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 →
Now is the time for all of us concerned about the future of health care in Minnesota to keep the fox out of the hen house by calling our Minnesota state senators and representatives and urging them to vote for the health insurance exchange bill put forward by Sen. Tony Lourey, DFL-Kerrick, and Rep. Joe… Read More →
When I and four other college students from Winona participated in the Southern civil rights movement of the 1960s, we were proud of Minnesota. Like the dozens from all over Minnesota who spent months or years helping people to register and vote in the face of poll taxes, literacy tests, threats and murder, we knew… Read More →
Terrie and Joe Adams work to make Marshwatch Farms into a place where people can learn that profitable food production and environmental health go together, even in a region threatened by sprawling development.
Many good arguments can be made for supporting a type of agriculture less reliant on energy, technology and Wall Street, and more on soil, communities and people: it’s better for the environment, produces good food and keeps more Main Street businesses open, to name a few. But after reading Jim Van Der Pol’s just-published collection… Read More →
