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.

Allan Savory of the Holistic Management Institute spoke recently in Ireland…the full video sat in my browser for a couple of weeks until the holiday madness subsided. Things have calmed down a bit, finally. Here’s an exerpted version

Allan Savory – EXTRACTS – Keeping Cattle: cause or cure for climate crisis? from Feasta on [...]

With the Copenhagen climate talks stuttering along, it seems like past time to throw in some quick comments
The effect of livestock on greenhouse gas emissions are often overrated, if not entirely exaggerated
Pasture is part of the solution to the carbon issue
Some farms are doing it right
And the systems exist to fix the problem
OK, seriously, I [...]

Our friend Clare was interviewed on KBOO recently along with Joel Salatin…quite a coup. I found it especially interesting to hear Joel talk about the massive gullies that were on his land when his family arrived there, since we are dealing with similar legacies of past land abuses.
They talk about land, farm [...]

Wow, it’s been a long time since we posted. Spring will do that.
Fortunately, Time magazine comes through with something, so we don’t have to. Their new issue has an article on buying beef by the quarter, conveniently, the same way we sell it. A surprisingly well done piece.

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 [...]

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% [...]

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 [...]

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 a [...]