http://www.vimeo.com/10954704
food
Dec 242010
Watch the on-line orientation, then come to the library to “borrow” seeds any time the public library is open.
Visit our Seed Saving page for tips on how to save seeds so you can return seeds at the end of the season. You can “borrow” seeds from any drawer, but when you first get started, save seeds from the “Super easy” and “easy” drawers. Don’t save seeds from the “difficult” drawer for the library until you have learned a more about seed saving. Thanks for being a member of our library.
Jun 052010
La Finca Agroecológica Utopía es una experiencia de resistencia integral detrás de los cerros de Monserrate en los Andes colombianos.
Finca Agroecológica Utopía 1/4 from ZeitgeistColombia on Vimeo.
Utopía. Un lugar en los Andes Suramericanos Hacer un mundo nuevo, hoy.
Finca Agroecológica Utopía 2/4 from ZeitgeistColombia on Vimeo.
La Finca Agroecológica Utopía es una experiencia de resistencia integral detrás de los cerros de Monserrate en los Andes colombianos. Utopía es un territorio de experiencias alternas donde cultivamos alimentos ancestrales, recuperamos las semillas nativas Andinas y brindamos a otros la oportunidad de experimentar nuestra forma de cultivar la agrobiodiversidad a través de la educación alternativa. Buscamos establecer alianzas con los sectores populares, campesinos y neocampesinos. Nuestros alimentos ancestrales y medicalimentos pueden comprarse vía internet (para despachos en Colombia).
Source: Frutosdeutopia
May 062010
Financial speculation or “pump and dump” is creating a global food bubble like the sub-prime mortgages market
Source: The Real News
What “financialisation” means for food workers
Peter Rossman
Over the last couple of decades there has been a huge swelling in the importance of the financial sector in the world economy. Investors now demand the same elevated returns in all economic sectors – including food and agriculture. As a result, even manufacturing and service corporations have been “financialised”. The dominant financial logic places little value on real production, productivity or jobs. This is extremely harmful to the vast majority of the
world’s population, and it has enormous implications for the billions of people involved in food production.In the European Union, food processing is the largest employer in the manufacturing sector, and it adds more value to its raw materials than any other industry. In the growth years 2000–2005 (the last for which I have figures, but the trend has intensified), over 15 per cent of jobs were eliminated in this industry – ahead of textiles, and behind only agriculture. These jobs were not lost to foreign imports: they were lost to pressure to pay out more to shareholders.
Increased profits and sales were not achieved through productivity-enhancing technological change, which in recent years has barely affected the production process as such, as corporations focus on delivering instant cash to shareholders rather than investing in productive capacity. The companies simply squeezed more out of less. Mergers, acquisitions, and financially mandated reductions in “head count” meant that medium-sized facilities were closed and production centralised in fewer units transporting products over longer distances, deepening and widening the industry’s already substantial carbon footprint.
Those companies now employ fewer and fewer workers to produce their branded products. Outsourcing and casualisation have become key tools for enhancing exploitation in the quest for super-profits. Precarious work [3] not only allows employers to achieve massive reductions in the wages bill, but also has a chilling effect on the bargaining power of the workers who remain directly employed. The organising task for unions now goes beyond winning global recognition, organising and gaining bargaining rights from transnational employers. It also involves uniting into a single bargaining power those directly employed by the company and the growing numbers of precarious workers producing within the same TNC systems.
Source: Seedling
Nov 262009
Executive Chef Dale Hart takes you behind the scenes at the Radisson LAX, where he and his team create an Organic Thanksgiving meal to go
The Journey is a unique documentary project that delves into environmental, socio-culture and economic issues, with a questioning mind.
The focus of the project is to find and film inspiring ideas and projects over a wide spectrum of individuals and cultures, whilst examining our ability to reform our ideals, and our lifestyle in order to make positive changes for our planet and the human race.
