It’s been a pretty eventful summer, so much so that actual blog updates were the ones who suffered from neglect the most. So in the interest of catching up, for starters, our endangered butterfly habitat were recently showcased on the Farm Service Agency’s blog. And, as Val mentioned, we were recently awarded Yamhill Conservation Landowner [...]

Last summer we installed our ram pump to get us more water for the farm. Our well pump recently failed, which drove me to write up the details of this recent project. Our property is split by 4 seasonal creeks, one of which is nearly perennial. Work in the past has focused on increasing the [...]

A sad loss happened this past solstice for our farm…Rich’s grandma, Lorene, died. While failing health meant that she had only been to the farm once, she was always a source for inspiration and support for us, and she will be missed greatly. Some photos and her eulogy follow, for ours, and genealogy’s sake. While [...]

(Part 1 is here) One of the downsides of managing a property that has been abused in the past is dealing with erosion issues. But, as the old saying goes, crisis = opportunity. Our property was overgrazed heavily in past years, to the point that some of the wet areas were eroded over 10 feet [...]

This started out as a single post, but I just kept rambling, so I’ll be dividing it into 2 parts: a background on erosion in general, and gullies in particular, followed by part 2, actions that we’re doing here on the farm to mitigate their impacts. Comments are appreciated A gully is a response that [...]

The NY Times has an article on the lack of processing facilities that is impacting small farms. We’re lucky here to have a few options for mobile (“Custom”) harvest facilities, but we still fret about the threat of our primary one (Frontier Custom Cutting) deciding to quit. Still, at least we’re not obligated to drive [...]

A while back we made contact with a woman who grew up on our property in the 1950s.  Renee was kind enough to share some pictures, and I’ve finally gotten around to scanning a couple of them, as well as found the approximate point that they were taken from in order to do a photopoint [...]

As the last post indicated, food security is a pretty compelling issue in the US, and the Northwest in particular. For a state that is awash in good farmland with which to grow enough food to feed all of us, a series of socioeconomic and cultural conditions prevents the food from getting from where it’s [...]

Via Resilience Science, who got it from Edible Geography(with excellent commentary) comes a new project of the USDA…the Food Environment Atlas. It’s a pretty fascinating tool…pounds of meat consumed per capita per year, access to grocery stores, WIC redemptions (pictured), and farmer’s markets are available down to the county level. We spent a good chunk [...]

I wish I had that tractor for the 3500 trees that we planted a few years ago Extreme Tree Planting – Trees for Earth from Peter Hill on Vimeo.