The United Nations-Food and Agriculture Organization has declared 2015 the International Year of Soils. That’s fitting, given how reliant the entire world is on keeping our soil in place, as well as keeping it healthy. But this isn’t exactly new information: years ago I happened upon a 1953 pamphlet called Conquest of the Land Through… Read More →
Winona County is fortunate to be located in the heart of the Driftless Region, an area unique for its geographic and biological features. For this reason we need a Comprehensive Plan suited to such a priceless resource. A plan that protects our bluff lands, wetlands, river valleys, forests and farms. We are home to many… Read More →
The threat of heavy rain did not keep a group of prospective farmers away from the Seward Neighborhood of Minneapolis this past Saturday. Stefan Meyer of Growing Lots Urban Farm hosted a Farm Beginning field day at one of Growing Lots’ urban locations, where he shared his experience with vegetable varieties, irrigation, compost, soil health… Read More →
My wife Bonnie and I have a 160-acre farm near Kellogg. This is the farm I grew up on and we milked cows there until eight years ago. Since then we’ve been raising grass-fed beef. We are at that point in life where we are thinking about the next steps for ourselves and the farm.… Read More →
Every budding farm enterprise goes through that certain stage at least once—the one where setbacks outnumber successes, careful planning gets bushwhacked by forces beyond one’s control and the learning curve can resemble a roller coaster headed in one direction: up. It’s at that period in an enterprise’s life that minimal risk is a farm’s best… Read More →
A Land Stewardship Project member with decades of experience in agricultural lending has been appointed to the U.S Secretary of Agriculture’s Advisory Committee on Beginning Farmers and Ranchers. Tim Gossman, who is a vice president and commercial and agriculture loan officer at Merchants Bank in St. Charles, Minn., is also a supervisor for the Fillmore… Read More →
Amy Haben and Tom Moore ride a golf cart over a rickety wooden bridge spanning Otter Creek and follow a path to a lush pasture where a couple dozen head of Scottish Highland cattle graze, their shaggy coats luminescent in the late afternoon sun of a June day. “Before they grazed the edge of the… Read More →
Five years into her farming career, Janna Goerdt has learned a lot about how to use sweat equity to coax the most production out of the soils of Fat Chicken Farm near Embarrass. But the 40-year-old former journalist has also gotten savvy about how to set some sustainable limits on both her farm and herself.… Read More →
Hope Community, a development organization in the Phillips neighborhood of South Minneapolis, owns a community garden in the center of what they call the “Hope Block.” Hope owns 176 units of affordable housing, almost all of which are on one block of the corner of Portland Avenue and Franklin Avenue. In the center of this… Read More →
Sometimes laboratory science and the reality of what’s happening on the ground intersect in a graphic way. That’s what struck me this morning as I was watching a video shot by Minnesota beekeeper Steve Ellis on May 7. Ellis has documented the die-off of bees on the very day that neighboring fields were planted with… Read More →
