The Feed Store

Our trees are unlikely to make a measurable difference in global carbon dioxide levels, and they will not do anything to hasten the end of the coronavirus pandemic, but according to Wendell Berry, these facts have nothing to do whatsoever with whether or not our decision to plant trees is, as Kerstin declared, good.

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,...

In some ways Good Husbandry stands as a kind of bildungsroman for Essex Farm and, by extension, the support-your-local-farmer movement.

Rushing to enslave themselves like animals in a cage, the animal rights and climate activists who think they are on the “right side of history” are unwittingly reinforcing their dependence on the corporations that have long damaged ecosystem and human health.

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.

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 farming.

Our disagreements are about real things, but people are real too.

This year an unexpected autumn snow blanketed our farm.  In the days that followed, single-digit temperatures secured its place in the landscape, and another,...

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

I’m prone to say that the gardening year resembles nothing so much as a succession of heartbreaks, and while it’s possible that this sentiment...