The Alaska Young Fishermen’s Almanac is the first book project of the Alaska Young Fishermen’s Network with support from the Alaska Marine Conservation Council and the Alaska Humanities Forum. Using her experience gleaned from creating our own New Farmer’s’ Almanac, Severine worked with the Alaskan Young Fisherman on this project and it features art, stories, advice and more from young fishermen across Alaska. Salmon Sisters is excited to offer this first, beautiful edition to our fishing community!
Discover the hidden power soil has to reverse climate change, and how a regenerative farming diet not only delivers us better health and wellness, but also rebuilds our most precious resource—the very ground that feeds us.
Josh Tickell, one of America’s most celebrated documentary filmmakers and director of Fuel, has dedicated most of his life to saving the environment. Now, in Kiss the Ground, he explains an incredible truth: by changing our diets to a soil-nourishing, regenerative agriculture diet, we can reverse global warming, harvest healthy, abundant food, and eliminate the poisonous substances that are harming our children, pets, bodies, and ultimately our planet.
Through fascinating and accessible interviews with celebrity chefs, ranchers, farmers, and top scientists, this remarkable book, soon to be a full-length documentary film narrated by Woody Harrelson, will teach you how to become an agent in humanity’s single most important and time sensitive mission. Reverse climate change and effectively save the world—all through the choices you make in how and what to eat.
Click HERE to buy the book, it’s currently the #1 bestseller on Amazon! Once you have bought and read the book consider joining the Kiss the Ground Bookclub!
“Hunger and poverty are perpetuated by undemocratic systems of power. Now, this great new resource lifts the veil hiding the history of dispossession and unequal land access in the US.” – Frances Moore Lappé
Land access is the primary barrier for young farmers today. Ensuring access for young farmers who are passionate about the production of healthy food that helps rather than harms the planet is critical in order to address and resolve the injustices in the food system that are at the root of so many of the problems in society.
The authors of this new book Justine M. Williams and Eric Holt-Giménez begins with the history of colonialism in the southwestern US. It includes information from the important leaders within the food system With prefaces from leaders in the food justice and family farming movements, the book opens with a look at the legacies of white-settler colonialism in the southwestern United State which can be largely characterised by widespread enclosure – and often subsequent depletion – of the rural commons through a process of privatization, that has endured until today. The history of this agricultural system is marred by racism, industrialization and destruction of ecosystems, and has concentrated much of the prosperity to be found in the food system in the hands of the few and powerful.
This book recognises what we have known for a long time: In order to move forward and achieve an equitable, sovereign and sustainable agricultural system for all, all of the players in the food movement must come together to demand land justice.
Are you dreaming, planting, and tending visions of a queer ecological future? Are you looking to connect with kindred spirits in your region and across the country to share resources to support these visions of collective liberation? Join Queer Ecojustice Project for our first ONLINE reading community!
Most gatherings will be local in your region (we call these regional groups, “nodes”). Monthly online community gatherings will occur in June, July, August, and September.
Read on below for more information about the organizers, facilitators, QTPOC reading group nodes in Oakland and Seattle, and QTPOC community land projects that need your support.
Salvage capitalism, ecological assemblages, and precarity… These are a few concepts that Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing fleshes out in The Mushroom At the End of the World, a genre bending book that tracks the global economy by way of the Matsutake mushroom.
As a farmer, I have noticed that my own ways of thinking and seeing the world have shifted with each passing season. I have felt something akin to love for an animal that I knew would one day be dinner, have felt tremendous connection to invisible soil critters and life webs as I hoed through pea patches. Social scientists refer to this process as affect, the suggestion that other-than-human-beings (plants, animals, earth elements) can impact and shape our ways of being. Continue reading →
Nichki Carangelo, of the delightful Hudson Valley-based, cooperative Letterbox Farm Collective, has just finished a publication on the commercial production of pasture rabbits. Funded by a SARE grant, “Pasture Rabbit for Profit” is an easily digestible, practical resource for farmers intended to guide readers through the start-up phase of their own pasture-based rabbitry. It includes a full enterprise budget along with housing plans, sample breeding schedules, feed guidelines and other rabbit husbandry basics. And it’s available for free download here!
Want to dive deep into the relationship between the history of cotton farming, capitalism, and the global economy? Then Sven Beckert, author of Empire of Cotton: A Global History, is your man. He’s a historian who knows all things cotton and his book was described by the New York Times as:
…a major work of scholarship that will not be soon surpassed as the definitive account of the product that was, as Beckert puts it, the Industrial Revolution’s “launching pad.”
More than that, “Empire of Cotton” is laced with compassion for the millions of miserably treated slaves, sharecroppers and mill workers whose labors, over hundreds of years, have gone into the clothes we wear and the surprising variety of other products containing cotton, from coffee filters to gunpowder.
If you don’t, however, have the time to read all 640 pages of Sven’s book, check out the video in the link below. It’s a recent lecture that he gave at the New School in New York that’s guaranteed to make you more informed and super smart!
Helen Zuman, long-time Greenhorns-follower and contributor to New Farmers Almanac, has an agricultural story to tell that is as gripping as it is disquieting– and she’s asking for help getting it published.
Helen writes, “The action unfolds on a farm in the backwoods of Western North Carolina – Zendik Farm, which, I discovered after being kicked out, was actually a cult. The story features an urge to homestead (part of what sent me hunting for a place like Zendik in the first place), firewood, wheelbarrows, snuffling bucks, outhouses, de-nailing, wild persimmons, abundant intrigue – and a glimpse of the detours aspiring agrarians were perhaps more likely to take back in the late 90s, when the beginning-farmer scene was nowhere near as robust as it is today.”
