First published in December 2013:
UN Report Says Small Scale Organic Only Way to Feed the World
And how are we doing here in the U.S., over three years later? Not well.
(Oh, and BTW: Corn and soybeans constitute 43% of all crops grown in the U.S. For corn, 88% is GMO; for soybeans, 93%.)
An English Sheep Farmer’s View of Rural America
Excerpt:
MATTERDALE, England — I am a traditional small farmer in the North of England. I farm sheep in a mountainous landscape, the Lake District fells. It is a farming system that dates back as many as 4,500 years. A remarkable survival. My flock grazes a mountain alongside 10 other flocks, through an ancient communal grazing system that has somehow survived the last two centuries of change. Wordsworth called it a “perfect republic of shepherds.”
It’s not your efficient modern agribusiness. My farm struggles to make enough money for my family to live on, even with 900 sheep. The price of my lambs is governed by the supply of imported lamb from the other side of the world. So I have one foot in something ancient and the other foot in the 21st-century global economy.
Less than 3 percent of people in modern industrial economies are farmers. But around the world, I am not alone: The United Nations estimates that more than two billion people are farmers, most of them small farmers; that’s about one in three people on the planet.
