Inside this issue you will find:
Bringing Dead Soils Back to Life
—Joel McNair
Liberty, Pennsylvania — An old disc mower and a tractor-mounted front-end loader. Chicken manure and lime. Tillage and seed. Dairy cattle, grazed well. Dave Johnson uses these tools to take the kind of land you don’t want to deal with and turn it into the sort of organic-certified pasture you’d be happy to have. Dave Johnson, organic pasture renovation specialist. There’s been a lot of renovation required here at Provident Farms. Much of the land in Pennsylvania’s northern tier country had been mistreated for many decades. In the 1800s this part of the Northeast was known for the quality of its timothy hay, with ton after ton shipped to Philadelphia and New York City to fuel the horses that drove urban commerce. “The fertility of this area is sitting in New York harbor,” Dave says. And with the steep land and tough general farm economy, not many people around here have been investing heavily in soil fertility in recent years. ...Read more
Turning Farmers Into Robots
—Gene Logsdon
I opened
the paper recently to see that three large dairy farms had
gone bankrupt in my part of the country. All three were what
we have become accustomed to calling “Dutch dairies” in the
eastern corn belt—farmers who came to America some ten to
fifteen years ago with money in their pockets from selling
very high-priced land in
Holland, willing to pay top dollar for American farms. The
university, agribusiness, and realty experts welcomed them
with open arms and supported them lock, stock, and bulk
tank. Many of us who have been around bulk tanks for a long
time protested the wisdom of this development as vigorously
as we could. If American farmers couldn’t make it with
thousand-cow dairies, how could farmers from far off do it
without intimate knowledge of our soils, climate, and
particularly the local people with which they would have to
do business? The Wise Men of Economics said we were just
xenophobic, which is a fancy university word for prejudiced
against foreigners. They wouldn’t listen to what we were
saying. They shunned us. Now those experts are being very,
very quiet. They are hoping no one will recall all that rosy
yakkety yak they were saying back then. Someone should hold
their hands to the fire and make them admit their mistakes.
I tried once. I tried to get in touch with one of them and
was told he had retired and on that particular day, was
playing golf in Palm Springs.
...Read more
Also in this issue are:
Spring 2010
-Bringing Dead Soils Back to Life
-When a Bull Calf takes Charge
-Turning Farmers Into Robots
-Q & A Transitioning to Organic
-Selecting a Pig for Outdoor
-Production
-You Name It
-On the Road Again
-Easy Honey Comb
-Production
-Local Blossoms
-His Name Was Jimmy
-The No-Dig Garden
-Small Blessings-Gather Round the Table
-Redefining Local
Regular contributors to our magazine:
-Jim Van der Pol
-Wendell Berry
-Ellen Bromfield-Geld
-Jo Ann Gardner
-Sharon Lovejoy
-Joel McNair
-Jigs Gardner
-Arthur Bolduc
-Gene Logsdon
-Ulf Kintzel
-David Bontrager
-Kristi Bahrenburg Janzen
-David
Kline and more