His new ebook, First Generation Farming, lays out his vision: building co-ops for first-generation farmers that hold resources in common and control a shared supply chain. His first such effort collapsed under the weight of interpersonal conflict four months after its formation in 2021, but he’s now building a cooperative structure in which his and two other farms supply livestock and eggs to a new entity, Blackbird Farms, a commonly held processor and sales distributor. Eventually, he says, Blackbird will buy the individual farm assets and fold those into a holding company. – Jacqui Shine

This interview was edited and condensed. 

JS: I wanted to hear about your book. You say the message is “how to start farming without ruining your life.”

CN: More or less, yes. 

JS: You’ve been writing about this for a long time. Is your sense of “how to do it without ruining your life” different than it was five years ago?

CN: Five years ago, I would have been able to give some general advice about, like, what products to take, what breeds to raise, more technical stuff like that. But what’s happened over time, as I’ve been able to get a better understanding of how food systems work, especially at scale—how the big boys operate—it became clear to me that if people are going to start farming and stay farming, there needs to be a fundamentally different platform for getting people onto the land. It’s way too risky. This [system] where people are going after grants or trying to do these policy things that make it easier for [first-generation farmers] to get themselves onto a plot of land, get themselves trained, start growing stuff and then trying somehow to market it—it’s just way too risky. And there’s too much attrition for it to ever create enough success to challenge conventional agriculture. 

We need to look to more of what conventional agriculture and conventional farmers have done to challenge some of the abuses that they’ve dealt with, which basically comes down to cooperatives, but a cooperative [model] more geared towards first-generation farmers that takes away a lot of the risk, that [is] really well resourced, that [has] land available for people to use and markets for people to sell into. So, you just take out all of this individual risk that goes into it. My book is about how to build those cooperatives and trying to deconstruct and dismantle a lot of the myth-making that’s led us down this path of thinking that small farms are the answer, which they just aren’t.

JS: There’s an existing set of practices for agricultural cooperatives. Is what you’re describing different?

CN: The only difference between what they’re doing and what we’re doing is that we’re trying to build a co-op that can build new farmers. We’re not trying to create a coordinated network of existing farms. We’re trying to bring in people who don’t have land and who aren’t farming right now, and we’re trying to bring them on to a commons. 

JS: It’s using the co-op model as a way to help first-generation startup farmers get into it, because it’s saner and more economically resilient. 

CN: The engineer in me doesn’t like to build things new if there’s something that exists that works, and co-ops work. Whenever you have an issue where there’s an abusive relationship between agribusiness and agriculture, co-ops tend to do—not a perfect job but a fairly good job of making sure the farmers are taken care of while also producing at the scale where the stuff they do is affordable. So, the only twist we’re trying is saying, “OK, how can we leverage the co-op model so that we can get new people into this and do it under regenerative ethics?”

Photo courtesy of Sylvanaqua Farms.

JS: Originally, you referred to yourself as a permaculture farmer. Have you abandoned that term? 

CN: I think a lot of my attraction to “permaculture” was just because of a void of information about how conventional systems work. They’re not as bad as people say they are. And the ones that are bad are bad for utterly fixable reasons and in utterly fixable ways. When it came to permaculture, small farming, it wasn’t like I had this religious devotion to any of these things. But if I see something that makes more sense and if I’m going to learn things about how conventional farming works, how agribusiness works and I’m going, “this just makes an awful lot of sense,” I want to change my mind.

JS: You don’t use small farming world terms such as “permaculture,” but you do still like “food sovereignty.”

CN: The “why” of me getting into agriculture has never changed. This has always been about making sure that people can determine how they are fed and that the systems that feed them are sustainable and durable and workable. “Food sovereignty” is one of those things that’s loosely defined enough to be able to choose your own adventure in terms of how you get there.

JS: What people want is for there to be room in the small farming system for Black and Indigenous farmers. And you say that system doesn’t work.

CN: Yeah, it’s like don’t run off the cliff. You see white [startup farmers] run off a cliff, you see three or four of them pull hang gliders out there and somehow float to safety, but most of them crash, and you never hear the stories of the crashes. The worst thing in the world for me would be for marginalized people who have something special to bring to the table [to run off the cliff]. Black folks, Indigenous folks, they have something we all need. And if we don’t get it, we’re screwed. I don’t want to see our people just follow these other folks off this cliff, because the consequences for us, number one, are worse. I know plenty of white folks got into farming, fucked up, kind of hit bottom, but they’re able to get up. Black folks, Native folks have a much harder time getting up when we crash. The consequences are harder, we fall on sharper rocks.

JS: What is that thing we need?

CN: It’s that outsider perspective. These are people who are not privileged, who are going to come to farming with the idea of, “I need to feed my people back where I came from where nobody has shit.” It’s a completely different perspective and brings a completely different sense of urgency to it. When that post went viral? My DMs were impossible, just full of colored folks: “I want to start my farm,” “help me start my farm, what do I do?” and it’s like, I see [where] you’re getting this idea from, and we may have to stop it right now before we lose a whole friggin’ generation of people who could do a hell of a lot of good if their energy was just directed 10 degrees to the left.

The post Chris Newman Wants to Help You Start Farming—Without Ruining Your Life appeared first on Modern Farmer.

When challenging its pork producer about its use of manure lagoons and the myriad health and environmental issues they pose, Ganzler knew that Bon Appétit’s end goal was not only to source more sustainable pork but to be able to communicate effectively with its customers about the issue—something that is quite difficult, since no one wants to talk about manure when they’re eating.

This tension is at the heart of Ganzler’s new book: How can companies practice authentic sustainability and work it effectively into their marketing strategy? In the book, Ganzler details Bon Appétit’s progress and missteps in navigating issues such as farmworker rights, pigs raised in gestation crates, chickens in cages, and more. The book, which comes out April 2, also includes interviews with other industry experts who talk about their experiences, including:  Rob Michalak, former global director of social mission for Ben & Jerry’s, who talks about integrating sustainability into operations and his experience with Milk with Dignity organizers; Gary Hirshberg, co-founder of Stonyfield Organic, who discusses picking your battles and taking stands on issues; and Lisa Dyson, CEO and co-founder of Air Protein, who talks about creating alternative protein and striving to be the number one meat company in the world.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: In your book, you say that when a business does something right or makes progress toward a sustainability target, it should get credit for it. This can bolster the business, but you write that it can also create a ripple effect toward industry change. How so?

Maisie Ganzler: A great example of that was in 2005, when we at Bon Appétit made a commitment to cage-free eggs nationwide. We heard that the client at another corporation said to their food service provider, ‘We’d like cage-free eggs served here,’ and the food service provider said ‘Oh, we can’t do that. There’s not enough available, blah, blah, blah,’—all these excuses. And the client said, ‘Well, Bon Appétit does it for their locations. So, I’m sure you can do it here, too.’ That’s the ripple effect that I’m talking about—once a company has proven that something is possible, other companies now need to come to the table and do the same.

MF: Something you worked on passionately was sourcing pork from producers that don’t house pigs in gestational crates. You didn’t reach this goal overnight but through a series of milestones. You eventually accomplished this with pork producer Clemens Food Group, on which Modern Farmer reported here. To get there, you first had to hear big companies tell you no, it wasn’t possible. Why did you push on regardless? How were you confident you could achieve something that wasn’t being widely done at such a large scale?

