Here’s a piece published a few days ago by Dan Barber, the mastermind at Blue Hill. Blue Hill is one of the New York restaurants that really helped to open our eyes in terms of sustainable eating, and they have a bigger restaurant, a farm (Stone Barns), and a related education center in Westchester.
Don’t let anyone ever poo-poo sustainable eating by claiming that “you can’t feed the modern world by retreating to 18th century farming practices”. The truth is that it is possible to apply modern knowledge to farming without applying modern chemical and petroleum-based industrial techniques. Sustainable farming has come a long way since pre-industrial farming. To me, the most powerful part of the piece is at the end:
“That’s really brilliant farming… And it’s enormously productive, too. At the height of the last season, Stone Barns produced something like 28,000 pounds of food. That’s off of six and a half vegetable-production acres and 22 acres of pasture. That’s an average of a thousand pounds of food an acre—more than the typical Iowa cornfield, and about 50 times more flavorful. Looking at a giant animal feedlot as the future of agriculture is like looking at an 18th-century factory billowing black smoke and saying, ‘Hey, look how advanced it is.’”
