1st of 3 Land Stewardship Project Crop Insurance White Papers Released Today WABASSO, Minn. — The nation’s main federal agricultural program is passing billions of dollars of public money onto a handful of major corporations via a system that lacks accountability and transparency, according to a new white paper released today by the Land Stewardship… Read More →
Cover crops proved themselves foul weather friends during the Great Drought of 2012. A groundbreaking farmer survey conducted in the Upper Mississippi River watershed showed that during that year’s brutal growing season keeping the soil covered with small grains and other plants helped fields preserve enough precious moisture to provide a yield bump of, in… Read More →
The Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) announced yesterday that it will award up to $250,000 in 2014 for on-farm sustainable agriculture research or demonstration projects. That funding amount is good news: it marks a $150,000 increase from previous years. The Sustainable Agriculture Demonstration Grant Program has supported farming innovations in the state for almost a… 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 →
This year Minnesota has taken real steps to put people at the center of our health care system. Most recently, Governor Mark Dayton and the Legislature passed a budget that continues and strengthens MinnesotaCare. Thank you for your calls, e-mails and actions—you made a difference. The final Health and Human Services Budget makes MinnesotaCare more… Read More →
If ever there was a shining example of a smart public investment in our food and farming future, Minnesota’s Sustainable Agriculture Demonstration Grant Program is it. This program has been an important driver of sustainable (and conventional) farming innovations in the state for almost a quarter-century. Farmers who qualify for these competitive grants are able… Read More →
Below is a picture from the close of a thought-provoking, challenging and energizing two-day meeting the Land Stewardship Project hosted this week at our Minneapolis office. Leaders and staff from state-based rural membership organizations representing 10 Midwest and Western states came together in Minnesota and shared our experiences and our analyses related to organizing for… 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 →
On Aug. 28, Land Stewardship Project board member Tex Hawkins spoke to a busload of LSP members and friends who visited a farm near Dodge, Wis., to witness firsthand the effects of frac, or silica, sand mining on a neighboring piece of property. I live in Winona. I’m on the LSP Board now, and have… Read More →
I sat in a farmhouse one afternoon last month as a hot wind lifted rich topsoil from surrounding fields. On the drive in, I’d noticed a surprising amount of rill erosion on newly tilled cropland—surprising because recent rains had not been all that intense and the fields were not unusually steep. Out of the blue… Read More →
