The Weblog

This page contains news, event information, and other items added by Ian and Adam, the resident farmers at Old 99. We send out a message every week, but most are set with a delete date about two weeks later. I archive some of the posts if they have content other than weekly availability of produce and meat.

You can send me questions too, which if they are of a general nature, I can post to this Old99 blog.



 
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Food Farms & Family Announcement Nov 30


This post expired on November 12, 2022.

Old 99 Farm and Permaculture Site

How to contact us:
Our Website: Old 99 Farm.locallygrown.net
On email: ianagraham@rogers.com

On Thursdays, 4 to 6pm: 1580 Old Hwy 99. From Dundas take Governors Rd west to Binkley, turn left and immediate right onto Old 99, second farm on right.
Or by appointment, please call ahead.

This newsletter contains background on Nicole Foss, coming to Copetown Community Centre, Nov 30, 1 to 5pm.

Food, Farms & Family: Building resilience within Limits

Copetown Community Centre, Nov 30 1 to 5pm.

Nicole is a Canadian with a science and legal education who is travelling the globe (15 countries so far) to engage people in the drivers of change in our time. We have the great good fortune that she is passing through our area and has agreed to speak on Food, Farms and Family: Building resilience within Limits.

Most of her work consists of speaking to community groups, and latterly municipalities as well. She has done hundreds of lectures worldwide over the last three years, including media appearances (five Max Keiser TV interviews, many radio interviews on Financial Sense Newshour, national radio in Australia and New Zealand, national TV in Sweden, many local radio shows and many newspaper interviews).

“I worry a lot about food production in the future. We’ve built a farming system with critical dependencies on things that won’t be there, at least to anything like the same extent, in the future. I also worry about the health timebomb we’ve created in the era of industrial food production, as it will be harder to deal with chronic health issues in an economic depression.”

“What I typically do is to integrate various subsystems into a bigger picture, so that people grasp what limits to growth really means, and I explain about different timeframes. Almost no one talks about the bigger picture, so people struggle to integrate information in context. I help them to do that, so they can identify critical vulnerabilities and prepare for challenging times.”

“I always address money and energy. Energy is foundational, and financial crisis has the shortest timeframe of all. Ontario is a financial disaster area in waiting. We’re seeing the beginnings of dealing with that in the dispute with the teachers. If people don’t understand financial crisis, then they risk losing all their freedom of action at the first hurdle and then have no capacity left to deal with other challenges. People need to know about finance because finance is the operating system, and it is about to crash. If people are not careful they will end up watching unprepared as all the assumptions they have built their lives on are invalidated. They need to know about energy, especially in Ontario. It’s all about helping people to prioritize scarce resources (physical, financial and time) in a changing social/psychological context – the psychology of contraction.”

Nicole will discuss food, agribusiness, landbanking, strip-mining soil fertility etc. Food & Farming is certainly a critical system. “I do typically emphasize the tendency towards centralization and increasing scale, and why I think it’s so important to decentralize and restore local control.”

So dear subscriber, if you have read this far, please go ahead and sign up for a very important event that will shed light on the near future that your family is facing.