An interesting but depressing article on how modern farming coupled with catastrophic climate change is leading us to global famine. Small farmers in Europe are also closing down at an alarming rate, and small farmers in the US are also falling. Given how the majority of our food comes from small farmers, this bodes badly.
As @RhisiartGwilym has linked to before, we could all learn from Cuba’s model, but I don’t see a lot of movement in that direction. Plus with the increasing problems caused by climate change we can expect more and greater crop failures, so even if we all start a backyard grow we are still constrained by extreme weather problems…
Serious problems ahead for sure
1 Like
Expect the Cuban Model to assert itself - spontaneously, from (sorry! 
) the grassroots - as the practical difficulties of just making ends meet and keeping ordinary life going get a fair bit more serious than they are for us right now.
Remember that we, Brits, Europeans, still qualify - for a short while longer - as members of the world’s Pampered Twenty Percent. Life simply isn’t tough and alarming enough for us yet to get us off our overstuffed, sitting-in-front-of-screens arses, and to start getting us arsey - and also getting physically active at arranging diy food. We’re still too confident about where the next several meals are coming from: the supermarket, of course; to which we drive, of course…
I’m not confident at making it through another five years. But if I do, I expect to see that sea-change easing quietly into people’s habits - perforce.
Apropos: my turf-grown potatoes are looking promising right now. Will show pics., with brief ‘how-to’ text, when they’re a bit nearer to harvestable.
2 Likes
PS: Jim Kovaleski - as video-documented by both Pete Kanaris’ and Justin Rhodes’ YT channels - is still perhaps the most inspired, and inspiring, path-finder practitioner of the practical methods by which the grassroots food-producers’ are end-running round the big-biz ‘food’ rackets, as those dinosaurs head towards their crash-and-dissolve time, under the impacts of the Long Descent.
Here’s a typical Kanaris vid of Jim’s work. Note that what appears to be bare-soil is in fact a multi-year wood-chip-plus mulch. Jim uses this in his Florida garden, whilst he uses scythed-grass deep mulch in Maine; there’s grass-meadow hay available there, but not in Fla.
Note too that Jim says he’s just rototilled this wood-chip-plus mulch for the first time in fourteen years; he explains why. But that - grass-fed gardens and wood-plus mulch fed gardens - demonstrates how easy it is to keep soil super fertile, so that the multi-cropping outlined in this video becomes easy:
