ISKCON News: Agriculture [pg. 1]

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.”

High Tunnels Grow Vegetables and Flowers for New Vrindaban Deities into Winter Months

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.

America’s First Urban ‘Agrihood’ Feeds 2,000 Households for Free

The Michigan Urban Agriculture Initiative is an agrihood centers around urban agriculture, and offers fresh, local produce to around 2,000 households for free.

ISKCON Farms Make Progress as New Vrindaban Hosts 2019 Conference

2019 marks the 50^{t h}anniversary 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.

Alachua Eco Farm Celebrates Simple Living at Fall Festival

About 350 people streamed in through the rustic cob entranceway of ISKCON Alachua’s Eco Teaching Farm on October 27^th, buzzing and excited to attend its third annual Fall Festival and learn more about simple living and higher thinking.

European Farm Conference to be hosted at Krishna Eco Farm in Lesmahagow, Scotland

Lesmahagow, a quiet village founded by monks in the 12th Century is now a home to monks but of a different order.

June Meeting to Set Collective Vision for North American Farms

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.

ISKCON Farm Conference Celebrates 10th Anniversary

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 to Host 2017 ISKCON North America Farm Conference

New Vrindaban is set to host the second annual ISKCON North America Farm Conference from October 13^th to 15^th 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.

Puerto Rican Eco Farm to Hold Bhakti Yoga Permaculture Retreat

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 Offers Opportunity for New Maintenance Person

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.

Four-Continent Conference to Launch Support Network for ISKCON Farms

This summer and fall, for ISKCON’s 50^th 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.

Soil Health Program Boosts Crop Yields Without GMOs

Chemical farming is the norm, but it does not have to be.

UN Urges Global Move to Meat and Dairy-free Diet

Lesser consumption of animal products is necessary to save the world from the worst impacts of climate change, UN report says.

Gita Nagari Farm Listed as Success Story by US Department of Agriculture

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.

India Creates Organic Seed Bank In Response to GMO Suicide Seeds

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.

"Grow More Food!": The Guyana Mood

Guyana’s present government has been pushing for agrarian reforms. One can see large boards on the highway saying `GROW MORE FOOD`! Some of the government policies directly support the aims and goals of an agrarian renaissance.

Community Supported Agriculture at ISKCON`s Gita Nagari Farm

Over the last 20 years, Community Supported Agriculture has become a popular way for Americans to buy local, seasonal food directly from a farmer.

Is Unemployment Equivalent to Murder?

We live in the age of ‘utility theory’. Utility is the defining factor of what is a creature’s ‘validity’ to live. An object is respected as long as it is of economic use to other human beings.

Globalization Destroys Rural Communities Worldwide

Punjab used to be the most prosperous agricultural region in India. Today every farmer is in debt and despair. Vast stretches of land have become water-logged desert. And as an old farmer pointed out, even the trees have stopped bearing fruit because heavy use of pesticides have killed the pollinators - the bees and butterflies.

Food and Faith: Agriculture as a Theological Act

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.

New Vrindaban Revives Its Agricultural Roots

When New Vrindaban was founded, we used ox carts for transportation, just like people use in rural India. Later, however, the focus of the community shifted away from agriculture.

HarvestFest & Balarama Full Moon Feast in Canada

Between August 21 – 24, 2010 the Saranagati Eco-Village community in Venables Valley, British Columbia, Canada will hold its annual HarvestFest and Balarama Full Moon Feast.

Indian Mangoes: Where Tradition, Industry and U.S. Nuclear Policy Collide

Bush opened the U.S. market to Indian mangoes. But how well is it working for Indian farmers

Detroit Looking At Downsizing To Save City

Detroit, the very symbol of American industrial might for most of the 20th century, is drawing up a radical renewal plan that calls for turning large swaths of this now-blighted, rusted-out city back into the fields and farmland that existed before the automobile.

