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What’s a guy to do when life slaps him in the face? When a roll of the boat knocks him to the deck? When a rogue wave drenches him in water? He gets up, dries himself off, and figures out a way. Pete Knutson has always been the kind of guy to find a way around the hurdles and challenges life tosses his way. 
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.” 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 
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. 
Most of the millions living in the Pacific Northwest forget that the drylands of eastern Washington and Oregon on the west of the Rocky Mountains and Montana to the east are also part of the nation’s “bread basket.” They’ve been raised to think that wheat comes from Kansas. The truth is that eastern Washington and Oregon, and central and eastern Montana produce millions of bushels of wheat, most of which is sold by the train carload to one of just a handful of huge commercial flour mills or is exported. 
Range rider Bree and her horse Shasta out for a morning’s ride. (Source: Hilary Anderson, Tom Miner Basin Association) While traditionally range riders – “cowboys” of old – were men, many of the range riders in the Tom Miner Basin today are women. Audio Interview Bree Morrison tells about her life as a 
Montana is rightfully called Big Sky Country, and it’s not unusual to drive 3 or 4 hours to attend a meeting, visit friends, or join a field day to learn about ranching or farming. On a hot and smoky day in August, Anderson Ranch in the Tom Miner Basin, near Yellowstone National Park, hosted several dozen folks who came to learn more about resilient ranching. 
Strawberries are my absolute favorite fruit, and I look forward to strawberry season every year. Depending on where you live that season can start as early as mid-June or as late as mid-July. This year we bought our last quart of berries at the farmers market the second week of August. They were amazing! 
Enclosed by surrounding mountain ranges, where black cattle and white sheep graze in sunshine filtered through a slight haze of wildfire smoke, a community comes together to concentrate on healthy animals, healthy soil, and healthy families. |
 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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