Dear Friends of AGC,

This letter is marking the six-month anniversary of A Growing Culture’s online launch and seeks to update our friends and family as to the progress of AGC.  We have been growing at a steady rate with site visits totaling almost 20,000 in 6 months from people all over the world. We are actively recruiting graduate students to share their research, while encouraging global farmers and educators to share their ideas, techniques and stories.  Our posts on Facebook and Twitter have had a profound impact on AGC’s development, with new people connecting each day. What started as a grassroots initiative amongst friends and peers in North Carolina has turned into a credible source of information with writers from four continents!

As some of you may have noticed from following our site, we do not want to limit our target audience to just farmers and professors, as we would also like to include those with a growing interest or passion for the eco agriculture movement.  Consequently, some of our content is scientific and technique based, while some is simply entertaining and educational in an effort to help those not directly connected to eco agriculture, make better decisions in support of a sustainable food system.  We have incorporated in North Carolina as a non-profit and have recently finished working with an attorney and accountant to file our federal papers, which are pending approval as we speak. Once we become a tax deductible charity, we believe that we will receive more generous donations; but in the meantime, we have been getting by with the charitable actions of our friends and family who have devoted their time through editing, writing, designing, or helping to spread the word about AGC.  It is our hope that, when we are granted 501c3 status, A Growing Culture’s public resources and global impact will greatly increase.
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Holy Crap, Batman!  Turns out we’ve been sitting on a fortune… and that’s no load of bull, either. In fact, we’re the ones that are full of it. We’ve been taking this resource and just flushing it down the drain. It’s time we grow up and re-examine our attitudes about this valuable commodity that we’ve been treating like, well, you know.

Seriously though, A Growing Culture is proud to have presented the first installment last week in what will be a series of excerpts from Joseph Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook. As we look forward to presenting the second installment from this “guide to composting human manure”, we’d like to take a moment to shed some light on the subject matter and the humble beginnings of what we deem to be a modern classic.

In terms of a viable compost source, human manure has been viewed as a “little too gross” to be used within a sustainable food system.  A once highly valued agricultural asset is now being viewed as waste and disposed of in a manner that further pollutes our valuable finite resources. AGC hopes to bring this to the forefront of the discussion table.  We encourage everyone to follow the link and purchase Joseph Jenkins’ The Humanure Handbook for a full in depth look at maximizing this resource.

The Humanure Handbook was something of an accidental literary phenomenon…  Read More | Comments

Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack addressed the Senate Agriculture Committee last Thursday in the first official 2012 Farm Bill hearing. The hearing was held on the heels of a draft of the Agriculture Appropriations Bill put forward by the House Appropriations Subcommittee on Agriculture, Rural Development, FDA and Related Agencies on May 23rd, which proposed deep cuts to all sorts of funding.   Read More | Comments