A Farm for the Future

I chanced across a fantastic British documentary video series recently, A Farm for the Future. It is perhaps one of the most positive and thought-provoking things I've seen or read in some time.

I am quite impressed with how it builds to include some very promising solutions for farmers caught in the energy crunch and what that will do to our food supply. Nothing presented was actually a totally new concept to me, but the way the series takes one woman beef farmer through the realizations of oil shortages and increasing costs all the way up to some workable solutions is quite well done.

I came away with a much better understanding of some basic, workable concepts like a forest garden. I have read the concept of forest farming here and there, but it was all text and line drawings, and I hadn't any real understanding. Seeing two examples on film in real life with some explanations to how and why it works totally changed my viewpoint, and I plan to begin some implementation here at home as money and time permits, in the form of guilds. It is the only thing that now makes sense to me in becoming sustainable in an uncertain future. Martin Crawford, who explains and demonstrates forest gardening (including animal feed from one) on the last 2 videos, has a book explaining how to do it yourself. The book is Creating a Forest Garden: Working with Nature to Grow Edible Crops. Another good book is Gaia's Garden.

I encourage everyone concerned about the future of our food supply (and that's everything from our own home gardens to giant corporations that are farming thousands of acres) to watch all 5 videos; they each are fairly short. Here's the link to the first one, and it will lead you to the others in order.

A Farm for the Future 01