The next time you take the garbage out, give a thought to Dennis and Karen Barta. I visited the Bartas’ Renville County farm earlier this week to learn more about a government plan to make some of the best farmland in the world into a repository for garbage originating in Twin Cities area trash bins…. Read more »
Posts By: Brian DeVore, Land Stewardship Project
Why ‘Home Grown Economy’ is a Radical Event
On Monday, Feb. 26, a significant event will take place in western Minnesota. It’s a day-long conference, and it will be held at the University of Minnesota-Morris. Nothing special about that. The event will feature some great speakers from throughout the Midwest, as well as panel discussions involving local farmers and other citizens. Good stuff…. Read more »
Biofuels & the Factory Field Mentality
The sports section of the Sunday Star Tribune included a short article with some big ramifications when it comes to creating a sustainable landscape while developing real energy security. It turns out some key agricultural leaders in Congress are realizing that focusing soley on corn ethanol as our energy savior is economically and environmentally short-sighted.
Mark Trail’s Beaver Tales
As any avid consumer of the Star Tribune‘s comics page knows, a certain pesky, but lovable, woodland creature called “Lucky the Beaver” is driving Mark Trail to distraction these days. Since early December, Lucky has been raising a ruckus in Lost Forest by doing what Castor canadensis does best: building a dam. All that damming… Read more »
Hormone Replacement Therapy
“Hormones Are For Teenagers” states a rustic-looking billboard for Minnesota-based Gold’n Plump. Clever, huh? It’s a humorous way of getting across the message that no added hormones are used to raise Gold’n Plump chickens. And that’s perfectly true. But there’s more to the story. The fact is the federal government banned hormones in U.S. pork… Read more »
I Eat & I Vote
On Dec. 12, more than 100 Twin Citians gathered in the basement of the Holy Trinity Lutheran Church in South Minneapolis to discuss federal farm policy reform at a meeting organized by the Land Stewardship Project and Oxfam America. Who cares about farm policy—in Minneapolis of all places? These people, who came from a variety… Read more »
A Steady Diet of De-Skilled Food
Now that Eric Schlosser’s classic mealtime muckraking book, Fast Food Nation, has been Hollywoodized, Americans are again talking about where those McNuggets and fries come from and how they arrive in our stomachs. It’s a teachable moment and perhaps the film will help maintain the momentum that Fast Food Nation set in motion when it… Read more »
Greenhouse Gases & Gully-Washers
It’s been a dry fall in Minnesota, and that means farmers have had plenty of opportunities to till up the soil after harvest. While driving around in farm country the day before Thanksgiving, I was struck by just how much corn and soybean stubble has been made subterranean the past few weeks. Acre-after-acre of rolling… Read more »
Factory Farming’s Secret Subsidy
Promoters of large-scale factory livestock farming like to argue that their model of agriculture is a natural progression—an example of free market efficiency succeeding. What they don’t want the public to know is that factory-scale production of pork, beef, poultry and milk benefits greatly from a silent, but powerful, government subsidy. As a paper out… Read more »
Counting Calories in Agriculture
A common argument in favor of large-scale industrialized agriculture is that it is just plain more efficient, and thus deserves to succeed. But measured by the amount of energy it takes to produce each calorie of food, the industrial farming system is anything but a lean, mean food-producing machine. In 1940, the average U.S. farm… Read more »