The Feed Store 109

I am an unlikely localist. My life is a product of globalization. My mother’s side of the family is from Singapore, China, and India, linked to each other through the…

Two autumns ago you couldn’t take a dozen steps without tripping over the decapitated corpse of a pigeon. There’d be one lying on the hard packed gravel of the driveway…

Robert Frost begins one of his best known poems by stating, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.” The New England poet is appropriately vague: he does not know…

An old painting by John Miles of Northleach imagines Adam in the midst of naming all the animals in the Garden of Eden. Adam stands in the middle of the…

I begin with a proposition adapted from Wendell Berry—namely, that mowing is an ecological act. Mowing extends the perennial drama of photosynthesis and carbon cycling. Too few lawn owners, however,…

The cheese crafted here came about as a byproduct of a larger whole, the natural dividend of a complete way of life, and this is the foundation of the best…

I had long resisted adding ten thousand new livestock to our less than two acres. I had listened to beekeepers’ tales of bears and had read enough about varroa mites…

I called him by the name I thought he deserved to be called by.

I wonder if Mr. Big in the sky would be willing to give us a Do-Over.

My farmstead poultry flock is sustained by a handful of broody hens—female fowl who have somehow retained their ancient instinct to nest and hatch offspring. Broody hens respond to their…

A conservationist is one who is humbly aware that with each stroke of the axe he is writing his signature on the face of the land. --Aldo Leopold, Sand County…

Nature stepped in in her wonted way and took complete control.

Oakland Township, MI My small, exurban farmstead is sustained, in part, by the relationship I forged with my local feed store. To help the reader appreciate the practical and economic…