I’ve been thinking about our food systems since I was a little kid watching my Dad lean on his spade in the back garden, as he often did while working in his vegetable patch. More recently in 2019 Bord Bia, Ireland’s state agency that promotes sales of Irish food and horticulture both abroad and in Ireland itself; asked me to work as an independent thinker on The future of food strategy 2045. I am still thinking about our food systems.
Last year I was hoping to work with a local horticulturalist on a farm switching project, using data from soil health, crop nutrition, enterprise risk analysis to return on investment to demonstrate the required action gives a business advantage. That work has n’t happened yet. But it got me gathering information and connecting to some amazing farmers in Ireland and beyond.
I am still thinking about our food systems.
Our food systems are broken.
We need to move from high yield crop back to nutritious food.
We need to redesign the pyramid of food.
We need to look at what we eat.
I’m going to do a series of blog post to link and gather some thinking as I develop some work in this area. I’ve blogged about a Circular Coffee Club for Gorey, and I really enjoyed presenting the idea for the first time in pubic at Down to Earth, Gorey via zoom. I achieved one of my goals to reduce my carbon footprint by giving that talk.
I’ve also an idea for family and school based workshops on our Food System – ‘whats on your plate’ that would explore our connection to the food we eat through photography, inquiry, consumerism, food history, family history, supply chains and really making a connection to how food gets to the morsel on your fork.
I’ve also been speaking with organisations globally about the ways they are working and what they are doing with food systems, bringing food miles to food meters, supporting ownership in the commons and teal organisations.
One such organisation is Smart, Circular & Sustainable Agriculture Project, was founded by Kerry Babb (Founder Paradise Group for Sustainable Development – USA) and a team of Sustainability professionals, to implement a sustainable agriculture farm initially in a headquarters city, then propagated in other parts of the country. This would be an ideal solution to propel the EU agricultural industry forward. The vision is to produce high quality organic food locally with high yields (excess for export), create jobs and increase local income. The concept is to fully utilize the abundance of deteriorated land to develop a highly technical and automated food-growing process by growing crop indoors in ultra-technical greenhouses where the yield would be 100% organic. There would be no need for pesticides and other chemicals in the growth process making the products organic and healthy. Notably, greenhouse farms have the potential to produce up to 350 times the yield as outdoor farms of equal size, therefore, this Farms model would empower local farmers with new crops, more available food, increase in jobs and an opportunity to create a new technical agriculture industry where they live.
Kerry and I continue to try to explore ways to bring his programs to Ireland and the EU.
Restoring the Quality of Our Food
Especially in places where shortages of national currencies and unemployment make it difficult to meet one’s needs with traditional money. Mutual credit systems not only make it easier to exchange goods and services between peers, but they also provide opportunities for people to share with others skills that they would not have thought to advertise at all. I may not consider my knack for cooking with exotic mushrooms a very marketable skill, but in a mutual credit exchange I might be pressed to think more deeply about what I’m doing that could be of use to the wider community. In this way, we develop ourselves more deeply as we begin to lean on others more directly.
An essay looking at the coordination signals used by the most advanced capitalist supply chains, and suggest how those signals could be useful for a very different, non-capitalist, social-economic system based on human and ecological needs. And suggest some even more advanced coordination signals that could be used for that more advanced system.
Roisin Markham 
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