Good Food is Everybody's Business
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.
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.
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!
Organicology – a “portmanteau word” meaning the study of organics – is the biggest conference/trade show focused entirely on organic seeds and produce in the country. This year more than 800 people attended the three-day conference.
Using our land wisely should be an inclusive conversation, and we believe the local food movement encompasses not just sustainable agriculture, but hunters, anglers, and …
At this year’s Tilth Producers of Washington conference, now referred to as T-40, a few attendees of the first conference – older, wiser, and grayer – mingled with younger farmers (some not yet born when Berry spoke in 1974 at “T-1”) to share ideas, advice, and plans for the future.
Casey Bailey, Clearlake Organic Farm, Fort Benton MT, was our “man on the scene” at this year’s MOSES Organic Farming Conference in La Crosse WI. This is his “diary” of this year’s events.
