review by Bob Banning
This book is well worth your while. It is likely to teach and delight you, and may sometimes provoke you.
As many readers of The Natural Farmer no doubt know, in 1975 Japanese farmer-philosopher Masanobu Fukuoka (1913–2008) published a book that would become an international best-seller and change how many people thought about and practiced farming. The book acquired much of its influence through the English translation made of it by Larry Korn with the assistance of Korn’s friend Chris Pearce and of Wendell Berry (1978); eventually it was translated into 25 languages. The book was entitled The One-Straw Revolution.
[Read more…] about One-Straw Revolutionary: The Philosophy and Work of Masanobu Fukuoka
At the close of the past century, the revitalized draft animal power movement was proceeding steadily with its initial plowing, cutting a fresh regenerative swath nationwide into the stagnant and wearisome, mono-cultured agribusiness that has dominated that landscape since mid-century. The degraded petro chemical approach to farming is “going by the way-side,” replaced by the single- and multi-hitch plow alike and the sweet scent and “invigorative natural processes” of the closed-farm fertility.
Almost fifty years after the first Earth Day, enormous amounts of food scraps are still wasted instead of being returned to the soil, where they belong. James McSweeney wants to be part of the solution by helping people develop successful community-scale composting systems that focus on food scraps, and with this richly detailed manual you can benefit from the composting expertise he has acquired over many years of working with hundreds of composters managing every phase and aspect of the composting process and the composting enterprise.
I try to start my tomatoes extra early, and know I risk inducing “transplant shock” in some portion of them when I begin transplanting into my unheated hoophouse in mid-April. This spring, with the first batch I was scrupulous about covering them at night with several layers of row cover, but got a bit lazy with the later transplants, because after all it was already May and I was growing inside, so really, they should be fine. Here in southern New England, the entire month of May was cold and cloudy, and although they survived, still to this day (I am writing in mid-July) many of those later transplants haven’t taken off—they are thin, knotty, and stunted, and sporting early fruit clusters that will be their downfall, unless I snip them off. Meanwhile, the tomatoes I transplanted the earliest, and pampered through their first several weeks in the ground, are taller than I am and bearing gloriously.
review by Bob Banning
Gardeners are experimentalists—we try new varieties, push the limits of weather, till or don’t. We observe, try something new, and observe again. Any gardener who has been at this a while accumulates a pretty large store of knowledge about the what, when and where, but less of the why. We learn that peas need a tight trellis to climb, while beans will gladly climb a straight pole. But why the difference? We know that topping a Brussels sprout plant will promote heavier sprouts, but why?
I know what you are thinking: “I don’t want to READ ABOUT sustainability, I want to DO SOMETHING.” I feel the same way. Well, the good news is that there is something you CAN DO — right now, without writing to Congress and without waiting for the next election.
Obach, a professor of sociology at the State University of New York at New Paltz, is a student of social movements who has also written about the labor and environmental movements. As any scholar would, he starts with a history of the organic movement, beginning with Jerome Irving Rodale and his concerns about synthetic fertilizers, already used in agriculture in 1942 when “Organic Farming and Gardening” was first published, and the proponents of natural and spiritual approaches to farming such as Albert Howard, Rudolf Steiner, Eve Balfour and Ralph Borsodi. Come the nineteen sixties and seventies, of course, the advent of Rachel Carson and Cesar Chavez’ indictment of agricultural chemicals and the growth of the counterculture seeking an alternative to a cor-rupt commercial society came together to create the back-to-the-land movement of food coops and communal farms.
Farming While Black is a great resource that provides both ‘how-to’ for the new and novice farmer while giving historical context to injustice and theft of lands from Black farmers and farmers of color.