According to the New York Times, “National lockdowns and social distancing measures are drying up work and incomes and are likely to disrupt agricultural production and supply routes—leaving millions to worry how they will get enough to eat.”
In West Virginia, the first frost can hit in Fall and the last in late Spring, halting the growing season all the way from October to May. But devotees in New Vrindaban, ISKCON’s first farm community have just introduced three high tunnel greenhouses, allowing them to offer locally grown flowers and vegetables to Sri Sri Radha Vrindabanchandra and the temple kitchens all year round.
The Michigan Urban Agriculture Initiative is an agrihood centers around urban agriculture, and offers fresh, local produce to around 2,000 households for free.
2019 marks the 50t hanniversary of cow protection in ISKCON, so it’s an excellent time to look at and celebrate that progress. And this year’s North American Farm Conference will take place where it all started – New Vrindaban, West Virginia.
About 350 people streamed in through the rustic cob entranceway of ISKCON Alachua’s Eco Teaching Farm on October 27th, buzzing and excited to attend its third annual Fall Festival and learn more about simple living and higher thinking.
Lesmahagow, a quiet village founded by monks in the 12th Century is now a home to monks but of a different order.
Over the past few years, the ISKCON Ministry for Cow Protection and Agriculture (IMCPA) has been bringing ISKCON farms together for biannual continental conferences. Now, the Ministry is beginning strategic planning meetings every other year, to foster team building.
The event showed how far ISKCON farms have come in networking and working together particularly over the last decade, with conferences now regularly organized in four continents by the GBC Ministry of Agriculture and Cow Protection. Because the ISKCON Farm Conference began in Europe in 2008, however, the 10th anniversary event focused on European farms.
New Vrindaban is set to host the second annual ISKCON North America Farm Conference from October 13th to 15th this year. The GBC Ministry for Cow Protection and Agriculture, which organized conferences on simple living in four continents last year, is behind the event. The conference, themed “Back to the Basics,” will be facilitated by ECO-Vrindaban and ISKCON New Vrindaban. Representatives from thirty farming efforts all over the U.S., Canada and Mexico will be invited.
This is a video message from Vandana Shiva aired during the Nexus Conference 2015(www.nexusconference.in) held in Govardhan Ecovillage on OCT 31 and NOV 1 2015.
The eco farm is run by Bhakti yogis. Director Vaishnava Das studied natural building at the California Institute of Earth architecture, while his wife, coordinator Draupadi Dasi, worked as an ecological anthropologist. “I’m very interested in Srila Prabhupada’s vision of long-term sustainability – working with the land, and growing food,” says retreat co-organizer Hita Karina, a second-generation devotee and yoga teacher from Alachua, Florida. “And Vaishnava and Draupadi are not only living that life, but teaching it too.”
ECO-Vrindaban (ECO-V) – which strives to fulfill Srila Prabhupada’s mandates for simple living and cow-protection at New Vrindaban in West Virginia, USA – is on the lookout for a new construction and maintenance person for its ongoing operations. A non-profit entity launched in 1998, ECO-V works closely with ISKCON New Vrindaban in the areas of cow protection and gardening activities. The organization looks after a total of around 800 acres.
This summer and fall, for ISKCON’s 50th anniversary, the GBC Ministry for Cow Protection and Agriculture will run conferences on simple living in four continents. It hopes that the conferences will also launch a support network for ISKCON farms around the world. The Ministry was first established in 1998 by Balabhadra Das of the International Society for Cow Protection (ISCOWP), who emphasized working with oxen and encouraged devotees to take up cow protection as a key part of their mission.
A video by Vedic Way.
Chemical farming is the norm, but it does not have to be.
Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change, UN report says.
A video produced by Jaya Deva Das.
The United States Department of Agriculture has listed ISKCON’s Gita- nagari Farm in Port Royal, Pennsylvania as one of the most important success stories of preservation and sustainability in 2013.
Renowned activist and author Michael Pollan argues that cooking is one of the simplest and most important steps people can take to improve their family's health, build communities, fix our broken food system, and break our growing dependence on corporations.
A short video about how to develop an abundant organic farm even under the most extreme circumstances.
In India there are a group of organic seed-collecting activists who have decided to take Monsanto down – by beating them at their own game.
Wendell Berry has said that eating is an agricultural act. I have always suspected that agriculture is a theological act. The way we produce and consume something as basic as our food not only determines our physical and environmental health but is a reflection of our social health and a contributing factor of our spiritual health.
On a summer visit back to the farm here where I grew up, I think I figured out the central problem with modern industrial agriculture. It’s not just that it produces unhealthy food, mishandles waste and overuses antibiotics in ways that harm us all. More fundamentally, it has no soul.
To the delight of many devotees living in rural ISKCON communities, the GBC (ISKCON’s administrative authority) recently set guidelines instructing all GBC members to spend 10% of their time boosting farm projects.
Do any GBCs really spend 10% of their time promoting rural projects? Are the guidelines making any measurable change?
A Kuwaiti company partly owned by the emirate's sovereign wealth fund is preparing to join other Gulf states in buying up agricultural land in Asia, part of a global land grab to ensure food security. Unlike the governments and corporations in the Gulf that have been acquiring vast tracts of arable land, mainly in poor countries of Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe, to produce food for their own people, the Kuwait China Investment Co. wants to invest on a purely commercial basis, selling its produce to anyone who can pay for it.
ISKCON's Krishna Valley self-sufficient rural project in Hungary now attracts 30,000 tourists per year. Why did these young people turn to a natural and simple life? What is the mission of their community? Gaura-Sakti Dasa, the president of Krishna Valley ISKCON community, answers these questions for Krishna Valley Magazine (published by Manorama Dasa, Hungarian Society for Krishna Consciousness).
BUENOS AIRES – The herbicide used on genetically modified soy – Argentina’s main crop – could cause brain, intestinal and heart defects in fetuses, according to the results of a scientific investigation released Monday. Although the study “used amphibian embryos,” the results “are completely comparable to what would happen in the development of a human embryo,” embryology professor Andres Carrasco, one of the study’s authors, told Efe.
La Crosse, Wisconsin, USA: “India has emerged as the capital of hunger, because 70 percent of Indian children are severely malnourished. Organic farming is the solution to this hunger,” Dr. Vandana Shiva, an Indian expert of world repute on issues of the environment, women’s rights and international affairs, said. She was the keynote speaker at the largest organic farming conference held here on February 27.
WILL ALLEN already had the makings of an agricultural dream packed into two scruffy acres in one of Milwaukee’s most economically distressed neighborhoods. His Growing Power organization has six greenhouses and eight hoophouses for greens, herbs and vegetables. There’s an advanced composting operation — a virtual worm farm — and a lab that is working on ways to turn food waste into fertilizer and methane gas for energy.
A farming experiment at the University of California, Davis, has found that organically grown tomatoes are richer in certain kinds of flavonoids than conventionally grown tomatoes. And one researcher is curious to determine why this may be.
The governments of many poor nations are alarmed at the rise in food prices. There are even problems in the Indian region of Punjab, where science once seemed to have found answers for a hungry world. The first thing Satpal Singh sees when he walks out of his bedroom door in the morning is a gleaming tractor, without a speck of mud on it.
The BBC has a feature on “the cost of food“. It shows how almost all types of food are getting more and more expensive. Drastically so!
What is happening here? Shouldn’t high-tech farming with its nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides and specially bred (often genetically modified) high-yield crop varieties allow humanity to easy feed everyone on the planet?