New Farmer's Almanac - Volume VI

The New Farmer's Almanac Volume VI: Adjustments and Accommodations seeks to recognize our own collective agency in the face of sizable uncertainties.

The morphing climate, ongoing culture of land dispossession, continuing global pandemic, shifting and intensifying weather patterns, and migrations of all species—spurned by political and environmental upheaval—are considered within. There is adaptability in each bloom of algae; tiny particles of inspiration can enliven lives and farm systems; the natural currents and connected sentience of the living earth moves genetic material. Dynamic flux and rapid change remains possible.

The power of the forces—the river, the wind—are summoned and given thanks, like our ancestors did. Here, we tune to the potential of the commons. Contributors from around the Earth reflect on natural systems, logistics of change, localization, resource sharing, and preservation; we eye new experiments in planting, seed breeding, and composting. The past is contextualized by the present, informing our ideas for the future. Climate grief and cognitive dissonance are examined among imaginations of urban food systems and equitable access. Readers are invited to envision tweaks to the carbon cycle; to see intercropping as a life practice; and sharing dinner as an embodied preservation of cultural foodways.

This compendium of ideas, strategies, and arguments honors the almanac tradition in featuring archival and contemporary words and artwork. Photos, maps, prints, drawings, and gems from the archives rest—and agitate—among personal essays, reports from the field, poetry, and interviews. Join us in exploring resilience, responsiveness, adaptation, and accommodation.

Contributors to this year's Almanac include:
Radical ecologist and soil steward Nance Klehm; Vincent Medina and Louis Trevino of Cafe Ohlone; Los Angeles-based social orchardists Fallen Fruit Collective; climate justice organizer and writer Maia Wikler; owner of Mother's Finest Family Farms Samantha Winship; beaver advocate and artist Suzanne Husky; creator of the Neo Eocene assisted forest migration project Oliver Kellhammer, Indigenous foodways scholar Leke Hutchins; staff from the Land Institute in Salina, Kansas; and poet laureate of Deep Ecology, Gary Snyder, among many others.

• Softcover
• 392 Pages
• 145 Contributors
• Publication Year 2023

Greenhorns works to promote, recruit and support the next generation of farmers through grassroots media production. Our role is to explore the context in which new farmers face the world. They also publish The New Farmer's Almanac: a collection of articles written by new economists, working agrarians, poets, agri-philosophers, and activists — lovingly compiled by the Greenhorns editorial team. Each Almanac focuses on diverse and relevant issues in evolving agricultural technology, food systems, agroecology, politics, and innovations in sustainability. Published biennially, the New Farmer's Almanac is a window into the undercurrents of agrarian thinking.