How Did Our Daily Bread Go Wrong?

Bread went from being a major part of our ancestors’ food intake to being a very small part of the food we eat today. Heavy, rich, and nutritious bread was once a daily staple; today commercial “industrialized” bread is produced in fully automated factories and is full of chemical additives and preservatives, too much salt, and has too little nutritive value. What went wrong?

Beyond Organic to Regenerative Organic

Regenerative Organic Certification adds criteria and builds off the USDA NOP standards and other standards in the areas of soil health and land management, animal welfare, and farmer and worker fairness. Beyond organic as it stands today.

It takes a community to raise healthy sheep!

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.

A Soil Crawl in Big Timber, Montana

When one of the world’s experts on soil health and land resilience (from Auckland, NZ, a 9,500 mile trek) is scheduled to lead a day-long workshop just 170 miles away, you do everything you can to be there!

Local Grains: Taking Back Our Wheat

Our “National Hymn,” America the Beautiful, opens with the image of endless skies over fields of ripe golden grain that reach to purple mountains on the horizon. Poet Katharine Lee Bates would probably be appalled to realize that she was eulogizing one of the worst examples of mono-cropping in existence – second only to the carpeting of Iowa with corn.

Chia and Maya: Potential For a Nutritional Renewal In Guatemala

The conquistadores virtually erased chia from Mayan cultural awareness as part of their campaign to subjugate the Mesoamerican peoples to Church and King. But today, even as ordinary Guatemalans are engaged in a massive ongoing popular campaign to throw off the rule of a corrupt and brutal elite, chia may be ripe for rediscovery.

Modern Hives Give Ethiopian Women Farmers New Vocation

Most of the Ethiopian farmers in the Lelistu Ogda farmer cooperative struggle with soil fertility. That’s why Ayelech Bekele and 19 other women now embrace beekeeping as an alternative method for increasing their incomes.