One bright spot in the dust-up over the showing of the film Troubled Waters is that it highlights an important water quality issue: we need more perennial plant cover on… Read more »
Posts Categorized: Food and Sustainable Agriculture
The U’s Shifting Story Line on Troubled Waters
When the University of Minnesota announced late Thursday that the public showing of Troubled Waters was back on as scheduled, officials there were no doubt hoping this week-long PR nightmare… Read more »
Troubled Waters-Troubled U
When the Daily Planet revealed this week that the U of M has pulled the plug on the premiere of an important film about farming and the Mississippi River, it… Read more »
America’s Industrial Drug
I recently called an older Minnesota dairy farmer in an attempt to track down a young guy he had been mentoring the past couple of years. It seemed the phone… Read more »
Making Community Gardens Feel at Home
By Megan Smith How many times have you wandered through a community garden and noticed its beautiful smells, creative architecture, stunning colors and abundant produce? Each garden is a wonderful… Read more »
Humble Pie Summer
For me, this has turned out to be the Summer of the Humble Expert. While conducting interviews for various articles and podcasts the past few months, I’ve run into a… Read more »
Introducing the Free Market to Animal Ag
In June the USDA released a proposed rule to bolster the ability of the federal government to protect farmers against abuses by corporate meatpackers—in other words, inject a little free-market… Read more »
6,000 Questions About Atrazine
When defending the safety of one of the most widely used weed killers in North America, Syngenta often cites the fact that some 6,000 studies provide “overwhelming” evidence that atrazine… Read more »
Son of the Soil
What can be more iconic than an image of a farmer holding soil? But when I took the photo featured below, it was more than a symbol—it was visual proof… Read more »
When a Farmland Spring Gives Up its Secrets
I find springs—those places where groundwater exposes itself to the sunlight of its own accord—fascinating. There’s something special about seeing firsthand an entity that’s recently been lurking underground in dark… Read more »