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Yesterday, the beautiful and unusual Fall weather abruptly ended. The day started out sunny, calm and warm but by three p.m. the wind was gusting in from the West and bringing the typical chill, we associate with early November. A little overnight snow gave us a forecast of what is yet to come.
Over the past weeks I have been exploring our agricultural past. This is a necessary journey, if we are going to chart a future course. We do not want to repeat the mistakes of the past but we do want to retain that which has served us well. The centuries have witnessed our transformation from a hunter-gather society to one based upon agriculture. In the beginning, man was the engine that pulled the plough. As time past and individual and social circumstances permitted, man was replaced by the horse. The invention of the steam engine saw the most significant change and the steam tractor changed man's relationship to the land and the horse. The farmer could now till ever greater tracts of land and produce ever more food to feed theg rowing urban centres that had begun to appear, with increasing frequency, during the Industrial Revolution. Today, agriculture sits at a crossroads, does it continue to specialize and grow ever larger or does it stop and reverse itself somewhat and return to a smaller but productive scale? The family farm is disappearing rapidly, partially because of the growth of the mega-industrial- agro-companies and partially due to urban sprawl. The city may well be biting or perhaps, more accurately, chewing off the hand that feeds it, without developing an alternative. How sustainable is this trend to larger and larger farm factories? We currently truck food hundreds fo miles to feed those urban centres that once relied upon the hinterland to met their basic needs, as the hinterland disappears the city's reach extends ploughing over and paving good farming land without creating an urban food system that can feed the city's population if and when the industrial food system collapses. Over the next few weeks, we will explore how a sustainable, locally-based food security system can work, and how this system can behaves as an economic engine for your community.
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The copyright of the article Out of the Past Our Future. in From Field To Table is owned by Bob Ewing. Permission to republish Out of the Past Our Future. in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
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