Agriculture

A study on the criminalization of farmers exercising their right to save, use, exchange and sell seeds under plant breeders’ rights laws.

Input companies, which are for the most part either mines or pharmaceutical giants; know they need to change their products and their role in the food and feed production chain because they are the same companies doing the research, advocating for and selling farmers a few of the depleted and in some cases totally absent soil organisms that their legacy products continue to kill.

In today’s blog post, I want to showcase the exact design process of creating a layout for a food forest with swales.

Based on a study published last year in Nature, the Stanford School of Sustainability reports that at the current rate, climate change will reduce the yield of staple crops — wheat, corn, soybeans, barley, and cassava — by 24 percent by the end of the century. The exception to staples is rice, which benefits from higher nighttime temperatures. But the lower supply of most staples, combined with higher demand — there continues to be more mouths to feed — means we will pay more for the food we eat.

The Participatory Ecological Land Use Management (PELUM) Association is working to advance agroecological principles and practices in East, Central, and Southern Africa. Their Kenyan chapter, PELUM Kenya, engages in advocacy, networking, knowledge sharing and capacity building to support the country’s smallholder farmers produce food in a way that heals the planet and supports their livelihoods.