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"Farming Commune" by Dorothy Day THE CATHOLIC WORKER farm at Easton has finished its third summer with bulging barns. These are the pleasantest days of all the year down in the country with trees turning to flaming gold and red and the sunlight like liquid honey. The nights are cold so that more blankets are […]

We received this email from the blog reader: We need a FARMER to join our staff and write from the vantage point of someone whose life’s work is to bring food from earth to market. Topics will include farming, agriculture, wild foraging / cultivation, and permaculture. You Are Ideally: - Active, non-industrial farmer versed in […]

A great article recently published in Solutions. Pasture Cropping: A Regenerative Solution from Down Under  By Courtney White Since the late 1990s, Australian farmer Colin Seis has been successfully planting a cereal crop into perennial pasture on his sheep farm during the dormant period using no-till drilling, a method that uses a drill to sow […]

Nearly Half of All US Farms Now Have Superweeds By Tom Philpott, Wed Feb. 6, 2013 for Mother Jones Last year's drought took a big bite out of the two most prodigious US crops, corn and soy. But it apparently didn't slow down the spread of weeds that have developed resistance to Monsanto's herbicide Roundup […]

http://mannlib.cornell.edu/collections/digital-collections a good sideshow for seed ordering and sorting !

"Local Food a Growing Trend for Land Trusts" By Erik Hoffner / February 2013 Grist guest contributor  When a land trust in Grayslake, Illinois, made a strategic decision in 2005 to include farmland in its list of property types to preserve, it joined scores of traditional ‘woods and waters’ trusts across the U.S. which are increasingly preserving […]

NPR: Farmer's Fight with Monsanto Reaches the Supreme Court NYTimes: Farmer's Supreme Court Challenge Puts Monsanto Patents at Risk And this from The Chronicle of Higher Education: In Standing Up for Big Ag, Are Universities Undercutting Their Own Researchers? "Some two dozen research universities and higher-education organizations, including the Association of Public and Land-Grant Universities […]

Entrepreneurs Take to the Seas for Inspiration By Eric Tyler, New America Foundation What happens when you mix 11 budding startups with Google executives, Stanford professors, a Nobel Peace Laureate and 600 college students and put them on a ship to circumnavigate the world? An experiment launched this month called Unreasonable at Sea hopes that […]

Because that farmer is all alone out there facing a MEGA corporation with fangs. In a front page story on Saturday, the Post writes up a case that might go to the Supreme Court about a farmer who planted surplus seed from a grain elevator and is being sued by Monsanto, because some of it […]

By Danielle Davis / February 5, 2013 via Seedstock.com Employing web-based social networking technology to simulate old school neighbor-to-neighbor information share, Farm Hack is a farmer-driven, collaborative project that develops, builds, documents and shares tools for resilient, small-scale agriculture. The secret behind it all is its use of an open source web platform that allows users to edit […]

By Jeremy Rifkin October 22, 2012 via The Commons Magazine "Medieval European agriculture was communally organized. Peasants pooled their individual holdings into open fields that were jointly cultivated, and common pastures were used to graze their animals.This system of village commons prospered for more than six hundred years at the base of the feudal pyramid, […]

Shannon Hayes, Sap Bush Hollow Farm 22 January 2013 Dear Friends; As some of you are aware, I trekked out to Wisconsin this past weekend to speak at a farming conference. While there, I had the opportunity to witness first-hand the impact the latest monoculture corn craze is having on farmers who are putting land stewardship […]

The Agricultural Fulcrum: Better Food, Better Climate By Diana Donlon for The Atlantic The National Climate Assessment, released this week, predicted increasingly negative impact of weather extremes on crops. But with industrialized farming as a key player in greenhouse gas emissions and climate change, the vicious cycle needs breaking. This past year treated us to […]

Fiscal Cliff Deal A Disaster for New England Farmers Shelburne Falls, MA – January 3, 2013 New England farmers received a sour New Year’s surprise when a short-term extension of the 2008 farm bill was attached and passed along with the fiscal cliff deal.  The terms of the deal originated with Minority Leader of the Senate, […]

Here are some meditations on OPENSOURCE by Dorn Cox of Greenstart NH-- a key leader of Farmhack. Here are some meditations on OPENSOURCE by Dorn Cox of Greenstart NH-- a key leader of Farmhack. "So many of the next steps we have talked about are around improving the value for the participant in farm hack, […]

we're diggin the story about farmhack AND civil eats' swanky new website! check 'em both out here: http://civileats.com/2012/03/20/farmhack-diy-farmer-collaboration/  

By Michael Prager for the Boston Globe GLOBE CORRESPONDENT DECEMBER 03, 2012 GROTON — Susan and Paul Shay bought their four-acre dream spread years ago, with the idea of returning some of the land to farming. But other than for a brief period of being leased to hay farmers, the land had lain fallow for […]

Quinoa Craze Inspires North America To Start Growing Its Own by Alastair Bland The explosion in world popularity of quinoa in the past six years has quadrupled prices at retail outlets. But for all the demand from upscale grocery stores in America to keep their bulk bins filled with the ancient grain-like seed, almost no […]

How Can Urban Agriculture Go From Niche To Food System? Everyone loves a story of a plucky urban farm, but what steps do we have to take to make them a vital and integral part of how we feed our cities? by Ariel Schwartz There are few upsides to the U.S. recession that left people across […]

Setting fires and spraying thousands of gallons of milk to protest unsustainable milk prices. Prices which are lower than the cost of production. Europe Milk Quota Protest: Police Sprayed With Thousands Of Litres Of Fresh Milk   Here in The United States, we cannot even pass the Farm Bill

