Local Food, Farming & Fisheries

Gambia

Western consumer culture spreads the message far and wide that farming is stupid, village life is backward, and young people must move to cities if they want to progress. But young people in the remote Gambian villages where Africa Organics works have access to a lot of things most people in cities – especially in the industrialized countries — lack; land of their own, clean water and fertile soil, knowledge of how to grow food and build houses in a sustainable fashion. The Home Farm Project helps young people who want to stay in (or return to) their villages establish permanent, diverse, sustainable farms, and works to lend prestige to Gambia’s traditional knowledge and skills. To learn more, visit http://www.africaorganics.org.

Photo by Home Farm Project — By Bioversity International (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

http://www.africaorganics.org/index.php

USA

Across the United States – where one acre of farmland is lost to development every minute – young farmers are having an increasingly hard time finding affordable land. Agrarian Trust works to come up with various unique ‘commons-based’ approaches to land ownership to strengthen local and regional food and farm economies. In doing so, they’re able to permanently protect farmland for sustainable agriculture and preserve its affordability for new and disadvantaged farmers in communities across the country. Learn more at www.agrariantrust.org.

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http://www.agrariantrust.org/

Indonesia

The Babahan Subak Association in the Tabanan province of Bali is a water-sharing farmer cooperative that upholds traditional organic farming methods and maintains an educational gathering space to share the practice, history, and spiritual and cultural significance of rice farming with locals and visitors. Learn more on the Uma Wali website (in Indonesian), and by contacting Emas Hitam Indonesia (English and Indonesian).

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http://umawali.org/

New Zealand

This small business based in Christchurch, New Zealand, allows the city’s residents to host their own beehives – and produce their own honey – by offering fully managed bee hives for rent to the home gardener. Learn more at http://www.beezthingz.co.nz.

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http://www.beezthingz.co.nz/

India

Beej Bachao Andolan (“Save the Seeds Movement”) has been working in the Indian state of Uttarakhand since the 1980s to restore traditional, agroecological farming knowledge, practices, and seed diversity – all of which have been disappearing since the start of the “Green Revolution” in the 1960s. The movement is led by activist and farmer Vijay Jardhari, who joined together with local farmers from villages across the state’s Himalayan foothills to collect and conserve some 350 varieties of rice and 220 varieties of kidney beans, as well as lesser numbers of wheat, barley, cowpea and lentil varieties. They have also documented and brought back into practice ingenious and sustainable techniques like baranaja, a system of intercropping and rotation of 12 staple crops. Find out more about the movement here and here, and watch an inspiring documentary film, Baranaja: Twelve Seeds of Sustainability, by Project Survival Media.

https://vimeo.com/126110309

France

In France’s Drôme Valley, 40% of the valley’s farmers use organic practices, compared to just 8% nationwide. The Biovallée Project, formed in 2009, is accelerating this trend by working with governments at the district and national level to plan and implement alternative energy production, conversion to organic agriculture, waste reduction, local food procurement for institutions, land use planning to slow urbanization, and more. Beyond improving the quality of life in the Drôme Valley, they aim to produce a region-wide sustainable development masterplan that will serve as a blueprint for the rest of France. To learn more, browse through the Biovallée website (in French) and read a detailed history of Drôme Valley’s organic production in this report from iPES-Food..

Photo by SMRD (CC BY-SA 3.0).

https://biovallee.net/

USA

This map is aimed at catalyzing the voluntary transfer of land and resources to indigenous people and people of color who are eager to build a life in agriculture, but are stymied by systemic injustices. Indigenous/POC farmers and aspiring farmers can list their projects and resource needs on the map, where they can be contacted by people with resources or money in the bank, and provided with the tools they need to grow nourishing food for their communities. Due to the US’s lasting legacy of slavery and discrimination, indigenous and POC farmers routinely suffer from a lack of financial means, institutional support, and connections in the realm of agriculture, where 95 percent of farms are operated by white farmers. Begun by Soul Fire Farm, the map is designed to be part of a larger effort to deal with this legacy, while in the process connecting people across racial and class divides in a mutually empowering way. View the map and read more on Soul Fire Farm’s website. And read more about some of the outstanding projects featured in the map in this Medium article.

http://www.soulfirefarm.org/support/reparations/

UK

Bristol Food Producers is a community benefit society and network of independent farmers, distributors, and retailers in Bristol, UK. The network provides mentorship for aspiring young farmers in the area, through a land matching program, skills development courses, access to markets, and events for socializing and networking. It also actively builds solidarity among existing local food producers, with the aim of scaling up local, sustainable, fair food production so that it can challenge supermarkets as the primary providers of food in the city. Visit the Bristol Food Producers and Bristol Food Network websites for more information.

https://bristolfoodproducers.uk/

USA

Established in 1999, California FarmLink supports a diverse range of beginning limited-resource and immigrant sustainable farmers. They work across the state of California, with a particular focus on central agriculture regions, to help these farmers find land, develop sound lease agreements, partner with landowners to purchase farms or transition farms to the next generation, participate in training on financial and business management, and access capital through FarmLink’s loan program and other lenders. Learn more at California FarmLink’s website.

Photo by Steve Corey (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

http://www.californiafarmlink.org/index.php

Hungary

Cargonamia takes a fun approach to shrinking food miles with three separate projects: an organic vegetable farm (Zsamboki Biokert), a do-it-yourself bicycle cooperative (Cyclonomia), and a self-managed bike delivery company (Kantaa). The three come together to create an urban food distribution hub that uses locally-manufactured cargo bikes to deliver locally-grown food across Budapest. To learn more, visit Cargonomia’s website.

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http://cargonomia.hu/?lang=en