P2P food system as a major environmental and social solution?

I totally follow you on this. Indeed, p.m. (pseudonym) wrote about such a society (and more than just agriculture) in "bolo'bolo" and "Voisinages et Communs" (neighborhoods and commons". Your name lets me think you can read french, so here it is: http://www.lyber-eclat.net/lyber/voisinages-et-communs from the editor's website (bolo'bolo too is available on the net).
Chemical agroculture isn't sustainable and will need for transition anyway because of the approaching end of Phosphorus. If we are to avoid pests, we'll need to shrink mono plant fields and go for smaller fields, or better yet multi-crops. Which means impossibility to use machinery to harvest (with the peak oil already there, transition is mandatory as well).
And then you have all those cities without proper diversity of vegetables in a close distance which will need to change as well.
And finally don't get me going on nearly 80% of cereals grown to feed cattle (at the expense of developing countries) for the developed countries. #GoVegan ;)

Nicolas,

Yes, exactly. This sort of transition is impending and necessary anyway as time goes on. So all the wiser to get started on it as well!

Also, I cannot read French unfortunately. That is one to work on I guess! But I definitely like the idea of not only food, but many different forms of production taking place in hyper local areas amibg peer networks.

Ok @robertlarocque, sorry for the french affiliation :-) Here's a translation I found in english. Don't let the style turn you down from this book. It's utterly important IMHO as it's a clearly laid out model of a better way to live in an energetically challenged world.
Here's the book: http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/bb_3.pdf

http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/bb_3.pdf - fantastic read, thanks for sharing, @nicolasstampf. Rather sobering, however, that a generation after that was written, the malaise deepens, and still very few people see :(

Hi Robert, thank you very much for sharing your thoughts. I believe many in this group will find this thread interesting, including myself.
I've been looking into ways to grow fresh, local and sustainable food for quite some time now and, if thigs go as I hope they will, I'll be trying my hand at it soon. As a firm believer in the commons+cooperative paradigm, I believe common ownership of the means of production (be it land or repurposed containers) should be the guiding principle of the new agriculture revolution, one in which industrial farms will be replaced by small, distributed, cooperatively operated and commonly owned ones.

Michele,

Yes, thank you for the response.

I agree, it is so much about ownership. Who owns the land and the farms that sustain our lives? And what are their practices and motives?

Massive industrial agriculture operations have been forcing small farmers out of production for a lomg time now. Even a small movement to counteract this would be very beneficial.

I have tried my hand at urban farming over the past 2 years. Very pleased with the outcome. If you set up an automatic watering system, a very small time investment can reap great results. Likely an average of less than 30 minutes every two days or so, in just a corner of the yard where I was living, and it sustained a good garden and now I have a freezer full of different food stuff.

This is also why I think an architecture of sharing or selling yields would be good. If you have even just a few plants of the same kind, or even just one fruit tree, it'll often give you more of that specific food than you know what to do with!

Robert @robertlarocque you write

"now I have a freezer full of different food stuff"

I guess domestic freezers are fair in the short-term for food storage. Some quick browsing suggests that very roughly 10% of household electricity use is for refrigeration, at least 1 kWh per day. I haven't researched the energy input to freezer manufacture and the complications of current freezer fluids; but I was guessing that one major future advance will be small-scale shared freezer facilities. If you scale up existing technology without changing it at all, then a freezer 8 times the size should only take 4 times the energy -- but there are lots more savings to be made through using better techniques, and not having refrigeration in a warm living space.

Cold storage seems to be hardly ever talked about, and to be the business of only very few highly centralised companies. It's one thing to get started on working towards decentralization.

There's nothing more important than food (OK, and drinkable water). I am delighted to see a focus on how to do food, including how to produce, store and distribute it.

Simon,

Agreed, food is so fundamental.

It's human health, human autonomy, it's also pretty much the basis of creating culture, which you see anywhere you go!

Also it's just about the greatest environmental dilemma that exists. 75% of our water, the vast majority of our land use, a large proportion of our chemical pollution into the environment, all from how our agriculture system functions.

Not to mention the lion's share of our oil use is associated with the corporatized and globalizd food industries, according to figures quote in the doco 'The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil'.

Robert
I really liked your approach and the idea. (Moreover food production fit perfectly in a supermarket coop that I belong to).

But I do not think that we are going to go forward to something concrete "giving opinions " here. For sure it helps, but for me it takes too much time.

You can read other threads that I started.
If them make some sense to you, and you want to achieve something concrete, let us work using "on line meetings".

1.- we sincere our intentions, our objectives and our availability.
2.- we define hypotheses or concrete tasks that allow us to advance ...
3.- what ever we achieve has to be replicable (you do it in your country and I should be able to implement it in Israel ) and of course it has to be P2p (where the connections add social value (to the community) and this way to each one...) ..

If you like the idea give me a call (what's up) or email.

+972 584881158
Miguelnovik@doragroup.net

Miguel,

Thanks for your response.

Yes, I agree with what you say. It has to be something that is replicable anywhere. And I like the way you approach this sort of thing.