The Journeymen (a person whom travels in order to gain experience, skills and knowledge) go in search of these stories – equipped only with minimal filming gear and personal possessions, they document their experience as they travel to global communities to observe, question and learn.
Video Source: The Journey, YouTube
Bristol gardener up for TV prize
A Bristol gardener is hoping to “put Easton on the map” by winning a television competition.
Nick Ward, co-ordinator of Eastside Roots gardening project, is one of four people with a chance to become the Community Gardening Champion on The Alan Titchmarsh Show.
There is a prize of £10,000 of gardening vouchers at stake as well as a 10-minute slot on each programme of the next series of the show.
Mr Ward, 37, said he hoped this would be his chance to give the eco-movement in Bristol the attention it deserved, as well as recognising the hard work of all those involved.
Eastside Roots is a not-for-profit workers’ co-operative that evolved from the Bristol Permaculture Group’s idea to provide a gardening hub for Easton and the wider Bristol community.
The term permaculture, which comes from the idea of permanent agriculture, is about making land sustainable by working with nature.
As well as a site in Old Market, where people can grow food and take part in horticultural courses, the group is turning derelict land next to Stapleton Road station into a community park.
Mr Ward said: “We offer lots of training and information-sharing schemes and workshops, everything from keeping bees to timber framing and busting myths about food.
“We want to share information that might be lost if it is not passed down through the generations.”
The idea for Eastside Roots came in 2005 when Mr Ward was studying a permaculture design course and realised Bristol, although renowned for its green credentials, lacked a gardening hub
Source: This Is Bristol
“Eastside Roots – a gardening Hub for the East side of Bristol. Connecting people and plants”
About Eastside Roots
Eastside Roots is creating a community gardening hub for Easton & the wider Bristol community, by renovating derelict land next to Stapleton Road train station & transforming it into a safe, social, positive, thriving green space & community resource. The green space at Trinity Centre is also being transformed into a flourishing garden with edible & flowering plants.
The aim is to create a forum for the sharing of skills & knowledge, for education, resource hire, as a plant & seed shop, as a demonstration of urban organic & permaculture food production, & a space for holding events & celebrations.
Source: Eastside Roots
WATCH VIDEO HERE –> “City Slicker Farms” for Urban Yards
People are always saying the tragedy of climate change is that those who contribute the least to the problem — the poor — are punished the hardest. There is truth to this; third-world, small-scale farmers whose fields experience climate changes too strong to adapt to don’t have industrial agriculture’s luxury of abundant surplus to cover their margin of error, or mass pesticide correction (fossil fuel use) to control the infestation of new pests that thrive in the new weather, or abundant water supplies that can be taken from the nearest neighborhood in short periods of dryness.
But with just one of these advantages taken away — through peak oil, erosion, severe drought or the like — the playing field will be evened. Those who educate themselves to adapt to a lifestyle of lower-energy inputs for higher gains are those who will thrive. Backyard farmers will benefit, while Food For Less and Wal-Mart devotees may be scratching their heads and rubbing their bellies.
Last week, I drove into West Oakland, California to meet with Patrick O’Connor of City Slicker Farms, an organization that works mainly with low-income families to increase “food self-sufficiency in West Oakland by creating organic, sustainable, high-yield urban farms and back-yard gardens.” CitySlickerFarms.org With curly hair, humility and heart, Patrick told me the vision he sees unfolding. Lower-income families taking responsibility for their own food. Unlike other programs he’s seen, he notes that the tendency of residents to maintain their gardens is high. Of course, all the cliches of the confidence building, community bonding, consciousness breakthroughs and other cb’s ring true.
They’re not doing this because their clients can’t afford food — they’re doing this because everyone should be eating local and learning to garden on some scale; their clients just happen to be unable to afford it.
We need more City Slicker Farms. Start slicking, or help someone else slick by getting in their yard and showing them this here video.
- Ben Zolno
permaculturetv
niccolox
Kirstie Stramler
Eric Toensmeier
calea68
alexmccausland
Recent Comments