Polyculture versus Monoculture: Which is Better? By Dr.
Mercola The "faster, bigger, cheaper" approach to food is slowly draining dry our planet's resources and compromising your health. The Earth's soil is depleting at more than 13 percent the rate it can be replaced.The documentary "FRESH" celebrates the farmers, thinkers and business people across America who are re-inventing our food system. The film demonstrates how we can collectively transform the current "industrial agricultural paradigm" into a healthier, more sustainable way of feeding the world, while restoring the health of our ailing planet. I hope you will set aside the time to watch it, as it will be time well spent.We have already lost 75 percent of the world's crop varieties over the last century.
Playing "Chicken" with Mother Nature In the words of Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and a number of other bestsellers: "Mother Nature destroys monocultures. " The Most Famous Monoculture Disaster: The Great Irish Potato Famine of the 1840s Growing a Movement. Breaking the grass ceiling: On U.S. farms, women are taking the reins. For 56-year-old Tammy Burnell, who lost everything she owned in the 2008 Iowa floods, it’s the freedom to stand in the verdant fields of Burnell Farms in Royston, Ga., and call out to the heavens — and know no one can hear her.
Hannah Breckbill, 25, walked from a career as a mathematician and settled in Elgin, Minn., planting Humble Hands Harvest “to work in something real and be the change I want to see happen in this world.” Forty-one-year-old Pilar Rebar quit her job as a pesticide applicator when she realized she had been told lies about the chemicals she was spraying on crops. Vowing to only grow “clean and healthy food,” she started up Sunnyside Organic Seedlings in Richmond, Calif. Meet three of America’s female farmers, the most rapidly growing segment of the nation’s changing agricultural landscape. The U.S. So hot is ag life that novels about farming are replacing chick lit, offering an unexpected twist to the notion of dirty romance. Not everyone needs help, of course. Breaking the grass ceiling: On U.S. farms, women are taking the reins. Someone Give This Man A Nobel Prize Already. He’s Going To Save The Planet!
Holding back the Doom with a big fat stick. At Milkwood, we spend the majority of our time focusing on positivistic strategies for an uncertain future.
This is mostly because the other way of looking at the future has a big flashing ‘here be dragons’ sign on it. Like everyone else, we know what’s happening out there in the big wide world. We know that there’s many gigantic problems, that the climate is changing, and that our granchildren’s world will definitely not look like this one.
It’s scary stuff. And yes, it does sometimes keep me awake at night. Part of our resolutely positive attitude has to do with our education enterprise, I suppose. Mostly because we know that, while fear can be very motivating in the short term (and might be an effective marketing strategy), it is not a good place to be coming from when you’re trying to create long term resilience, or enduring community, or a strong state of mental health. So we’ve always been very careful with how we’ve talked about and approached the great re-skilling. Future Scenarios - Introduction.