About this Website

“If we are concerned about food production, small farms are more productive. If our concern is efficiency, they are more efficient. If our concern is poverty, land reform to create a small farm economy offers a clear solution. The small farm model is also the surest route to broad-based economic development. If the loss of biodiversity or the sustainability of agriculture concern us, small farms offer a crucial part of the solution.”

- Peter M. Rosset, Food First / The Institute for Food and Development Policy

“I want a page, a site, a thing that is created, curated, edited, and discussed. It’s a blog that treats a topic as an ongoing and cumulative process of learning, digging, correcting, asking, answering. It’s also a wiki that keeps a snapshot of the latest knowledge and background. It’s an aggregator that provides annotated links to experts, coverage, opinion, perspective, source material. It’s a discussion that doesn’t just blather but that tries to accomplish something… It’s collaborative and distributed and open but organized.”
      
      - Jeff Jarvis, Journalist

My name is Lucas Mulder, I’m an independent journalist, and I am currently working on a long-term project looking at farming and food, namely the potential of small farms to produce food in ways that are focused on sustainability, responsibility, and good health. By natural extension I’m exploring the crisis facing small farmers as they suffer through low market prices, higher costs, competition from increasingly industrial food systems, and public apathy as to where there food actually comes from.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization is projecting that within 40 years global population numbers will top 9 billion people – 34% greater than today. To feed these new people U.N. scientists are suggesting that world food production will need to increase by a minimum of 70%. Many of the early ideas presented to try and meet these needs have revolved around industrial solutions, many of which have already failed in the past.

Miguel A. Altieri, a leading voice in sustainable agriculture, has written: “Only by changing the export-led, free-trade based, industrial agriculture model of large farms can the downward spiral of poverty, low wages, rural-urban migration, hunger and environmental degradation be halted. Social rural movements embrace the concept of food sovereignty as an alternative to the neo-liberal approach that puts its faith in inequitable international trade to solve the world’s food problem. Instead, food sovereignty focuses on local autonomy, local markets, local production-consumption cycles, energy and technological sovereignty and farmer to farmer networks.”

The function of this site is to help me gain a better understanding of where I am in my work, to centralize my research, and to better feature the people and places I come in contact with. Through a combination of photography, video, interviews and field notes I am looking to highlight a wide range of voices: farmers, farm-workers, fishers, shopkeepers, market vendors, chefs, consumers, community organizers, and local NGOs – folks who are dedicated to a more sustainable, and equitable agricultural future.

A good part of my work will also be focused on making connections, adding context through articles and online discussion, seeking out and presenting the work of other journalists working on similar long-term projects, and generally looking to include as many relevant voices as possible.