On Friday November 16, 2012, the University of California (UC) razed all of the publicly planted crops on the Gill Tract. Occupy the Farm is disappointed that the UC has unneccessarily destroyed the hard work of the community and food that could have fed it. Over the course of the last month, members of the […]

The Death of Farmbrain by Amy Halloran These days, everyone seems to enjoy tending chickens and eating local. But lifestyles are rarely ways of life, and the grain that goes into our daily bread is still easiest to obtain from giant operations. Visiting a dying small farm shows why. Read the article here.

by Cathy Stanton. Where slow food meets slow knowledge I shed 40 pounds this week, and it feels great. The weight was in the files and materials from the Ethnographic Landscape Study that I’ve been working on for the last three years for Martin Van Buren National Historic Site.  The project is now officially finished, […]

The Staff and the Board of the Quivira Coalition are very pleased to announce a major leadership transition. On November 1, 2012, the Board formally appointed Avery C. Anderson as Quivira’s new Executive Director! Courtney will assume the title of Founder and Creative Director and will focus on fundraising, writing and outreach activities. This transition is […]

Prop 37 Defeat Reveals a “Food Movement” that Is Still Half Baked by Jason Mark – November 8, 2012 Good food partisans have much work to do to build a movement infrastructure A scant three weeks before election day, Michael Pollan, writing in the New York Times Magazine, opined that the vote on California Proposition […]

on seeds... Surin Declaration: First Global Encounter on Agroecology and Peasant Seeds November 6 -12, 2012; Surin, Thailand (Photos os the First Global Encounter on Agroecology and Peasant Seeds) La Via Campesina International delegates, representing our regional member organizations, are meeting in Surin province of Thailand in Asia to have the First Global Encounter on […]

Greece's New Farmers by Victoria Bouloubasis for The Huffington Post [vimeo http://vimeo.com/50199525] Popular perception of Greece teeters between two extremes. One is based on serene, mystic island landscapes and a carefree gusto for life. The other extreme, the most present, is a daunting and glaring depiction of a dire economic crisis rife with violent civil […]

and the role they play in generating the next generation, from liberal arts to technical colleges. http://www.kentuckypress.com/live/title_detail.php?titleid=2625

Seriously. VOTE! The Last Four Years: Change at the USDA Many of us with interests in agricultural and food policy issues have felt a little left out during the Presidential campaign. The candidates have not talked much at all about agricultural or food policy. Yet, it is one area of distinct change that came with […]

michael pollan dishes it out this week in NYTIMES -- read it here: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/14/magazine/why-californias-proposition-37-should-matter-to-anyone-who-cares-about-food.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

Via the Organic Seed Alliance: There shall be at the seat of government a Department of Agriculture, the general design and duties of which shall be to acquire and to diffuse among the people of the United States useful information on subjects connected with agriculture, rural development, aquaculture, and human nutrition, in the most general […]

After Graduating From College, It’s Time to Plow, Plant and Harvest RED HOOK, N.Y. — It was harvest time, and several farm hands were hunched over a bed of sweet potatoes under the midday sun, elbow deep in soil for $10 an hour. But they were not typical laborers. Jeff Arnold, 28, who has learned […]

{scaling up the northeast grain system} Wild Hive Editor’s Note: Our monthly local-grain-love-fest with Amy Halloran is back with the 8th installment in her Scaling Up The Northeast Grain System series. You can read her previous seven pieces here. In this installment, Amy comes full circle and visits the mill & bakery where her gain-love began. […]

By JULIA MOSKIN NY Times. Published: September 11, 2011 OLD ORCHARD BEACH, Me. -- THE first time the Food and Drug Administration sent an inspector to check out the dairy operation at Kate’s Homemade Butter, things did not go well. “The guy wouldn’t even get out of his car,” said Daniel Patry, the company’s good-humored founder. “He refused […]

Mitt Romney, Monsanto Man Wayne Barrett September 12, 2012 Though Mitt Romney has been campaigning for president since 2006, it’s alarming how little is known about critical chapters of his business biography. Nothing spells that out more clearly than his ties to Monsanto—the current target of a mid-September Occupy nationwide action—whose dark history features scandals […]

Andrea Damewood Columbian Staff Reporter Saturday, June 30, 2012 YACOLT -- To see Dan Swansey perched atop a plow working the land, making soft clicking sounds to encourage his two Belgian draft horses, is to immediately be transported to farming's past. There's no tractor, there's no exhaust. Instead, there's Bud and Charlie, plodding through the […]

A Banker Bets on Organic Farming By MARK BITTMAN It’s unlikely that large-scale changes in the so-called food system will happen without movement on the part of big investors. Sadly, most of these — like the corporations they support — take short-term, profit-maximizing views. (This, along with enthusiastic dabblers, is the basic reason we have […]

Falls Church, VA, Aug. 27, 2012 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) – On July 31 Armand and Teddi Bechard entered into a consent agreement with the State of Missouri, ending a case that began in 2009. On two occasions in the spring of 2009, undercover agents from the Springfield-Greene County Health Department allegedly purchased raw milk at the Bechard’s central delivery point, a health food […]

A recent talk given by John Ikerd -- professor emeritus and sustainable agriculture visionary. Read more of his MANY works: http://www.johnikerd.com) "I believe that to live and work on a good farm is pleasant as well as challenging; for I know the joys and discomforts of farm life and hold an inborn fondness for those […]

New campaign finance reports reveal that Monsanto Co. just contributed $4.2 million to defeat Proposition 37, which would require labeling of genetically engineered food.  That is the largest contribution in the race.  Total contributions to defeat Proposition 37 amount to $25 million, and nearly $23 million during the last week. Other major new contributions against Proposition 37 were given by E. […]