Last week, I was invited to a round table discussion with Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel,US Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack and about a dozen influential people in the Chicago local food movement. The topic was on improving access to healthy food in Chicago communities. This discussion was located at Inspiration Kitchens, Garfield Park's gourmet restaurant and cooking school. It was truly wonderful to see the efforts being put in place to solve the food desert problem in the struggling neighborhoods of Chicago.

While quite impressed with the urban farming efforts of my friends and associates eloquently summarized during the roundtable, I found my rural farming concerns a little off topic and graced my associates with silence.    

I will, however, unload this message upon you all if you care to listen. What I have to talk about are rural farming issues but they have much broader implications for all of us.  

Sometimes it takes a new term or phrase to capture the mood of the moment. For those of us who have been following modern industrial agriculture practices and their effects on the land in an environment of climate change, please accept physicist Joseph Romm's contribution: "Dust-Bowlification". 

Then couple this perspective with the recent article, Riot of Soil Erosion Brings Shame found in, believe it or not, the online journal of industrial ag's Successful Farming Magazine. 

If you dare to read those two articles back to back you will be saying "shiiiiiit" better than Senator Clay Davis did for the TV drama series "The Wire".

  Continue Reading on my Blog.

Harry