MG: I pushed on for two main reasons. One was that it was simply the right thing to do. If you’ve seen a sow in a gestation crate, it’s heartbreaking. They can’t turn around, they can’t walk; it is very clear that something better could be done for that animal. So, that’s where we start, rooted in the idea that it’s the right thing to do for the animal. But as you’ve pointed out, we’re also a business and we want to get market credit. And we had made a public promise, and I was not going to go back on that. So, while I was transparent about the difficulties and about missing the deadline, I never wanted to say it can’t be done. Was I confident that it could be done? Not necessarily, but I don’t need confidence to keep pushing forward.

MF: You advise companies to own their challenges and obstacles to achieving their sustainability goals—something that can be tempting to hide. Why is it actually better to be transparent about these things?

MG: Being transparent is important because one, it will insulate you to some degree from greenwashing claims. If you are the person that’s stepping forward and saying here’s where we fell short, nobody can have that “gotcha” moment. The other thing is that it actually gets you more credit in the end. If you pretend that everything’s easy to do, why should anybody celebrate that you did it? If you’re transparent about how challenging it was, how many bumps there were in the road, how many times you failed and redoubled your efforts, how much more expensive it was, then all the more reason for customers or advocacy groups to laud your accomplishment when you finally do pull it off.

I don’t think that anybody on the consumer side, anybody reasonable, expects perfection from a company. But they do expect honesty. And I think that’s a reasonable expectation. One of the things that I talked to Gary Hirshberg about, the founder of Stonyfield, is he talked about people needing to make an emotional connection with the brand, especially if you’re asking them to spend more money on something. Just what I was talking about [with] gestation crates, and how they are so horrible for sows, that cuts to my heart, not necessarily to my head, because it is more efficient, it is more cost-effective, but my heart tells me something different. And a lot about building an authentic brand based upon sustainability is listening to your heart and being open with your heart.

If you’re not authentic in your desire to make real change, I think that people smell that. And you may actually have something backfire. Instead of [achieving] what you want, you may be in a worse position if you’re inauthentically making these promises.

Ganzler holds a piglet. (Photography provided by Maisie Ganzler)

MF:  You talk about how in Bon Appétit’s Farm to Fork program, you don’t require that producers be certified organic, but you do require that farms be owner-operated. As a farmer in St. Louis told you, if you’re a small farm, you can’t afford to scrap a whole field if you have a fungal outbreak, you need to be able to apply a fungicide. If you held firm to requiring organic certification, you’d end up putting the squeeze on some of your smaller producers. When setting a sustainability goal, how do you make sure that the parameters you choose can actually help you achieve your desired outcome?

MG: You have to first be really clear of what your desired outcome is. So, for the Bon Appétit Farm to Fork program, the desired outcome was to support farmers that were growing for taste—that was the initial impetus of the program: to get the best-tasting food. And to do that, we decided that we had to support small-scale farmers that were close to us that were able to grow for flavor, as opposed to grow for conformity or transportability or a whole host of other reasons. Be really clear about what your goal is. 

MF: Considering Bon Appétit’s size and reach, you encounter a lot of issues in our food system. You work with producers across a wide geography and advocates on a wide breadth of issues. From your perspective, what are the biggest issues in our food system right now? 

MG: From sitting in the chair of a food service company that’s a buyer, I think that the biggest issues really surround animal agriculture, how animals are treated and the impacts that the raising of those animals have on our environment. And there’s a lot of different things in play. And there’s a lot of strong opinions but also some conflicting information. So, I would say that there’s a whole host of issues around animal agriculture.

MF: For small farmers or food businesses that don’t have a marketing department, budget or training, do you have any advice for how they can still tell their story effectively?

MG: I think that the first thing is that they need to figure out what their story is and distill it down. If they have a package, what can they put on the package that quickly communicates the most salient points of their story, not the encyclopedic version of it, because no one’s going to take time to read that. Everybody’s got a website, so the same thing there, really figuring out what your headline is and succinctly communicating that to your customers. And making that headline something that does create an emotional connection with people. Not being afraid to take a stand, whether that is in the issues you take on, how you talk about them or where you talk about them. 

What I was trying to communicate in the book is the importance of both making meaningful change and getting market credit for it. And that’s where the title comes from—You Can’t Market Manure at Lunchtime. There was this real environmental change we were after, dealing with manure lagoons, but we also needed to be able to talk to customers about it. Because we are not advocacy groups, we are for-profit companies. But we have the power to do good in this world and capitalize on it. And there’s nothing shameful about that duality.

The post When Corporate Sustainability Goals Are Good for Business appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In his new book, What are Animal Rights For?, author Steve Cooke acknowledges this point straightaway. Norms surrounding how we treat animals are deeply entrenched, so a world where no one eats animals—and in fact, those animals have legal personhood—is so far afield from anything we are familiar with that it is hard to wrap our minds around.

But there is a long history of different groups and belief systems that value kindness toward animals or believe in the rights of animals, going back millenia. When it comes to what is codified into law today, the US has laws affording certain protections to animals, but they only go so far. Meanwhile, a movement to give animals the rights of personhood—a legal acknowledgment of the possession of rights—is unfolding globally. Around the world, this designation has been granted to animals, waterways, corporations and more.

Cooke, an associate professor of political theory at the University of Leicester, believes that a world based on animal rights is the type of world we should work toward. As far from our current reality as it is, he hopes that his book will give people some of the tools they need to start imagining that world.

This book, which will be featured in a launch event November 15, is part of Bristol University Press’ What is it For? series, which asks tough questions about what a better future could look like. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: Your book advocates for a society built around nonhuman animal rights, where animals have legal personhood. What inspired you to write this book?

Steve Cooke: My research is all about animal rights. I think animals ought to have rights, and there’s the question of how to get them to having rights. How do we move from the world we’re in now to the world we might have—the ideal world? I think lots of the puzzles around answering that question are connected with the imagination. One of the reasons for writing the book was to try and give people who read it the tools to imagine a possible future where nonhuman animals can have rights. And so the book is aimed at members of the public as well as academic audiences—I wanted to be able to appeal to as wide an audience as possible and just give them the conceptual and imaginative tools to think about this. 

MF: You say that right now, animals generally only have rights insofar as they don’t conflict with human goals or interests. How can an understanding of nonhuman animal sentience change our perception of what rights animals should have?

SC: It relies on our scientific understanding of nonhuman animals, and the scientific understanding of a great number of the kind of creatures that we eat is that they are capable of very complex emotions. They’re capable of feeling fear, of pain, of happiness. But also, the more cutting-edge research on the psychology of animals shows that they can also experience things like grief, they can build complex relationships, anticipate the future, form friendships. 

So, even animals like pigs and cows; cows have really rich emotional lives. You might get cows that are more likely—and you’ll know this if you’ve worked on a farm—to be curious or more fearful. So, they have individual personalities, they have preferred grooming partners and feeding partners. They have these rich lives because they’re social beings. We wouldn’t be able to farm them if they weren’t social beings. It’s kind of required by domestication and farming to have these animals that are capable of forming these relationships. So, we know that they’re capable of rich emotional lives. But when it comes to thinking about that in social settings and as individuals in the society that we live in today, very often, we downplay the sentience of these animals—that capacity to feel. And that’s a real problem for achieving change.

Pigs in a pen. (Photo from Shutterstock)

MF: In the book, you explain that there is a difference between animal rights and animal welfare. Can you explain that difference?

