Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Douglas Willhite" <drwillhite@earthlink.net>]

Food, Climate Change and the Coming Energy Crises
by Graham Stouts, Zone 5

Some years ago a friend told me she had been visited by a neighbor of hers, a farmer, who was curious to see what she was doing planting potatoes in her garden. Apparently the neighbor farmer could not understand why on earth she was going to the trouble and hard manual labor of digging beds and setting seed potatoes when they were so cheap to buy. In recent years farming has become defined more and more by the availability of grants and subsidies, and by the dictates of international trading agreements. One of the consequences of this is that individual farms are producing an ever diminishing range of products for an increasingly global market.

 Simultaneous to this, the home garden has become a fashion extension of manicured lawns and clipped shrubs. Growing food has become a special interest hobby or is viewed as some kind of regressive primitivism which swims against the tide of lawnmower culture now becoming prevalent in the suburbs. Across the water, the easy complacency which surrounds the supply of food was severely tested in September of 2000 when after just a few days of a nation-wide truckers’ strike, many parts of the UK found themselves facing what has become unthinkable in modern times: a shortage of food. Once the deliveries stopped arriving, it was only a matter of days before the shelves were emptied. Since little food was produced locally, it quickly became apparent that there really was no other source of food available. Modern farming and globalised systems of trade have created a situation in which we are perilously vulnerable to political and environmental factors quite beyond our control. Unless we start taking this issue seriously and make dramatic changes to the way we think about and produce food, we are facing the increasing likelihood of food shortages and yes, famines, even in the most developed and ‘modern’ parts of the world.
(29 March 2007)
First published in Sustainability March 07.