And then I read this from Verge Permaculture in Canada and had to share.  This is something I truly believe.

“ON FOOD SECURITY: I am reading My Ishmael and in one the opening chapters Ishmael says, “You’ll know you’re among the people of your culture if the food is all owned, if it’s all under lock and key.” The very word “food security” implies this very idea, that food is not secure. Language is important in helping us to determine where we are going. It is the very fibre that makes up the fabric that defines our cultural story, a tapestry if you will.

It has taken me some time to define the predicament that our culture finds itself in and I can say that food supply, how it is grown, who grows it, where it comes from, how it is delivered and who owns it is a central theme that permeates a lot of the problems that we are all trying to solve. One of the things that has shed light on all of this is my own food forest in my front yard. This food forest now is largely self managed and it produces asparagus, apples, cherries, gooseberries, currants, honeyberries, seabuckthorn berries and leaves, potatoes, rhodiola, yarrow, strawberries, rhubarb, mint, sunchokes, perennial onions, sorrel, raspberries and raspberry leaves. This system gets more complex and stable every year, produces more and needs less management. It epitomizes food security, in fact it epitomizes food sovereignty. I recognize that we could not live on those foods alone however, ecological design has to be patterned around nature and thus requires connection, so when we scale these systems up with chickens and pigs we have a system that can meet a lot of our needs.

A lot of people say that the concept of food security hinges on who owns the land. This is true, we might also say that “You’ll know you’re among the people of your culture if the land is all owned, if it’s all under lock and key.” He who controls the land controls the food. I agree with this to an extent, I would say that more important than the land are the skills. We find ourselves in an interesting time right now. Never in the history of this culture have there been so many people that know so little. Most of the people that own the land have no clue how to manage it or shall we say, work with it, to obtain a yield. This in my opinion gives the people who have invested in knowledge, skills and understanding the trump card. Land prices right now are completely out of wack, especially in Canada. They are based around two false assumptions… 1) people can manage huge amounts of land because we have an unlimited amount of fossil fuel and 2) Land is based on how many condos or rural acreages you can fit on it, not on the water it harvests or the sun it collects ie. what it can produce. You can see this in agricultural rental rates. You can buy an acre of of prime crop land for 5,000 – 10,000 or you can rent it for $50 – $100/year. If you decide to own, the interest on the land will eat up the profit that you can grow from the land and the venture sinks. Keep in mind 1 acre of wheat sells for about $300.

So where am I going with this. The agricultural model right now is broken and we are not going to sell our way out of this problem. In order to change the fabric of our culture we need to change the thread that we sew the tapestry from. This is going to take time which is why ventures like SPIN farming are so important as a transitional mechanism to meet our food needs locally. Long term however we can all grow our own food sovereignty on much less land, in much less time for much less money than most people think using perennial community owned solutions. And the minute that we stop trying to put things under lock and key, the sooner we will have true freedom. How do we do this? The funny thing with food being “under lock and key” is that food is not a resource that is easy to control. It does not have to be finite like oil or gas, and it is perishible. We can grow a lot more food than we will ever need which would put the Monsanto’s of the world out of business without ever have to protest or legislate anything. This is because food is inherently open source, it produces seed for whomever wants to pick it and it gives people at the grass roots the ultimate power. It replicates extremely fast, which is counter to an economy based in scarcity. Think of this saying “ you can count the number of seeds in an apple but you can’t count the number of apples in a seed”. Locking up food can only happen if there is a scarce supply. You can only have a scarce supply under lock and key if…
1) you have a small population of people producing it,
2) if that population is growing annuals that can store for long periods of time
3) if even a smaller number of people control the seed.

So the solution is, getting everyone to produce just a little, grow perennials which are hard to patent and get everyone to save just a little seed and learn to propagate. Seem unreasonable? Is it any more unreasonable than the situation we find ourselves in right now? Patenting of life, starvation, malnutrition, disease in pandemic proportions and I could go on and on. The more complicated the problems become, the more obvious and simple the solutions have to be.

One day we will wake up and recognize that using current economic metrics, growing food may not be a smart thing to do, but it might just be one of those activities that is stupid not to do if we look at it from a health, freedom, earth and human stewardship point of view. We either need to tune our economics so that it values the metrics that currently are viewed as externalities or change the way we look at the importance of how we feed ourselves. Turn your lawn into your freedom, your health, your activism, your message to the world. If you don’t believe this is possible, read “The Grass is Not Greener” enclosed in the comments section below.

In the meantime have a look at the photo below, I think it will make things a lot clearer.