SC: One of the reasons I like doing this with nonhuman animals is it also helps us think about humans. When we think about human rights, fundamental human rights that we have, like the rights against being killed or assaulted, rights to property—those things prevent other people from using us in order to benefit themselves or to achieve social benefits. 

A rights paradigm around animals would be nonhuman animals are provided the same sorts of protections that will prevent us from using another animal for the sake of our own benefit, whereas the welfare paradigm that governs most of our interactions with animals at the moment says that there are limits on what we can do to them. But those limits are really determined by human benefits. So, you should act to minimize suffering, but suffering isn’t ruled out if we can identify a benefit to ourselves. 

The animal rights paradigm is focused on protecting the animal for the sake of the animal and not for the sake of us, whereas the welfare paradigm allows our benefits and our interests to sometimes overcome, to trump the most serious fundamental interests of other animals. And that’s the key difference.

MF: One of the big ways that humans interact with nonhuman animals is through agriculture. In the book, you explore the idea that an animal rights society wouldn’t have to exclude animals from agriculture completely, but it would look a lot different. What kinds of practices would remain, versus which ones would go away?

SC: This is tricky, because I’ve worked on farms for a long time. But, certainly, we wouldn’t be killing animals and breeding them for the sake of killing them. [Industrialized] farming practices would violate the most important animal interests—their interest in not suffering, their interest in continued existence, not being killed. So, those sort of fundamental farming practices of meat, milk, leather are going to be ruled out. 

Now, there are cases where you can think of situations where you might keep animals in ways that respect their rights, that don’t harm them and that might benefit them. And then we could gain some benefits in return. So, there are cases where we can think of animals working as laborers almost, where they might gain labor rights in return. Their labor might contribute to plant-based farming. Perhaps, chickens laying eggs might not violate their rights or sheep that shed wool naturally or where the wool can be harvested without causing suffering. Those kinds of cases might be compatible with respect for nonhuman animal rights. Now, not all theorists are going to agree with me on that. And that does open up some scope between an animal rights position and a strict vegan position; they might not be necessarily the same thing. But you can see there are some highly reduced areas where we might continue to use animals.

A flock of chickens. (Photo from Shutterstock)

MF: Human diet is a big part of this conversation, but widespread diet shifts are notably hard to achieve. You point out in the book that, in an animal rights society, there are probably some living species that could supplement our diet. What are those? And why would they be options?

SC: If we’re talking about the fundamental rights of animals, those are grounded in sentience, and there might be some species that aren’t sentient. There are likely to be at least some animals that haven’t got a capacity to feel, have no sense of self that persists over time. An animal rights position might allow for the consumption or use of those. 

The more likely scenario, I think, is cultured animal products, lab-grown in bioreactors, using harvested cells from animals that have been gathered without causing any suffering. And there’s massive amounts of research going into that at the moment, huge breakthroughs have been made, and there’s a good chance that in the future, meat will continue to be eaten. But it won’t ever have been anywhere near an actual animal, which is almost a stranger position to imagine for the future than the idea of animal rights to some people.

MF: You end the book writing about trust. In a lot of contexts, including agriculture, animals come to trust us and we ultimately end their lives. Why did you choose to include a discussion of trust between humans and other species in this book?

SC: Because I think rights aren’t enough. We don’t change anything in the world without changing people’s attitudes as well. The kind of ways that we relate to others really matter in terms of our intentions and our attitudes, as well as our beliefs that we have about the kind of rules that we ought to follow. And trust, I think, is one of the most important ways in which we interact with nonhuman animals, and not just in terms of farm animals, but also in terms of our companions. I like to try and think about the kind of world that would not only be just and everyone’s rights are protected, but also in terms of being good. 

I think the nonhuman animals that we engage in relationships with ought to be able to trust us. There’s something very wrong with cultivating a relationship, that by its very nature puts one party in a position of vulnerability, that’s the nature of trust; when you trust someone you become vulnerable to them, you make it easier for that person to harm them. And so many of our relationships, particularly with animals, that we then go on to kill for meat, are that kind of relationship. We make them vulnerable. And our emotional relationship with them makes it easier for them to be transported to slaughter, to be moved around the farm to be separated from their children—these are the necessary components of animal agriculture. And I think they don’t just violate your right, they also breach your trust. And I think if we wanted a good society, it would be the kind of society where we could be trusted as individuals. 

The post What if Animals Had the Same Rights as Humans? appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Before the late 1970s, around 70 percent of the clothing that Americans bought was made in the country. As the world became increasingly globalized, this changed. Much of America’s clothing production was moved overseas. Today, most of the wool used in clothing comes from Australia. Synthetic fibers made from raw substances such as petroleum also extended the distance between local economies and natural fibers by offering a cheaper and faster alternative. Today, “fast fashion” results in far-reaching environmental and social impacts, such as exploited cheap labor and the use of harmful dyes and unsustainable fibers. What do we lose when we are removed from our fiber sources?

Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands in British Columbia, Canada, have many artisanal textile farms. In her new book, Fleece & Fibre: Textile Producers of Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands, Francine McCabe takes you to them. Through thoughtful accounts of farm visits and original photos of charismatic animals, McCabe guides readers through the materials that are made in her region, as well as the farmers, plants and animals that produce them.

Beyond the individual farms, McCabe also paints a larger portrait of the textile landscape in Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands. The area seemingly no longer has any processing mills for raw fibers. As a result, much of the material produced in the region has to leave to be processed, and it can’t be sourced by makers or artisans looking for local product. 

In this book, which comes out October 10, McCabe digs into what it means to have a local and sustainable fiber economy and explores the confluence of industry and art.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Modern Farmer: You begin the book with a quote from Indigenous writer and bryologist Robin Wall Kimmerer: “To love a place is not enough. We must find ways to heal it.” Why did you choose this quote and how is this sentiment reflected in your book?

Francine McCabe: Everything she writes is wonderful and touches my heart. I read [that quote] while I was in the very early stages of researching for this book. And I just felt like that was the sentiment I wanted in this book. That was the through-line I wanted this book to have. I love Vancouver Island and I love the fiber economy we have here, and I would love to see it grow and be nurtured and for consumers to be more aware of what is going on in our fiber economy around us—and the importance of our textiles as a place-based symbol of where we come from. 

Our textiles are gorgeous, that come from here. And it can be a way to showcase our beautiful land and our place. When I read that quote, it really spoke to me because I feel like if we can grow our fiber economy and we can nurture our textiles here, that is a way of us nurturing our land and taking care of the place we live.

Bluefaced Leicester X at New Wave Fibre. (Photography by Francine McCabe for Fleece & Fibre)

MF: You use a concept term in your book that might be new to many readers. What is a “fibershed”?

FM: I haven’t coined this term. It is from Rebecca Burgess, who is from California; she is the founder of the fibershed concept. But fibershed, technically, it’s the same as a watershed. It’s the place where you can get your raw materials, you can process those raw materials with transparency, in a specific way that is specific to that land, to that place. Each little pocket, each fibershed through our country, can produce the same breed of fiber, but it’s going to be different. It’s going to be processed differently, the feeling’s going to be different. So, a fibershed encompasses our raw materials, our makers [and] what’s specific to this region.

MF: The Coast Salish history of fiber work, before sheep were introduced to the area, was based on now-extinct Woolly dogs, mountain goats and many types of plant fiber. How can knowing the history of the fibershed inform the decisions we make as consumers?

