Time for another mini-post, this time about butterbeans.For over a hundred years, my family has handed down and grown what we’ve always called colored butterbeans. My great-grandma brought them with her when her family moved from Belhaven, N.C. to Roanoke Rapids in...

I can’t tell you the number of glowing accounts I’ve heard and seen about regenerative agriculture over the last few years. And it’s no wonder why. Guided by ecological principles, it promotes “regenerating” healthy soil to increase organic matter, water retention,...

Believe it or not, an insightful way to really “get” the value of ultra-local is to examine its extreme opposite: ultra-processed. Which these days is very on-point, because rising concerns about UPFs (ultra-processed foods) may well be moving us toward...

So far you’ve seen an introduction to the self-sufficiency garden system, how it relates to a broad description of farms and gardens, and what food self-sufficiency can mean. Next up: exploring why gardens are inherently far more efficient than farms, especially the...

Once in a while I’ll insert a mini-post having something to do with gardening, just as a break from the longer posts. So here is the first such.One day while walking through the rows of my garden corn plants, I came upon this little scene. A feather had blown in and...

I noted in my introductory post that food self-sufficiency means different things to different people. Here, I’ll describe what it means to me, based on my research over the last several years, and how I arrived at that version. Along the way, I’ll weave in various...

Nowadays, there’s really only one way to feed millions of people, right?Wrong. There are two ways: with farms, and with gardens. Yet we think that only the former can actually deliver massive amounts of food to millions. Simply because that’s what we’ve been taught to...

For years, as a college professor of sustainability, I thought that the amazing efficiency of our industrial food system was due to clever technology powered by energy-dense fossil fuels. But then, spurred by the Covid shock to the food chain, accelerating climate...