If you’re interested in local food cultivation, food justice + security and community resilience, I highly recommend watching the videos.
The first features Brock Dolman of Occidental Arts and Ecology Center, an intentional community, 80-acre permaculture farm, research/demonstration/education/advocacy center, and the 6th oldest certified organic farm in California.
‘I think people all over the planet over time who were agrarian placed-based people were in relationship with the plants that they were cultivating & collaborating with & overtime the food system has become corporatized & industrialised. The diversity of genetics has been whittled down because of a consolidation in a corporate scenario & then many of those crops were hybridised & patented & so you don’t have access to the genetics unless you buy it from this corporation so now you’re on the hook to them. That’s just not a recipe for resilience & community security. The global world of seed savers are pushing back against that trend & are saying no & really honouring that these are living beings. These are organisms & we are in relationship with them.’
-Brock Dolman at about 21.04 of the video ‘7 friends built restoration eco village. Outcome 50 years on.’
For just a bit of a personal touch, linked below is a video clip with moments from my first experience growing corn from seed last year (on our large balcony in a city setting), including hand pollinating, close up of the tassels and silks (it was also my introduction to learning about corn physiology and growth), and finally, 1st harvest.
My family and I are leaving our current dense urban context in less than a month for a suburban context where I look forward to cultivating even more corn (and other plants) with EU-certified organic non-GMO sweet corn Golden Bantam seeds.
Another great video I recently watched was ‘Reinventing farming & food post-globalization’ hosted by Financial Times global business columnist Rana Foroohar.
‘We have a whole group of urbanites, urban dwellers, who don’t understand where their food is coming from, how it’s grown, how much work and effort goes into it. And yet the care that those farmers spend on their soil affects water quality, air quality, even the resilience of our food system in the time of the pandemic, where we had large-scale infrastructure breaking down, supply chain issues. And what we really need to see is a regional, local food economy that can be far more adaptive to the needs of their communities. So when it’s localised and smaller, it is more responsive and it’s more nimble. And farmers’ markets play a key role in that local food system. Adaptive local markets.’ -Christine Ferran, Executive Director of Foodwise, speaking at about 24.05 of the video