Another award for a favorite local distiller: Gulch Distillers takes two. Tyrrell and Steffen take it home again!
Read more: Gulch Distillers takes two
 
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Happy Pig Says "Welcome!"
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2019 ApplePalooza: 1720 pounds of apples, 43 cartons to share, and 60-some of your closest friends: a do-it-yourself buying club. Here’s how Sarah Oien Page did it. 
On a drizzly Saturday, Dave Scott (a livestock specialist with the National Center for Appropriate Technology, NCAT) and Brent Roeder (Montana State University, MSU, sheep specialist), lead a workshop on grazing, practices, integrated parasite management, FAMACHA© scoring, and new sheep identification and handling methods. It could have been titled, “All Things Sheep, Kids (the 2-legged kind), Barber Pole Worms, and Mud… and Community.” 
Whether you are a farmer, an orchardist, or a home gardener, good tools make the job! And you can’t do a quality job without quality tools. How do you find good hand tools that are sturdy, repairable, and properly sized to your hand or height? 
Supermarkets and big box stores offer nearly 50,000 – or more – products for us to choose from to feed ourselves and our families. A nation-wide analysis of U.S. grocery purchases revealed that highly processed foods make up more than 60 percent of the calories in food we buy, and these items tend to have more fat, sugar and salt than less-processed foods. If we don’t understand the high cost of bad food – to ourselves, our families, our communities, and our economy – we will see life expectancy shorten, chronic diseases increase, and healthcare costs continue to spiral. Selecting locally grown and minimally processed food items – good food – can mean more healthful and nutritious food on your plate. 
Just imagine – what if we could no longer import our food? Or bring it in from the “produce corridor” that extends from Mexico to British Columbia up and down Interstate 5? Or even get it from neighboring states or provinces? What we thought was science fiction, is turning out to be fact! 
Bob Quinn is a “local boy done good:” a serial entrepreneur, an organic farmer, and contributor to nutritional research studying the health benefits of ancient wheat compared to modern wheat.Grain by Grain covers all three areas in detail and describes how they are interrelated and contribute to better local and regional economics. A quirk of the weather (thanks, Climate Weirdness!), and hungry migrating birds can clean out a crop in a matter of hours! Help a friend: Make a donation at Nash and Patty’s Go Fund Me Page. Instead of this… Nash’s has this… Patty and Nash Huber, Nash’s Organic Produce, made it 
Like most good ideas, Gulch Distillers’ Purple Prairie Barley Whiskey started with a conversation and the question, “What if…?” Join me as we make a visit to the Gulch to taste the 2018 Release of Purple Prairie Barley Whiskey. 
Can Montana feed itself? That sounds like a pretty basic question – after all, Montana is the fourth largest state in the United States, spanning 147,000 square miles. Shouldn’t we be able to support our meager population of 1,050,000 souls? We are primarily an agricultural state where almost 28,000 farms and ranches are spread across 60 million acres. |
 The Voice of Eco-Agriculture North America’s premier publisher on production-scale organic and sustainable farming. Learn more here. A Video You Don't Want to Miss!Clara Coleman, daughter of renowned farming pioneer Eliot Coleman, has a clear plan for a new collaborative farming model called the ARC Farming Project—Agrarian Resource Collaborative Farming. 
It is in response to today's particular agricultural challenges and embraces farmer entrepreneurial diversification. Watch the video here. |
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