alternativenewstome1

by  N.Morgan For a large part of the past century, Western pop culture has systematically denigrated and devalued what should be one of the most honored professions of all. Those who labor with the land, day-in, and day-out, to deliver the food that we eat have assumed a social status too often similar to the dirt of the soil they till. No one stops to ask a simple question: What do we do when we have killed off all our farmers? Some of the more naïve city-dwellers would retort with a little reflection, “But we have industrialized food production; we don’t need manual farm labor today.” Indeed, the numbers are impressive. Let’s take my homeland, the United States of America. In 1950, a time of general prosperity and strong economic growth, the total US population was 151,132,000 and the farm population was 25,058,000 making farmers just over 12% of the total labor force. There were 5,388,000 farms with an average size of about 87 hectares. Forty years later, in 1990,...

How To Fill Your Freezer, Just Like Grandpa Did  I have an image in an old Outdoor Life magazine that stirs my soul every time I gaze at it. In this particular picture a hunter is walking through a stretch of Eastern woods with a wool cap on his head, a thick checkered flannel shirt, and knee-high laced boots. The look on his face is the look of a man determined to fill the freezer and provide for his family. It is the look of a hunter. The image comes from the mid 1950s, and the man could be anyone’s grandfather. He carries little equipment on his person, much less than the 500 pounds of gear we hunt with today. He has a leather belt with a sheath knife , a few spare cartridges, what looks to be an army surplus canteen , and precious little else. What really captures my attention in the photo, aside from the set look on this hunter’s face, is the worn and battered Winchester Model 94 he carries in his gloved hands. More http://bit.ly/1E3ewHR 'via Blog this'

The Greenhouse of the Future — Grow Your Own Food Year-Round With This Revolutionary System  It’s no secret that food security is becoming a critical issue around the world. With drought, economic instability, erratic weather and interruptions in transportation a very real threat, it really doesn’t take much to have the food supply disrupted . We’re certainly not immune to these effects in the West, especially since we rely heavily on corporate farming and mega supermarkets. Add to this population growth and the ecological toll of conventional, large-scale food production, and we have a seriously unsustainable system in place — one that could topple at any time. The drought in California, USA is a perfect example, where entire almond orchards and other crops have been laid to dust. But it’s not all doom and gloom. As the famous proverb says: “Necessity is the mother of invention.” Taking this proverb and running with it, a team of innovators from Quebec, Canada have dev...