FM: It was really neat to read a lot of that history because I had seen that there was a lot of fiber in our region that is no longer used because it wasn’t properly utilized. The processes of making it weren’t supported. So, now I see how much fiber we have here, and I want those fibers to be supported and utilized so that they don’t disappear. So, just to talk to some people about the Woolly dog and how much it was utilized and how it was the main fiber here and now it’s basically extinct…It’s pretty sad to hear. You don’t want those fibers that are specific to our region to disappear any further. So, I think that was really important to hear those stories and to really solidify the importance of processing our fiber locally, as much as we possibly can, using it, showcasing it.

Francine McCabe, author, “is a mixed-blood Anishinaabe writer, fibre artist, and organic master gardener from Batchewana First Nation, living on the unceded traditional territory of the Stz’uminus First Nation with her partner and two sons.” (Photo courtesy of Francine McCabe)

MF: You highlight an interesting discrepancy in your book between the amount of financial support and grants available for food-based agriculture and the lesser support for fiber-related farms. Why do you think this disparity exists?

FM: I think it’s maybe because all of our textile production has been moved overseas—out of sight, out of mind. So, people aren’t questioning it as much. The idea of transparency in our textiles hasn’t been brought [to] our attention as much as it has with food, even though food and fiber are both agricultural issues, they both start from the land and our dependence on the land and farmers. But I think that people just aren’t quite aware of it as much or we don’t consider it as much. Clothing and textiles are something we’ve kind of taken for granted as part of our surroundings, but they are just as impactful as our food that we are taking into our bodies. 

MF: You set out to answer a pretty specific question—why is local fiber so costly to produce? You found your answer: no local mills. How would introducing more local infrastructure change the textile industry in Vancouver Island and the Gulf Islands? 

FM: There are people here who are interested in starting that, but the startup is extremely expensive. And there’s no government funding at this time, that’s like, ‘here’s the startup for a fiber-related business.’ So, a lot of people are struggling with just how to get funds to start that. 

But if they were able to start that, every single farmer that I spoke to in this book said they would use a local fiber mill, if it was here. So, if there was somebody who had extra funds to start a fiber mill, they would be in business, and they would have years worth of fiber to process. If I had the money, I’d be all over that. And it would change our infrastructure because it would allow for a lot more of our fiber to be processed right here on the island, which would bring down the price for farmers. It opens up a bunch of different doors and a bunch of avenues for local businesses. It would be a huge boost for the economy.

Fleece from Gotland sheep. (Photography by Francine McCabe)

MF: You advocate that consumers demand the same transparency from our textiles as our food—we need to know what is in our textiles. What are some of the issues woven into mass-produced textiles?

FM: A lot of products that you buy that claim to be 100 percent natural [or] organic, the material may have been grown organically and the material itself might be 100 percent cotton, but then it’s finished with a finishing product that leaves a residue on the fiber that would never allow that fiber to break back down into the soil. So, yes, the fiber itself is natural and organic, but the chemicals in the process that they’re using to dye it and to treat it is not organic. 

It’s one of those confusing things, as it is with food. Like “organic”—what does that really mean anymore? And so with our clothing, it’s the same thing. They say things on them, like “ethically sourced,” but what does what do those words really mean? For us as consumers to just demand from our brands, what does that mean? What does ethically sourced mean for you? And who’s making your products? Where’s the material coming from? Just more questions we could be putting onto the brands so that they feel the need to have more transparency.

Yarn being dyed at Hinterland Yarn. (Photography by Francine McCabe for Fleece & Fibre)

MF: In reporting for this book, you visited several different farms, spoke with a lot of innovative people and met many photogenic animals. I’m sure they all stand out in their own unique ways. What specific highlights or takeaways will stick with you?

FM: I got to meet the Valais Blacknose breed [of sheep], which was one of the breeds I really wanted to meet. And they were just as cute as I expected them to be, and friendly, so that was great. But I think really just being able to see the farmers and see their actual passion for the fiber solidified that this book was where I really wanted to go, because I wanted to help them pass their message along and wanted to connect them to other makers.

MF: You encourage readers to stay “fiber curious.” What does that mean to you?

FM: When you go to purchase products, maybe look at your tag, see what they say, just look for local stuff. If you’re thinking you want a new sweater, maybe get curious who’s making sweaters in your 15-mile radius around you and see if those are the types of sweaters you might want, versus going out to the store to buy one. Just stay curious about what is happening with your textiles [and] where they’re coming from. Think about them as you would your food. 

We are at a time in this world where it’s important to consider all of these different avenues, not just our food. And maybe it’s time to change how we produce and consume our textiles, as well. I think it’s just important that people realize that our textiles are an agricultural product. We are depending on farmers and the land for these things, as much as we are our food.

The post Staying ‘Fiber Curious’ in an Age of Fast Fashion appeared first on Modern Farmer.

My partner, John, and I were traveling in the early days of a long-planned speaking tour as the concern and confusion regarding the crisis reached its first fevered pitch. Tour events disappeared in front of us wholesale. But my first thought upon hearing about the California lockdown orders was not “How do we get home?” or “How do we keep from getting sick?” or “How do I stem the ebbing of my work and income?” As gardeners, our first thought was “We need to order seeds.” 

We were not, apparently, the only gardeners to have this instinctive thought. When I got online the day after the lockdown orders, before being able to get on a flight home, “Out of Stock” and “Back-ordered” popped up on our computer screens over and over again from our favorite organic seed sellers: Redwood Seeds, Peaceful Valley Seed, Territorial Seed, Fedco Seeds, Hudson Valley Seed, Seed Savers Exchange, Southern Exposure Seed Exchange, Kitazawa Seed, Johnny’s Selected Seeds, Baker Creek Heirloom Seeds. As a gardener, to feel a sense of scarcity in the seed supply was an alarm bell ringing—and ringing loudly in my mammalian brain, triggering survival anxieties and a determined instinct to engage with my own survival. Our collective survival. 

As gardeners, our first thought was “We need to order seeds.” 

Seed is important: Botanists know this, ecologists know this, farmers and horticulturists know this and most gardeners have a pretty good basic understanding. 

But, if many of our (human) species are overwhelmingly “plant blind,” even more of us are stunningly seed stupid—many of us are not sure exactly how they work, how they’ve evolved, how they are being handled at legislative, commercial or, perhaps most importantly, cultural levels, and why this matters. 

Jennifer Jewell.

In the midst of climate crisis, a precipitous rate of biodiversity loss in our world, a global pandemic, attendant financial chaos, global social-justice reckoning and now the most globally reverberating war in the last 50-plus years, we as humans, and in the United States as an industrialized society, are being offered an intense short course in what we need most in this world, what is in fact essential to our lives: Community, family, health, dignity, clean water, clean air, access to some open space and sufficient food are all unquestionably on this list of essentials. Foundational to clean water, clean air, and sufficient food are … plants. 

Foundational to the vast majority of plants on our planet are their seeds: the smallest form of, the very essence of, these plants. 

In this bizarre moment of colliding urgencies for life as we have known it, we are collectively being offered an opportunity to remember and really understand the essential importance and power of seed in our world: for food, for medicine, for utility, for the vast interconnected web we include in the concept of biodiversity and planetary health, for beauty and for culture, whatever that might mean to us. 

