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Fresh Voices

Interested in hearing directly from the next generation of innovative farmers? Check out the Land Stewardship Project’s Ear to the Ground “Fresh Voices” podcast series. You can read profiles of Farm Beginnings grads here. You can check out all 295 episodes of our Ear to the Ground podcast here. Ear to the Ground 294: Rootless Regeneration …  Read More

Healthy Farms, Healthy Frogs, Healthy Land

While walking a piece of North Dakota landscape under a withering summer sun, one’s thoughts turn to moisture—or rather, the lack of it. So when I and other participants in a soil health tour kicked up signs of cool, shady places while traipsing across a hay field, it seemed like a mirage. Green-and-black leopard frogs…  Read More

Nitrate’s Season of Reckoning

Ag Pollution in Karst Country Offers a Critical Opportunity for Soil-Friendly Farming

For residents of southeastern Minnesota, the past few months must seem like “The Season of the Nitrate.” It turns out nitrogen, that critical source of crop fertility, is quite adept at escaping our farm fields, and, in the form of nitrate, polluting groundwater. So much so that scientists, government officials, and physicians now recognize it…  Read More

Ear to the Ground No. 258: Prairie’s Horizontal Grandeur

What happens when you get out of the car and wade into a prairie? A scientist and a soil expert talk about this biome’s under-appreciated beauty, its outsized benefits, and how grazing can fuel its ecological energy.   Other Ear to the Ground Podcasts on Prairies & Farming: • Episode 25: The farm as natural…  Read More

Change Comes from the Ground Up

As the staff and member-leaders of the Land Stewardship Project conduct our organization’s work for stewardship and justice on the land, the central concept that keeps arising is “change comes from the ground up.” Whether the subject is farming practices, public policy or community vitality, thinking about positive change in this way is enormously helpful…  Read More

Land Line: Grasslands & Carbon, Local Foods, AU Cap, Fertilizer Prices, Dry Wells, Methane Digesters, Forever Green

June 7: An LSP Round-up of News Covering Land, People & Communities

Claim: Grazed Grasslands Trump Cover Crops on Long-term Carbon Sequestration (6/5/22) The Food and Environment Reporting Network reports on research showing that rotationally grazed pastures sequester more carbon than annual cropping systems. An ongoing 29-year-old field experiment in Wisconsin shows that perennial pastures managed with rotational grazing accumulated 18% to 29% more soil organic carbon…  Read More

The Crop Insurance Conundrum

More Evidence that a Safety Net has Morphed into a Web of Destruction

When one sees the word “unambiguously” used in a carefully researched academic paper, it’s time to take notice. For example,  a recent Journal of Policy Modeling study reports results that are “…unambiguously suggestive of a crop insurance policy regime that is biased in the direction of increasing consolidation in crop farming….” That conclusion is based on…  Read More

LSP Land Line: Big Ag Gravy Train, Habitat Loss, Soil Health, Dairy Crisis, Nitrogen, Kernza

Sept. 25: An LSP Round-up of News Covering Land, People & Communities Very large farms collect one-fifth of USDA’s coronavirus payments (9/23/20) Chuck Abbott reports on Agriculture.com that the government’s COVID-19 payments to agriculture have been a gravy train for mega-operations. According to an analysis done by the Environmental Working Group, the largest 1% of…  Read More

Bold Solutions Call for Bold Action

Minnesota’s Next Governor Must Take Direct, Concrete Steps The people of Minnesota are beginning to consider what they would like the future of the state to look like in the context of the fall gubernatorial elections. Will they elect Minnesota’s first woman governor? Go “Back to the Future” with a former governor? Select a leader…  Read More