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 [...]

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 found an article from a couple weeks back in the Oregonian about efforts by farmers’ markets to encourage low-income shoppers. I thought it was an interesting article which highlighted the fact that while use of food stamps is up dramatically at several area markets, some markets are having a tough time getting low income [...]

I was invited to speak at the InFARMation (and Beer!) gathering next Tuesday evening. Friends of Family Farmers has been hosting these events since the start of the year. I’ll be talking about our nearly 10 years of experience raising animals, options for consumers who choose to opt out of purchasing factory-farmed meat, and challenges [...]

Joel Salatin is gearing up for the media push for the movie Food, Inc, which I read somewhere is going to be a combination of Omnivore’s Dilemma and Fast Food Nation. That should be fun This is just a quick Chelsea Green clip of him speaking recently I’m a little skeptical of Joel’s energy analysis…tripling [...]

Mother Jones has an interesting article about farmers markets in its March/April edition. The article’s thesis is that farmers markets may not be all they are cracked up to be, and that the food that customers are buying at farmers markets may be overpriced versions of exactly the same produce (even grown by the same [...]

The US Dept of Health and Human Services recently conducted a study on food source traceability (thanks to the Oregon Independent blog for the tip-off about this study), and found that they could only trace 12.5% of the items. Wow. To turn that figure around, they couldn’t identify the source of 87.5% of the foods [...]

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, [...]

From Good Stuff NW: One of your elderly neighbors said, “It’s either buy food or take your medicine. It’s a real hard choice.” You can choose to listen, or you can ignore them. But these are real Oregonians facing real choices, and it’s time for those of us who can to take real steps to [...]