I saw this link a while back, and finally found an hour to watch the video… The Oil Drum also has a good commentary on it…the comments there are always worth a visit.

In more Soylandia news, farmers who illegally planted genetically modified Roundup Ready soybeans are now going back to conventional soy after finding that the Monsanto product gave poor yields. Unfortunately, the final paragraph is the stomach-sinker: “Companies have been focusing their research on GMO soy more than on conventional ones. So in 10 years we [...]

Here’s a link to our 2009 newsletter, with recipes, musings, and our plans for the year. Enjoy! (note that we’ve heard of some problems opening the PDF with old versions of Adobe Reader. If you have problems, update your software for free here)

In the vein of What is a small farmer, Yes magazine has a short profile of a series of new young farmers

Time to dredge up the past again. There’s been another surge of interest by several Oregon farmers to get into growing some of their own grain for feed. No wonder, as feed prices have more than doubled since we started doing chickens, and while the commodity insanity of the last year is taking a breather, [...]

Following up on my mention of the new USDA Secretary Tom Vilsack, and Scott’s comment therein, there’s some additional, more promising news on Vilsack’s new tenure. This article talks about Vilsack’s newfound progressive take on the future of agriculture, acknowledging the importance of food to all Americans.  Not so different than Nicolas Kristof’s call for [...]

The weather has been pretty fascinating these days…last week, we got our annual February banana belt, with sun and highs around 60.  This week, it’s still warm-ish, but there’s a lot of rain showers to be dodged. Some farm views these days…click for bigger fence in progress 3 year old planting is looking like a [...]

Melissa has a good post up on financing a startup farm. When you add it to Katie’s financial post and our rundown of starting a farm, beginning farmers can get a pretty good dose of the realities of making it happen.

Following up on my post a month or so ago on Oregon State’s flawed farm to school study, the Oregonian today has an article that basically reiterates all of my points.  Nice to see that that the media can come through for us on these things.

To hear Senator Pat Roberts (R Kansas) tell it, a small family farmer: is about 5′2″…and he’s a retired airline pilot and sits on his porch on a glider reading Gentleman’s Quarterly — he used to read the Wall Street Journal but that got pretty drab — and his wife works as stock broker downtown. [...]