes to show the world that a different kind of economic development is possible.

Nouvelle Vie Youth Corps http://nouvelleviehaiti.org/ is working to train a new generation of young Haitian leaders in Permaculture design. Also featured is the MPP Haiti (of recent fame for organizing the burning of Monsanto's "gift" of seeds), and a number of other organizations.

Polyface Farm

Polyface, farmed by Joel Salatin in Virginia, is one of the most productive and influential alternative farms in America. This description by Michael Pollan is a fantastic example of what sustainable agriculture is all about.

"Though it was only the third week of June, the pasture beneath me had already seen several rotational turns. Before being cut earlier in the week for the hay that would feed the farm's animals through the winter, it had been grazed twice by beef cattle, which after each day-long stay had been succeeded by several hundred laying hens. They'd arrived by Eggmobile, a ramshackle portable henhouse designed and built by Salatin. Why chickens? 'Because that's how it works in nature,' Salatin explained. 'Birds follow and clean up after herbivores.' and so during their turn in the pasture, the hens had performed several ecological services for the cattle as well as the grass: They'd picked the tasty grubs and fly larvae out of the cowpats, in the process spreading the manure and eliminating parasites. (This is what Joel has in mind when he says the animals do the work around here; the hens are his 'sanitation crew,' the reason his cattle have no need of chemical parasiticides.) And while they were at it, nibbling on the short cattle-clipped grasses they like best, the chickens applied a few thousand pounds of nitrogen to the pasture--and produced several thousand uncommonly rich and tasty eggs. After a few weeks' rest, the pasture will be grazed again, each steer turning these lush grasses into beef at the rate of two or three pounds a day.

"...Salatin's audacious bet is that feeding ourselves from nature need not be a zero-sum proposition, one in which if there is more for us at the end of the season then there must be less for nature--less topsoil, less fertility, less life. He's betting, in other words, on a very different proposition, one that looks an awful lot like the proverbially unattainable free lunch."

(from The Omnivore's Dilemma by Michael Pollan)
Click here to order The Omnivore's Dilemma from Amazon.com