Open Source Farming: A Renaissance Man Tackles The Food Crisis

Dahr Jamail | Truthout | August 10, 2014

Given Anthropogenic Climate Disruption and our dwindling capacities for producing enough healthy food, a cutting-edge farming technique that dramatically increases produce yields from a design engineer in Port Townsend, Washington, may well already be filling a critical void.

The news about our global food supply is not good.  Around the world - from the Middle East, across much of Africa, to California - wars over water and food are already occurring.  Billions of people already lack adequate supplies of potable water on a daily basis, and by 2030, nearly half the world's population will live in "water-stressed" areas, according to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's Environmental Outlook 2030 Report.

As Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute and author of World on the Edge, has written, "Water is the new oil, and land is the new gold." These words underscore how overpopulation and Anthropogenic Climate Disruption (ACD) have combined to overstress our capacities for producing enough food.  These facts, along with ever-escalating food prices, highlight how serious our food crisis has already become.

The corporate answer to the food crisis has been to introduce genetically modified organisms (GMOs) in an effort to expand crop sizes and yields. The outcomes and implications of this, however, continue to prove detrimental to both the environment and human health.  However, on a local level, scientist Joe Breskin seems to have found a solution for dramatically increasing vegetable yields in greenhouses, doubling the length of growing seasons and feeding more people for less money - all while using cutting-edge energy efficiency techniques...