Web roundup
Want to know what I’m reading about agriculture, food, and sustainability? Well this periodic post is the place to find out: Kajabi on the old wise farmer Treehugger on exploding pig barns The New York...
View ArticleSome thoughts on bureaucrats, school lunches, and the lies we tell ourselves
Bureaucrats tend to obfuscate the truth with words, and far too often, people fall for the resulting lie. Take school lunches as an example. As recently evidenced by the whole debacle over the...
View ArticleNon-industrial farming as a vow of poverty
I had an interesting conversation with someone the other day that included the idea that the other person would be interested in farming as a career except for the vow of poverty. At the time, I...
View ArticleSome thoughts on the future of agriculture
Yesterday on Facebook, I posted a link to an article on Grist about urban farming. The point of the article was that urban farming is not a panacea for our food production ills, and I made the argument...
View ArticleHay season
A couple of times a year, I mow lots of grass. Not in the $40-billion-make-my-lawn-look-like-a-golf-course sort of way, but in the make food for animals sort of way. We mow and bale about 30 acres of...
View ArticleFive years on: Disasters, reevaluations, and the straight and narrow
There are few things like a disaster of one’s own making to cause one to reevaluate. We’ve had more than a few disasters, big and small, since we came back to Innisfree on the Stillwater. They kind of...
View ArticleNot for the faint of heart
There are days that I understand why people don’t want to be farmers. It’s not a job for the faint of heart. Certainly, I’m making a judgment call here, but the fact is when your livelihood relies on...
View ArticleAnd so much more…
I’ve discovered over the past five years that people have huge preconceptions about what being a farmer means. I know, coming in, I had all sorts of them, and I know I am surrounded by fellow farmers...
View ArticleOn animals and worldviews
I suspect that one of the driving forces of the greatest changes in society over the past 100 years versus the past several millenia has been specific movement of people away from caring for food...
View ArticleSwinging for the fences
The one part of our farming adventure at Innisfree on the Stillwater that has dogged us since the beginning is the fact that we have continued to lease our 100 acres of tillage ground, mostly for the...
View ArticleA state of mind
For me, the biggest downside of farming is that my health doesn’t always agree with it, mostly in the form of sometimes debilitating allergies. People often ask me why I keep doing it knowing that I...
View ArticleTaming a tangled wilderness
We’re unusually free with sharing our successes and failures here at Innisfree on the Stillwater, a fact that is intentional and purposeful rather than naive and dramatic. You see, our desire, along...
View ArticlePlease excuse the mess
Really, it’s more of a metaphorical mess as we go about the business of steering the beast that is Innisfree on the Stillwater in a new direction. What does that direction look like? Well, we’re now...
View ArticleFarming in the age of COVID-19
The past couple of months has been a strange time here at Innisfree, as I know it has been for everyone during this time of social isolation and pandemic outbreak. What’s been strangest for us is how...
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