MOTHER EARTH NEWS October - November 2016

I just finished reading a book that’s been on my nightstand for quite a while. I thought it would be another chronicle of the sustainable agriculture movement, this time in Montana. Instead, I discovered in Lentil Underground: Renegade Farmers and the Future of Food in America, by Liz Carlisle (Avery Press, 2015), an incredibly inspiring and hopeful saga of grit, determination, love for the land, openmindedness, and, most of all, community. Carlisle tells so compelling a story that I read the first half of the book out loud to my friend one delightful evening after watching the Missouri River flow for a few hours in central Missouri. At times, I was moved to laugh, and at other times I was sufficiently choked up that it took a few deep breaths…

“MOTHER EARTH NEWS changed my life. Thank you!” EDITORS’ PICK Mobs of Poultry I enjoyed Greg Judy’s “Mob Grazing Made Simple” (August/September 2016), which attributes this method to centuries-old grazing patterns of bison and other ruminants on prairie. Judy’s point about how herds enhance grasslands is brought home by Allan Savory’s wonderful TED Talk (watch at http://goo.gl/fTCDwv ). I want to mention a productive add-on to cattle mob grazing: chickens. You can centrally locate a chicken coop within the hub of the planned cattle-grazing areas — just give the birds access via doors or corridors. Or, you can roll a coop on wheels onto a grazed area immediately after the cows are moved. MOTHER even offers DIY chicken tractor plans (Country Lore, August/September 2016). The benefits of adding chickens to your mob-grazing operation include freerange…

When the founders of the National Young Farmers Coalition (NYFC) started their nonprofit organization in 2010, they saw the writing on the barn wall: The average age of American farmers had climbed to 58, and many were expected to retire in the following decade. The up-andcoming generation of growers would need better access to tools, connections, and land to keep family farming alive in the United States. According to an NYFC survey of 1,000 new farmers, people who want to start farming face many hurdles, including a lack of access to credit, capital, land, and affordable health insurance. Young farmers especially may already be saddled with student debt, creating another barrier to entering the field. Before NYFC’s inception, there wasn’t an advocacy group out there for new farmers to rally around.…

They’re both essential autumn crops that you can store in winter. One grows half-buried in the soil; the other hangs from one of Mother Nature’s most picturesque trees. And within their respective categories, onions and apples each hold a position of importance — no cook should ever be without them. Plan an Onion Patch As shoppers, we know that onions come in several colors: red ones sweet and mild, white-skinned ones with a bit more bite, and tan ones super-flavorful. As a gardener, you learn other distinctions, too. In the South, where summer days are shorter, people grow “short-day” onions that can form bulbs as soon as there are 10 to 12 hours of daylight. Northerners grow “long-day” onions, suitable for a colder climate and 14- to 16-hour summer days. Vidalia, Georgia,…

Living in self-reliance and simplicity is a dream many have but only some fulfill. My husband, Dennis, and I live that lifestyle on Deer Isle, Maine, where we built an off-grid homestead. We grow and store most of our food, rely on solar power, produce our own lumber, raise pigs and chickens, and meet our minimal financial needs by running Deer Isle Hostel during summer. I came to Maine from Sweden in 2008 to help Dennis start the hostel, and at that time, I didn’t even know what the word “homesteading” meant. Leading up to my move, I had an office job in Sweden in which I felt trapped in a grid made up of my office, the commuter train, and my apartment. Looking back, it was like wearing a sweater…

Several years ago, an empty urban lot in the city of Peterborough, Ontario, sparked an interesting and exciting debate among our faculty at The Endeavour Centre, a nonprofit sustainable-building school based in the city: What would it take to build the “greenest” home in Canada? And could such a home blend into an existing neighborhood and meet conventional cost and building code expectations? In 2012, we set out to answer those questions, as the design and construction of such a house became the focus of our six-month Sustainable New Construction program. A group of eight students joined our faculty and guest instructors to attempt to meet the highest standards we could imagine for a residential construction project. Building Goals From the outset, we knew that meeting our goals would involve a lot of…