In rural sub-Saharan Africa, most people are farmers, and for part of the year, they go hungry.

It’s called the hungry season. I encountered it when I lived in a farming community in Malawi for two years as a Peace Corps volunteer. Families in my village subsisted off of the maize and beans that they harvested, but there was only one growing season, and making stocks last an entire year was difficult. Imagine growing all of your family’s food for an entire year using just a hoe, seeds you saved from the year before, and a one acre plot of nutrient-depleted soil.

In 2005, a business student named Andrew Youn visited villages in western Kenya that undergo a hungry season. Youn had already graduated from Yale magna cum laude and he was about to earn his MBA. He met two farmers who were next-door neighbors in the village of Bungoma. “One was yielding two tons of food per acre and her family was thriving,” he says. “Her neighbor was yielding four times less, she had lost a child, and she was badly off. The only difference was seed, fertilizer, and training.”

Read more at GOOD

Waste Not: In Ghana, Fecal Sludge Could Be Black Gold

Accra, Ghana, is a tropical capital on the Gulf of Guinea, but almost no one swims in the ocean here. If you are not turned off by the mounds of trash the ocean continuously heaves onto the beach, the water’s unnatural brownish color hints something is awry. The city’s open sewers empty straight into the ocean. And then, of course, there is Lavender Hill.

Every day, just past a lighthouse on Accra’s western edge, trucks dump more than 250,000 gallons of human feces directly onto the beach and into the ocean at Lavender Hill.

“That’s over 100 trucks dumping continuously, day in and day out, where the sludge is channeled down the beach and into the sea,” says Ashley Murray, the 32-year old founder and CEO of Waste Enterprisers, a Ghana-based business with the mission to improve urban sanitation.

In the slums of Nima and Jamestown, owners of toilet blocks have to pay dumping companies to empty their pay latrines, Murray says. When they can’t pay trucks to come empty the waste, the toilets shut down, and people have to find other places to defecate. Ride your bike or walk along Accra’s beach road, and you can’t escape the smell of shit.

Read more at Good

The Basin Blues

The Murray Darling Basin Plan is once again a pretty big deal in Northern Victoria and once again it has polarised farmers and environmentalists. I’m relatively neutral on the topic in the sense that I can understand all perspectives and I’m not emotionally involved, but I’d like to contribute to a resolution in whatever way I can.

For those who aren’t aware of the MDBP, it is a strategy designed to reconcile the irrigation needs of farmers in South-Eastern Australia with the ecological needs of the river system in that region, particularly ‘icon sites’ such as the Coorong Wetlands at the mouth of the Murray River in South Australia. A guide to the plan was released in 2010 to the ire of farming communities who heavily criticised the proposed amount of water removed from the irrigation network, arguing that the reduction in water will effectively destroy farming communities through loss of productivity.

I haven’t read the whole plan yet so the legitimacy of my comment is probably questionable, but based on the majority of media coverage, you’d be forgiven for thinking the basis of the plan was to literally take water from food and fibre producers and send it down the river into the sea. This impression has fueled some intense emotional responses from rural communities and in some cases has resulted in a complete stonewalling of the plan. Obviously it’s more complicated than this and the task of simultaneously increasing river flow and building the economies of productive communities is a challenging one.

I wonder what opportunities are lost through approaching this plan at a broad-acre, national level and how such a mega-structure of policy will restrict further innovation and refinement at a local scale in the future. Anyone who’s been keeping an eye on this blog will probably know that I’m an advocate for local responses to big issues, especially where food production and the environment are concerned. There is an intrinsic lack of detail and relevance to specific communities and properties in plans of this scale and generally it’s been evidenced that targeted and informed local approaches are more resilient and appropriate than broad nation-wide strategies.

Furthermore, tackling water issues at a community scale allows for much greater autonomy than a prescribed top-down solution, and is also far more efficient. Giving more attention to local initiatives confers more autonomy and ownership on rural communities, resulting in a greater understanding of the issue, more informed opinions and less emotionally-charged sensationalism. Rather than heavy handed regulation and overarching policy frameworks, more attention should be given to enterprise, particularly social enterprise. Enterprise generates innovation and efficiency, two concepts that are essential to the implementation of any response to issues in food and ecological systems.

Of course local initiatives can only achieve so much without support and guidance from a regional body but at this stage it seems that the kind of scale I’m talking about isn’t even considered as a worthwhile planning approach, indeed it might even be considered a hindrance. Until regulatory institutions and political parties can relinquish some of their tightly held grip on environmental/agricultural solutions and pass some autonomy onto local initiatives and enterprises, it’s hard to see where the solutions will actually come from.

I Just sent off my first concept plan to a client. It’s not really food related but It’s giving me some awesome experience. The project is a mini golf course at an outdoor education centre for kids with special needs. There’s an 8m elevation change across the site and every hole needs to be wheelchair accessible so it’s very challenging but so far the client is very happy.

The Australian Institute of Landscape Architects (AILA) recommends graduate landscape architects work in a firm for 5 years before they can register as a landscape architect with them, with the first 2 years spent doing cad work on a fairly narrow range of projects. I’m not interested in that so I have started my own business and I’m dedicating a fair bit of my time to building relationships with landscape architects and associated practitioners in Central Victoria, who might become mentors for me in the next couple of years.

If I can also get contractors on board and build a reputation for quality design, clients will give me work whether I’m a member with AILA or not. If I can connect with other regional landscape architects at the same time, within 5 years I should have AILA registration, a successful business and a good reputation all generated under my own steam. I have a history of doing things the unorthodox way and I’d like to demonstrate that landscape architecture graduates can get somewhere without relying on firms giving them a leg-up. It just takes courage and a bit of hard work.

Final exhibition/examination layout.

Community Land Trusts (CLT) are non-profit organisations, run by volunteers, which develop housing or other assets at permanently affordable levels for long-term community benefit. CLTs are tried and tested. In the US, where they originated over 40 years ago, there are now more than 250 such communities. They are taking charge of their own destiny by creating companies to develop and manage assets, which will in turn generate income for future generations. Big or small, rural or urban – there’s one in New York’s Bronx – they provide a variety of housing tenures as well as workspaces, energy generation, community food and farming.

Click here to read the full article at Green Futures

Ballarat is the closest regional city and most large scale farmers in the area currently sell livestock at the Ballarat sale yards and grow potatoes for McCains’ Ballarat plant on a contract basis. Kyneton, the largest town within 20km of Trentham, has sale yards and two abattoirs that process local beef, lamb and pork. KR Castlemaine, a well-known smallgoods company, is located 30km from Trentham in Castlemaine.

The immediate scale of my research is the ‘district’ scale with a radius of about 7km (the inner red circle). It also has the potential to expand to a ‘region’ scale, with a 30km radius (the outer red circle). My decision to focus on the concept of the district is intended to project to a future where networks of community-based local food systems are widely understood as an intelligent way of maintaining a diverse abundance of sovereign food.