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The First Year

Largely because of a dog named Fred, who despised hats and joggers and anything that his unknowable mind deemed suspicious, Mateusz and I rented a farmhouse north of Toronto in the summer of 2010.

Farmed Out

Wes Jackson On The Need To Reinvent Agriculture

We must turn our attention to the water and the soil and ask, “How do we insure that the bread we eat does not come from grains that are grown in eroding soil and that load our water with nitrogen and pesticides?” Soon people will realize that annuals are poor managers of soil nutrients and water, and that agriculture will need to turn to perennials to better manage those resources.

Grandpa’s Vessel

Before he developed Alzheimer’s, my grandfather was stern and taciturn, but after the plaque started to build up around his synapses, he turned into a different man, and in many ways a better one. He started to laugh at things, like the way one of our pigs would chew bubble gum, or how the barn kittens played in the hay.

Prophet Of Modest Profit

Woody Tasch On How Not To Get Rich Quick

We use the power of entrepreneurship but support the entrepreneurs who design businesses to solve social and environmental problems and are committed to bioregions and communities. I’m especially interested in agriculture as a place to create that change. We’re not investing enough in small-scale, organic agriculture. Rapid economic growth has created tons of cheap food with a long shelf life, but it’s destroyed family farms, which are vital to rebuilding and preserving soil fertility.

After All This Is Over

We got dressed up to go to the courthouse. It was strange to be out of school, and even stranger to be heading off to appear before a judge to prove that our family was broke, but our mother insisted we kids come along. My brother and I sported polyester suit coats handed down from our cousins in Terre Haute, and the girls wore the same dresses they had worn for our grandparents’ funerals.

The Mere Mortal

Carla happened to be kneeling outside the poultry enclosure when she heard her daughter Amanda in the milking barn telling the new boyfriend, “My father is a beatnik. He hates life up here. He calls us ‘montagnards.’ He really loves North Beach. And he’s in the right place, too, in North Beach. Because he’s into porn — something I approve of.

Countertop Culture

Something Is Fermenting In Sandor Katz’s Kitchen

The revolution I would like to see is a devolution of agriculture. We have to let go of the notion of mass-producing food. It just doesn’t work. Cars and computers may lend themselves to mass production, but with food it has been a disaster. We have to revive small-scale food production and relearn the art of food processing, including fermentation, so we can stop relying on these huge and vulnerable food infrastructures.

Beekeeper’s Boy

I recently started keeping bees, and already I’ve been amazed just watching how they cluster and move, then suddenly flow in a line like a rivulet of water just a few bees wide — many small minds following some higher thought known to them only in common and to none alone.

Archipelagoes

I am on a tiny island in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland with a full-grown ram between my legs — not the way I usually spend a summer Saturday. This began as a simple errand, to fetch a fleece for dyeing from John Finlay, a crofter and neighbor of my hosts.