2025-2026 Farm Beginnings Class LSP is now accepting applications for its 2025-2026 Farm Beginnings class session. For details, click here. ♦ ♦ ♦ In a sense, when the brothers Andy and Ben Klein enrolled in the Land Stewardship Project’s Farm Beginnings course in 2023, it was a return engagement for at least one of them.… Read More →
Note: The Land Stewardship Project’s Ear to the Ground podcast recently featured an interview with Marvin Johnson, a Minnesota farmer and president of the Alumni Association for the School of Agriculture at the University of Minnesota. Johnson discussed the history and the future of the Endowed Chair in Agricultural Systems. For three decades, the Endowed… Read More →
How critical is nitrogen to raising corn in the Midwest? Well, consider the fact that farmers feel compelled to pay for it, even at a time when the war with Iran is sending prices to dizzying heights during the 2026 planting season. The agronomic value of nitrogen became clear during a special oversight hearing held… Read More →
Back in 1998, I was working on an article for the Land Stewardship Letter about how the lack of biodiversity in agriculture was threatening the agronomic, ecological, and economic future of Midwestern farming communities. One of the people I interviewed was Don Wyse, a respected University of Minnesota plant scientist who had recently helped coordinate… Read More →
Farmers Battle Saturated Soils with More Roots in the Ground To Tom Cotter, the various natural resources his farming operation relies on don’t operate in a vacuum. Rather, they have a relational quality — the role one resource plays in keeping his business viable depends on how it interacts with other resources. For example, rain… Read More →
On a warm day in early October, the owner-operators of Clover Bee Farm are preparing a delivery for the 43 shareholders that make up their Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) vegetable operation. Standing in a hoop house, Andrew Hanson-Pierre cleans dozens of fat onions, while across the farmyard in a barn that’s been converted to a… Read More →
The State of Iowa is on the verge of eliminating one of the nation’s leading centers of sustainable agriculture research and innovation. The Iowa Legislature’s vote to defund and close the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture comes at a time when the work of the 30-year-old institution is, in many ways, just beginning. It was… Read More →
Early this morning, the Minnesota Legislature took a major step toward supporting the kind of agriculture that can green up our landscape in a way that’s economically viable for farmers. Conference committee negotiations produced $1 million for Forever Green, an innovative University of Minnesota research initiative involving cover crops and perennial plant systems. Funding for… Read More →
I talked to a Todd County farmer yesterday who uses 100 percent no-till and other conservation measures to raise his crops. Conserving soil is important to him, and so he’s quite upset at how mobile humus has been on neighboring farms this fall/early winter. “You know that little skiff of snow we got the other… Read More →
Last week, the “Increasing Land Access, Security, and Opportunities (LASO) Act” was introduced in the U.S. Senate, championed by Minnesota Senator Tina Smith. If enacted, this innovative bill, via the 2023 Farm Bill, would fund powerful, community-led solutions to the land access crisis faced by the new generation of young and Black farmers, Indigenous farmers, and… Read More →
