Whom Do We Blame, As We Watch Nature Dry Up?
by Donella Meadows
— August 12, 1999 —
Early this summer, long before the word “drought” was mentioned in the media, our household of farmers was ready to strangle the weather forecasters. “A gorgeous sunny day coming up,” they’d warble. “Another beeyootiful weekend!” To us that meant a day of blistering sun, a beeyootiful weekend of irrigating.
“City folk!” we’d mutter, as the [...]
There’s Farming and Then There’s Farming
by Donella Meadows
— June 3, 1999 —
Awhile ago Beth Sawin and Phil Rice, researchers at the Sustainability Institute, put together a graph that I can’t get out of my mind. It shows Midwest corn yields doubling from about 60 bushels per acre in 1950 to 120 bushels on average today. Despite the doubled yield, gross earnings per acre have stayed [...]
Dear Folks: May 23, 1999
Dear Folks,
Twenty-seven years ago today Dennis and I moved to Foundation Farm. Now it is for sale. And I am soaking up my last May here.
May! I swore long ago never to leave this farm in May, never to miss a moment of this wonderful, magical month. (When the black flies appear and the crabgrass seeds germinate by the gazillion [...]
Dear Folks: April 25, 1999
Dear Folks,
Maybe we won’t need to put a “for sale” sign on Foundation Farm.
Maybe it will sell itself.
As soon as I started talking about putting it on the market, I got three expressions of interest, one from my next-door neighbor Peter Whybrow, one from a nice family in Meriden who have been eyeing it for some time. So this week [...]
Genetic Engineering Is Not Just More of the Same
by Donella Meadows
— March 25, 1999 —
Genetic engineering is nothing new. People have been messing with genes since the first farmers selected the biggest wild grass seeds and began to breed what we now call grain.
So say many widely respected scientists. It’s no big deal, they say, to snip out code from a flounder and paste it into a tomato. [...]
