Staggered by Queen’s speech

Yesterday Queen Beatrix held her annual Queen’s speech (Troonrede). I was astonished by her words about the Dutch agricultural sector. The text – written by our ‘demissionary cabinet’ – promoted a production- and export-oriented agriculture based on new technologies and innovations.   “Nederland is de op één na grootste exporteur van land- en tuinbouwproducten. Het innovatieve [...]

Can farmers inform policy about multifunctional agriculture?

By Leonardo van den Berg (MSc. student International Development Studies, Wageningen University) & Klarien Klingen (graduate International Land and Water Management, Wageningen University). On the 8th of October we participated in the mini-conference about multifunctional agriculture organized by the Rural Sociology Group. We would like to share some thoughts about the conference and relate them [...]

Corn, soybean and hogs; the way we do things here

Iowa agriculture is dominated by corn, soybean, hog and ethanol production. A common feature among this list is that all of these are commodities; bulk products ready for further industrial processing. In a way, Iowa agriculture represents a single ‘farming style’ (Van der Ploeg et al), a choice for: - a high level of specialization - high input/high [...]

Yet another crisis in the hog industry

During my time in Ames I met quite a few current or previous students of the Graduate Program in Sustainable Agriculture (GPSA) in which both Jan and Cornelia Flora teach. The GPSA is a truly interdisciplinary program in which students with diverse (and often international) backgrounds meet. Although each student has a ‘home department’ such [...]

Feeding the city or nourishing the city?

More than half of the world’s population is living in cities. It are especially the larger cities that are increasing in size and many of these ever expanding cities are located in regions that are most suitable for food production. The tension between a growing urban population and a decline in agricultural land is increasingly [...]

Knee-high by the 4th of July

Independence Day, the 4th of July is of course an important day in the US. And it therefore serves as a marker in time, if the corn is knee-high by the fourth of July, you can be happy. Well, here in Ames, one can be satisfied. The corn is more like shoulder-high already. Maybe this [...]

Fighting from inside capitalism

Last week I joined Jan Flora to a meeting in Des Moines called the “Midwest Meat Roundtable”. It was organized by the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility (ICCR). ICCR is a nationwide consortium of faith based intentional investors, such as the Adrian Dominican Sisters from Michigan or the United Methodist Church in Illinois. The meeting [...]

Food democracy

Nothing but corn in Iowa. So I did some serious weeding and hoeing of corn this weekend……..Of white corn. Not the regular uneatable corn which goes into feed fodder, energy production or corn sweetener. These immense fields are round-up ready anyway. The corn grown in the community garden in Marshall town (see blog) can be [...]

Times of change?

At the Changing Lands Changing Hands conference in Denver, Jess Gilbert reminded us in his opening speech of the agricultural policies that were put in place with the New Deal policy in the depression of the thirties. Henry J. Wallace was the driving force behind a set of progressive and innovative policies, many of them, still existing [...]

The role of the state in the food system

Last Friday, I presented ideas and examples of the state as emerging actor in sustainable food consumption to the sociology department of Iowa State University. In Europe, there are more and more examples of different levels of government, – state, region or city governments – taking initiative to integrate sustainability concerns in new ways of food provisioning. They [...]