This recognition of the importance of seed on micro and macro levels did not just happen in March of 2020 with the COVID-19 pandemic in full form, with increasing climate extremes of the last several years or with the Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupting geopolitical stability and global food security and health. On the contrary, the stewards of the “seed world,” that dedicated sector of our independent plant-engaged world, have been sounding the alarm and preparing the soil for a likewise global seed-literacy and seed-protection revolution of sorts for many years. 

The seed world is rich with scientists, spiritualists, growers, activists and protestors who have been keeping seed alive, accessible, shared and safe. These seed stewards have been preparing for the battle ahead as seed (its integrity, its diversity and our open access to it) has become increasingly threatened. These seed keepers have been declaring loudly to all who would listen why we should join in the work to know and care for seeds ourselves as one of the most proactive steps we can take to rebuilding our human food systems, our social systems and the global ecosystems of biodiversity on which we all depend. 

Since the 1980s, when the first GMO seed patent was issued, and the 1990s, when reporting began in earnest about seed supply strategically (and stealthily) being consolidated into the holdings of large agribusiness-chemical corporations, the smaller seed sowers, growers, banks and knowers have been recording and responding. Their strategic, heartfelt, ground-level actions—documenting, saving, sharing and protecting seed—protect us all.

Excerpted with permission from What We Sow: On the Personal, Ecological, and Cultural Significance of Seeds (Timber Press, 2023)

The post Why Seeds Matter appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But the impacts of roads? Those go on for miles. As Ben Goldfarb writes in his new book, Crossings, the “road effect zone” covers about 20 percent of the country. “Park your car on the shoulder and bushwack half a mile into the woods, and you’ll still see fewer birds than you would in an unloaded wilderness. Hike two miles more, and you’ll still see fewer mammals. If you’re a Kerouac reader, you grew up steeped in the dogma that highways represent freedom. If you’re a grizzly bear, they might as well be prison walls.”

Goldfarb traveled across the country, and the globe, to learn more about how roads have shaped not just our communities but the natural world around us. Animals, both on land and in the waters, have a harder time migrating to food or to mate when surrounded by roads. Road salt is leaching into our water, contaminating the streams. The noise pollution from roads has changed the way birds and insects interact with neighboring forests. 

As Goldfarb discovered, roads may be nearly invisible to the modern human, just another necessary part of everyday infrastructure. But to the other species on this planet, roads have fundamentally changed their existence. 

Goldfarb spoke with Modern Farmer about his new book, how roads have impacted animals and agriculture and where we might go from here. This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. 

Modern Farmer: Let’s start with the basics. Your book talks a lot about “road ecology.” What is that?

Ben Goldfarb: Road ecology is the field of scientific study that looks at how roads and other transportation infrastructure affect nature and what we do about those impacts. The most obvious one is the dead animal lying by the side of the highway. A lot of road ecology is about why roadkill happens and what its effects on populations are and how to prevent it. But you know, it’s also a lot bigger than that. It’s about how roads disrupt animal population distributions and migration patterns and how road noise affects ecosystems and how all of the road salts that we apply changes waterways. So, it’s kind of a daunting vast field of study in some ways.

MF:  Why do roads have such an outsized effect on the world around them, considering that they actually take up such a small amount of physical space?

BG: It’s a good question. There are a couple of reasons that come to mind. First is that even though roads themselves don’t take up a huge amount of spatial area, they inflict habitat loss at a kind of gigantic scale. The example that always comes to mind for me are these migrating herds of mule, deer, elk and pronghorn antelope that we have in Colorado, where I live. For those herds, which have to migrate across the landscape to reach food and resources at different times of the year, roads can be a total impediment to their movement. There are some really heartbreaking cases of herds that starve because they can’t reach certain key valleys in the winter. So, for those animals, the road is 100 feet wide, and yet, it’s denying them access to millions, potentially millions of acres of good habitat. So, the road has this impact on the movement of animals that’s far vaster than its own physical form. 

The other thing I would say is road noise. Especially from big highways, noise is billowing away from the highway, and going half a mile or a mile into the surrounding ecosystem, and that noise has a huge impact. Animals have very sensitive hearing and tend to avoid noisy areas where the sounds of predator or prey might be obscured. 

MF: You do talk about wildlife crossings (built sections of highway that allow animals to safely pass over the top of or underneath the roadway) and the different ways they might look or feel and how they aim to facilitate animal movement. But there is also the notion of what makes a wildlife crossing successful. Just because the animal is moving doesn’t mean they’re going where they need to go, doing what they need to do. How do you actually track if a wildlife crossing is having the intended effect?

BG: You could say the wildlife crossing is working when an animal crosses the road using it. That does make intuitive sense. But, this has been documented in certain cases where the animals who are crossing are all young males, who are going back and forth looking for a female on either side of the highway and are unable to find one. So, maybe that crossing has been used dozens or even hundreds of times by young male bobcats or coyotes, but if they’re not mating, then they’re not contributing their genes to the population and the population might not be growing. 

There really haven’t been many or maybe even any studies that have rigorously shown a wildlife population increasing because of the presence of wildlife crossings. There’s still one more kind of level of research to be done, and that’s the level that would show real population responses to these structures.

Author Ben Goldfarb. Photography by Terray Sylvester.

MF: I want to talk a little bit about the intersection of roads and agriculture and ranching. In the book, you mentioned the anecdote of wildlife crossings in Wyoming and how they were actually really supported by ranchers, and I wanted to find out why ranchers were so supportive of the idea in that area.

BG: [In that instance], there was this campaign for a special license plate in the state, and the sales of the license plate would go towards wildlife crossings. That campaign to create the license plate was not really going anywhere until the big ranching association got on board and supported it. 

Of course, there are many ranchers who love wildlife, that’s a big part of the appeal. Many ranchers care about being good stewards of nature and ranch in harmony with the elk, deer and other critters who use those ranch lands.

But there’s also the linear infrastructure of ranching that’s all over the landscape. 

MF: You mean fencing? 

BG: Fencing, yes. And those fences have a real impact on wildlife mobility, they can prevent animals from moving successfully and equally across the landscape. Imagine a scenario in which the cattlemen association is supporting these campaigns and pointing the finger at highways as being the problem to potentially distract from the impact of ranch operations in restricting wildlife mobility. 

I think that’s the thing about country roads. In some ways, they’re this safe neutral state that all industries can work on together, because they’re not exactly anybody’s fault. They’re just the structures that are out there. And they’re very harmful, but we can lay the blame on [the roads themselves]. Because it’s a non-regulatory space. 

MF: Another section of the book that stuck with me looked at groups of people planting milkweed and other pollinator-friendly crops along highways and rest stops and attempting to make the roads more friendly for butterflies and other pollinators. It feels like there are these smaller interventions that we may not even be aware of as we drive but that are helping to combat the negative impacts of roads. 

BG: It’s funny because what gets all the press are these fancy and expensive wildlife crossings like the Liberty Canyon crossing near Los Angeles for mountain lions. It’s a $90-million project and it’s been written about 10,000 times. But there’s also just so much opportunity in existing infrastructure. 

We have all these culverts out there, probably a couple million of them, that funnel runoff and seasonal water under roads, and each one of them is a potential wildlife crossing. They’re just waiting for a little tweak. Little retrofits [to the culverts] are incredibly inexpensive and can do a lot to use the existing landscape. 

We have all these culverts out there … and each one of them is a potential wildlife crossing. They’re just waiting for a little tweak.

MF: Are the most negative impacts of roads reversible? Or is there something that we might be able to do, especially as regular citizens? 

