Browse Topics
Agriculture
Sunbeams
October 2012Country things are the necessary root of our life — and that remains true even of a rootless and tragically urban civilization. To live permanently away from the country is a form of slow death.
Sowing Dissent
Lunatic Farmer Joel Salatin Digs In
A farm should be aesthetically, aromatically, and sensuously appealing. It should be a place that is attractive, not repugnant, to the senses. This is food production. A farm shouldn’t be producing ugly things. It should be producing beautiful things. We’re going to eat them.
October 2012
Anhydrous
Our father was blind for five days. He pawed the walls as he felt his way around the house. The television stayed turned up loud, as if the chemicals that had burned his eyes had also scorched his hearing.
October 2012
The First Year
Largely because of a dog named Fred, who despised hats and joggers and anything that his unknowable mind deemed suspicious, Mateusz and I rented a farmhouse north of Toronto in the summer of 2010.
October 2012
At Home On The Range
When I met Randy Livingston in 2000, I was making the long drive from California back to my home state of Minnesota and had stopped in the mountains of Utah to go for a run. On a quiet gravel road three miles from the highway, I found myself face to face with a cowboy on a horse and a couple of dogs trailing behind. He invited me back to his small camper trailer for a cup of coffee.
October 2012
Detroit As Barn
Gone the hay. Gone the tools. Gone the morning work. / Over there a tractor rusts. Gone the cows, goats, / the slack-tongued mule.
February 2011Farmed Out
Wes Jackson On The Need To Reinvent Agriculture
We must turn our attention to the water and the soil and ask, “How do we insure that the bread we eat does not come from grains that are grown in eroding soil and that load our water with nitrogen and pesticides?” Soon people will realize that annuals are poor managers of soil nutrients and water, and that agriculture will need to turn to perennials to better manage those resources.
October 2010
Grandpa’s Vessel
Before he developed Alzheimer’s, my grandfather was stern and taciturn, but after the plaque started to build up around his synapses, he turned into a different man, and in many ways a better one. He started to laugh at things, like the way one of our pigs would chew bubble gum, or how the barn kittens played in the hay.
August 2010
Prophet Of Modest Profit
Woody Tasch On How Not To Get Rich Quick
We use the power of entrepreneurship but support the entrepreneurs who design businesses to solve social and environmental problems and are committed to bioregions and communities. I’m especially interested in agriculture as a place to create that change. We’re not investing enough in small-scale, organic agriculture. Rapid economic growth has created tons of cheap food with a long shelf life, but it’s destroyed family farms, which are vital to rebuilding and preserving soil fertility.
June 2010
After All This Is Over
We got dressed up to go to the courthouse. It was strange to be out of school, and even stranger to be heading off to appear before a judge to prove that our family was broke, but our mother insisted we kids come along. My brother and I sported polyester suit coats handed down from our cousins in Terre Haute, and the girls wore the same dresses they had worn for our grandparents’ funerals.
June 2010
