Roots of Change - Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture [00:29:20m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (159)

Roots of Change (ROC) is a collaborative of diverse leaders and institutions unified in common pursuit of achieving a sustainable food system in California by 2030. In 1999, a group of California-based foundations came together to explore the challenges facing the current industrialized food system and to discover a means to maximize the impact of their investments in pursuit of a healthier system. In 2000, they commissioned and released Roots of Change: Agriculture, Ecology, and Health in California, a report that consolidated information from policy makers, farmers, scientists, and activists, as well as data from numerous state agencies. The report made the case that multiple environmental, social, and economic problems in California can be addressed simultaneously by a comprehensive transition to a sustainable food system.

California is the nation’s most populous state, the largest economy in the U.S., and the 7th largest economy in the world, the state has the resources to lead the way to a sustainable future. With an agricultural industry is twice the size of any other state, California is the nations largest food producer. Worldwide, California is the world’s fifth largest supplier of food and other agricultural commodities. Because California helps feed the nation and world, actions here will create waves of change. Changing the state’s food system will require that all Californians of every ethnicity, religious belief, political party, and region take part in this effort.

Michael Dimock is the president of ROC Coordinating Team. Michael has worked in the agricultural sector for seventeen years. He founded and directed a unique organization, Ag Innovations Network, which provides strategic planning and consensus building services to rural communities, farming and food companies, and government agencies focused on sustainability. He was Chairman of Slow Food USA (until January of 2006) and a member of the Slow Food International Board, and has been Chairman of the Board of the Community Alliance with Family Farmers, the state’s oldest organization dedicated to sustainable family farms. Michael came to the ROC Fund following his leadership, as a grantee, of the ROC effort to build a statewide leadership network.

Visit ROC website: http://www.rocfund.org, and to read the New Mainstream Report to see what a sustainable food system looks like: http://www.rocfund.org/resources/reports/the-vivid-picture-project-reports

Read and Sign the Declaration for Healthy Food and Agriculture http://www.fooddeclaration.org/

 

 Food Not Lawns: How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community [00:27:58m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (129)

Back in June the Wall Street Journal is reported on an increasing trend amongst suburban homeowners: growing, instead of buying, food. As the WSJ article reports:

“In Portland, Ore., sales of vegetable plants this season have jumped an unprecedented 43% from a year earlier, and sales of fruit-producing trees and shrubs are up 17%. Sales of flower perennials, on the other hand, are down 16%. It’s much the same story at Williams Nursery, Westfield, N.J., where total sales are down 4.6% even as herb and vegetable-plant sales have risen 16%. And in Austin, Texas, Great Outdoors reports sales of flowers slightly down, while sales of vegetables have risen 20% over last year.

George Ball, chief executive of seed giant W. Atlee Burpee & Co. in Warminster, Pa., says Burpee’s sales of vegetables and herbs are up about 40% this year, twice last year’s growth rate.”

Recently, a NASA-funded study, which used satellite data collected by the Department of Defense, determined that, including golf courses, lawns in the United States cover nearly fifty thousand square miles-an area roughly the size of New York State. The same study concluded that most of this New York State-size lawn was growing in places where turfgrass should never have been planted. In order to keep all the lawns in the country well irrigated, the author of the study calculated, it would take an astonishing two hundred gallons of water per person, per day. According to a separate estimate, by the Environmental Protection Agency, nearly a third of all residential water use in the United States currently goes toward landscaping.

A third of our greenhouse gasses are produced from shipping food. Yet not so very long ago in the 1940’s, Americans managed to produce 40% of the food they consumed from Victory gardens in their own back yards.

Today we’ll be talking to Heather Coburn Flores, author of Food Not Lawns, How to Turn Your Yard into a Garden and Your Neighborhood into a Community. In “Food Not Lawns” (2006), Heather C. Flores argues that the average yard could yield several hundred pounds of fruits and vegetables per year.

Heather is co-founder of the original Food Not Lawns grassroots gardening project in Eugene, OR, she is a certified permaculture designer, holds a BA degree in ecology, education, and the arts from Goddard College

MySpace
http://www.myspace.com/foodnotlawns

Her Amazon Profile
http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A1APFEWFJOGMB2

ChelseaGreen
http://www.chelseagreen.com/bookstore/item/foodnotlawns#