Complimentary Blueberry Juice

Agriculture and innovation have always gone hand in hand. Indigenous American Three Sisters methods with corn, squash and beans. Incan terraces and potato cultivation. Anishinaabe food forests.

Many people not only don’t grow their own food, but food comes exclusively from the store. Land is a prospective real estate development, not for farming. And farms are sold and conglomerated as agriculture has evolved to become a tradeable commodity with margins with ever-increasing costs on equipment and amendments of chemical natures for monocultures.

A lot of what we are doing is simply unsustainable. We have long lost our way chasing the so-called ‘green revolution’ to it’s logical end. We’ve arrived at a fulcrum era. One where some will continue along the chemical path, others will find difficulty with drought or dust storms. Both scenarios will produce financially insolvent agriculture. Marketable technological gimmicks will be floated as solutions, like laser weeders or robots, but these will not solve the core issue.

We have entered an era where agriculture and food security have been removed from our human communities, just as we have removed the biology and nature from our food systems. Our food is less nutritionally dense. Our food loses nutrients over the distance it travels and the time it spends in warehouses. Even still, we don’t even eat it. We waste enormous amounts of it. The public health implications of lack of food security and lack of access to quality nutritious foods are enormous.

Here are some questions that can send us on a better path much quicker:

– What will agriculture look like 1000 years from now?

-Is there something we are doing today we will be embarrassed to admit we were doing at all?

– What can we learn from ancient indigenous cultures and the multi-species sustainable food systems they grew, without machines or chemicals?

– Why do we silo our problems instead of looking at a bigger picture?

– How have forests, plains, prairies, riparian zones, or any natural land-based ecosystems, survived and thrived without nitrogen fertilizer for the past 800 million years?

– Why are we so reductive in how we think plants work?

– Why don’t we want to be close to where our food is grown?

Graham

thanks for reading complimentary blueberry juice