Minnesota Sands Announces Intentions to Target Fillmore & Winona Counties for More Mining The Minnesota Environmental Quality Board (EQB) made the right decision May 21 by tabling the issue of taking a Houston County mine out of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) ordered on the multi-site Minnesota Sands, LLC, frac sand mining project. Thus, the…  Read More →

With a single phrase, we can put conservation to work on rented land. And that would have a major impact from a landscape point of view: more than half the crops in Minnesota and Iowa alone are produced on rented acres, and every one of them could be saving soil, water, habitat and money with…  Read More →

A three-hour drive separates the rolling hills of Minnesota’s Douglas County from the front steps of the Bell Museum of Natural History. But a year after the controversy over Troubled Waters—the Bell’s Emmy award-winning film on farmland pollution in the Mississippi River basin—brought words like “dead zone,” hypoxia” and “nitrogen fertilizer” to the attention of…  Read More →

Local Control & Environmental Review Stay Strong Despite Attacks; Some Gains for Sustainable Ag Research & Beginning Farmer Land Access The 2017 session of the Minnesota Legislature was highlighted by a tough fight over corporate agriculture’s push to make it easier for factory farms to force their way into communities. Corporate ag and its supporters…  Read More →

On a blustery late summer day, Jan Libbey and Tim Landgraf hike through a waist-high prairie to the top of a dramatic knob on their farm in north-central Iowa. As they stand amongst big bluestem, Indian grass and switchgrass, corn and soybean fields flow in every direction, the monocultural landscape broken up only by a…  Read More →

When Nathan Vergin applied to work as an apprentice on Polyface Farm in Virginia back in the mid-2000s, he had to undergo a three-day “working interview.” Vergin, who grew up helping out on a sheep dairy near Northfield, Minn., passed the trial by fire, and went on to serve a two-year apprenticeship with the farm’s…  Read More →

The Land Stewardship Project works for solutions to the healthcare crisis in rural Minnesota because we know that lack of affordable, high-quality care is a major barrier to having thriving rural communities with more farmers on the land. We are pleased to see that Governor Tim Walz and Lt. Governor Peggy Flanagan’s proposed Budget for…  Read More →