#community agriculture

[freshtendril]

I’m so lucky to have a farmer friend. This morning he dropped off some chicken eggs for me but also included a nice surprise of Turkey eggs. That’s right, eggs from his turkeys. And they are some big jumbo ones and are so beautiful. Make friends with your farmer. They bring food into your life. Literally. Thank you farmers!

[fcfvafeed]

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[reasonsforhope]

Legit though, we should start turning ecosystem restoration and work to make our world more tolerant to the effects of climate change into annual holidays and festivals

Like how just about every culture used to have festivals to celebrate the beginning of the harvest or its end, or the beginning of planting, or how whole communities used to host barn raisings and quilting bees - everyone coming together at once to turn the work of months or years into the work of a few days

Humble suggestions for festival types:

Goat festival

Besides controlled burns (which you can't do if there's too much dead brush), the fastest, most effective, and most cost-efficient way to clear brush before fire season - esp really heavy dead brush - is to just. Put a bunch of goats on your land for a few days!

Remember that Shark Tank competitor who wanted to start a goat rental company, and everyone was like wtf? There was even a whole John Oliver bit making fun of the idea? Well THAT JUST PROVES THEY'RE FROM NICE WET PLACES, because goat rental companies are totally a thing, and they're great.

So like. Why don't we have a weekend where everyone with goats just takes those goats to the nearest land that needs a ton of clearing? Public officials could put up maps of where on public lands grazing is needed, and where it definitely shouldn't happen. Farmers and people/groups with a lot of acres that need clearing can post Goat Requests.

Little kids can make goat-themed crafts and give the goats lots of pets or treats at the end of the day for doing such a good job. Volunteers can help wrangle things so goats don't get where they're not supposed to (and everyone fences off land nowadays anyway, mostly). And the goats, of course, would be in fucking banquet paradise.

Planting Festival and Harvest Festival

Why mess with success??? Bring these back where they've disappeared!!! Time to swarm the community gardens and help everyone near you with a farm make sure that all of their seeds are sown and none of the food goes to waste in the fields, decaying and unpicked.

And then set up distribution parts of the festival so all the extra food gets where it needs to be! Boxes of free lemons in front of your house because you have 80 goddamned lemons are great, but you know what else would be great? An organized effort to take that shit to food pantries (which SUPER rarely get fresh produce, because they can't hold anything perishable for long at all) and community/farmer's markets

Rain Capture Festival

The "water year" - how we track annual rainfall and precipitation - is offset from the regular calendar year because, like, that's just when water cycles through the ecosystems (e.g. meltwater). At least in the US, the water year is October 1st through September 30th of the next year, because October 1st is around when all the snowmelt from last year is gone, and a new cycle is starting as rain begins to fall again in earnest.

So why don't we all have a big barn raising equivalent every September to build rain capture infrastructure?

Team up with some neighbors to turn one of those little grass strips on the sidewalk into a rain-garden with fall-planting plants. Go down to your local church and help them install some gutters and rain barrels. Help deculvert rivers so they run through the dirt again, and make sure all the storm drains in your neighborhood are nice and clear.

Even better, all of this - ESPECIALLY the rain gardens - will also help a ton with flood control!

I'm so serious about how cool this could be, yall.

And people who can't or don't want to do physical stuff for any of these festivals could volunteer to watch children or cook food for the festival or whatever else might need to be done!

Parties afterward to celebrate all the good work done! Community building and direct local improvements to help protect ourselves from climate change!

The possibilities are literally endless, so not to sound like an influencer or some shit, but please DO comment or reply or put it in the notes if you have thoughts, esp on other things we could hold festivals like this for.

Canning festivals. "Dig your elderly neighbors out of the snow" festivals. Endangered species nesting count festival. Plant fruit trees on public land and parks festival. All of the things that I don't know anywhere near enough to think of. Especially in more niche or extreme ecosystems, there are so many possibilities that could do a lot of good

[somethingcorenotsure]

I think it's so adorable that early humans took wild gourds - a tiny fruit that hollows out as it dries, making it float - and decided to make something out of it

they thought the tiny fruit was so good that they bred it for thousands of years, making it larger to form into bowls and cups, and different shapes to become bottles and spoons

and musical instruments

And then, people took the hollow gourds they farmed, and they turned them into houses for birds. We adapted them into the perfect houses for birds, and now there are specific breeds of birdhouse gourd just for making into birdhouses

And humans dedicated gardening space and time and thousands of years of breeding to make the gourds so absolutely perfect for birds, that there is a species of bird that lives almost exclusively in them

[bumblebeeappletree]

Every once in a while I’ll see some posts about everyone should become vegan in order to help the environment. And that… sounds kinda rude. I’m sure they don’t mean to come off that way but like, humans are omnivores. Yes there are people who won’t have any animal products be it meat or otherwise either due to personal beliefs or because their body physically cannot handle it, and that’s okay! You don’t have to change your diet to include those products if you don’t want to or you physically can’t.

But there’s indigenous communities that hunt and farm animals sustainably and have been doing so for generations. And these animals are a primary source of food for them. Look to the bison of North America. The settlers nearly caused an extinction as a part of a genocide. Because once the Bison were gone it caused an even sharper decline of the indigenous population. Now thankfully Bison did not go extinct and are actively being shared with other groups across America.

Now if we look outside of indigenous communities we have people who are doing sustainable farming as well as hunting. We have hunting seasons for a reason, mostly because we killed a lot of the predators. As any hunter and they will tell you how bad the deer population can get. (Also America has this whole thing about bird feathers and bird hunting, like it was bad until they laid down some laws. People went absolutely nuts on having feathers be a part of fashion like holy cow.)

