A summer vegetable garden is the closest many Americans will ever get to agriculture. In the spring, they prepare the soil before planting the seeds. In June and July, they water the shoots, weed the spaces around them, and worry about insects, slugs, and blights — and whether they should use chemicals to kill them. If they’re lucky, August brings an overflow of produce, so much, for some, that they now feel guilty about food gone to waste.
Growing food is hard and chancy work. It’s something of a miracle that we’re able to feed more than 8 billion people. When we do see famine or hunger, politics are more to blame than agriculture. In the coming decades, however, the odds of success will get longer. We’ll need to feed another two billion people under increasingly hostile climatic conditions.
This daunting new challenge has proved fertile ground for a new crop of books about climate change and agriculture, the focus of this month’s bookshelf.
Well, definitely found a few for me I will need to get to the library for:
- Resilient Agriculture: Cultivating Food Systems for a Changing Climate 2E by Laura Lengnick
- From the Ground Up: The Women Revolutionizing Regenerative Agriculture by Stephanie Anderson
- Regenerating Earth: Farmers Working with Nature to Feed Our Future by Kelsey Timmerman
- Mulberries in the Rain: Growing Permaculture Plants for Food and Friendship by Ryan Blosser & Revor Piersol
These stand out to me as good ones for people farming their own food, which I’ll be expanding on (as long as all goes well) “soon”.
