and

http://www.localharvest.org/

Check out:
http://www.foodnotlawns.com/

aquaponics / hydroponics
green roofs
biodynamic gardening
guerilla farming

Food production is a fairly petroleum intensive business -- from the fertilizer to the machines to final transport and plastic packaging and plastic grocery bags. Oil is far from gone but will get progressively more expensive so we will see many changes in the way food is produced and sold.

The people I know who garden at home as I do, treat it as a hobby. There is no way that I could compete on cost or production with commercial ag. Food has never been cheaper than it is right now so the financial incentive just isn't there. The motivation for people I have talked to is satisfaction and having access to absolutely fresh vegetables and herbs 2 months out of the year.

I think hydroponics hold a lot of promise and buildings are being designed and built now with hydropnic systems built in. Generally you have to have temperature control and a source of heat so integrating the greenhouse into homes, schools and other buildings makes sense. But when you look at what is most commonly grown hydroponically you can't live on it -- tomatoes, greens, strawberries. Aquaponics adds fish to the system so we are getting there.

The same for home gardens -- it is a piece of the solution and worth fighting right now for the right to plant something other than grass in your yard but the solution is going to have to include more than tomatoes, carrots and peas.

People NEED to be encouraged to buy Heirloom seeds and then to save the seeds for next years planting. There are lots of online resources for this.

Those little packets of seeds you buy at Home depot or most garden stores are produced in a way where the next generation of seeds are unusable. This makes it necessary for people to rebuy their seeds every year,

But if people are just getting into gardening for the first season or two, or if heirloom varieties aren't available, plant whatever you can get. The point is to grow food.

Self imposed bans? or how would this be implemented?

I do think though that this is in general a good idea.

Bryant

We need to encourage as much growth in the local food economy as fast as possible. The bans on non-local food (or some variant of that idea) would be by the operators of the farmers' markets themselves. It's done all the time, and it works very well.

We need to keep food in the stores too, so a general ban on non-local food would be ideological and unfeasible. This is about the need to keep people eating, not scoring political points.

Thanks for clearing that up.

Bryant

...with big flashing red lights and screaming sirens.
I can't believe it's taken me this long to connect the dots.

I would like to see is for Master Gardeners in each community who would act as guides to the how-to in this area. We go to the classes but they do not have anyone who will actually come out and talk to you specifically about you own garden. One really good system that has arisen in our community is the local butchers and grain sales places do give a lot of good advice. We no longer go to our government farm people because they cannot get their heads out of yesterday.

Edited to add that my Native American grandson would like to see the tribe start greenhouses etc to enhance their food supply. I had also suggested that the tribe plant perrennials such as apple trees, rhubarb, berries and other easy to grow items at all tribal housing. So far no action.

Author Charles Eisenstein says in his book "The Ascent of Humanity", Those things that must be done to avert the crisis will be done only as its consequence"

Another way of saying that people only act when the crisis is already impacting them. That's why it's crucial that those of us who know what's happening start getting threse systems in place. In another year or two it may be too late to avoid widespread misery.

Eisenstein's book is one of the most remarkable things I've ever read, by the way. It's a root-cause analysis of the unfolding global predicament, and it ends up at a very deep place. He's made it available on-line for free at http://www.ascentofhumanity.com/text.php

It's the one book I recommend right now over all others about the crisis.

does a LOT of outreach. We have a column in the paper, a phone that one can call, and a booth at the farmers' market.

something they want to sell.

They may rule you HAVE to shop

http://www.democraticunderground.com/?com=view_post&forum=1002&pid=481026

It is important.
And as an example I buy my eggs from a guy who started keeping chickens and selling the eggs putting the money in the bank for his kids education...when I first met him his kids were just barley able to do the chores and that has been at least 1 so I 0 years ago ...now the local market close to me is carrying them and I don't have to go to his place to get them so he is doing well on just a small operation and I know how well he treats his chickens....the eggs are tasty and the shells are hard as can be...unlike the ones that come from factory farms with pale yokes and shells so week you can put a finger through them if not careful...
Supporting people like these are important...and healthy too.

Another option:
*Move to The Woods and start growing your own.

It is preferable to move to an area that is not already populated by Factory Farms in order to avoid contamination from toxic chemicals and GM pollen.

We chose the above option in 2006.
So far, so good.
Every year, we produce MORE,
and consume LESS.

Our surplus goes to neighbors and the local Food Bank.
Some of our neighbors have become dependent on us for eggs and Veggie/Berry surplus.
There is already a localized cash/barter black market in this area (Ouachita Mountains, Arkansas).
Poverty is a real problem here, and people are finding ways to share and make life easier for one another.

I come from the hippie "back-to-the-land" generation, and 99.9% of the people that tried couldn't make it happen. If you can, more power to you!

