There’s something eerie, something of a detached mentality, about the scenarios being painted of what the future might look like 10, 20 or 50 years from now. 

Elizabeth Farrelly in: Bring on the urban farm, but don’t deign to usurp nature (SMH November 22, 2020), writes about the innovations taking place in order to supply our needs utilizing land resources that are located closer to home.  More than that, not even land in the traditional sense of farms and gardens on the outskirts of towns and cities.  No these are vertical farms of the industrial kind that can be built almost anywhere because the growing medium is not soil, but manufactured growing beds in trays or tubes held in scaffolding like structures built of concrete and steel.

Farrelly notes the quote, “innovate all you like but if you innovate on top of a broken system, it’s still gonna be a broken, nature-destroying system.”  The urge to dominate nature is the problem, not the solution.  Call me romantic, says Farrelly, but I trust the random world of weather, bugs and dirt.  Colour me unpersuaded by roots that have never touched soil, chloroplasts that have never absorbed photons of the sun.

Surely one of the aims in an era of greater awareness about the benefits of connection with country, would be encouraging less industrialisation of our food supply chains, not more.  Read the full story at this link: Don’t deign to usurp nature.