BG: Are they reversible? I don’t know. You could build a great wildlife crossing, but that doesn’t address noise pollution or storm water runoff or the debris filling the culverts. As the total impacts are so diverse and so nasty, there’s no single thing you can do to prevent them all. So, we may solve a few of the problems, like roadkill and animal mobility, but that’s only part of the problem. 

We can prevent new construction in bad places. There are good examples of fighting those roads in the US. There are also numerous examples of fantastic uses of existing infrastructure. In the book, I talk about how the forest service operates the largest road network in the world. I don’t know if most people realize that all of these old logging roads are out there on the landscape, hemorrhaging sediments into otherwise pristine streams. These old logging roads have been obliterated by the forest service and various conservation groups over the years, so that’s a good example. 

I also talk about the removal of urban freeways as well. These sections of interstate were plowed through communities of color in the 1950s and 60s very deliberately. Now, some of these really harmful road sections are starting to be rethought and torn down and replaced. It’s an example of roads being unbuilt. They might seem permanent and inevitable, but they aren’t necessarily so. We have four million miles of roads, and the vast majority of that is not going anywhere, but we are capable of removing harmful sections. 

MF: You write that our infrastructure “no longer has the luxury of invisibility” because of climate change. Can you expand on that? 

BG: In all things we’ve done to modify landscapes, nature always fights back.

One example is Vermont, which has [had] gigantic rainstorms this summer, leading to lots of flooding. And all of these dirt roads in Vermont were just turning to mud, bleeding sediments into the river, and all of these culverts were getting blown out as they got filled with debris. These intense rainstorms destabilized Vermont’s road network. 

In Alaska, you can see pavement that’s fractured and buckled, because of melting permafrost beneath roadways. As that permafrost melts, the overlying infrastructure, the roads, [are unstable]. There are just all of these ways in which our changing planet is impacting our transportation network and revealing how shoddily built a lot of it really is.

Crossings will be released September 19 from W.W. Norton press. 

The post How Our Network of Roadways Has Altered the Natural World appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Some of these fungi pose threats—to humans, animals or  plants. Mostly traveling via spores, fungi can move from place to place easily, carried on an animal’s wing or the sole of a shoe. Then, once in the right conditions, fungi spread. They can infect a variety of species, recently causing problems for bananas, coffee and chocolate.  

And we could be next. 

“Over the past century,” Monosson writes, “fungal infections have caused catastrophic losses in other species, but so far [humans] have been lucky. Our luck may be running out.” 

For many species of fungi, climate change is propelling their spread and aiding their ability to infect potential hosts. We spoke with Monosson about the dangers that fungi pose to humans and our food supply and what we can do about it. 

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Emily Monosson. Photography courtesy of W. W. Norton & Company

Modern Farmer: It feels like mushrooms and fungi are having a bit of a moment in pop culture, with Netflix documentaries and The Last of Us. 

Emily Monosson: Talk about timing! Because of both the pandemic and The Last of Us, that’s brought a lot of attention to the dark side of fungi. There’s been a lot of good stuff about fungus and for good reason. I mean, the fungal kingdom is really important to everything—how we live, how we grow food…

MF: Right, you talk in the book about how fungus can be helpful or harmful, and one interesting example in agriculture is bananas. Can you expand on what happened with bananas and fungal infection? 

EM: Well, in the 1950s or 1960s, we started eating the Cavendish banana, which is what we all think of as the banana. And yes, there are lots of different kinds of edible bananas, but we rely on the Cavendish. And before the Cavendish, there was the Gros Michel banana. That banana was impacted by a fungus that’s now called TR1, which pretty much threatened to wipe out the banana industry. And so, [the industry] turned to the Cavendish banana and started growing that.

MF: The problem is when we lost the Gros Michel, we had fields and fields and hectares and hectares of this banana that got wiped out. And now, we’ve replicated that process with the Cavendish, which is a little mind blowing.

EM: It is. So, the Cavendish was resistant to that TR1 one fungus, which is great. But, pathogenic fungi, if they are spore-producing fungi, some of those spores are really resilient, and they can live in the soil for maybe decades. So, once a plantation becomes infected, you can’t grow those kinds of bananas there anymore. The crop needs to be grown somewhere else. There’s no treatment for it except for maybe flooding the plantation. 

Now, a newer fungi, TR4, is spreading to many of the banana-growing regions, and it is killing the Cavendish banana plants. I went to a place in Costa Rica that was growing bananas; Costa Rica does not have this TR4 yet, and they’re just terrified of that fungus making it into Costa Rica. And so, there’s very strict regulations about taking banana plant parts into places. When you go to the airport, there are big signs that [warn against bringing in bananas].

But scientists who study these fungi think that the reason this has spread is that bananas are cloned [meaning there’s no genetic variation or immunity to TR4 that can pop up]. It’s hard to understand how this can happen to that degree again, that it’s threatening most of the Cavendish banana industry, because of how much was known about how the fungus travels.

So, one of the solutions is to just broaden our palate, maybe think about eating other kinds of bananas, and be a little bit more open to buying a small banana or red banana or blue banana. 

MF: Let’s talk about those spores that can live in the soil. As you say in the book, once a fungus shows up, there’s virtually no getting away from it. How long does that period last? Is it possible to wait out a fungus?

EM: It’s complicated. A single fungus can produce many different types of spores. Some of them are short-lived, and they have to land on their host. And if they don’t land on their host, they’ll just die. But some of them, like some of the spores from TR4, can apparently live for decades. That’s a big problem. Those will not go away, and when their favorite host returns, then they will germinate and grow. 

I also wrote about bats, which are susceptible to fungal infections, too. Scientists believe that the spores that infect bats drop off onto the cave floor when the bats fly out. And then, as the bats fly around, they clear the fungus from their bodies. But when the bats return, the spores are still on the cave floor, and they get reinfected each time they return to their hibernacula.

MF: Throughout the book, you talk about different fungal pandemics, including the banana and bat examples we just talked about. You mention fruit and nut trees, row crops, frogs and salamanders. You mention that it’s a bit of luck we haven’t seen a widespread fungal pandemic in humans yet, but our luck could be running out. Why is that?

EM: That partly comes from Candida auris, a yeast that sort of emerged around 2016. It tends to infect people who are already compromised in some way; it runs through hospitals, long-term care facilities, and [it] impacts people who are immunocompromised. It also seemed to emerge around the world and many different places. There were five different strains of this fungus that seem to all emerge at once. And so, the question is, how would that happen? Why would that happen? It wasn’t like COVID, where you could trace to see how one strain evolved into others.

One of the hypotheses about how it emerged is that it was a fungus that was probably living in the environment, as most of them do, and making its living there. And then, as the environment has warmed a bit, it evolved to tolerate warmer temperatures. For humans, our body temperature tends to protect us from fungal pathogens, because they can’t tolerate it. So, what the thinking with Candida auris is, maybe it evolved to eventually be able to make the jump into humans and live in our body temperature and infect us. So, that’s one example of what could happen with the changing climate—more fungi that are living out in the environment might be able to grow in our bodies. 

One thing that I would say, though, is that something like The Last of Us, a real pervasive fungal pandemic that’s everywhere and can infect humans, most scientists would say that’s probably pretty unlikely. We’re not going to suffer what bats or frogs or, you know, chestnut trees have experienced.

MF: Obviously, a show or video game like The Last of Us is fiction. But what does separate us from bats and trees and salamanders?

