From the fact-is-stranger-than-fiction department: In 2007, Monsanto talked the USDA’s Risk Management Agency into giving farmers a discount on crop insurance premiums if they planted the company’s triple-stacked GMO corn. Reportedly, some reviewers of the proposal raised concerns that the premium subsidy would unfairly benefit a single private company. But in the end, the USDA…  Read More →

There is a widely-circulated public story, or narrative, that growing enough food for the world’s future population will require doubling production by relying on technologies such as nitrogen fertilizer and pesticides tied to traits in genetically modified crops. The narrative is that family farmers, consumers and governments must rely on corporate-controlled technology from multi-national agricultural…  Read More →

Sometimes it takes a bit of an evangelist to remind us that praying at the altar of facts and figures can blind one to how they all connect in the bigger picture. In the case of production systems that build soil health, that preacher is Ray Archuleta. “The soil is naked, hungry, thirsty and running…  Read More →

Over 80 people came out to the Starbuck Community Center in western Minnesota on a balmy March evening to hear presentations from University of Minnesota meteorologist and climatologist Mark Seeley as well as staff and farmer-members of Land Stewardship Project’s Community Based Food Systems and Farm Beginnings programs. The focus of the event was climate…  Read More →

Cover crops proved themselves foul weather friends during the Great Drought of 2012. A groundbreaking farmer survey conducted in the Upper Mississippi River watershed showed that during that year’s brutal growing season keeping the soil covered with small grains and other plants helped fields preserve enough precious moisture to provide a yield bump of, in…  Read More →

Gary Van Ryswyk’s concern for how his farming methods impact the landscape is obvious. A practitioner of a no-till system that avoids disturbing a field’s surface as much as possible, he is particularly focused on keeping soil in place. “None of us who farm want the soil to move—we care,” Van Ryswyk told me one…  Read More →

The Land Stewardship Project has been spending part of this fall gathering input from members and staff on how we should proceed with our work during the next five years. This development of what we call our “long range plan” has taken the form of member-leader input sessions, staff meetings and a survey sent out…  Read More →

The Minneapolis Parks and Recreation Board asked city residents a year ago for ways in which it could better support urban agriculture in the parks. From these comments, a draft of the “Urban Agriculture Activity Plan” was born. The draft has since been vetted by Parks and Recreation staff and a Community Advisory Committee, and…  Read More →

In October, I told the Minnesota House Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture Finance Committee that we had begun to listen to our farm, an assertion lawmakers heard with some surprise. The occasion was testimony around the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s presentation of its “Nitrogen in Minnesota Surface Waters” report, which showed among other things that…  Read More →

One recent August day, I stood in a field in North Dakota watching soil being spaded up and listening to farmers talk about the optimal cover crop seeding mixes, how long to mob graze a paddock and which no-till equipment does the best job of cutting through last year’s plant residue. It was 90 degrees…  Read More →