The Feed Store

Durable Trades, Durable Families

Rebekah Curtis reviews Rory Groves' book Durable Trades through the lens of the novel Growth of the Soil. While sometimes difficult to apply to modern-day life, the trades are not only occupations, but reasons and ways to come back home.

Water and Wood: An Artistic Parable

Ed Hagenstein reflects on Makoto Fujimura's metaphor for cultural engagement and suggests that cultural renewal starts with the essential resources all around us.

Getting to Know the Neighbors

We can increase the aesthetic appeal of our neighborhood by smashing the suburban quasi-monocultures of landscaping plants purchased from big box stores and restoring the rightful biodiversity of our ecosystems...Behind the natural beauty there thrums a glory ancient and ever-new that generates love for place, if we let it.

Farmers, Physiologists, and Daylight Saving

That advocates of year-round DST persist says something about the evolution of American agriculture and how out of touch we collectively have become with the intractable pulse of nature.

Hillbilly Grace on a Five-Acre Farm in Lincoln, Arkansas: A Review...

Minari is haunted by O’Connor, as Chung explores the theme of misfits and “hard to find” good men (and women) that jolt our senses toward who we truly are, including our limitations.

Please Eat Cows

Animal agriculture, we hear over and over, is horrific for the environment and horrific for the livestock involved. Yet most of us can’t or won’t change our ways. There may be a general sense that beef is horrible, but there is a literal sense that steak is delicious.

Pigs and Hollies and Swamps, Oh My!: Corrymeela Ranch, Limestone County,...

Corrymeela is a dreamscape, a landscape that I marvel at every time I go out there. If conservation consists of loving something—a tract of land, a garden, a wood—then my hope is to love this land even more intensely into its full God-created glory.

Thinking Like a Lamb

Today I make a COVID resolution: I will learn to be more lamby-like, as Carl would say: to think like a lamb.

Grace Olmstead’s Uprooted Idaho, and My Own

Uprooted is partly a memoir of her extended family, partly a paean to a way of life that is both dying and which she never really understood while she grew up in the midst of it (and thus feels the loss of all the more deeply now), and partly a study of the causes of that dying, and how what has endured--the habits, the connections, the sense of place--has shaped her extended family nonetheless.

Men in the Field: The Farming Stories of Leo L. Ward,...

The best stories in the volume offer Cather-esque explorations of the links between place and people. The stories are remarkable for their dense layers, for their social, psychological, and emotional intricacies.