Not Your Father’s Fish Farm

Chef Dan Barber squares off with a dilemma facing many chefs today: how to keep fish on the menu.

With impeccable research and deadpan humor, he chronicles his pursuit of a sustainable fish he could love, and the foodie’s honeymoon he’s enjoyed since discovering an outrageously delicious fish raised using a revolutionary farming method in Spain.

Dan Barber is the chef at New York’s Blue Hill restaurant, and Blue Hill at Stone Barns in Westchester, where he practices a kind of close-to-the-land cooking married to agriculture and stewardship of the earth. As described on Chez Pim: “Stone Barns is only 45 minutes from Manhattan, but it might as well be a whole different universe. A model of self-sufficiency and environmental responsibility, Stone Barns is a working farm, ranch, and a three-Michelin-star-worthy restaurant.” It’s a vision of a new kind of food chain.

Barber’s philosophy of food focuses on pleasure and thoughtful conservation — on knowing where the food on your plate comes from and the unseen forces that drive what we eat. He’s written on US agricultural policies, asking for a new vision that does not throw the food chain out of balance by subsidizing certain crops at the expense of more appropriate ones.

In 2009, Barber received the James Beard award for America’s Outstanding Chef, and was named one of the world’s most influential people in Time’s annual “Time 100″ list.

“Dan Barber is increasingly becoming known as a chef-thinker, popularizing simple ideas that upend the way people think about the food we eat.”
Gothamist.com

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No-Till Farming

No-till farming is radically different from what you’re probably accustomed to seeing.

All those neat rows of plants, bare ground in between, not a weed in sight.

This modern sort of farming is made possible with massive amounts of petroleum products, and not just the diesel that runs the equipment! Agricultural chemicals – fertilizers and herbicides – are also petrochemicals.

And it turns out that breaking up the soil by plowing or disking, long used for weed control and water conservation, might not be the best answer after all. Mother Nature, with her way of mulching the soil with last year’s spent crop, has it all over those USDA crop scientists.

Forward-thinking agriculturalists all over the world have looked backward and decided to try not tilling their fields.

And guess what?

No-till farming means there is a natural mulch. Mulching controls weeds, so no herbicide is needed.

Mulching also slows evaporation, so not as much irrigation is necessary. Mulch also becomes compost (and extra compost can be added on top of the mulch, if desired), so chemical fertilizer is kaput, too.

What does this mean to the farmer?

Lower costs and higher profit margins.

What does it mean to the world? Reduction and possible reversal of Global Warming.

Here’s a short film out of Canada to explain no-till farming a little more.


For more on how proper farming methods can prevent global warming, see The Carbon Cycle and Agriculture

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Global Warming Video – Short and Not-So-Sweet

I don’t watch much TV, so I had only seen this global warming video once before.

It is a television commercial produced by the Ad Council, an organization that always seems to come up with brilliant ways to get a message across to their targeted audience.

Very powerful.

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