Drought Puts Focus on a Side of India Left Out of Progress

PIPRI VILLAGE, India — Two very different recent scenes from India: At a power breakfast in New Delhi for many of the country’s corporate leaders and top economic officials, Finance Minister Pranab Mukherjee declared that India had “weathered the storm” of the global economic crisis and was witnessing “green shoots” in industry and services that signaled a return to more rapid growth by next year.

Op-Ed: Food for the Soul

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.

You Say Tomato, I Say Agricultural Disaster

Tarrytown, N.Y. - If the hardship of growing vegetables and fruits in the Northeast has made anything clear, it’s that the list of what can go wrong in the field is a very long one. We wait all year for warmer weather and longer days. Once we get them, it seems new problems for farmers rise to the surface every week: overnight temperatures plunging close to freezing, early disease, aphid attacks. Another day, another problem.

Food, Faith, & Farming: New Vrindaban Takes the Lead

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?

Arab States in 'Neo-Colonial' Food Grab

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.

Interview: Gaura-Sakti Dasa of Hungary's Krishna Valley Project

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).

Michelle Obama's Organic Garden Angers US Farming Companies

Mrs Obama started work on the kitchen garden with a gang of schoolchildren last month. Media coverage of the first White House food plot since Eleanor Roosevelt "dug for victory" in the Second World War garnered media coverage across the world. But to the consernation of Big Ag, Mrs Obama has said the project will not use chemical products to tackle pests or give her plants a boost, the Times reports.

Herbicide Used in Argentina Could Cause Birth Defects

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.

Planting the Seeds of a Revolution

You have to admit that this gives new meaning to the idea of a "shovel-ready project." There are now 1,100 square feet on the South Lawn of the White House being transformed into a kitchen garden. If Americans follow the first family's lead, the seed pack will become the new stimulus package. At least we'll have something to do with those pitchforks after the AIG bonus babies surrender their money.

"Organic Farming Answer to India’s Hungry Kids"

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.

Study Shows Happy Cows Produce More Milk

Happy cows produce more milk, according to researchers at Newcastle University. Cattle that are named and treated with a "more personal touch" can increase milk yields by up to 500 pints a year. The study, by the university's School of Agriculture, Food and Rural Development, involved 516 farmers across the UK.

Declining Bee Population Threatens Major Growers

The busy bee may be a cliche. But it turns out that bees are very busy on the world's farms, pollinating many of the fruits, vegetables and nuts we eat. But a major report from the National Academies says bees and other important pollinators are losing out to development and disease. The report's authors warn the losses could have a big impact on some farmers, such as the almond growers of Central California.

New Govardhana Farm Supplies Deities With Own Vegetables

Despite difficulties earlier this year, ISKCON’s certified organic farm in Australia, New Govardhana, is now able to supply its Radha Krishna deities with all the vegetables needed for their offerings.

An Urban Farmer Is Rewarded for His Dream

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.

Detroit's Inner-city Sanctuary

For people growing up in poor neighborhoods in the city, nature is usually something ugly, little more than the weeds smothering fields or sprouting from sidewalk cracks. Eight years ago, Detroiter Tom Milano, 60, wanted to show his eastside neighbors a glimpse of the beautiful side of nature by creating a thick pond garden in the front yard of his old brick bungalow home. The display was so well received that creating gardens for others turned into his unusual job.

Guerrilla Gardener Movement Takes Root in L.A. Area

Brimming with lime-hued succulents and a lush collection of agaves, one shooting spiky leaves 10 feet into the air, it's a head-turning garden smack in the middle of Long Beach's asphalt jungle. But the gardener who designed it doesn't want you to know his last name, since his handiwork isn't exactly legit. It's on a traffic island he commandeered.

Are Organic Tomatoes Better?

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.

Punjab Reaps a Poisoned Harvest

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 Myth of the Rising Cost of Food

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?

New Congo Community Grows Own Food, Saves Millions

The Democratic Republic of Congo's new Varnashrama community appears to be going against the global trend of rapidly increasing food prices. As a UN aid official recently commented to global news agency AFP, "The Philippines may end up having to feed people to save them going hungry as the market price of rice soars out of reach of ordinary households."

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