A Nation of Farmers
Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil
By Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton
New Society Publishers, 2009 (www.newsociety.com)

Sharon Astyk, a former academic who farms in upstate New York with her husband and four children, and Aaron Newton, a sustainable land planner and director of environmental programs in North Carolina, explore the limits and dangers of our globalized and industrialized food system in A Nation of Farmers. They illustrate how our current crisis is a direct result of our food system and provide guidelines to keep us from a dark future by encouraging ordinary people to take their place in the most basic of human projects—self-provisioning. A Nation of Farmers ex-amines the limits and dangers of the globalized food system and includes in-depth guidelines for:

• Creating resilient local food systems.
• Growing, cooking and eating sustainably and naturally.
• Becoming part of the solution to the food crisis.

By making self-provisioning, once the most ordinary of human activities, central to our lives, we will have better food, better health, better security and freedom from corporations that don’t have our interests at heart.

Astyk and Newton explain: “This book begins from the simple premise that it is both possible and necessary to stop the harm that industrial agriculture is doing—resource depletion, global warming, global poverty, increased food insecurity and hunger, and unsafe, low-quality food—and that we can do so simply by choosing to change the nature of what we grow and what we eat. It is a call for more participation in the food system, for millions of new farmers and hundreds of millions of new cooks in the US and worldwide. It begins with the recognition that for a host of reasons, we simply have no choice but to radically alter our food system, to end its dependency on fossil fuels and to bring food security to the table as a central issue of our times. … Believe it or not, what we are describing is a call for a return to human norms and human community, to living in a way that is connected to our land and our food, much as all human societies before ours have. We argue that not only can we cease to do the harm that industrial agriculture does but we can replace it with something better—a better way of growing and preparing food and also a democracy of the sort that Thomas Jefferson imagined for his nation, a democracy that is not vulnerable to being stolen or sold, as our present one is …”

The Transition Timeline
For a Local, Resilient Future
by Shaun Chamberlin
Chelsea Green, 2009 (www.chelseagreen.com)

The first edition of Gaia’s Garden introduced Permaculture’s central message: Working with Nature, not against her, results in more beautiful, abundant, and forgiving gardens. This extensively revised and expanded second edition broadens the reach and depth of this approach for urban and suburban growers.

Many people mistakenly think that ecological gardening—which involves growing a wide range of edible and other useful plants—can take place only on a large, multi-acre scale. As Hemenway demonstrates, it’s fun and easy to create a “backyard ecosystem” by assembling communities of plants that can work cooperatively and perform a variety of functions, including:

• Building and maintaining soil fertility and structure,
• Catching and conserving water in the landscape.
• Providing habitat for beneficial insects, birds.
• and animals.
• Growing an edible “forest” that yields seasonal fruits, nuts, and • • other foods.

 A new chapter on urban Permaculture, designed for people who have very limited growing space, explains how to apply basic Permaculture principles for more diverse, productive and beautiful gardens. Best of all, an ecological garden reduces or eliminates most of the backbreaking work that’s needed to maintain the typical lawn and garden.

Joel Salatin explains with humor and passion why Americans do not have the freedom to choose the food they purchase and eat thanks to bureaucrats who provide themselves sole discretion over what food is available in the local marketplace. Their system favors industrial, global corporate food systems and discourages community-based food commerce, resulting in homogenized selection, mediocre quality, and exposure to non-organic farming practices. Salatin’s expert insight explains why local food is expensive and difficult to find and will illuminate for the reader a deeper understanding of the industrial food complex.

Called “the high priest of the pasture” by The New York Times, Salatin refers to himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.” He lives with his family on Polyface Farm ( www. polyfacefarms.com) in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia where he has developed a system of pasture rotation that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximizes the composting of animal waste. Each species on the farm is dependent on another. The cows, for example, eat the nutrient rich grass in Pasture A and then are moved to Pasture B. The chickens then move to Pasture A where they pick through the cow pies eating bugs and grinding the waste into the ground where it revitalizes the grass for the cows.