(In finger2006 photo.)
An 11th generation NH farm, founded in 1632, gets ready to sell, and lists the local food movement as one of the reasons. The reason: as more people grow and sell local vegetables, there’s more competition for market space. Apparently NH is hitting the saturation point where supply has [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Farming’
Local Food Fallout
Local CSAs in the News
“Connection to the Earth is something that every American used to enjoy but has lost. It feeds a person
on many levels to have a direct connection to the place where their food is grown.” –Marthe Levie of Peacefield Farm CSA.
Our friends at Red Acre Farm CSA made the paper this week with a wonderful [...]
The facts about food and farming
“On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of [...]
Farming (and shopping) as environmental indicator
(Image source)
“[F]armers in 1941 wanted high-value grains like wheat and corn that they could sell off the farm, [but] they didn’t yet have the mined and manufactured fertilizers needed to get high yields from those crops. Instead, they colected nutrients from large areas of land using low-value crops like grass and alfalfa, fed them to [...]
Absentee Farmers in Chile
Another glimpse into the past, this time to the fundos of Chile in 1949.
“Almost all of Chile’s arable land is in single great land holdings of 5,000 to 50,000 acres, in vivid contrast to the small farms of North America where the owner and his family do most of the work.”
True perhaps in 1949, but [...]
The Chicken of Today
Made in 1948, this film discusses the post-war program to develop “The Chicken of Tomorrow”– the chickens we buy in stores today. I doubt they realized at the time that the chicken industry would be completely changed, based on mono-crops raised in confined spaces. Already, the methods displayed in the film show chickens confined, unable to [...]
Rural electrification
Made in 1951, this short film produced by the Farm Journal reminds us how different agriculture was just 50 years ago. It shows the bias of its time: that electricity would solve all our problems when in fact gas is much more efficient for heating. Bigger was presumed to be better. And I’m amazed at [...]
My wife’s “new” rifle
(Wiki photo.)
Living where we do, we need to have a rifle behind the door. One day, a pack of wild dogs showed up, headed for our goats. And coyotes occasionally come too close. These are real threats we never had to deal with when we lived in the city. If we’re going to keep animals, [...]
Guide for Beginning Farmers
(LEISA Network photo.).
“At the outset, then, its often best to ‘borrow’ land, to steward the land of some holiday home owners, to gently lease some pastures from an extensive land-owner, ‘beg borrow or steal’ if you have to, or do it as a sideline.”
This is just one pearl of wisdom from the Greenhorns Guide for [...]
