Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
How can the necessary relocalisation of food systems be reconciled with a need for exchange based on mutual aid, complementarity, and reciprocity? Can local biodiversity (and its products) support territorially grounded agricultural economies while also nurturing the emergence of spaces for innovation and cooperation across diverse realities?
As Graeber puts it in his lecture on Care and Freedom, “We need to reimagine production and consumption.” We need to produce ‘Care’ not money, and this is really the central ethos of the Care.Home.Farm project.
A healthy diet costs in global average US$3.68 per day in 2021. This is considerably higher than the average food expenditure in almost all low income countries, where people have to do with a diet dominated by staples and oils, lacking protein and a number of micronutrients. The cost of healthy food is also out of reach for many people living above the World Bank’s extreme poverty line.
The not-so-secret ingredient in a healthy local food ecology is the embodied presence of those involved. Ecological agriculture cannot be practiced remotely. The only way to manage any landscape sustainably is by living in it long enough, and intimately enough, to learn how to manage it well.
For Baldes, he wants to eventually hunt buffalo like someone would any other wildlife. He’s in the process of buying property to allow buffalo to roam like they did before western expansion.
Increasing self-provisioning by communities take chunks of our lives out of the market and will at the same time lead to less consumption and less emissions as self-provisioning reduces the time available for salaried work and thereby shrinks the economy and human demands on ecosystems.
At the moment Agrihouse’s focus is on building small, cost-effective ponds to capture and store water, creating a replicable model that other small farms can adopt. In doing so, the farm aims to become a hub for sustainable development in Italy, supporting farmers ready to transition toward regenerative and agroecological practices, while providing a real-world example of what ecosystem restoration can look like.
Given how absolutely fun it is to make clothes that you wear, and wear clothes that you make, I expect this equation to come out better than what people might think. And I expect that to be the same for every beautiful handcrafted item we create and use at Care Home Farm. But either way, it will be real, and that’s relaxing.
As Reed and I talked about acorns, eventually I realized that what we were really discussing was something entirely different. We were trading cultural stories about what it means to be human.
In ways I won’t rehash again here, I think our society puts too much weight on the term ‘farmer’, and still more on ‘real farmer’. One reason I’ve embraced the identity of ‘farmer’ is to push back against this, but I’ve sometimes felt uncomfortable when others represent me as an example of that revered and semi-mythical being, the real farmer.
A healthy ecosystem is diverse and small-scale manufacturing systems have the potential to contain much more diversity than industrial levels of production. I use bread and linen – basic daily items of food and textiles to illustrate this position.
What’s needed now is a holistic vision, one that frames agroecology as a system, not a simple set of tools, and aligns funding models accordingly. Piecemeal policies will not cut it. Only by backing the full chain, from producers to consumers, can we build a resilient, truly sustainable food system.
