Bio Pivot and Good Farming: Two Reasons for Cautious Optimism in Farming
The Problem There’s a steady drumbeat of bad news associated with farming. Agriculture plays a role in topics like climate change, topsoil loss, fertilizer pollution, and water depletion. Even as consumers and governments seek to remediate these, global population growth and increasing affluence pressure the existing food system to increase production. The tension between efficiently...
Privatized Genetics: Lab Grown Meat and the Ethics of Ownership
Who Owns the Cells that Make Lab-Grown Meat? An article in the guardian discusses the private ownership of the cell lines used to produce lab-grown meat. These cell lines are significant because they are able to reproduce themselves indefinitely in the right environment. So these cells, put into a nutrient bath and given some sort...
Can Dog and Bunny Be Friends?
The most recent addition to the farm is a lop-eared bunny named Acorn. She lives in an open bottomed hutch on the lawn, where she passes her days eating grass or lying around in the shade. She has soft fur, big eyes, and a calm temperment, so it’s no surprise that the kids love her....
What a Box Shortage Can Tell Us
This past week I received an email informing me that my order of cardboard shipping boxes had been delayed indefinitely due to a lack of board stock. This comes on top of the three weeks of extra lead time I was told to expect when placing my order. I’m lucky to be a bit paranoid...
Digital Hostages and Healthy Food
For a brief moment last year food security became a topic of mainstream interest. COVID and its fallout had an impact on every aspect of the economy, but it was particularly visible when it came to food. There were shortages in grocery stores even as food packaged for restaurants and institutions was dumped. Slaughterhouses shut...
Big Ag Is Not Best
A recent article in Foreign Policy praising industrial caught my attention. (Big Agriculture Is Best by Ted Norhaus and Dan Blaustei-Rejto.) What I noticed was not the list of points about scales of efficiency, which are common enough. Instead, what I’ve been thinking about since reading it is how it frames this argument in relation to...
What Can You Do With 20 Tons of Broccoli?
Gazing upon the forty-two thousand pounds of broccoli that is currently sitting in palletized stacks of boxes down by my driveway raises some questions: questions about the intricate supply chain that brought it from a field in Mexico to my farm in central New York, questions about a food system that aggregates and disaggregates food...
I Can’t Know Much
One of the particular joys of this spring has been the return of visitors. Over the past month a steady flow of grandparents has passed through the farm, and as I write this my friend Mark has come to stay for a while. We all have our peculiarities, and one of Mark’s is that he...
What Epicurious Gets Wrong About Beef
Website Epicurious recently announced that it will no longer be publishing recipes featuring beef. The statement itself is so milquetoast that, despite my best efforts, I have not been able to summon much in the way of righteous indignation. But I am concerned about the ignorance it represents. The exclusive justification for the move is environmental. In...
We’d Get Bored of Pterodactyls
The commonplace is easy to take for granted. For example, I imagine that I would be thrown into an endless state of rapturous wonder if I saw a pterodactyl flapping its way over the farm. While I would, of course, be amazed for a bit, I have no doubt that if the skies were alive...