For an artist, it’s always nice to get a little public recognition—it helps make up for all those hours spent alone in the studio. So when Deborah Foutch’s piece, “Soil Horizon,” won a blue ribbon at the Minnesota State Fair in 2015, she was thrilled. But even more exciting was that the artwork—it uses various…  Read More →

“What? Did you sell your cows?!?” This was the response from my neighbor, who had stopped by several years ago after seeing my pasture covered with 2.5-foot-tall grass. “I have never seen this pasture with grass longer than a golf green in nearly 30 years; you must have sold the cows!” This is a good…  Read More →

As Laura Lengnick makes clear, “resiliency” is all the rage these days. It seems the term is being tossed around by everyone from Wall Street investment bankers to wildlife biologists. That the term is in such vogue is a good thing. It’s an acknowledgement that whatever system we’re talking about—economic, ecological or sociological—it often lacks…  Read More →

In the late 1790s and early 1800s, British economist Thomas Robert Malthus used mathematics, the agronomic reality of the day and basic biology to lay out a grim assessment about the future of the planet: we were doomed to an endless cycle of boom and bust. It was inevitable human populations would periodically grow to…  Read More →