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Social Sustainability: Fostering Farmer-Focused Communities 

2nd in a Series on LSP's Soil Health Hubs

For soil health practices to be truly sustainable, they must be economically viable, environmentally beneficial, and socially supported. As the first blog in this series illustrates, the Land Stewardship Project’s Soil Health Hubs sit at the intersection of these three “legs of the stool.” “Economic” and “environmental” viability may seem like no-brainers, but why is…  Read More

California Dreaming

A Farm Beginnings Grad Makes a Go of it in an Urban Setting

2025-2026 Farm Beginnings Class LSP is now accepting applications for its 2025-2026 Farm Beginnings class session. For details, click here. ♦ ♦ ♦ By the time Elyssa Eull moved back to Minnesota a few years ago, she already had several years of experience working on vegetable farms. But she felt that in order to successfully…  Read More

Legislative Wrap-Up: A Chaotic Session  Produces Concrete Results

Market Access, Land Access & Soil Health Support Passes 

Give it a Listen Episode 374 of LSP’s Ear to the Ground podcast features a discussion with government relations director Laura Schreiber about how the organization’s priorities fared during the legislative session. ♦ ♦ ♦ As I write this, the regular session of the 2025 Minnesota Legislature wrapped up with some unfinished business, which means…  Read More

Land Line: CAFO Control, Cancer in Farm Country, Nitrates, Soil Health, Farm to School

March 19: An LSP Round-up of News Covering Land, People & Communities

Something Smells With the Feedlot Trend, and it’s More Than Just the Manure 3/16/25 Ron Way, former assistant director of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, writes in the Star Tribune about how factory farms have transformed the landscape in southern and central Minnesota. Highlights: Since the 1970s, backers of large-scale, industrialized livestock production have successfully…  Read More

A Sense of Where You Are: Seeking Signs of Life

Part 4 in a Series

Note: This is the 4th installment in the 12-part “A Sense of Where You Are” series.  Jerry and Nancy Ackermann’s context is this: for around four decades, they have been raising corn and soybeans in southwestern Minnesota’s Jackson County, a region dominated by the kind of flat, fertile fields that regularly churn out impressive yields…  Read More

A Sense of Where You Are: Forest for the Trees

Part 5 in a Series

Note: This is the 5th installment in the 12-part “A Sense of Where You Are” series.  Grazing livestock have been described as “combines that poop.” That’s an accurate, if somewhat graphic, depiction of how moving cattle and other animals through well-managed paddocks can rebuild soil that’s been decimated by tillage, chemical use, and compaction. Langdon…  Read More

A Sense of Where You Are: The Snowball Effect

Part 10 in a Series

Note: This is the 10th installment in the 12-part “A Sense of Where You Are” series.  There’s nothing like getting diminishing returns on your investment in time, labor, and resources to put things in context. “I just got sick and tired of spending money on fertilizer, planting in the dry powder, and watching the soil blow…  Read More

A Sense of Where You Are: 7 Years Later

Part 11 in a Series

Note: This is the 11th installment in the 12-part “A Sense of Where You Are” series.  Be careful who you invite onto the farm, especially if it’s a return visit. Jon and Carin Stevens learned that lesson in late August when a nationally known soil health expert walked their fields and grubbed up some samples…  Read More

Breaking the Meat Processing Bottleneck

Endowed Chair Puts the Right People in the Right Place to Address a Critical Problem

A cornerstone of creating a regenerative agricultural system in the Upper Midwest is reintegrating livestock onto the land in a way that farmers can add value to forages and grains while cycling nutrients in a manner that manure becomes a way to build soil biology, rather than a waste product to be disposed of. Over…  Read More

Ear to the Ground 279: We Are What We Eat

There’s a connection between the biome beneath our feet and the bounty on our table. Allen Williams thinks research linking soil health and nutrient density of food holds huge potential for advancing regenerative agriculture. 4th of 4 episodes in a series: Episode 1 Episode 2 Episode 3 More Information: Allen Williams will be presenting on two southeastern Minnesota farms…  Read More