world agriculture
sastyk | August 11, 2011First, check out my guest post at Scientific American Blogs as part of their "Passions of Food Day" Blog Fest.
Also, just keeping you all updated (as much as I can within the confidentiality guidelines), we got our first call about a foster placement, in this case a group of five children. It isn't clear that we would be asked to take all five - we might be asked to take 3, 4, or 5, depending on different possible scenarios. It isn't at all clear whether we would take all five children (which is more than we hand planned to accept, although we do feel strongly about keeping siblings…
sastyk | July 19, 2010The first thing you need to know about my farm is that it is huge. I mean enormous - by world standards. The vast majority of the world's farms - more than 80%, are very small farms, of less than 2 hectares (about 5 acres), and they produce the majority of the world's staple crops and calories.
I suspect most folks in most of the Global North will find that a little surprising. The term "farm" in the US tends be applied most often to very large farms. We have a strong internal sense that small scale agriculture is particularly unsuited to growing staples. Most small farms in the US…