Notes from the June garden
Bangor Daily News - 6/13/2012. In the second week of June, at the end of a small vegetable garden bed once devoted to an assortment of herbs but recently turned over to rhubarb, a clump of chives is in full flower. It survived the transition because both Marjorie and I are fond of its June flowers. |
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The five farm bill amendments you should keep an eye on
Grist - 6/13/2012. By Philip Bump – Right now, the Senate is considering the Agriculture Reform, Food and Jobs Act of 2012 (read: the farm bill, though ARFJA is also catchy). It left the Senate Agriculture committee and arrived on the Senate floor, where it was promptly peppered with over 90 amendments. |
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Food has gotten cheaper – but at what cost
Grist - 6/13/2012. By Tom Laskawy – Grist readers have been struck by our coverage of shockingly high food prices in Inuit communities in Canada’s far north. It’s less a story of life in extreme lands than the culmination of a historical destruction of indigenous peoples’ traditional foodways combined with a conservative government’s unwillingness to help them adapt. |
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Can garden farming be too successful?
The Contrary Farmer - 6/13/2012. By Gene Logsdon – This is just mischievous philosophical musing. Don’t take me too seriously. On the other hand… One of my favorite books is the classic “Farmers of Forty Centuries” by F.H. King, written in 1911. It details the way food was produced in much of Asia for something like four thousand years and still is in many places there. It was, according to King who traveled the area at that time, an amazing kind of small scale agriculture that, without chemical fertilizer or power machinery of any kind was producing more food per acre at the beginning of the 20th century than farming in America then or now. |
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