Serve Your Country Food is a fascinating project to illuminate the growing movement of young farmers in the United States The creators encourage the use of data visualizations and maps (soil maps, agricultural areas, superfund sites, etc.) to find opportunities and identify challenges. The overall aim is to encourage "thousands of new growers of fruits, nuts, vegetables, grains, dairy, and livestock to transform the landscape of sprawling development and corporate control into a dignified, livable, and culturally rich mosaic of ecological farming." It makes me want to start a vegetable garden. Seriously. From Serve Your Country Food:
The young farmers now emerging onto the land seek to reclaim, restore, and resettle the deserted rural towns of America. We are similarly poised to revive the fabric of urban life with markets, gardens, bees, corn patches and waterways. Motivated by a force of intention that cannot be rationalized economically, with lives driven by an instinct for direct action and stewardship that honors the planet, people, and place, we are the allies of every American. Our instincts are emboldened by the mercury shatter of dew on the broccoli plants at dawn, by the roar of pollinators in a flowering crop of buckwheat, and by the river of neighbors streaming through the farm-gate clamoring for “real” tomatoes and happy chickens. The hands of young farmers on the land seek to push forward an agenda of sustainability on a human scale.
Serve Your Country Food (Thanks, Mike Liebhold!)
