Healthy soil and sustainable growing

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Subject: Rodale Institute: Meeting human need, honoring natural limits

Welcome to the Rodale Institute web update newsletter.

 Dear Paul: Don’t look for One Big Answer to fix the way America farms, or 
eats, or fails to make food available across income levels. We didn’t get to 
our supposed “success” in providing what used to be thought of as cheap food 
overnight. It took decades to convince most food shoppers that they could 
have convenience in packaging and food prep, aesthetic beauty and virtually 
limitless selection unhindered by seasonality or distance from a growing 
area—all for so cheap we could eat all we wanted and still spend less of our 
income for food than virtually anyone else on earth.
Working out of this delusion as things fall apart food-system-wise will 
happen in piecemeal efforts even at the national level. This is true because 
agri-business capacity, distorted market forces, farming infrastructure, 
farmer production skills and popular food expectations are so tightly 
knotted. They form an interdependent system that now seems clearly 
dysfunctional in providing broadly available human nutrition in an 
ecologically sound manner without social injury and animal suffering.
But maybe that’s the good news. With so many parts breaking at one time, more 
people will take food seriously. The most observant who are also the most 
creative within the most resilient networks will lead us, inevitably by their 
best intentioned trial and error, to what comes next. These will be 
innovations that are more decentralized, more locally adapted, less 
greenhouse-gas producing, less fossil-fuel dependent and more able to feed 
more people more nutritiously than what we have now.
It will be a messy, and painful, and necessary process in creating an economy 
based, somehow, more on honoring natural limits and in meeting human need 
than what we have now. And there will be celebrations as the curious and the 
desperate find new ways to reach “enough” in food that we never thought about 
until we had to.
Some will compete for what already is, but here’s calling for more people to 
cooperate to what is yet to be. We need:
More and more-resilient relationships between farmers and those who buy their 
food. Pioneering this challenge are CSAs that survive supply disruptions, a 
challenge that will be showing up more often in food venues, probably near 
you. Learn more...
More sharing of farming knowledge through field days and farm walks this 
growing season across the U.S.A., like those sponsored in Washington state by 
grateful farmers giving back for the help they received. Read more...

More professional agricultural women mentoring new entries into food and 
agriculture, one of the focal points for the Pennsylvania Women in 
Agriculture Network during their meeting at Rodale Institute this week.
See more...
Eat well, and think creatively.
Greg Bowman and the
Rodale Institute editorial team