Month: October 2010

American Wasteland by Jonathan Bloom

American Wasteland examines where and why we waste nearly half of our food, while offering suggestions on what we can do better. In the book, Bloom discuss why food waste really does matter and chronicle why it occurs from the farm to fork.

Engineering an Organic Farm: Crown S Ranch

Jennifer Argraves, Crown S Ranch, talks about the farm that she and her husband, Louis Sukovaty, own and manage. Jennifer tells us about how they raise and market beef cattle, pigs, sheep, turkeys, broiler chickens, and eggs.

Bringing It to the Table by Wendell Barry

Only a farmer could delve so deeply into the origins of food, and only a writer of Wendell Berry’s caliber could convey it with such conviction and eloquence. Long before Whole Foods organic produce was available at your local supermarket, Berry was farming with the purity of food in mind. For the last five decades, Berry has embodied mindful eating through his land practices and his writing.

Engineering an Organic Farm

Raising more than 400,000 pounds of hay and grain to produce more than 48,000 pounds of meat and 4,500 eggs on 150 acres of farmland is no small job. Jennifer Argraves and Louis Sukovaty are literally running from sun up to sun down. Louis is an electrical and mechanical engineer by trade and Jennifer is a civil engineer. Both apply their systems thinking to every project on the farm, looking for ways to let the “process” do all the work.

Collaborative Consumption

Rachel Botsman, co-author of the recently released What’s Mine is Yours: The Rise of Collaborative Consumption, spoke at the recent The Feast Conference about the …

The $200 Hamburger – Raj Patel

“Cheap food is cheat food.” Raj Patel hones in on what it means to have corporate monopolies that can manipulate both price and supply, coupled with a free market philosophy that hijacks government oversight and public protection, where the price of something bears little relation with its true value.

Preserving Our Farmland

Good local food depends on farming and farming requires clean, fertile soils in functional working landscapes. “And once productive farmland is converted to residential or commercial use, it’s converted forever. It’s practically impossible to bring it back,” Steve Ventura, University of Wisconsin, Land Information and Computer Graphics Facility.