I originally downloaded the audio version of Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, to simply keep me awake during a long wintry drive across the southern part of Minnesota and through the heart of Iowa. But by the time I arrived at my destination—a national conference on cover crops and soil…  Read More →

Having just come from working several seasons as an outdoor educator, I have had ample time to appreciate our wild places. In my previous position as an instructor leading canoe and dogsled trips in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, I was able to explore the interactions between humans and nature and marvel in the…  Read More →

Despite the unrelenting rain, more than 100 people congregated on the corner of Franklin and Portland Avenue in Minneapolis last Tuesday to celebrate the launch of the South Quarter IV development project, which included a heartfelt speech from Mayor RT Rybak. The ceremony was hosted by Aeon, affordable housing developers and long-time partners in Hope…  Read More →

Last month, the American Medical Association (AMA), the largest association of physicians in the United States, officially recognized obesity as a disease. Previously, obesity was only recognized as a “condition,” defined as a range of weight that may have an adverse effect on health, reduce life expectancy and increase the likelihood of certain chronic diseases,…  Read More →

Good things go bad when out of their rightful places. Take farm fertilizer and soil, essential ingredients in the field but all wrong in the 27 percent of Minnesota lakes now too contaminated to drink. Last month’s report from the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) blasted corn-and-soybean agriculture as the major source of nitrogen contamination…  Read More →

On a crisp morning in September, North Dakota farmer Gabe Brown held two handfuls of soil and searched for signs of life—theoretically not a difficult task considering one teaspoon of humus contains more organisms than there are humans in the world. But many of the bacteria and invertebrates that lurk in the dark basement of…  Read More →

A recent press release from the Stanford School of Medicine read, “Little evidence of health benefits from organic foods.” The headline could just have easily read, “Despite billions spent on research and subsidies, conventional foods found more dangerous than organic.” The Stanford study was striking in several regards: 1) no new research was conducted —…  Read More →

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 →

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 →