EM: That’s a really good question. One thing is that it’s rare for a fungus to spread from person to person; they’re not as transmissible. In The Last of Us, the fungal spores got into the food, and that’s how people were exposed. But to have a spore-producing fungus able to infect humans and be everywhere all at once, it’s harder to do. 

MF: What about fungicide? How big a role could or should they play?

EM: Well, fungicide wouldn’t help soil-borne fungi, because it comes up through the roots, where you can’t apply fungicide. If it’s on the surface, then spraying a fungicide could be helpful. 

MF: What about gene editing or other forms of fighting against the fungi?

EM: I did interview one scientist who has been working on modifying bananas so that they can resist the TR4 disease. He’s gone about it in two different ways: One is to insert a gene from other bananas into the Cavendish banana that can resist the fungus. That would be a cisgenic process, taking from one banana and putting it into another banana. The other thing that he’s doing is to see if those resistance genes are in the banana but they’re silent or not turned on. So, that’s where gene editing might come in, to see if you can basically flip the switch on those genes and have them activated. 

MF: What about legislation or governmental policy? 

EM: When plants are imported in for us to buy, there are rules, they are inspected. Some would like to see increased certifications or inspections made mandatory. But unless there’s really good rapid diagnostics, some of the diseases are hard to identify. 

The ideal test would be able to take a swab of something and identify lots of different pathogens on it, and do it rapidly, because then a plant could either be certified that it’s clean and disease free. I wrote about a program in the US where nurseries are working with different state departments to ensure that the plants that they’re selling are certified as disease free as possible. So, you know, that’s something that if consumers look for that certification and encourage that kind of thing, then plant growers will be more aware of trying to do that. 

I think the bigger problem is really in the animal world, because we don’t have as many regulations and certifications and even inspectors for animals in trade as we do for plants.

MF: There was a section where you were talking about just the sheer number of animals that pass in and out of the United States. With all of those animals traveling through the country, some escape is inevitable. 

EM: Yeah, and the thinking is that’s how some of the fungal pathogens affecting wildlife have happened. So, there’s a movement to better control the animal trade.

For certain kinds of animals, there’s really no regulation that they need to be disease free. What some of the scientists that I talked to are trying to do is to just keep those animals from entering the country, to reduce the animal trade, but not being able to do that. They’ve been working with the Fish and Wildlife Service to figure out how best to reduce the potential for that to happen.

MF: What about the immediate big picture? You end the book by saying that looking critically at things like monocropping is our moral obligation. What do you make of that both on a community level and an individual level? How do we act within that system? Most people don’t grow bananas or have any control over the banana industry. So, how do we live within that moral obligation?

EM: It’s hard. You want to have solutions at the end of a book like this. And it’s often very hard for individuals to do something. If enough consumers demand something or are open to something, then there’s the potential that maybe the industry will respond. 

Look at all the different kinds of grains we eat now. I mean, that was probably unheard of how many years ago? That is a hopeful thing. Making many types of grains available is mainstream now. That could happen in something like bananas. We could demand and be open to lots of different kinds of bananas, which might move them away from the big monocrop Cavendish that we have now.

The other thing we as individuals can do is while we travel, when you see that sign that says ‘Don’t bring banana anything into this country,’ don’t do it. Don’t shove it in your pocketbook and think that you’re getting away with something, because what you could be doing is carrying the next pandemic.

The post Fungi Are Coming For Us appeared first on Modern Farmer.

But those guideposts are changing. With the climate warming, advice from years past has limited utility in the present. 

That’s where the New Farmer’s Almanac comes in. 

Art by Emily CD.

The new collection comes from Greenhorns, a publishing and media company focused on agroecology and restoration. The Old Farmer’s Almanac is still going strong, and this new collection, while not affiliated with the traditional almanac, pays homage to it. In 12 chapters, broken up by month, the almanac balances practical advice with emotional reflections. There are essays and how-to guides, interviews and poems, photographs and even cartoons. Each submitted work is penned by a farmer or gardener, and each takes a look at that central problem: Within a warming world, what can you do? Where do you turn to for advice? 

“The subtitle of the book is ‘Adjustments and Accommodations’. We’re thinking a lot about the kind of small, slow and steady ways that each of us can have an impact,” says Renee Rhodes, commissioning editor. “A big part of this year’s theme had to do with recognizing the ways in which we do have agency, despite being in a moment of stacked crises.” 

That look at agency and individual action is expressed in hundreds of different ways throughout the compendium. Don Tipping’s article on dry farming in the Pacific Northwest explores shifting ways of approaching a landscape he’s worked with for decades. Madeleine Granath’s poem, On Farming, begins with the line “relinquishing control, a lifestyle.” Danielle Walczak’s essay explores the beauty in routine. There are the writers who turned to practical, technical missives on adapting skills, and there are the writers who explored their own mindset shift, as they got creative and responsive in relation to their land. 

Art by Milo Vella.

As the commissioning editor, Rhodes sifted through all the works to find the right balance, ensuring that everything would meld nicely together. Each month gets its own mini-theme; May’s is “Stress and Surrender,” while February’s was “Causeway.”  Those mini-themes helped Rhodes focus while still aiming for work that cascaded in sequence. “It was a movement between tones, so that you have the poetic balancing out the scientific, and things segue into each other. A rain theme can evolve into a soil theme, which can evolve into the long history of Indigenous land ethics, and evolve into a thinking about alternative architectures,” says Rhodes. 

While there is a pervasive pop-culture archetype of the farmer as practical, unsentimental and occasionally even rigid, these submissions showcase an entirely different side to farming and tending land. “There’s an artistry to [farming], and there’s a culture and history of art and writing and literature and poetry as found in land work,” says Rhodes. “One of the goals of it is to share how huge of a cultural contribution agriculture is to our world, and that it does go beyond the technical and the practical.”

Softway Through the Thicket. By Taylor Hanigosky.

The works also act as a community-building effort. That feeling of agency—both lost and gained—reminds many farmers that they aren’t alone. “When people tell us how the book lands, there’s an appreciation for hearing from this many farmers in one place, because, so often, folks are working in a more isolated way,” says Rhodes. “Doing land work is not hypothetical. It’s very tangible. Creating room in that reality for the spirit and the culture-making…we create a space of belonging.” 

This is not a book filled with solutions to the new and varied problems that farmers face. But it is a record, an almanac, on the ways in which farmers tinker and try and shift their thinking. It’s an individual practice, but, ultimately, it works as part of a community, evolving together. In the editor’s note, Rhodes writes that farmers and landworkers are constantly adjusting their work to new circumstances. “Those who are attuned to the baseline, who are nimble in response, humble in their pace and calm in a present of constant change and uncertainty are the skilled workers we need in this moment.”

The post The New Farmer’s Almanac is an Intimate Log of a Changing Climate appeared first on Modern Farmer.

In an effort to educate herself on her new pets and the welfare of their species at large, Danovich dove deep into chicken literature in bookstores and libraries, but her searches came up short. Other than a surplus of how-to guides on backyard hens, she couldn’t find any books that enumerated the complex human-chicken relationship and what makes chickens so precious beyond their eggs and meat—for example, their ability to form bonds, successfully socialize with a variety of other species and display affection—which had been Danovich’s experience after adopting her flock. “So, I was like, ‘I guess I should just write it.’” 

