The end of livestock?

Cows graze in the mead­ow and chick­ens roost in the chick­en coop at night — any­one who has suc­cess­ful­ly com­plet­ed kinder­garten can tell you as much. But just as we have not always lived in our com­fy hous­es, the ances­tors of our farm ani­mals led their own lives on the grass­lands and in the forests …

Shared pain

With the dog on a leash I walk along the bank of a small ditch. A majes­tic swan floats in the mid­dle of the water and eyes Maus sus­pi­cious­ly. A lit­tle fur­ther on a cat cross­es the street. We con­tin­ue and pass fresh green weep­ing wil­lows and a group of coots whose star­tled flut­ter makes …

Agroecology

In the past few weeks we have been work­ing hard at our WWOOF loca­tion on Chiloé. Fred­dy has been har­vest­ing giant gar­lic, Ajo Chilote. These are sold in indi­vid­ual cloves, so the major task now is peel­ing them. Clos­er to the house, I sowed new let­tuce and chard. The work is almost hyp­not­ic; with each …

Farm animals in the Global Goals

The Glob­al Goals were launched in Sep­tem­ber last year. These suc­ces­sors of the Mil­len­ni­um Devel­op­ment Goals try to give a com­plete pic­ture of how we can improve our world. The goals are based on exten­sive con­sul­ta­tion of stake­hold­ers. The most impor­tant out­come is the real­iza­tion that pover­ty reduc­tion and a sus­tain­able soci­ety are two sides …