Featured Posts
The Last Chapter Made it to HuffPo
You may already know that for the last year or so I’ve been posting weekly articles on FarmAid’s blog, Homegrown. With my foray out of the fields and into writing, just before Christmas I decided to put a stop on my weekly Homegrown post in order to reevaluate how, exactly, I could keep [...]
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Building a Future with Farmers
Last month, The National Young Farmers’ Coalition published a comprehensive report about the future of farming, and it may not come as a surprise that young farmers face tremendous obstacles in starting a farming career. Tell me about it, I thought as I paged through it. The primary obstacles defined in the report are startup [...]
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Farming, Young Farmer Profiles
Managing Montesino
Montesino Ranch in Wimberley, Texas, is every farm gawker dream you’ve ever had. The red-roofed barn with thick cedar posts meets you first. Then, miniature dappled Herefords, quietly grazing and lifting their furry heads to stare at you with engaging interest. Surrounding this is 160 acres of beautiful Texas bush and rolling hill country. [...]
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And the Winner Is …
“I tell you what guys–if Jeff Dunham shows up to the Clucker Council meeting again and tries to stick his hand up my butt, he’s gettin’ the beak!” Thanks everyone for participating! I so enjoyed parsing through all your entries. You made it a really difficult decision. But alas, I only have one copy of [...]
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Giveaway! Farmstead Chef Cookbook
First, we kissed off corporate America as twenty-somethings, pledging to never again let dysfunctional executives walk all over us while greed runs wild. You might say our premature mid-life crisis may have been caused by indigestion. That’s way before we realized an inconvenient truth or the dark side of Food, Inc. Back then, we overdosed [...]
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Working with Joel Salatin
This summer, Scott Price completed a four-month internship at what may be the most well-known and well-respected organic farm operation in the country: Polyface Farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, run by Joel Salatin. An accountant by education, Scott cut his teeth farming in this internship, and he hopes to make farming a lifelong career. Below, [...]
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Farming, Young Farmer Profiles
Young Farmer Profile #3: Marysol Valle at Urban Roots
It’s hard to put your finger on what makes the farm at Urban Roots so enchanting. Maybe the protective surrounding of trees takes you to a rolling country somewhere, rather than off highway 183 just a few minutes from downtown Austin. Maybe it’s the diverse species of birds that call Urban Roots home, and serenade [...]
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Sad Face: A Brief Note to My Readers Intended to Fill the Void
So this adjustment out of farming is going to be harder on me than I thought. My grand plan was to wait it out until I was inspired to write about ag and ag issues again, but in the meantime that meant a crushing silence on Dissertation to Dirt. I started to feel uncomfortable with [...]
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Farming, Round Table Farm, Round Table Farm
Life Off the Farm
I am currently settling into a farm-less life. We have both found non-ag jobs, and Round Table Farm is closed. Travis has been hired by a functional landscaping business called Yard Farm. It’s close enough to agriculture that Travis’ abilities transfer easily, but different enough that he has the opportunity to learn new, concrete skills [...]
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The USDA Loves Subsidies: Do Small Farms Deserve Help Too?
Gene Logsdon, my unspoken mentor (so unspoken that he, in fact, doesn’t know), recently posted an articlepointing to small farming as one answer to the jobs crisis in the US. If the government would get out of the way of small farms, Logsdon says, we’d all be in a much better spot. As of now, [...]
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