Food and Sustainable Agriculture

Late last Tuesday afternoon I and around a dozen crop farmers emerged from the air-conditioned confines of the “Biofuture” trailer. Like abductees departing an alien mothership, we blinked in the bright hot…

Late last Tuesday afternoon I and around a dozen crop farmers emerged from the air-conditioned confines of the “Biofuture” trailer. Like abductees departing an alien mothership, we blinked in the bright hot…

It may be July, but the Star Tribune gave some of the biggest agribusiness firms around a nice Valentines on July 21. On the opinion page, the newspaper’s editorial board lauded firms…

You can pass into law the greatest policy in the world, but in the end its success depends on good implementation. Exhibit A: When the “Livestock Investment Grants Program” was passed during…

Next week Ken Meter will be in western Minnesota and eastern South Dakota, telling the story of how feeding the raw commodity maw has drained our Main Streets of their lifeblood while…

Now that the 2008 Farm Bill is officially law, it’s important to make sure all that work sustainable ag groups like LSP put into some of the legislation’s key components does not…

On a sunny (remember sun?) spring afternoon a few weeks ago, Karola and Rick Dalen were giving me a tour of their Northern Harvest Farm near the northeast Minnesota community of Wrenshall…

One night last August, Art and Jean Thicke’s hilltop farm in southeast Minnesota was pounded by 15 inches of rain. This was the same storm that dumped record amounts of precipitation on…

The just-concluded session of the Minnesota Legislature produced benefits for family livestock farmers, while attacks on local control were stymied once again. The bad news is that an exciting program for promoting…