Christina Sarich, Staff Writer
Waking Times
Waking Times
If you’ve already been through an economic collapse, you might know a thing or two about how to feed your family with little money. More importantly, you might know how to do it without pesticides, herbicides, fungicides, and GMO seed. On a total of about 20 million acres managed by over 35 million Russian families, Russians are carrying on an old-world technique, which we Americans might learn from. They are growing their own organic crops - and it’s working.
According to some statistics, they grow 92% of the entire countries’ potatoes, 77% of its vegetables, 87% of its fruit, and feed 71% of the entire population from privately owned, organic farms or house gardens all across the country. These aren’t huge Agro-farms run by pharmaceutical companies; these are small family farms and less-than-an-acre gardens.
A recent report from Agro-ecology and the Right to Food says that organic and sustainable small-scale farming could double food production in the parts of the world where hunger is the biggest issue. Within five to 10 years we could see a big jump in crop cultivation. It could also take the teeth out of GMO business in the US.
According to World Watch, we can also farm fish responsibly and feed the planet. Sustainable fish farms along with organic gardening are becoming the new agro-business.
“Farmed seafood has certain advantages over wild fish in meeting modern demand. For a global marketplace that demands increasingly predictable products—uniform-sized fillets available year-round, free of the vagaries of weather or open-ocean fishing—fish farming delivers this predictability. Farms are also becoming more productive, raising fish at a lower cost and expanding the potential market.” (Brian Halwell, Farming Fish for the Future).
As long as this is done in sustainable ways without GMO salmon, we really can feed over 7 billion people.
Unfortunately, not all of us want to utilize organic farming. Purchasing 500,000 shares of Monsanto stock in 2012, Bill Gates is just one key figure who argues that GMOs are an absolute necessity in order to fight global starvation. Of course along with ‘saving the world from starvation’, GMO crops also bring along a large number of unwanted health and environmental effects. This isn’t even considering the fact that long term, we truly don’t know what kind of impact this will have on the earth on a major scale. Though we do know once everything is GMO, it will be virtually impossible to go back to a natural world.
Check out NaturalSociety’s YouTube Channel for some recent videos on the March Against Monsanto event occurring in Philadelphia, PA. The videos offer some educational information along with a look at how people everywhere reject Monsanto and genetically modified organisms. Say goodbye to GMOs. We don’t need them.
“We won’t solve hunger and stop climate change with industrial farming on large plantations,” says Olivier De Schutter.
This article was originally featured on NaturalSociety.com.
About the Author
Christina Sarich is a musician, yogi, humanitarian and freelance writer who channels many hours of studying Lao Tzu, Paramahansa Yogananda, Rob Brezny, Miles Davis, and Tom Robbins into interesting tidbits to help you Wake up Your Sleepy Little Head, and See the Big Picture. Her blog is Yoga for the New World. Her latest book is Pharma Sutra: Healing the Body And Mind Through the Art of Yoga.
This article is offered under Creative Commons license. It’s okay to republish it anywhere as long as attribution bio is included and all links remain intact.
The statistics in this article are at odds with statistics in the writer's source materials. It is not 35 million families---it it less than half that, which makes fare more sense given the acreage involved. See the following:
ReplyDelete"On a total of approximately 8 million hectares (20 million acres) of land, 16.5 million Russian families grow food in small-scale, organic gardens on their Dachas (a secondary home, often in the extra urban areas). Because growing your own food happens to be a long-lived tradition in Russia, even among the wealthy.
If Russian families can manage such production in their region's very short growing season (approx. 110 days), imagine the output most parts of the world could manage by comparison. Unfortunately in just the US alone, lawns take up more than twice the amount of land Russia's gardens do (est. 40-45 million acres)."
THESE alternative stats make far more sense, since gardens of less than an acre can hardly feed more than a family over the course of a year of 110 growing days. Especially if the garden is one that is a multi-crop garden. Remember that 110 growing days is a very short season. Now we understand that each family has over 2 acres, which makes far more sense.
Please where are both of you getting your 'statistics'?
ReplyDeleteI can't understand why Russia can do it and we can't. They have such simple farming methods yet they were able to produce organic products and feed the population with it. We can surely get a thing or two from their methods and apply it to feed our own population with healthy organic food.
ReplyDelete- ModestoMilling.com