We’re slowly getting better with having gardens and vertical farms within cities, and there’s some laws on being able to have a chicken or two at your house or what-have-you in the city for some eggs. (Or maybe some quails since they’re smaller than chickens it’s something that you’d might have to check in your area.) Maybe you would be able to raise some honey bees or rent them out because each honey tastes different from different plants. But ultimately when it comes to meat or cheese? Go to your local farmers. Go to farmers markets, meet with the people there, become friends, go actively check out their farm. See how the animal lives are and if the farmer is willing, talk to them about sustainable agriculture. See what they can change if they’re willing. Support indigenous communities and buy their food and products, especially if you’re close enough that the food won’t spoil on its way to you. (Like imagine living in Texas and you want whale meat from Alaska and you buy it from an indigenous community. I would imagine that would be pretty hard to get.)

Either way everything dies in the end. Do we shame scavengers for eating corpses they found before it could rot and spread disease? Do we shame the animals that hunt other animals to survive? Yes factory farming should no longer exist. So let’s give the animals the best life we can give them. If there’s babies born that the farmer doesn’t want, give them away to someone who wants them as a pet. Or someone who wants to raise them for something else. Not everyone can raise animals for their meat. I know I can’t I would get to emotionally attached. I’d only be able to raise them for their eggs and milk.

Yeah this was pretty much thrown together, and I just wanted to say my thoughts and throw them into the void. If you have some examples of sustainable farming/agriculture, please share them because while I got some stuff I posted from YouTube, I’m still interested to see what stuff I might’ve missed!

[ireton]

Climate Communism - Dutch Farmers - WEF

This is the REAL REASON they want to get rid of the Farmers.

[lilithism1848]

[thedansemacabres]

something lovely for sustainable agriculture in honour of the gods, I think, would be learning how to make natural dyes, use eggshells for all sorts of purposes, sewing, etc. These arts are often forgotten, allowing for corporations to overtake our lives. Demeter's hands guide our own, so why not learn to make lovely dyes with her fine crops?

[elftwink]

one thing thats so interesting about being a vegetarian is you get to hear all about everyones hypothetical activism that they care about very deeply when talking specifically about your diet and why it's stupid, but literally will never bring up ever again in any other context

[tinyshe]

Oregon [usa] has been shutting down small farms and market gardens in a pretty aggressive manner. They're even resorting to sending out cease and desist letters to these farms, using satellite tech to track them down first. Their justification? Water conservation and protecting groundwater. They're wielding two laws in particular to make this happen.

[justalittlesolarpunk]

hello! I've just found your blog and that's AMAZING, but I have a question: what do you think about industrial food? it's super low quality, and furthermore, they produce a lot of trash as plastic (unnecessary) packaging! It would be easier just to say "starting eating organic food", but for poor people, buying grapes or apples, even not organic, costs more than buying cookies full of fat, sodium and carbohydrates (not talking about all the chemicals). I personally, think about non conventional food plants as an alternative since most of them are super resistant to weather changes and easy to rise. I wanna know what you think about

Hi! Thanks for getting in touch. The long and short of it is, I hate industrialised farming. It pollutes the air, soil and water, poisons and impoverishes farmers, increases the likelihood of zoonotic pandemics, reduces the genetic diversity of plants and encroaches upon wildlife territories. We need a massive return to local, small-scale regenerative agriculture if we are to feed everyone and equitably share the earth with other species. But you’re right, it has to be done in a way that’s just and fair for people who can currently only afford plasticked, pesticided and processed food, as well as making a living for farmers. We’re all on the same side here, but people often don’t realise that. I also think we need to massively diversify our food plant range - a system that relies on just a few staple crops is insanely vulnerable, especially with more and more extreme weather coming our way. So many plants I was raised to think of as ‘weeds’ are not only edible but highly nutritious and often medicinal. Where are the dandelion farmers? The mycologists selling turkey tails? And foraging should be taught in all schools so kids can feed themselves in the wild and pass these skills on to future generations. As with most climate solutions, I don’t think it’s an either/or - I’d welcome pretty much any solution as part of a wider melting pot of alternatives. The only thing I won’t budge on is that we have to change, because the way we in the North and West farm right now just isn’t sustainable.

[alex51324]

First Farm Box of the season!

First, does anyone recognize these green guys?

I'm guessing maybe some kind of radish? I haven't cut them open yet.

Here is the group picture:

I got radishes, rhubarb, asparagus, green garlic, greens of some kind, a big bunch of sage, beets, and Jerusalem artichokes (which I only recognized because of that "this isn't ginger" picture that made the rounds last week or so.) I also got the cheese share, which is three cheeses every other week; this time it's gouda, baby swiss, and a sheep's cheese spread. I'm signed up for the fruit share, too, but that doesn't start until June.

Here's everybody hanging out in the box--

and a little free advertising:

They have pickup locations throughout central Pennsylvania and in several major cities in the mid-Atlantic: New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and DC, among others. Signups are open (and prorated) throughout the season, and they have a bunch of different subscriptions--produce, meat, dairy, eggs, flowers, etc.

[sereniv]

Oh the genocide of his tribe was partly the fault of cattle ranchers? oh thats so interesting and so suprising!!! who would have guessed that an industry built on exploitation, colonization, and money would ever participate in wiping out a people and their land as to continue exploiting and earning money!

i fucking hate everything

[stanley-mushroom]

I left my boots in the barn over the winter and a very lucky mouse made an entire home in one of them 😂

[lilithism1848]