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. [...]

Hello, and welcome to Mossbackfarm.com 2.0.  !  We’re officially at our 5 year blog anniversary, so it seemed like a good time for a change of scene. Actually, it’s not so much a change of scene, because we tried to keep with the same general theme as our original blog, but the engine that powered [...]