City Fresh Foods

I just got back from speaking at the ECO Farm conference.  The original organizers of the conference were celebrating 30 years of saying and creating an alternative way to the conventional, industrial farm system.  When they started in 1980 1/10th of 1% of all farms at the time were considered organic.   Today in 2010 that number is 3%.  Which is a large jump-  but then again when you think about it 97% are still putting a lot of unnecessary harmful chemicals into the soil and into our food.  Organic growing systems replenish the soil, conventional mono-crop growing systems gradually destroy the soil.  What happens when we don’t have any soil left?  Yeah that’s right – we have a big problem.

Folks like Wes Jackson of the Land Institute who opened up the conference makes me hopeful.  For the last 30 years his research center has been working to develop a perennial prairie grass that would compete with the wheat annuals.  What this means is that upon success we would be able to harvest our grains from a bio diverse system that demands no artificial chemicals or excessive watering and preserves the soil.  Now he did say initially that his research and development was a 50 to 100 year project,  and he reports some things they are ahead of schedule and some right on schedule.  All I can say is gods speed to you and your team Wes.  Meanwhile here at City Fresh Foods, we are going to focus our attentions on the vacant land closest to us and throughout our community and ask the question is there a viable business model for someone to intensively grow organic fruits and vegetables on these vacant parcels?   Stay tuned… the answer is the future of farming.

-Glynn

This entry was posted on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 8:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.