sustainable agriculture
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Pom-Pom club: Just how ‘Wonderful’ are pomegranates?
In Checkout Line, Lou Bendrick cooks up answers to reader questions about how to green their food choices and other diet-related quandaries. ————— Dear Checkout Line, For months now, I can’t seem to walk through my local natural-food market without smacking into a vast display of pomegranates — and I usually put one in my […]
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USDA’s Deputy Secretary discusses local, organic farming
Cross-posted from Civil Eats. Deputy Secretary of Agriculture Kathleen Merrigan It was by no means Kathleen Merrigan’s first trip to the Ecological Farming Conference (EcoFarm). But when the Deputy Secretary of Agriculture stood at a podium to address last week’s annual gathering of farmers, retailers, processors, and advocates, it was clear she had never had […]
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Seeking sustainability, finding skeptics at the American Farm Bureau meeting
Seattle, Wash. — Attending the American Farm Bureau’s annual meeting in the Emerald City on Sunday, I felt like a Red Sox fan at a Yankees game. It did nothing to calm my nerves when I heard Farm Bureau President Bob Stallman say this: A line must be drawn between our polite and respectful engagement […]
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Russ Parsons on launching a civil, inclusive food-system debate
Can we all just get along? Image: Tom Twigg for GristIn a recent article, the LA Times foodie pundit Russ Parsons attempted to start a “more constructive give-and-take, the start of a true conversation” on the food system. He argues the debate has congealed into a tedious battle between “hard-line aggies” who are “convinced that […]
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It takes a community to sustain a small farm
A local grocery store in Pleasantville, Iowa.Wikimedia Commons These days it seems the most popular person to be in the food system is the “local farmer.” Farmers markets are popping up everywhere, and their size and popularity grow all the time. Local food is trendy–even the First Family is in on it. But as anyone […]
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USDA sustainable-ag czar Merrigan hits youtube
Way back in August 2006, I wrote a column arguing that farmers in northern areas could grow a lot more vegetables in the winter, if the USDA would invest in research and infrastructure for it. I wrote: If we wanted to make that vision come true for the nation’s northern climes, all it would take […]
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Can delicious crepes create a buckwheat revival?
Just add Paris: buckwheat crepes in their glory.April McGregerMy love for buckwheat first blossomed in the Soba-ya shops of Japan. Years later, that love was rekindled on the sidewalks of Paris eating Galletes de Sarrasin, or Breton-style savory buckwheat crepes, washed down with hard apple cider in stoneware cups. I found the deep, pleasantly bitter, […]
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More power, less roadkill: How one professor’s landscape has shifted
I took Environmental Studies 101 during my first college semester 20 years ago with Dick Andrus, a professor who has just marked 36 years of teaching at Binghamton University. I thought it’d be good to check back with him and see what he’s talking about in that class now. Q. What are your new Envi […]
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Grist Exclusive: Will Whole Foods’ new mobile slaughterhouses squeeze small farmers?
Jennifer Hashley processes a chicken on her Massachusetts farm. Massachusetts poultry farmer Jennifer Hashley has a problem. From the moment she started raising pastured chickens outside Concord, Mass. in 2002, there was, as she put it “nowhere to go to get them processed.” While she had the option of slaughtering her chickens in her own […]