Reading in progress
Sunday 16 August 2026
What is working, where, and who made it work. Read the whole turn of the earth in two minutes, then go as deep as you like.
Leave the seed heads standing on the thistles and teasels instead of tidying them away. The goldfinches have been waiting for this.
228 of 365On the twenty-fourth and twenty-fifth of July, fifty-three smallholder farmers travelled to Vía Orgánica, Regeneration International's sister organisation in Mexico, in the state of Guanajuato. They came from sixteen different municipalities, and they spent two days away from their plots, sitting with interviewers and answering questions: how big is your plot, what grows on it, what animals do you keep, what are you exposed to in the way of pesticides.
The instrument was TAPE, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Tool for Agroecological Performance Evaluation. It scores ten elements of a farm's sustainability from nought to a hundred, and it is built to work at the scale of a single plot. The same framework that asks about biodiversity, vegetation and income also asks about social context and women's empowerment, so a low score there appears on the page next to a low score for the landscape, and has to be answered for in the same way.
The session opened an eighteen-month collaboration between Renature and Regeneration International, which aims to train two hundred smallholder farmers - half men, half women, as an explicit target - in the agave-and-companion-tree agroforestry of the Billion Agave Project. The July assessment establishes the baseline against which everything after will be measured. Soil samples have been taken from the fields of every farmer interviewed, and are being analysed for physical, chemical and biological parameters.
More field interviews follow over the coming months. The point of scoring each plot at the start is that the project can track how each one changes as the months pass - comparing like with like, rather than judging one farm against another that started from different ground. The scores will be processed into recommendations, and the effort goes to whichever element scores lowest, instead of guessing from a distance which part of a stranger's farm needs fixing.
TAPE comes from the FAO and is built to run on a single plot. A growers' group can work through it in an afternoon per farm: score the ten elements from 0 to 100, take a soil sample the same day, and repeat in a year. The weakest score tells you where the work is.
Regeneration International · Read the source
At Heritage Farm in Decorah, Iowa, Seed Savers Exchange put 22 tomato varieties in front of the public and let tasters decide which deserved to be remembered. Visitors of all ages sampled across three categories - slicers, cooking tomatoes, and snacking types - and then voted for their favourites. The event was free, made possible by three sponsors: Decorah Bank & Trust Co., Mountain Rose Herbs, and Streamworks. It ran on nothing more complicated than ripe fruit and opinions.
The slicer category went to 'Bookie'. Best cooking tomato was 'Rizzi Softball Plum', a name that tells you roughly what it looks like. The snacking vote went to 'Chocolate Cherry', which Seed Savers sells as seed through its shop. The two other winners, the organisation notes, can be found on the Exchange, its listing service for members - so each winner sits somewhere a person can actually get hold of it.
This is the part of seed saving that rarely gets described: not the vault, but the tasting. A variety survives because someone wants to eat it again, and an afternoon like this is one of the few places that wanting gets counted. All three winners now have a fresh cohort of people who have eaten them and can ask for them by name. A tomato nobody tastes is a catalogue entry; a tomato twenty people argue about has a future.
Run your own tasting next summer: grow four or five varieties from a seed swap, slice them side by side on one plate, and have the household rank them blind. Keep seed only from the winner. Cost is a few seed packets and one season; the discipline is not saving seed from the tomato nobody ate.
Seed Savers Exchange · Read the source
Today's lead story involves fifty-three farmers, sixteen municipalities, and a score for every plot — which sounds, on the face of it, like a job someone would try to sell a machine learning system for. It is worth saying plainly what it actually is. TAPE, the FAO's Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation, is a structured questionnaire. Farmers walk their own land with a facilitator, answer questions about soil cover, seed diversity, income sources and labour, and the answers are tallied into indices. The computing involved is a spreadsheet, and often not even that.
This matters because the vendor pitch writes itself. Satellite imagery, yield prediction, an app that scores your farm from orbit. Such systems exist, and some are useful, but they answer the questions the satellite can see — canopy greenness, field boundaries — and not the ones a farmer can answer in an afternoon: who eats what the plot produces, whether the seed is saved or bought, whether the family can survive a bad year. TAPE's scores are coarse and slow to gather. They are also about the right things, and the farmer holds the pen, which means the number can be argued with.
The cost comparison is not close. A two-day workshop in Guanajuato, some facilitators, paper and fuel, against a modelling pipeline that needs imagery licences, labelled training data, and a server running somewhere on someone else's terms. The paper version also fails better: when a question turns out to be wrong for the local context, you cross it out. Nobody has to retrain anything.
There is a place in this work for the heavier tools — hedgerow bird surveys and parish rainfall archives are real jobs for pattern recognition at volumes no volunteer can match. But a score for every plot, owned by the person who farms the plot, is a reminder that the first question is never which model. It is whose hand holds the number.
Regeneration International · FAO Tool for Agroecology Performance Evaluation · source
A Central European late-August dish for when the plums are falling faster than you can eat them - potato dough wrapped round whole fruit, boiled, rolled in fried crumbs.
Boil the potatoes in their skins until a knife goes through easily, then peel them while still hot and mash or rice them until no lumps remain; let them cool a little. Work in the flour, egg and salt to make a soft dough that only just holds - it should feel like a warm earlobe, and if it is sticky add flour by the teaspoon rather than the handful. Halve the plums, take out the stones, and put half a teaspoon of sugar where the stone was, pressing the halves back together. Divide the dough into ten, flatten each piece in your palm, wrap it around a plum and seal it well, rolling it into a ball with floured hands; any gap in the seal will let the juice out and the water in. Lower the dumplings into a wide pan of gently simmering, salted water - wider than you think, they want room - and cook for about ten minutes, until they have floated for a good two minutes. Meanwhile melt the butter in a frying pan and fry the breadcrumbs with the cinnamon until they are the colour of a brown paper bag, then lift the dumplings out with a slotted spoon and roll them in the crumbs, serving with more sugar alongside for those who want it.
Nothing drops off. Today's readings move here tomorrow morning and stay, filed under the entrypoint they came in on. Below is the back-spool already gathered from the network.
The institutions whose public output feeds this reading. Each is watched every morning for what it publishes openly. Individuals are not listed here.
Permaculture Association · Permaculture Magazine · Regeneration International · Seed Savers Exchange · Garden Organic · Navdanya · Biodynamic Association UK · Biodynamic Demeter Alliance · Rodale Institute · Kiss the Ground · Savory Institute · Landworkers Alliance · Sustainable Food Trust · Real Farming Trust · Agroforestry Research Trust · Soil Association · A Growing Culture · Pasture for Life · Farmerama Radio
Ecosystem Restoration Communities · Rewilding Britain · Rewilding Europe · Trees for Life · Knepp Estate · Beaver Trust
The Restart Project · Low-tech Magazine · Makery · Repair Cafe International · Precious Plastic · Library of Things · Wuyong (Ma Ke)
Centre for Alternative Technology · AECB · Passivhaus Trust · Community Energy England
Julie's Bicycle · Dark Mountain Project · Emergence Magazine · Orion Magazine · Resurgence & Ecologist
Shareable · Transition Network · Global Ecovillage Network · Capital Institute
Bioneers · Gaia Education · Schumacher College · Center for Humans and Nature · Findhorn Foundation