Grow Your Own — Part IV: Follow Along

As you’ve read all week, we are going to be simulating the crash of fossil-fuel infrastructure in our food system. You can read about the overall idea, the chronological outline, and the study parameters in previous posts. Today we’ll be discussing how we’ll be sharing our results as we go.

Regular Social- and Multimedia Reports

We’ve been offering a podcast and video series for years now. Unfortunately our work gets so busy that we do not update them as often as we should or would like. This project has generated more interest in our early discussions than any of our other work, and we think that many people would be interested in watching a webseries about it.

Starting in the new year, we’ll begin to put out weekly episodes. We’ll introduce the study, talk about what we’re trying to understand and what things we won’t be looking into. It will be an update to the information laid out this week. Then we’ll take a week-by-week look at what we’re doing on the ground, all from the perspective of a “parallel timeline” where fossil fuels supplies are dwindling. We’ll discuss our successes, failures, and what we hadn’t expected to learn.

Our podcast will be a companion to the webseries. While the project runs, we will use the podcast to discuss related books and articles. We’ll seek out interviews with thinkers who have discussed the obsolescence of fossil fuels and the food system.

We will have some information on the blog, but by and large we hope to concentrate most of our reporting information in the videos and podcasts. We have previously reported on the hour-per-day gardening idea and may continue to discuss our specific gardening work there. We will be tracking our hours worked on this project. We will share our measurement data as it is collected as a continuation of this series.

Formal Reporting

In addition to reporting our findings as we go along, we will be compiling, analyzing, and reporting on our data in more formal reports, articles, and write-ups. We’re at the early planning stages now, but the primary data points will include:

  • the amount of time, divided by task, we work towards growing our own food,
  • purchases of both food and equipment,
  • amounts and types of food grown,
  • preservation efforts,
  • and, just for fun, recipes.

By the time we start going in February, we will likely have more data to record. As the growing season wraps up, we’ll begin to consolidate and analyze our data. We’ll look for statistics that describe our harvest.

We plan to write a general-audience piece about the project up to fall season. We’ll create sharable infographics and photos to go along with this write-up. Additionally we’ll write a more technical piece with more data and statistics, for those who are interested in a deep dive into numbers.

Presentations

We will make staff available to present to large and small groups about this project. We will seek out opportunities, such as the Wisconsin Garden Expo, the Wisconsin Permaculture Convergence, and others. Please do contact us if you’re interested in having someone come talk about this or any of our other projects.


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