What have you done today to lower your impact?

We are washing away the foundations of our existence on every front. It is high time we move from crashing about on the planet like a bull in china shop and find a way to go forward with intent. We must find systems of living based on sustainability. The systems and tools exist, it is up to each of us to adopt them.

Blog Archive

Friday 16 January 2009

Start a Farm in the Heart of the City


Grow, cook it, eat it! Check out an excellent article about urban agriculture over at Organic Consumers Association. The authors website is Homegrown Evolution.
That's their book on the left. It looks interesting, I might have to read it.

Here is an excerpt from the article at OCA;


"The idea of urban farming is nothing new. Back in the days before freeways and refrigerated trucks, cities depended on urban farmers for the majority of their fresh food. This included small farms around the city, as well as kitchen gardens. Even today, there are places that hold to this tradition. The citizens of Shanghai produce 85% of their vegetables within the city, and that's just one example of a long Asian tradition of intense urban gardening. Or consider Cuba. Cubans practiced centralized, industrial agriculture, just as we do, until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989. Overnight, Cubans were forced to shift from a large, petroleum-based system to small-scale farming, much of it in cities. Today, urban organic gardens produce half of the fresh fruits and vegetables consumed by Cubans.

The United States once was a nation of independent farmers. Today most of us do not know one end of a hoe from the other. In the last half of the 20th century, a cultural shift unique in human history came to pass. We convinced ourselves that we didn't need to have anything to do with our own food. Food, the very stuff of life, became just another commodity, an anonymous transaction. In making this transition, we sacrificed quality for convenience, and then we learned to forget the value of what we gave up."

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Yes, but the real reason no one farms anymore is because most people have gotten lazy, food handed to them at subsidized prices.
Our family has been living off the grid and producing most of our own food for over 15 years now, and it is a lot of hard work.
But worth it...
We can't complain about everyone else, we have to be the change we want to see in the world, one family at a time.

C Robb said...

Thanks for the Comment,
I couldn't agree with you more. My wife and I are working on plans to get started on the same thing in 2009.

What part of the world are you living in?

Would you be interested in writing a series of posts about your experiences for this blog or do you already have a blog or site I could link to?

I'd love to hear more about your experiences off grid.

Thanks again for the post and stopping by the blog
Robb