Minnesota’s state leaders have the power and responsibility to act in the best interest of all Minnesotans, as well as our water and land. We rely on our state to ensure we have safe water to drink, clean air to breathe, and healthy land to pass down to the next generation. But right now, Big…  Read More →

Reimagining Farm Policy that Puts People, Communities & the Land First The energy has been incredible. Over the past two months the federal policy team at the Land Stewardship Project has been holding Farm Bill listening meetings in Minnesota to discuss the upcoming 2018 Farm Bill. The central question has been: “What would make the…  Read More →

It’s that age-old struggle: accepting a little short-term disturbance in the name of long-term stability. Dave Trauba regularly faces the challenge of explaining that tradeoff to hunters who visit the Lac Qui Parle Wildlife Refuge in western Minnesota only to find their favorite spot for shooting pheasants has recently been grazed by cattle from a…  Read More →

As a Nature Conservancy scientist based in a Midwestern state, Steve Chaplin thinks a lot about the impact agriculture has on ecological treasures such as native tallgrass prairie. “Other than plowing, grazing has probably been responsible for the degradation of more prairie than any other source,” says Chaplin, who is in the Conservancy’s Minnesota field…  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 →

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 →