Fertile Ground USA...Celebrating the people behind the plow

Slow Food vs. Monsanto
Michael Pollan and Monanto's Hugh Grant square off at Google.org forum Posted by Tom Philpott at 12:44 PM on 22 Sep 2008

CLICK HERE to watch Willie Nelson's performance at the 2008 Farm Aid concert plus much more.

SOMERVILLE, Mass., Sept 25, 2008 /PRNewswire via COMTEX/ -- Open Letter to Congress Calls for $1 Billion Investment in Farm Communities to Solve America's Economic, Environmental, Energy and Health Problems

To read the open letter to Congressional leaders sent by Farm Aid Board of Directors Willie Nelson, John Mellencamp, Neil Young and Dave Matthews, please visit www.farmaid.org/lettertocongress.

For more on the Man of the Hour/Day/Year, Growing Power's Will Allen, check out the MacArthur video here.
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The Slow Food Nation Food For Thought Speakers Series videos are online now at:   http://slowfoodnation.org/

While interviewing Dickson Despommier, creator of the Vertical Farm Project, on the Colbert Report, Stephen Colbert muses why we should build vertical farms when we can plow our way to the Arctic Circle.

Hear why we are at the end of our cheap food chain and what will happen next. Paul Roberts talks to Tom Ashbrook on WBUR's ON POINT.

Meet Will Allen, CEO of Growing Power in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, learn how to brew worm tea and heat your greenhouse with coffee grounds.

NOW travels to Virginia to meet farmers who've made the difficult switch from tobacco to organic produce and the movement to 'buy local'. Plus environmentalist Bill McKibben on his 'National Day of Climate Action.'

Michael talks about farming from a plant's perspective and how corn has a plan to take over the world.

But most importantly, he talks about how Joel Salatin's farm in Virginia's Shenandoah Valley offers us a model to "re-animate the world":

"It’s a very productive system…on 100 acres, he gets 40,000 pounds of beef, 30,000 pounds of pork, 25,000 dozen eggs, 20,000 broilers, 1,000 turkeys, 1000 rabbits, an immense amount of food. You know, you hear, can organic feed the world? Well, look how much food you can produce on 100 acres, again, if you give each species what it wants, let it realize its desires, its physiological distinctiveness, put that in play…If you ask Joel Salatin what he is he will tell you he’s not a he’s not a chicken farmer, he’s not a sheep farmer, he’s not a cattle rancher, he’s a grass farmer, because grass is really the keystone species for such a system. If you think about it, this completely contradicts our idea of nature, more for us, less for nature. Here, all this food comes off this farm and at the end of the season, there is actually more soil, more fertility and more biodiversity. That’s a remarkably hopeful thing to do. There are a lot of farmers doing this today, this goes beyond organic agriculture, which is still a Cartesian system more or less and what it tells you is if you take account of other species, take account of the soil…that we can take the food we need from the earth and actually heal the earth in the process. This is a way to re-animate the world.

[This was taped in March 2007 and posted in February 2008.]