An intimate journey through the full arc of cult involvement, MATING IN CAPTIVITY shows how Zuman joined Zendik, learned its mating rituals, endured exile, and – finally – mated in the wild.
Helen has launched a thirty-day kickstarted campaign to fund the book, and rewards include advance access to the paperback, a reading (with Q&A) at a venue of your choice, and a handwritten copy of the manuscript. The campaign ends April 10.
To many activists in the Bay Area and other cities in the US, “tech” has become a dirty word. It can feel like large tech companies are steamrolling through cities and neighborhoods, destroying traditional jobs, ushering in gentrification, raising rents, and obliviously pushing the little guy around.
As a result, there’s been justifiable anger, protests, and blow back against these companies. In his book, Throwing Rocks at the Google Bus, Douglas Rushkoff suggests a more measured approach. Yes, these tech companies have done wrong, but Rushkoff believes the digital economy doesn’t have to be all bad:
This isn’t the fault of digital technology at all, but the way we are deploying it: instead of building the distributed digital economy these new networks could foster, we are doubling down on the industrial age mandate for growth above all. As Rushkoff shows, this is more the legacy of early corporatism and central currency than a feature of digital technology. In his words, “we are running a 21st century digital economy on a 13th Century printing-press era operating system.”
Protest however you see fit, but give this thoughtful book a read to expand the discussion and hear another point of view. You can buy it HERE or head on over to your local library to find a copy.
This weekend we would like to steer you towards Artemisia Rae’s White Oak Summer, an erotic romance novel, that blends sex and farming into a lovely little fireside read. When she’s not writing blush-worthy prose Rae is farming and helping run a local seed cooperative in Boise, Idaho.
The synopsis:
White Oak Summer is a story about self-discovery. To escape from a dead end job and a life without purpose, Kelsie Thompson accepts an internship on an organic farm. In lush western Oregon farm country, White Oak Farm owners Dana and Craig become Kelsie’s mentors in life and in love. Dana instructs her on the fine art of beekeeping and the luscious intricacies of the plant kingdom. Craig has different things to teach Kelsie and not all of them have to do with farming. Their neighbor – hunky goat farmer Joshua Murphy- complicates things with his own agenda, while the other interns struggle to find their own places in farm life. As the season unfolds, Kelsie learns as much about her sexual interests as she does about growing vegetables. With the inherent sensuality of the natural world as her backdrop, she reaps what she sows.
One reviewer exclaimed, “farm stories with sex scenes.” I can’t help but recall Kristin Kimball’s words from the Dirty Life when, out of sheer seasonal exhaustion, she and Mark began referring to farmer sex as touching hands… This sounds like a superb addition to farm fiction canon 🙂
During these turbulent political times where the country feels more divided than ever, we should still take the time to put away our devices, crack open a book, and see what the history of our country can teach us.
Enter writer James Agee and photographer Walker Evans. Many of us are familiar with their seminal work Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Published in 1941, the book was an instant American classic. Agee’s words and Evans’ photographs shone an unflinchingly honest eye at the daily lives of sharecroppers in rural Alabama during the Great Depression.
What’s more, Agee wasn’t afraid to look inward at his own privilege and role as a reporter in documenting the lives of impoverished farmers. This theme is expanded upon in the duo’s lesser known work, Cotton Tenants: Three Families, a “rediscovered masterpiece” about Southern cotton farmers that was shelved and finally published in 2013. As a critic from the New York Times wrote:
Agee squabbled with his editors over what he felt was the exploitation and trivialization of destitute American families. . . . What readers are about to discover now is what all the fighting was about.
In these days of “alternative facts”, attacks on the media, and a supposed urban/rural divide, both books are well worth a read. Cotton Tenants can be purchased HERE or run on over to your local library to borrow it!
We wanted to point you in the direction of activist, author, and poet Janisse Ray’s new book The Seed Underground. Ray’s most recent work focuses on perhaps one of the more overlooked and important aspects of food security, the seed. Continue reading →
George Monbiot has something of reputation for discussing the more dire circumstances we face today, but in his latest article for The Guardian he presents some reasons not to despair. In particular, Monbiot hones in on the commons, which (as you may know) is the theme of this years New Farmers Almanac.
Dec 10th Book Release Party: Nature’s Remedies & New Farmers Almanac
Calling all fellow Greenhorns, plant lovers, and herb nerds!
It’s Jean Willoughby here, and I can easily be described by all three of those lovely, earthbound designations. I hope you’ll join me and an amazing group of folks at the Third Root Community Health Center, a worker-owned cooperative in Brooklyn, for a book release party this Saturday, December 10th.
We’re getting together to celebrate the launch of my book Nature’s Remedies: An Illustrated Guide to Healing Herbs(Chronicle Books). We’ve also teamed up with Greenhorns folks to usher in the release of the latest edition of The New Farmers Almanac.
I’m planning to give a short talk, sort of a ‘people’s history of herbal medicine,’ that I’m excited to share with the Greenhorns community. We’re also going to be joined by a few herbalists, who will be on hand with their wares. Come get some healing, nourishing, and delicious gifts for your loved ones and learn more about medicinal herbs.
Nature’s Remedies & New Farmers Almanac Book Release Party Saturday, Dec. 10th, 2016 6:30 pm to 9:30 pm Third Root Community Health Center 380 Marlborough Rd, Brooklyn, New York
+ Food & Drink
+ Herb-infused Meads
+ Meet farmers, medicine makers, and herbalists who will be there with their wares
+ 100% of Nature’s Remedies book sales will benefit Third Root!
the irresistible fleet of bicycles 