Interior development: Food security isn’t found in the supermarket
See Joel Salatin
Notes on Salatin Kommersant 2007-08-20:
Salatin sells direct to consumer, bypassing intermediaries.
Salatin compares the contrast between organic farming and Western civilization to the contrast between a holistic Eastern worldview vs. European formalism & analysis.
Salatin conducts agricultural shows that get public acquainted with an organic peasant farm, resulting in a loyal following.
Salatin organized metropolitan buying clubs that communicated via email lists.
Salatin doesn’t serve outside the 100 mile (160 km) zone around his farm.
Salatin strongly believes in limits to growth—he says that boundless growth is vile western thinking.
In addition to the buying clubs, Salatin also serves restaurants and makes direct on-farm sales.
Anya thoughts:
Food safety is improved, not jeopardized, by localized food security.
Food security question 1: can it be grown?
Food security question 2: can it be brought to the people from wherever it’s grown?
Food security question 3: is it affordable at a price that works for farmers, distributors, and consumers?
“local” is a big buzzword
distributed growing, storage, distribution chains, retail much better than centralized for food security
Food deserts are rarer here in Russia than in America because shopping facilities are distributed so well around small towns, villages, and along routes.
In the USA there is frequently one town with almost all the shopping and all the surrounding towns must go there to shop. Proprietors in the small towns can’t make it because people are trained not to shop there, and because for some reason they don’t sell the same quality. Further, Internet megabusinesses threaten even the shopping towns’ businesses.
polycropping as crop insurance
polyculture for sake of profitability of the space / farmer. closes the gap so the farmer can profit more with lower prices due to stacked enterprises—that land area is already paying, now it’s paying more Salatin runs beeves through, then eggmobiles 3? days later to pick through the cowpies
if you integrate Salatin beef/layer system into food forest, you get supplemental diet for the animals
urban permaculture is the ultimate local
Myron thoughts:
Food security should be integrated into every landscape, especially the landscapes focusing on food production.
Many times, even farms are not food-secure, like if all they grow is bee products, buckwheat, wheat and rapeseed. And that's far more diverse than many farms.
Enterprise theory: build your farm's economic and ecological model out of several different enterprises benefiting from each other. For example, if you run an apiary (centerpiece enterprise), fruit and seed production are good side enterprises to add on.
A key to food security is food that produces itself, in marginal areas that no-one bothers about. Plants like Jerusalem artichokes, lambsquarter (лебеда), nettles, caragana and burdock are all highly productive food-producing plants and are often weeds in the countryside (caragana less so). If people were educated about their value, and just a small amount of effort was made to spread them everywhere where they can grow without causing hazards, like underneath the trees between the road and the sidewalk in cities, the level of preparedness for famine would be far higher.
John notes:
When my family moved to Russia and took the elektrichka from Moscow to our city for the first time, we were greeted by a woman offering us apples from her bumper crop that year. That's food security.
Our neighbor brought us a large bag of potatoes he grew himself for our safety, even though he lived just down the road.
We walked around another neighborhood and there was a cow grazing some government-owned land.
In another neighborhood, goats mowed an unbuilt area between apartment complexes.
A nearby city characterized by its preponderance of apartment buildings had beautiful and creative plantings that included berries and other food.