I'm a student currently who just moved to a new location on a college campus. I participate with a community garden here (CSA) and farmers market. But also face difficulties to start such a system as I described that I think many will also face (raising awareness among the right people, accessing land, meeting existing growers, limited time, etc.).

However I do think the idea is very important to attempt to develop upon. So I do hope to move forward with it to the best of my ability.

I will read your other threads though, and contact you if I have any thoughts on it! Hopefully we can move these practices forward!

If you haven't already, check out Jose Luis Vivero Pol´s excellent work on food as a commons, specially the policy proposal he coordinated for the European Commons Assembly:

The Food Commons in Europe

Or check out the Food an agriculture P2PF blog category, for more stories and perspectives.

-

That's what I'm saying, @staccotroncoso — there's no mention I can see in those pieces of food storage or cold storage.

I should add to this. It's obvious that food storage is necessary in all but subsistence hunter-gatherer societies (and maybe even for them). To minimise the carbon footprint of the food supply chain, and to maximise its resilience, we need food storage closer to the producers and the consumers. Come on, folks, where can we discuss this?

Robert

Sorry but what is in lumio of my project is not updated.

I could give you 2 new webpages, but I do not think that you need them.

Let us start from your experience and reality and get set up the task and "right questions" that would drive us to "your vision".

I look forward to hearing from you

Indeed, David Holmgren's book on Permaculture is more a transitioning book toward less energy than an agriculture book (which it is absolutely not IMHO): https://permacultureprinciples.com/au/product/principles-and-pathways-ebook/

Very worth a read also IMHO, and very P2P (and Commons) orientated.

Nicolas

@nicolasstampf, do you know where the terminology "bolo'bolo" (as well as all the other phrases used in that doc', such as "ibu" and "eodu") originates? I'm intrigued...

It's explained in the book: purely invented language to ensure total neutrality and void meaning so no bias involved.

Is it? Oh! I haven't yet come across that explanation - maybe I should pay closer attention ;)

Hi Robert, great to hear your thoughts and vision. I have been in this space for over 30 years both as a farmer and now as a Food Hub operator / software developer / investment cooperative board chairman here in Australia.

Check out Open Food Network (OFN) and the things that are happening through that open source software system globally, is quite inspiring. There is a big global get together of all the developers with public workshops and events in Melbourne in early Dec from around the world strategizing the next steps.

We have taken a system perspective to building the complementary parts to replace the old model.

My main work is with the Food Connect Foundation and also with ORICoop if you want to see what is happening in our space.

Lots to do so look forward to your work.

Love the bolo, bolo read @nicolasstampf, what a readable and perceptive piece of writing, still appropriate for today.

All the best and my apologise for not providing hyper links to my notes (I can't seem to find where to link in loomio .... yet :)

Robert

(I can't seem to find where to link in loomio .... yet

You can just paste an URL in your comment. Like https://openfoodnetwork.org/

Or you can use MarkDown format to make linked text. Just put [] around the words you want to appear and right after that, put () around the web address you want them to link to. Like this but with no spaces:

linked text

Thanks Bob, that will help a lot
cheers
Rob

Like This watch this great video on decentralisation

It works @strypey, unbelievable

Thanks for starting this topic @robertlarocque , and great to see Open Food Network in the house (high five @robertpekin ), I met Serenity Hill at the first Open Source//Open Society and we had a great conversation about the OFN's vision. There are so many great resources in this space, thanks especially to folks like the biodynamics and organics movements, the permaculture and slow food movements that grew out of their compost heaps, and the transition movement that grew out of permaculture.

Firstly, check out the Localizing Food Project, spearheaded by one of my permaculture teachers, Robina McCurdy of Earthcare Educators Aotearoa. Robina travelled the length of this country connecting with local food projects, and is producing a series of crowdfunded documentary films covering different aspects of them. The latest one is 'Edible Paradise - Growing the Food Forest Revolution'.

Secondly, have a browse through Appropedia.org, a crowdsourced mediawiki site for appropriate technology, PracticalPlants.org and Plants for a Future, which are the same thing but for articles about plants. There's also OpenSourceEcology.org, an appropriate tech development project based at FactorE Farms. Also WikiHouse.cc, it's not about food, but like OpenSourceEcology it does demonstrate the way the crowdsourcing and human-centred design principles behind wikis and free code software can be applied to creating new stuff on the physical layer.

Thirdly, the P2P food network/ app idea is already being tried by folks like OFN, and here in Aotearoa, BuckyBox (now fully free code), and OOOBY (Out of Our Own Backyards), see OOOBY founder Pete Russell's TEDx talk on 'Hacking the supply chain' (sadly I believe OOOBY's platform remains proprietary). I'm collecting notes about food coop and box scheme software on the Aotearoa Permaculture Network wiki.

Finally, a bit of shameless self-promotion, I wrote a paper for the FreeCulture2010 conference called 'Free to Know or Free to Own? Convergence of Free and Slow Culture in Global Relocalisation'. It looks at the parallels and points of overlap between the original ecology movement and what I sometimes call 'digital ecology', the worlds of free code, online commons, and green tech.

@strypey, I like this line from your paper's abstract: "the freedom to know and the freedom to grow are going to have to take precedence over the freedom to own". Boom!