Much Ado About Kernza
Have we been doing agriculture all wrong? It’s an important question to ask these days, as questions about the sustainability of traditional farming bulk large. We need to double food productivity and streamline distribution networks if we’re to meet the growing needs...
How Sustainable is SUSTAIN?
It was a corporate initiative supporters claimed could mainstream sustainable agriculture. Now critics are wondering how much impact it’s really having. When Land O’ Lakes, the dairy giant, announced SUSTAIN, an ambitious program designed to reduce nitrogen-based...
How Fires in the Amazon Will Affect Farmers in the Midwest
It’s an adage among ecologists: everything living is connected. What happens to one biological population has what economists might call a multiplier effect, cascading down a chain of causes and effects to shape the lives of other biological populations in far-flung...
Farming off the Grid
Everyone knows farms draw a lot of energy to run. While power costs usually comprise only 2% of farms’ overhead, that’s still $10,000+ annually in costs. There’s significant variation depending on what commodities the land produces. If you raise cattle, that median...
5 Ways to Fix Mass Food Production
Though it’s bigger than ever, the industrial food complex is under heavy criticism these days. Environmentalists fault it for chemical runoff, biodiversity loss, and depletion of water and soil. Animal rights activists decry squalid conditions inside factory farms....
Brace Yourselves. Severe Weather Is Getting Even More Extreme.
Talk with any group of farmers, and conversation will eventually turn to the weather. That’s not just a convention of polite conversation. It’s a staple of discussion because farmers look to the skies for, well, everything. Even tiny fluctuations -- too many...
Are Ag Science Degrees Still Worth the Investment?
The current generation of farmers stands among the most well-educated group ever to take up the plow. According to a recent USDA survey, almost a quarter of all active farmers have earned undergraduate degrees. Among new farmers, the proportion of the degreed eclipses...
5 Key Challenges for Organic Farmers
So you want to become an organic farmer? You’re not alone. In fact, you’re part of a trending practice that’s worth billions of dollars. Analysts have pegged industry growth among organic farms at just over 6%. That may not sound too impressive until you realize that...
Agroforestry as Triage: How Trees Are Healing Soil
Many of the famines that have plagued Africa over the past four decades have not come because of lack of rain, but because of deteriorating soil quality. That claim runs counter to the conventional wisdom spun everywhere from media outlets to political commentary. Yet...
6 Alternative Revenue Sources for Farmers
Many farmers struggle to meet their financial obligations relying on traditional cropping and livestock husbandry. That’s necessitating the search for alternative sources of revenue generation. If you already do that, you’re not alone. Nearly half the 687,000 farming...