Good Food is Everybody's Business
Where does your food come from? These are the people who grow it, catch it, prepare it, or sell it to you.
A descendant of generations of Montana ranchers and farmers, Tim Dusenberry, owner and operator of Double X Bar Ranch, is the steward of nearly 600 acres of farmland where he raises 135 head of beef cattle, 40+ pigs, and uncounted laying hens just a few miles from the city limits of Helena.
If you were to eat a dinner consisting only of Montana’s top agricultural products, here’s what you’d have in front of you: steak, a potato (no butter or sour cream, sorry), a big piece of bread, a cold glass of beer, and a piece of black cherry pie. What happened to that salad or side serving of veggies?
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: …
On a beautiful early summer day, more than 100 people gathered at Jody and Crystal Manuel’s Prairie Grass Ranch for a Montana Organic Association Farm Day to learn more about dryland cropping, cover-crop grazing, soil health, and control of the organic farmer’s nemesis: bindweed.
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.
While traditionally range riders – “cowboys” of old – were men, many of the range riders in the Tom Miner Basin today are women. Audio …
