On Aug. 28, Land Stewardship Project board member Tex Hawkins spoke to a busload of LSP members and friends who visited a farm near Dodge, Wis., to witness firsthand the effects of frac, or silica, sand mining on a neighboring piece of property. I live in Winona. I’m on the LSP Board now, and have… Read More →
I am a 6th-generation Winona County resident; I live near Lewiston on the family farm where I was raised. We are here today, in the spirit of openness and full transparency, to learn more about an industry that is poised to make a huge and rapid impact on this beautiful region. We are a region… Read More →
By the time he was 20, Nolan Lenzen had already completed a dairy management course at a local college and launched a farming career in partnership with his father and grandfather. They were milking 90 cows in a tie-stall barn and cropping 300 acres near the south-central Minnesota community of Watertown. Some might say it… Read More →
The local frac sand industry is part of Big Oil’s continued efforts to monopolize the profits from natural resources that belong to everyone. Who really owns the earth, the oil, air and water? Big Oil’s frac-sand process uses huge amounts of water from our limited-supply aquifers. We can live without oil, but we can’t live… Read More →
I coordinate a project in western Minnesota that is based on the idea that producing positive environmental impacts in a watershed can happen without having to remake the entire region’s landscape. Scientific studies and on-the-farm experience suggest that just a 10 percent increase in diverse crop rotations, grasses and other perennial plant systems can be enough to meaningfully improve the safety of the water, reduce flood potential, restore wildlife habitat and stimulate a thriving local and regional foods economy. This is especially true if we can target fields that are particularly sensitive to problems like erosion.
On Friday July 20th I traveled with a group from St. Charles to the Chippewa Falls area to view first hand the frac-sand industry. I was so impacted by what I saw I felt I had to share my thoughts. The size and scope of the processing facilities was far greater than I had anticipated.
The sustainable agriculture community lost a true friend this week when Bud Markhart passed away after a courageous battle with cancer. I had the opportunity to interview Markhart last fall for an LSP podcast. He was a professor of horticultural science at the U of M, and so it’s no surprise that he made his… Read More →
The U.S. Senate passed its version of the 2012 Farm Bill this week. While it’s far from perfect, specific amendments related to conservation and accountability that were passed during the floor vote give one hope that the voices of average citizens can be heard inside the Beltway. Let’s hope this is a sign of things… Read More →
One can almost detect the longing in Denise Crews’ voice when she describes what foods she misses the most since she was diagnosed with Type 2 diabetes. “The hardest thing to give up was the fried chicken—Popeyes, Kentucky Fried Chicken. Their biscuits. The grease,” Crews told me during a recent LSP podcast interview at a… Read More →
I sat in a farmhouse one afternoon last month as a hot wind lifted rich topsoil from surrounding fields. On the drive in, I’d noticed a surprising amount of rill erosion on newly tilled cropland—surprising because recent rains had not been all that intense and the fields were not unusually steep. Out of the blue… Read More →
