I was really delightfully surprised to see how many people came out to chime in with their thoughts on the Challenge: What are you doing to claim food sovereignty for yourself or your community, and why? With this amount of interest I am inspired to open up new challenges from time to time around the theme of freedom and resilience.

I sure did learn a lot and came away very inspired to see real examples of what can be done to accomplish food sovereignty for families and communities with a good plan, some hard work and a lot of love.

Incredible! We had 12 entries sharing lots of wisdom and inspiration about food sovereignty.

It was extra hard to choose the winners of this contest because there were so many amazing entries!! But alas I narrowed it down to the following three:

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1st Place: @wildhomesteading

Your post My Response to - Challenge: What are you doing to claim food sovereignty for yourself or your community, and why? was really telling of your knowledge, hard work to build food sovereignty for your family, and your willingness and dedication to invite your local community to learn with you, as well as dedicating yourself to teaching online. I've transferred your 10 STEEM winnings to your wallet. Congratulations!

One of my current sites used to be a homestead but was abandoned years ago - now I'm restoring it for wildlife habitat. But there are a lot of old and amazing fruit trees growing wild on the property. The above picture is one of these trees.

This site will be opened to the public in the future as part of what we are calling the Inspiring Kids Preserve. It will be a place for kids, families and the community in general to come and learn and reconnect with nature.

But I also want them to connect with the idea of growing their own food.

So to help with that we have teamed up with a local fruit tree group to run free workshops to teach people how to prune and take care of their own fruit trees by practicing on our wild fruit trees.

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2nd Place: @ligayagardener

You really outdid yourself with two entries to this challenge! Part 1 and Part 2. Number of entries aside, your dedication to your family's food soveriengty is impressive. Supporting already 60% of your family's diet, despite a small growing space, and increasing every year is quite a feat. I was especially impressed by your willingness to share your time with your community to build spaces to share food, knowledge, inspiration and community resilience. Great going @ligayagardener! I've transferred your 5 STEEM winnings to your wallet. Congratulations!

I got the first 'Grow Free' cart established in Gawler and that lead to 4 more being started These carts are part of a rapidly growing movement and are for folks to leave and take produce as needed. If you have surplus, you leave it. If you are in need, you take. It's a really simple Idea that works.

We are part of the local Saturday morning food share. This is where like minded folk catch up every week or when they can and we swap and give any excess from our gardens. Really, anything garden related is OK at these swaps.

Until last year, when the trees weren't big enough, we got about 20% of our food needs from the garden, mostly through annual plants . This year, it's about 60% as the trees and bushes are beginning to yield and we have made the small, experimental aquaponics system into a big one. Even with the big extension to the aquaponics, that only adds a bit less than 10 square metres to the equation but it does allow paved and fence space to by utilized.

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3nd Place: @riverflows

I was personally really drawn to your post A Revolution in Dirt and Seeds: Answering @Sagescrub's Challenge on What We Can Do to Increase Our Food Sovereignty, but I also believe your words have the potential to inform and inspire many others. I appreciated the bit of history and culture that you opened with. It was really beautiful to know how you have generously shared your time and effort with your community to inspire and empower them to garden for community resilience. Great work @riverflows! I've transferred your 5 STEEM winnings to your wallet. Congratulations!

I live in a rural area that was once a big wool production area and at the edge of a wheatbelt too. There's a lot of farming folk around here, but there's also a lot of people with small acreages or at least big blocks of land where they have the capability of growing food for their own table. It's been fantastic to share inspiration, seeds, plants and knowledge, and we've been having monthly food swaps. So succesful has this been that the town over from us has started their own group and also do swap meets, and many members are in both groups.

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Keep scrolling for the rest of the wonderful entries to this challenge. Thank you everyone for contributing your time and thoughts on this subject!

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FOOD SOVEREIGNTY - WHAT IT MEANS TO ME

by @papa-pepper

After some reflection and contemplation, I decided to record an attempt at a coherent ramble, so hopefully it worked and people will understand what I'm up to and why. Basically, I believe that there is much wisdom in taking control of things as precious as your own food supply, and much of what is considered to be "food" is becoming increasingly compromised. Here, we want to first of all do it ourselves, and in the process, encourage, inspire, educate, and equip others to do the same. (I cover more in the vlog below.)