~Rob”

Ernest and Rose Alma Alix with Elmer @1912

I have been the designated “keeper of all images”  for both my family and Bill’s.  I think this happened because of my background in photography, all things related just came into my house.  I’ve rescued family photographs from trips to the dump in family moves.  Boxes and boxes of photographs were brought to me when Bill’s grandfather died and we cleaned out his home of 60 plus years.  And then there are all of the photographs from multiple generations of my family on both my mother’s and father’s side.

Over the years I’ve sorted and scanned most of them.  They are in folders by families in chronological order.  It sounds fussy but if you are a photographer you get it, especially one who enjoys the history of the craft.  All of the photographs were sorted by type (ie. paper, process), then by clothing and known approximate dates.  What I found was once I scanned them I had a much easier time putting them in order.  You could look at a group of thumbnails and see how people changed, how they aged.  Although I didn’t have exact dates for many of them you can see how the people moved through time.  Being able to see a few photographs side by side also is invaluable when it comes to unknowns.  If you have a family tree at your disposal it’s fairly easy to figure out who’s who.  You become quite intimate with the people in your family who are no longer with you.   You can make up stories in your head about them from the snippets of things you heard growing up and the way they look in the images you have.  You begin to build your story.

The photograph shown here is one of my favorites.  The little boy is my paternal grandfather with his parents.  I love how much he looks like his mother, how he leans into her with her arm around him, hand on his shoulder.  The beauty of scanning your photographs is the capability to look at the details closely.  Her hand is the hand of someone who used them hard.  Life in the early 1900’s was not easy for a farmer’s wife.  They were not well off by any stretch and I know how hard she worked from the stories.  I love that they are wearing their Sunday best.  It’s nice to see that their clothes aren’t threadbare like so many other relatives photos show.

The Alixes put great importance on being photographed.  I have boxes of studio photographs from generation after generation.  These were all taken by people who really didn’t have a lot of money, but it was important to them.  There aren’t a lot of candid shots.  I believe someone may have had a box Brownie around the late 1920’s and you see a little more of their day to day life.  Another way of getting the flavor of what their lives were about.

The Alix photographs are what I grew up with.  I would sit with my grandmother going through the box and she would tell me who people were, where they were, what they were doing.  They are seared into my memory.  For the past few days I’ve been thinking about a particular photograph that I want to write about and for the life of me I can not find it.  I have a gap in my digital files that are all of my father growing up.  There are probably over 50 photographs.  I can see them all in my mind but I can’t put my hands on them – digital or original.  It’s driving me crazy.

In my mind I thought I was magnificently organized when it came to this and I’ve found that there’s a gaping hole.  I’ve searched box after box in the last day to no avail.  They’re around somewhere, I just haven’t located the spot.  So I will continue to search and as I’m looking I will be thinking of all of those stories that surround those images – should be good fodder for future posts.

Leave it to Gene to tell it like it is (with a photo to boot).

 I think New Englanders are conditioned at birth to complain about the weather.  If it’s not too cold it’s too hot, too dry, too wet, too windy, you get the idea.  I’m here today to complain about the weather (probably not for the first time).  We have been stuck in an unusual weather pattern for weeks now.  Rain, rain, rain, humidity, rain, thunderstorms, rain, rain, you get the idea.  I’ve looked at my weather apps more in the past month than I ever have, not that I can do anything about it.  I asked a very good friend who’s a weather forecaster (albeit in Arizona) what he thought about the weird weather we were having in this area – he told me the weather was “slightly anomalous”.  Maybe you have to be living in day after day of rain to think it is weird, it does something to your brain after a while.

The photograph above I took this morning while taking the dogs out.  It looks so verdant, everywhere. My gardens are jungles now.  It was raining when I walked outdoors, just a slight sprinkle.  I couldn’t tell because the windows on our house are so fogged from the air conditioning running that you can’t see anything out of them at this point.  The trees are all drooping from the weight of the water on their leaves.  Although the grass looks great (and much greener than it usually does this time of year) it is hiding the river that is running through the center of our back yard.  This river is over 3 feet wide and separates the garden from the tree in the foreground.  

When you exit the back door of the house (which is now so swollen that it will not shut properly) you are hit with the heat and humidity – the air is thick.  Last night when I went out with the dogs I was wearing sandals – I wasn’t aware of the river in the back yard until I stepped into it.  The thing that amazed me the most is the fact that it was warm – like bath water.

The days of summer march on while I sit and wait for those glorious sunny ones with a slight breeze and low humidity, my favorite kind of summer day.  I then realize if the sun comes out it will feel like we are living in a tropical rain forest as the water begins to evaporate from the ground.  Yup, only to give us another rainstorm at the end of the day – a vicious cycle.

Whine, whine, whine – but I’m kind of wishing it was snow.