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farming 64

Fuel, Food, and Fault: Rethinking the Emissions Debate

If we are serious about sustainability, we need to rethink where and how we apply pressure.

Sowing Winter Wheal: Preparing Seed and Soil for the New Era

As my hibernal title indicates, my sense is that this trajectory will be difficult.
April 14, 2025

Finding The Seam: How Small Farmers Can Thrive

There are much easier ways to make money than farming. The primary goal of a good farmer is to find success in caring for one’s land, community, and family.

The Keeper, The Tiller, The Question

A Cain and Abel Story for Modern Man

In Defense of Livestock

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…
February 28, 2024

Deworm the Goat

The true virtue of a hobby farm is that it gives us the space to confront that tension between natural and artificial.

Socialism, Localism, and the Future of Industrial Agriculture

If I’m honest, I am skeptical that the localist approach I advocate will bring about a quasi-utopian future of widespread flourishing, at least within my lifetime. But at least localism…
Garth Brown
December 15, 2023

Fear and Hope in the Hay Field

We need to love smaller, more energy-efficient houses and cars in order to love people more. We need to give up much of our casual oil consumption for leisure. We…
October 20, 2023

Hope for a Humane Agricultural Future: A Review of Saying NO to a Farm-Free Future

The ecomodernist approach of Regenesis relies on a mechanistic understanding of humanity. The presumption is that humans are merely fleshy machines that can adapt to flourish in any environment as…

Does Food Policy Matter? A Review of Small Farm Republic

Folks reading this site might, and there is a minority of the public that spends the time and money to grow produce or seek out good, local farms. But most…

There’s No More Room: Toward an Anarcho-Pastoralism

What I’ve just attempted to describe are the joys of the edge. Freedom, I believe, has a limited half-life when it’s in the heart of civilization. Anarcho-pastoralism means that there’s…

A Twenty-First Century Agronomic University: The Maurin Academy

We use the experience of the JPII farm not only to learn and improve over time but to inform our audience of the realities and pitfalls of attempting this way…

A Beautiful Farm?

These benefits and this healing can only begin to happen when beauty is allowed once again on the farm. One cannot truly have a good farm without it.

The County Meeting

We will speak to gatherings of farmers in seventeen different counties throughout southern Georgia. Along the way we will travel 1750 miles.

Who is America For? A Review of Cheap Land Colorado

eading Cheap Land Colorado makes you wonder how we can make more space for human flourishing among the poor and on the edges of society? Conover’s approach to the San…
February 20, 2023

The Coming Cow Wars: Why Raising Cows is a Revolutionary Act

To nurture small-scale local agriculture is to oppose the Maoist, Stalinesque, Hitlerian, Huxlian, Schwabian, Gatesian push to monopolize global food production. My cows plod the Underground. And I plod along…
January 5, 2023

The Call of Farm Life: The Challenge of Constancy and Fidelity

While in my current brief stint in D.C., I am often given a puzzled look when I tell someone that I am going back to the farm: “You’ve made it…

Farming as Poetical: Masanobu Fukuoka and Wendell Berry on Agriculture’s Poetical Form

Poetry is the creative ordering of words to bring forth the fruits of the human heart and intellect. The poet is called to lose himself, so to speak, in listening…

A Farmer Who Walks the Talk

Human stories, centered around human persons in pursuit of wisdom, are the roots from which communities grow. We can be sure, by the sweat on the brows of each person…
January 24, 2022

Intellectual Grounding: A Conversation with Wes Jackson

It’s hard to escape from beauty if you’re ready to observe the biotic activity and geologic history of the world. Beauty is essential, and I’m saying that, even with the…

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…

The Growing Pains of a Small Farm: Kristin Kimball’s Good Husbandry and “The Problem of Scale”

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

Fitting into the Bigger Picture

Mayweed is a persistent gift that teaches me how to thrive in unlikely places.

Wholeness and Gratitude: Working through Scott H. Moore’s How to Burn a Goat

Moore insists that his book about farming is not exclusively about rural places: “the point is not even about farming . . . most of what I’ve said in this…