Under the Henfluence is that book. The narrative begins with Danovich’s personal relationship to her own vibrant flock, starting with the adoption of her first hens and the bonds she developed with them, as well as her adoration for their quirks. “When Betty was hot or annoyed, her head feathers would stick straight up like an elaborate punk hairdo. It was a delightful surprise,” writes Danovich. More hens come and go, with each new group of girls named after famous fictional women. (There’s the Law & Order: SVU brood and Dana Scully from The X-Files is represented as well.) Danovich writes through her learning curve in raising the birds and leans into the awkwardness and mess of it all—even chicken rearing. “Chickens have sex through a process known as a ‘cloacal kiss.’ The hen squats for the rooster, who balances himself on top of her so that their vents can touch. It’s, um, very romantic.”

The narrative is easy to devour, and it illuminates facts about chickens that most people likely don’t know. From there, Danovich broadens out into reporting on the wider poultry industry, investigating uncomfortable truths about things like the male chicks culled by egg breeders. “My family, way back when, they were farmers,” says Danovich. “Nowadays, there’s an obvious disconnect between the way I think most of us would like to see animals being treated in the farm industry and the way that it’s actually happening.”

And, unlike a lot of pandemic pet acquisitions or consumerist stress-purchases Danovich’s dedication to her hens has not waned, either. In February, PBS News reported that 23 million households adopted a pet during the pandemic, and now, shelters all over the country are reaching maximum capacity as countless people are changing their minds and returning their pandemic pet purchases—dogs, cats, bunnies, even chickens. In a time of fear, says Danovich, America stress-bought all the baby chicks, making last-minute acquisitions and not knowing what they were truly getting into. “I do feel really troubled most by the baby chick industry and whether or not that’s the best thing to be doing. Plenty of people are always giving chickens up or selling them, so getting adult hens is a little less fraught.”

Under the Henfluence makes it impossible for the reader not to think of—and possibly love—the idea of chicken in a new way. “I wanted the book to feel like even if you didn’t have chickens, emotionally, you were going on this journey of getting to know chickens that kind of mimics what I went through,” says Danovich. Even after years of research, composing, editing, revising and publishing Under The Henfluence, Danovich is deeply invested in broadening her understanding of her subject. “Honestly, I haven’t gotten sick of them yet. I’ll be on a walk with my husband and I’ll share these new amazing things I recently learned, like the biology of chickens and how something works,” says Danovich. “It’s really making me more aware of things in the wider world that I hadn’t really yet paid attention to.” 

Her flock is now up to eight, and the girls have a wildly popular instagram page (@bestlittlehenhouse, 108k followers and counting). The book is out today.

The post Chick Lit: Inside The Real World of Backyard Chickens appeared first on Modern Farmer.

Instead, you think to yourself “my garden is too small to actually make any profit.” “Who would I even sell to?” “I don’t have the space to scale a business properly,” while you weed and prune and tend to your plants.  

If you’ve looked out over your garden plot and thought any of those things before, Jill Ragan would like a word. The proprietor of Whispering Willow Farm, who also runs a popular YouTube channel documenting life on the Arkansas farm, has made it her mission to help everyone get the most out of their garden—no matter what the size. In her new book, The Tiny but Mighty Farm, Ragan walks readers through the basics of everything from plotting out a garden to germinating seeds to supporting other producers in your community. But most importantly, she debunks the myth that only those with multiple aces can have a successful farming business—something she discovered first-hand when she and her husband first began farming.

“When we bought our first piece of land, we were broke … We couldn’t afford more than an acre,” says Ragan. “At first, I felt really defeated by that.” She worried she would only be able to grow enough to feed her family; she certainly never imagined that she could feed a whole community. But when she started speaking with other small farmers—such as Ray Tyler at Rose Creek Farms, who successfully farms on only an acre—it changed her perspective. “That’s when I started thinking, ‘I don’t need to spend more money on more land, I need to spend more money educating myself on how to use my land better.’’

So, that’s what she did. She plotted out garden patches, ensuring every bed was positioned optimally, and researched garden tunnels to learn how to protect her crops from the elements and maximize output. After all that work, she came to another realization. “When you scale up your land, your inputs go up, too,” says Ragan. “It’s going to take you so much longer to pay yourself back the debt that you’re in. If you would have just stayed small … you probably would have been better off.” That’s why one of the key tenets in The Tiny but Mighty Farm is not just to start small but to not be afraid to stay small. It’s entirely possible to build a business from your suburban backyard garden—and Ragan is happy to coach you through it. 

But before you even put your hands in the dirt, the first step, she says, is to define the pillars, values and visions for your business, which are the immovable core tenets, the guideposts for growth and your goals and dreams. Ragan adds that it’s important to sort out each of these beliefs from the get-go, since they will ultimately influence how you operate. 

“If you’re going to grow food, you might have that fork in the road where someone’s asking you to compromise,” says Ragan. Maybe you are a completely organic grower or maybe you’ve committed to no-till practices. Maybe you’re a conventional producer, but you know that you’re keeping half of your land untouched because you want to use it for something else. Whatever you’ve decided, Ragan says to make that promise to yourself and let those promises guide your decisions. Ragan advises growers to write down their values and put them somewhere visible (hers are posted on her dining room wall) so they can be referred back to whenever needed. Once you’re clear on what you actually want out of the business, it’s time to get to work. 

Ragan has filled the book with charts and notes sections to help with things such as plotting out succession planning and mapping out a garden, which readers can copy or fill in directly. Using notes, maps and spreadsheets is crucial, she adds—especially when utilizing a small space. “I didn’t want this to be a coffee table book. I want dirt on the pages, I want you to jot notes down,” says Ragan. 

She recognizes that kind of organizational impulse doesn’t come naturally to everyone. In fact, it didn’t come naturally to her, either. “I’m not going to lie, that’s not who I am at all,” she says. “I’m totally a free spirit. By nature, I’m not an organized person.” But after a few months of trying to wing it on the farm, she realized that simply wasn’t going to work. “I may hate [spreadsheets] with every fiber of my being, but the farm was suffering because I didn’t have these systems in place.” Today, Ragan credits the success of her farm and business to those spreadsheets and organizational systems—and they can help readers get started, too. 

One of the most important things to schedule into those charts and planners is rest time—and not only once you’ve done the work, planned out the garden and finished your first planting. No, says Ragan. Plan for regular rest and relaxation throughout the process. Farmers and growers of all sizes can burn out, especially if they’re also attempting to sell their products. 

“It may sound silly, like why do you need to block out time for relaxation? When I walk into the garden, I immediately see fruit that needs to be harvested, beds that need to be weeded or something that needs to be stalked up a trellis, and it’s my natural instinct to go and fix the problem,” says Ragan. “But when you constantly do that, you’re never enjoying the bounty of what you’ve worked so hard for.” Ragan says she learned to schedule blocks of 30 minutes at a time where she would go and sit in the garden: just sit, without worrying about the work that needed to be done. Even if you have one raised bed or an acre of land, it’s the same principle. You’ve worked hard, she says, so give yourself time to enjoy the literal fruits of your labor.

The Tiny but Mighty Farm is for hobby gardeners, full-time farmers or anyone looking to get from one end of the spectrum to the other. But no matter where you are in your journey, Ragan believes you’re ready to grow. “Don’t wait. The more you wait, the more you’re going to make excuses,” she says. “The only way you’re going to know how to farm and garden is by getting your hands dirty and making those mistakes. Don’t hesitate, don’t question yourself. Just dive in.” 

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