The front page story in today’s (May 13) USA Today about the “high cost of weather” says “it looks like 2011 is perhaps going to set a new record” of weather-related costs. It is also interesting that ranchers in Texas announced this week that they will have to begin selling their animals because the severity of the drought is such that they have no grass in their pastures for the animals. And also this week ranchers in Manitoba, Canada, announced that they will begin selling their animals because, given three consecutive years of record rainfalls, their soils are no longer capable of absorbing the continuing rainfall and so they can no longer turn their animals into their pastures without turning it all into “muck” and destroying it.
All of this reaffirms the fact that we need to foster a greater diversity of seeds that are more adapted to local ecologies since it is this biological diversity that will be essential to the reestablishment of more resilient food systems in each food shed — a point that was articulated so clearly by Gary Paul Nabhan in his book, Where Our Food Comes From.
