In October, I told the Minnesota House Environment, Natural Resources and Agriculture Finance Committee that we had begun to listen to our farm, an assertion lawmakers heard with some surprise. The occasion was testimony around the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s presentation of its “Nitrogen in Minnesota Surface Waters” report, which showed among other things that…  Read More →

On a recent August evening in south-central North Dakota, soil scientist Kristine Nichols laid out what I like to call the “purebred vs. the plugger” approach to farming. “With healthy soil, you may not out-yield your neighbor in the best years, but you will out perform them in the not-so-good years,” said Nichols, a soil…  Read More →

Gardeners at Hope Community in the Phillips Community of South Minneapolis have been working hard this week to prepare soil and create a design for the urban agriculture space that has come to be known as the “2012 Garden,” in honor of its address at 2012 Oakland Avenue. The 2012 Garden has gone through many…  Read More →

What with farmland changing hands at price levels that would make a Beverly Hills realtor blanch, one could be forgiven for jumping to an obvious conclusion: Farm Country is flush with cash these days. Indeed, based on pure numbers, the statistics are impressive. Midwestern farmland values increased 16 percent in 2012, the third largest gain…  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 →

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 →

At a time when we’re all scanning the dark horizon of recession land for any economic spark, local food systems look to be a flare-up that’s got some staying power. The past several weeks have been full of signs that both in Minnesota and nationally producing and consuming food in our own collective backyard isn’t…  Read More →

While spending time in western Minnesota’s Big Stone County recently, I came across a lot of talk about food deserts—those places where people don’t have good access to healthy, affordable food. But while interviewing LSP organizer Rebecca Terk for this week’s podcast, an interesting twist emerged: a type of food desert can exist even when…  Read More →