Liked your take on local Northern European diet. I live in the south end of the California Central Valley, a local sustainable diet would be winter wheat, chickpeas, fava beans, garlic and other cool season vegetables grown in the rainy winter, with olives, figs, grapes, citrus, stone fruits, nuts grown to some extent at the base of the foothills of the Sierras with irrigation drawn from the snow pack melt off. Apples and pears could grow higher up. Cattle, sheep, goats would be grazing in the foothills and mountains and on crop residues to provide meat and dairy. However the enormous production enabled currently by pumping groundwater wouldn’t be happening.
Our neighbour switched his extensive sheep farm from long time conventional management to organic conversion two years ago, which looked in practicality like he simply stopped applying nitrogen fertiliser to the silage fields (not replacing it with anything) and switched to an organic (soy based) sheep feed. it’s been very interesting to watch his yields drop (in grass production and losses of livestock), but at the same time the farm beginning to look much healthier in a more natural way (diversity of native grasses where it used to be a monocrop of ryegrass etc). My thoughts were that a lot more training and support is needed for farms like his to maintain yields to convert successfully. A lot of farmers like my neighbour have gone into organic for the subsidies (great) but with no idea how to manage the land without chemicals, which really requires a complete overhaul and rethinking of the farming system, not just cutting out N and pesticides and expecting the same results.
Liked your take on local Northern European diet. I live in the south end of the California Central Valley, a local sustainable diet would be winter wheat, chickpeas, fava beans, garlic and other cool season vegetables grown in the rainy winter, with olives, figs, grapes, citrus, stone fruits, nuts grown to some extent at the base of the foothills of the Sierras with irrigation drawn from the snow pack melt off. Apples and pears could grow higher up. Cattle, sheep, goats would be grazing in the foothills and mountains and on crop residues to provide meat and dairy. However the enormous production enabled currently by pumping groundwater wouldn’t be happening.
Yes, agriculture would become an art, a craft, a relationship instead of an impersonal industrial process.
Excellent article, thank you.
Our neighbour switched his extensive sheep farm from long time conventional management to organic conversion two years ago, which looked in practicality like he simply stopped applying nitrogen fertiliser to the silage fields (not replacing it with anything) and switched to an organic (soy based) sheep feed. it’s been very interesting to watch his yields drop (in grass production and losses of livestock), but at the same time the farm beginning to look much healthier in a more natural way (diversity of native grasses where it used to be a monocrop of ryegrass etc). My thoughts were that a lot more training and support is needed for farms like his to maintain yields to convert successfully. A lot of farmers like my neighbour have gone into organic for the subsidies (great) but with no idea how to manage the land without chemicals, which really requires a complete overhaul and rethinking of the farming system, not just cutting out N and pesticides and expecting the same results.