agriculture

Farmers are already leading the way on methane reduction and it’s time the gas and coal industries did the same, Farmers for Climate Action said today.

The mainstream media has given a great deal of coverage to the COVID-19 pandemic - as it should - but interwoven among the stories on poor vaccination rates, conspiracy theories, and the people ignoring quarantine, there is a consistent run of horror stories on the impact of lockdowns, often with a message that we must get back to the pre pandemic "normal" life.

To keep up with global food demand, the UN estimates, six million ha of new farmland will be needed every year. Instead, 12 million ha are lost every year through soil degradation. Australia lost 36 million ha of agricultural land in just the four years from 2005 till 2009.

The Stanley Plateau nestled in the foothills of the Victorian Alps, is fighting for the right to preserve its water resources from extraction by a company that transports the water to a plant in Albury, across the border in NSW, for bottling. The bottled water from Stanley and surrounding areas is for domestic and overseas distribution processed by a multi-national company.

As human overpopulation in Victoria Australia fuels new sprawling suburbs, kangaroos are being continually deprived of habitat and pushed out into roads. There is an ongoing pantomime to pretend that it is not the human population, but the kangaroo population that is making new impositions on the environment. Culls are called for and, not unexpectedly, country MPs are trying to win votes from the fringes by calling for a commercial kangaroo meat processing industry. Maryland Wilson, President of the Australian Wildlife Protection Counsel, has leapt into the breach to defend kangaroos. Among other things she has said that it is inappropriate for the Minister for Agriculture to make decisions affecting wildlife. She has also repeated her call for wildlife corridors.

Feed the world with Genetically Modified foods? The French Minister for Agriculture is preparing a new law to prevent GM crops in France as the European Court of Justice has questioned the health-risk basis of current French laws against GM. It probably suits GM patenters to keep the battle on this footing as a decoy because the major danger lies elsewhere - in loss of productive land tenure.

Aussies take action! Lock the gate!" Australians to gather in Brisbane to defend water and land from coal and coal-seam gas fracking, which has already been totally banned in France. (See comments.) On Sunday October 16, 11a.m. Queens Park Cnr George & Elizabeth Sts. Brisbane City.

Is there really any social justice or ethics that we continue to grow our own population and consumption levels if it means we parasitically must acquire valuable arable land from a country already being preyed upon by developed nations?

illustration from http://www.elzpublishing.com/index.html

""There is no box. That is the mind-set we need if civilization is to survive."
Lester Brown

(Scroll down for information from writers in Australia, Canada, USA to date. More input welcome)

Film

The Discovery of Honey, painting by Piero di Cosimo, taking the happy social connotations of honey to the mythical plane.

On Wednesday, 12 August 2009 the Victorian Parliament Upper House passed a motion moved by the Liberal Nationals Coalition to disallow parts of a water regulation which would have seen the Brumby Labor Government break key water promises.

The Coalition’s disallowance motion was supported by the Greens and DLP member Peter Kavanagh.

The message coming from Fair Water Use Australia is that the Federal and State Governments are not handling Australia's water properly, transparently or effectively. The mishandling is causing a dangerous crisis. The public should be very concerned and NGOs should support Fair Water Use and the UN in their call for a state of emergency and a Royal Commission. Australia, this is really serious.

This document is republished to give background dating from 2003 as the Victorian government began to take control away from citizens and locals over water, land and government, and to assume more and more control, in public-private associations. It was the beginning of overt attempts to promote private profit from induced scarcity.

Details of Shepparton inquiry even are below the italicised editorial. The comments preceding the details of the Senate Inquiry in Shepparton are my response to AWPC's Maryland Wilson's questioning of my supporting irrigators. Comments and independent reports of this event will be most welcome. Submit to "contact" at top left margin of this site or reply in the comments function at the bottom of this article.

Food garden in White House

In the aftermath of breaking ground on the new, 1100 square foot White House garden, Michelle Obama named chef Sam Kass to head the White House Food Initiative. And Kass isn't a fan of big agriculture and mass fertilisers.

see Candobetter review here of Peter Andrews' book on Natural Sequence Farming
By Duane Norris (Natural Sequence Farming)[1]

The present circumstances around the country pose a huge headache for Governments with devastating fires in Victoria and floods in Queensland.

This book paints a picture of the ecological mechanics of this continent, using clear, concise prose. It is a painlessly educative book. The bold claim of its subtitle, "How Australia's landscape can be saved," stands up to scrutiny.

Note from Candobetter Editors:

An oasis of sanity in a sea of growthist madness?
Could this be happening in the Land of MORE, MORE, MORE?
Bloomington, Indiana supports a steady-state economy!

You heard it right….

The City of Bloomington Environmental Commission issued a statement which identifies steady state conditions as being in the best interests of the community..

In the early 1970's, a book titled "The Limits to Growth" was published, a report by the Club of Rome on the predicaments of mankind. Ultimately translated in 30 languages, it caused a furore, predicting that should civilisation continue on its present path, it would run out of every resource under the sun, causing a collapse of society and a major dieoff of human population.

The following was posted in response to an article Working the land - or not of 24 Jun 08 by Jenny Hume on

The Australian Government is set to pass laws ending the single desk marketing of Australian wheat this week.