Since the 2023 session of the Minnesota Legislature ended last May, Land Stewardship Project members have been celebrating our historic wins and preparing to build upon them during the 2024 session, which begins Monday, Feb. 12. This past summer and fall, LSP organizers engaged in hundreds of one-to-one and group conversations with LSP members, supporters,… Read More →
An Innovative Farming System Requires Innovative Training One sign that you’re a solid employee is that the boss hates the idea of you walking out the door, never to return. So let’s consider the case of Ryan Heinen, who has worked on the west-central Minnesota dairy farm of Nate and Angie Walter for the past… Read More →
Note: This is the 12th installment in the 12-part “A Sense of Where You Are” series. In case Allen and Kathleen Deutz need a reminder of one of the main reasons corn dominates the landscape in their part of southwestern Minnesota, they need to look no further than the massive Archer-Daniels-Midland ethanol plant that rises to… Read More →
There’s a bit of a disagreement over how many enterprises were originally on a certain wish list when Hannah Frank and Justin Thomas were considering launching a farm. “Didn’t we have, like, 40 different enterprises on our goal sheet?” Thomas asks Frank on an overcast day in July while the couple stands next to a… Read More →
A Shared Threat Prompts a Shared Vision for a New Farm As the land auction progressed, it looked like the parcel was on its way to exchanging hands at a decent price. But the landowner grew increasingly anxious about the guy who was likely to get the highest bid—he was a well-known owner of large-scale… Read More →
Unearthing the Links Between Soil Health, Farm Profits & Water Quality Building soil health may be about bugs, bacteria, and biology, but justifying farming practices that nurture such a natural process often comes down to a human-generated gauge of success: how much money does it put (or keep) in the bank? On a sunny day… Read More →
As last week’s Congressional Research Service report on bee health makes clear, the crisis plaguing pollinators is not a single, big bad bogey man. It’s likely a combination of factors such as habitat loss, pesticide poisoning, introduced diseases and the stress of making domesticated honey bees the insect equivalent of migrant workers. That’s the bad… Read More →
When I heard that Land Stewardship Project board member Loretta Jaus was being recognized by the White House this week as a “Champion of Change for Sustainable and Climate-Smart Agriculture,” I couldn’t think of a more deserving recipient. From the first time almost a decade ago that I visited the western Minnesota dairy operation she… 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 →
The Land Stewardship Project, sustainable agriculture and family farming lost a true friend this week when Dan Specht was killed in a tragic farm accident. He was 63. (See obituary here.) Dan, who farmed above the banks of the Mississippi River near McGregor, in northeast Iowa, had been a pioneer in innovative, sustainable farming methods… Read More →