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Food sovereignty, how we participate.

by @warfsterveld

Now after years of trial, error and lots of learning we grow most of our food ourselfs. Still there is always more knowlegde and skills out there and that is a great asset as well. Once you've grown that tomato plant you will eat so much that you don't know what to do with it anymore. That is when you start you first skill: canning. Nowadays besides canning we also make bread and cheese quite regularly. However my favorite crop of all remains the potato.

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Eco-$aver Potlucks

by @eco-locals.com

Our food is a primordial connection to all things. It is one of our biggest expenses and can be a huge stress on our health, environment and quality of life. Let's use these insights to build stronger and greener communities. Here's how it works. Find a few friends, the more the better.

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Is Food Sovereignty Possible in a Harsh Climate?

by @minismallholding

At the moment we have mains water and access to chicken feed. We are able to supply ourselves with eggs, most of our fruit and vegetables when in season and some meat. All our herbs come from the garden and excess is shared with neighbours. It's not much, but it is a way of reaching out to the community and making those connections. For such an introvert, I was actually quite surprised to realise that I now know more of the people on our street than some of our chattier neighbours.

Community is essential when things get hard so cultivating that is important for me. Most of my neighbours aren't particularly interested in growing their own food, but the fact that we are doing it has started a seed of thought within some of them.

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A Challenge: What are you doing to claim food sovereignty for yourself or your community, and why? My Response...

by @porters

We have coal oil lamps and the oil to go in it plus we do have a small solar system set up on our camperized van which we could bring to the house if needed.
Sad to say, but we have prepared for the internet no longer being available, which it very well could be, with a good library of books and music plus a tight local community.

We have a good supply of grains and seeds, pulses and rice in a storage room that keeps cool and dry.
We know how to cook things from scratch, can and preserve our foods and have a diet that we are happy with and are not reliant on the stores to maintain it.

This past year we took our gardening one step further and began our indoor gardening project.

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The (non)Violent Gardener: My Feeble Attempts at Food Sovreignty

by @nateonsteemit

Our efforts here to establish our own food forest and a tree-guild-based sharing garden are just the start. A big part of the sharing garden is going to be my marketing attempts to spread information about permaculture and home food production to everyone I am blessed enough to serve. When people come to pick berries and food, I'm going to greet them with a hug (I'm a hugger) and a small book or brocure of permaculture information.

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Homesteaderscoop Challenge: What are you doing to claim food sovereignty for yourself or your community, and why? Stanmr's entry

by @stanmr

Food security is something I've been working on for years now. I guess we always think about taking care of our own first. Food sovereignty is a newer concept for me. I'm the kind of person that usually thinks, I can do this all on my own. It was part of why I became interested in gardening in the first place. I used to dream about feeding my large family from our little garden plot. We ended up with a few good meals in the summer. Or sometimes we were able to supplement some peppers and tomato's for part of a meal. Then a big haul of winter squash and other end of the season bounty. I was content with that for many years but was, and still am concerned with how much we put in the pantry every fall. How to stretch the growing season. Or how to convince my children to eat healthier.

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HomeSteadersCoop Challenge: Salt sovereignty for myself, my community, and my Queen...Why?

by @yestermorrow

Which all the furor about various means of attaining food for all people's, and caring for your community in the centuries to come after Lili takes her revenge upon mankind... Nobody seems to be speaking about Salt...

I won't go into the particulars of it, (in fact, you should ask the folks @steemstem) but salt is an absolute necessity for all Earthly Life.. If even the children of Mama Evie need it, then you can damn well bet that Aunt Lili's children need it... It's just physics... If you had access to every possible resource, but no salt... You would die...

HARD...
Normally, Salt is harvested from the Sea... It's quite easy to get it from there, and nobody even makes a fuss about it anymore... But inland.. Folks who don't have access to salt-water, need take a different approach. How does one manufacture table salt with no Sea-Water?

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Posted from my blog with SteemPress : https://homesteaderscoop.com/challenge-winners-what-are-you-doing-to-claim-food-sovereignty-for-yourself-or-your-community-and-why/