ALASKA FOOD SECURITY is a crisis compounded since 200 farming families from the midwestern US were brought to the fertile Matanuska Valley to try and eek out a living during the Great Depression. Later, during WWII between 5,000-6,000 head of cattle provided sustenance for our troops on Kodiak Island. Today we don’t have enough cattle statewide to feed Alaskans for more than a month or two. Commercial ag land is limited to 450-acre plots and mostly hobby farms supply produce for Farmer’s Markets.
Opportunity Lost The State of Alaska has a high opinion of the value of Agriculture Land, which includes Agricultural Homesteads with Agricultural Rights Only, and Fee Simple land with Agricultural Covenants. Perhaps that is why so little ag land is in production in Alaska. It is just too valuable to allow much of it to …
The Sorry State of Alaska Agriculture: Kodiak Island Area Beef Production Read More »
Addressing Alaska’s Hierarchy of Needs This is an update of a story that first appeared February 10, 2021. Alaskans are generally stuck at the bottom of the 5-level pyramid of human needs defined in Abraham Maslow’s 1943 paper, A Theory of Human Motivation. His 1954 book “Motivation and Personality” expanded on this theory and remains a …
Realities of Alaska Food Security (2020©donnliston.co) Familywith food on the table have many problems. Familywith no food on the table have one problem. …
Who Cares about Alaska FoodSustainability? WITH STORY UPDATE RESPONSE FROM ADF&G (2020©donnliston.co) This is a story of one man attempting to deal with the machine known as the State of Alaska. We who have lived a long time in Alaska know this machine well because it creates dependency while asserting to promote Alaskan independence. The …
The Future of Alaska Food Security Rayna Reynolds, 9, is a farm girl in the Matanuska Valley. (2020©donnliston.co) When 200 farm families were selected from three mid-western states to be moved to Alaska’s Matanuska Valley for a farming experiment in 1935, nobody was certain what would happen. During the early 1930s Alaska agriculture was in …
