This is my dream: To live as my forefathers once did - in harmony with the land that sustains us. A project to investigate and innovate the creation of a low impact home with methods of living in a form of permaculture designed to sustain my family and improve biodiversity. To leave the land richer than before and in doing so enable others to do so.
Only smallness can save us!
Posted 28/07/08 by Matt B in the Feeding Yourself category
Thanet is a small island district of Kent in the UK. It is one of just two ideal locations for growing cauliflower but the credit crunch has exposed a single point of failure in the current aggricultural methodology - the supply of potash and phosphates the price of which has shot up.Kent News has an interview with one of Thanet's last few cauliflower farmers as the news slowly trickles through that the price Supermarkets pay and the cost of production do not match up.
the year before [...], Peter Linlington of Birchington, who Mr Philpott called “the best cauliflower grower ever”, stopped producing caulis on his 400 acres.
It is this very problem that is addressed by the creation of "micro farms", permaculture installations and the return of the owner farmer and the family run small holding. George Monbiot suggests that the most efficient farms are the small farms. He is talking about something called the "inverse-size yield relationship" [more] which basically stats that the productivity of the farm is inversely proportional to it's size.
Big business is killing small farming.states Monbiot
by developing plants which either won’t breed true or which don’t reproduce at all, it ensures that only those with access to capital can cultivate.
Yet the credit crunch is killing access to capital and with it our only reliable access to food. Now is the time to consider every way we can to take back control of our food production.
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