I spent some time in Wisconson backalong, and the cretins I was dealing with kept pissing and moaning about the Hmong refugees that had been resettled in their area.
They were grousing because these folks took every opprutunity to grow their own food - some colored a little outside the lines, like indoor gardening without containers or drainage, chickens in the apartment.... But some landlords had told them that they could plant every square inch of the yard if they wanted - just rake it out and reseed the grass when they moved, and keep the chickens in a coop.
I did'nt want to argue with these goobers - but right then I decided that my grandmothers, with their big vegetable gardens, chickens, sometimes a pig or a "beef", and cellars full of home-canned food - must have been Hmong.
We have some Somali refugees hereabouts, and they have jumped at the chance for community garden plots. I'm wondering if some of our recent refugee immigrants could be leading lights in urban market gardening, with help from USDA's Cooperative Extension - which also runs 4-H, a long-running skills training and social program for rural kids - could be a great fit for places like Detroit. The city could lease out suitable plots very cheaply - and I could go on....

we have seen a large and steady growth of forest land in the northern states over the past century.

We're not trying to duplicate the industrial ag system here. In fact that's the very thing we don't want.

judging by the local farmers markets there is plenty of that.

Not a matter of choice but necessity. If the interlocking global crises in energy, the environment and the economy keep building, I think we may in fact be moving back towards more of an agrarian society starting quite soon. The shift may have even started in subtle ways already.

the problems as I see them:

1. How do these small farms remain economically viable until armageddon? Small farms are a borderline proposition as it is because their product is usually too expensive for the average person. The laws of supply and demand still apply - I don't see the huge increase in demand.

2. Such farming is low density low productivity - no way it can feed large metropolitan areas.

3. The infrastructure to distribute food locally right now is huge - how do you plan to replace it? It you plan on it still being there, then your fears of reverting back to an agrarian society are overblown.

There is a reason we shifted to the agribusiness model of food production - it is the only way to feed the population of America. The only realistic outcome to the crisis you anticipate is mass starvation until the population is reduced to where it was when we were last a non-industrialized agrarian society.

And there are plenty of fairways that would grow a nice crop of turnips, come to that.....

Or growing forage crops. Which could be grown on those knobby old hayfields that are currently being grown over. The landowners might like to see them come into use again, and save the expense of "bush-hogging" to keep them open.

In fact quite literally in the backyard of Gillette Stadium there is an organic grass fed beef/dairy farm. My town of Attleboro now has 2 farmers markets and some community gardening places.

Note: If you google map it, the Lawson farm butts up to the practice fields.

but they represent such a tiny fraction of the food supply that to think we could use such methods to reliably and cheaply feed the population of America is ludicrous.

With the changing climate we may have to change how things are done.

We don't need to replace the entire food supply, we need to insulate ourselves against shocks to the food system. We need to increase the system's resilience. To do that we need to begin with the most obvious and easiest changes that can be made with the least resistance from the bureaucrats and economists. Growing a bit of one's own food (or food for one's neighbours) qualifies in spades.

-- and permaculture is a fascinating thing to study:

http://www.permaculture.org/nm/index.php/site/classroom/

Seattle’s vision of an urban food oasis is going forward. A seven-acre plot of land in the city’s Beacon Hill neighborhood will be planted with hundreds of different kinds of edibles: walnut and chestnut trees; blueberry and raspberry bushes; fruit trees, including apples and pears; exotics like pineapple, yuzu citrus, guava, persimmons, honeyberries, and lingonberries; herbs; and more. All will be available for public plucking to anyone who wanders into the city’s first food forest.

“This is totally innovative, and has never been done before in a public park,” Margarett Harrison, lead landscape architect for the Beacon Food Forest project, tells TakePart. Harrison is working on construction and permit drawings now and expects to break ground this summer.

http://www.takepart.com/article/2012/02/21/its-not-fairytale-seattle-build-nations-first-food-forest

But people get lost in forests and starve to death because they can't recognize any of it.

I like the idea of a food forest, but it seems to me that educating people to recognize food in its natural form and natural habitat shoule be a parallel effort. Not to mentionit would be more sustainable to pick edible "weeds" than pineapples in Seattle.

But that's just me being a sustainability curmudgeon. For now anything that gets people back to the idea the food grows in natural settings and not at Safeway is a good thing...

I don't know what the schools do now.

In our area, acorns are one edible, supposedly the Indians ate them. How to prepare them, I think they need to be ground up and leeched with water to get rid of some bitterness. So far as I know, the only places they grow are on private property and "parks" that exist. Another edible, I don't know whether we have any in our area, is Japanese Knotweed. According to wikipedia, its illegal to grow it in some areas because it is so invasive. When looking at it some months back, I found one reference that said it contained a somewhat high amount of oxylates, but was unable to confirm that at the time with multiple references.

The natural place for there to be such a local-edible education would probably be during elementary school, since so many drop out by the later grades. As a matter of survivability, one would think that would be a basic lesson one generation should pass to the next in any formalized curriculum.

And regarding the food forest, I don't know how they intend to grow pineapple there. It doest read as if it's been built yet. Maybe the entire release was simply marketing.