Aug 8, 2012

Get Into Farming (video) Permaculture Research Institute

by Craig Mackintosh PRI Editor August 9, 2012...
Warning: Don’t play if you don’t appreciate bad language!
...
It’s a system of extraction — it’s trickle up economics.
...
Today, large scale agriculture is undermining itself. It is undermining us. The key drivers towards this state of massive vulnerability were 1) fossil fuels, and 2) Norman Borlaug’s so-called ‘Green Revolution’ and the ‘get big or get out’ policies that started in the 1970s, under the then US Secretary of Agriculture, Earl Butz: [Butz's] mantra to farmers was "get big or get out," and he urged farmers to plant commodity crops like corn "from fencerow to fencerow." These policy shifts coincided with the rise of major agribusiness corporations, and the declining financial stability of the small family farm. — Wikipedia

This ‘fencerow to fencerow’ large acreage agriculture was only possible, albeit if temporarily, due to industrialisation and its life-blood: oil. The present and future era of expensive energy promises the undoing of centralised agriculture, and, potentially, centralized control — whether by the State or privatised monopolies. With energy supplies waning, we have one small window of opportunity to regain what the oil era stole from us. And, we have the opportunity to regain a sense of the ‘magic’ and wonder of the natural world we’ve all but forgotten we’re part of, and which by biological necessity we were born to partner with.
...

Great read...!   Link to full article: Get Into Farming (video) Permaculture Research Institute                                                   Monte Hines

No comments: