Tag Archives: agriculture

Environmental Correspondent Zyro Roze explores stark realities and imaginative solutions with a homesteader and sustainability educator from Spencer, Indiana about her life journey in academia and as a nature lover from a young age about her formative years, her travels and educational attainments, her return to her home state, the Owen County property that she is reclaiming and her passion for environmental and …

For this episode, we share a candid and generative conversation between Kay and Sarah, shortly after World’s End, Sarah’s farm, hosted a week long group retreat. They share reflections on that experience, and the role of farms in hosting urban visitors. They touch on the strange idea of owning the land, reflecting on the concept of ownership, and how that …

By Nathaniel Weinzapfel Introduction: First held in 1970 and recently reaching its 50th year anniversary, Earth Day is an annual holiday held to demonstrate support for environmental protection and celebrate life on our planet, with over a billion people participating in related events worldwide. This holiday has recently been extended to encompass all of April, in what has been aptly …

This month, we spoke to Susanne Wengle, a professor at Notre Dame who researches post-Soviet political and economic transformation in Russia.  Her second book is Black Earth, White Bread; a Technopolitical History of Russian Agriculture and Food. We were eager to hear her perspective on the history of agriculture in Russia and Ukraine and the current war’s ripple effects on food systems …

For this episode of Partisan Gardens, we learn about the conditions facing migrant farm workers in California. We share a two conversations: one between Partisan Gardens and Nikola Garcia, author of a recent article in Inhabit: Territories called “The Farmworker Caravan: Mutual Aid in California’s Migrant Worker Communities.” The other is a conversation between Nikola and Darlene Tenes, founder of …

This month, Partisan Gardens is all about the banana. Second only to the tomato as the most consumed fruit in the world, the banana has thus far only been made available in temperate regions through a violent extraction process led by multinational corporations. Attacks against this colonial system likely began at least as early as the 1870s, when bananas were …

This month on Partisan Gardens, we are sharing a presentation by Kristin Ross, author of the landmark book “Communal Luxury: the Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune.” She delivered the lecture to the 2019 Antipode American Association of Geographers Lecture in Washington DC and gave another version of the talk here in Bloomington that same year. Titled the 7th Wonder …

For our episode this month, we spoke with Ken Asmus, the founder of Oikos Nursery.  From 1982 till earlier this year, Oikos was one of the most important sources of rare fruit trees and other non-commercial perennial food plants.  Ken recently retired from the nursery business in order to better pursue his research into food-bearing plants for an era of …

For this episode, we interviewed urban farmers across Chicago, along with a mutual aid organization that stocks its sidewalk fridges with fresh produce from some of these same farms.  Their work is not only meeting urgent needs, but is helping to sketch out a horizon for another kind of life, grown inside the shell of the metropolis. The history of …

The global pandemic has exacerbated an already-simmering crisis of food insecurity, itself rooted in growing populations pushed outside of formal labor markets.  This exclusion, often implemented along racial lines, leads to precarity and a struggle for survival, which has only grown more bleak with the pressures of COVID-19.  The economy simply cannot produce enough jobs, and even those existing jobs …