Good Food is Everybody's Business
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.
While traditionally range riders – “cowboys” of old – were men, many of the range riders in the Tom Miner Basin today are women. Audio …
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.
We all imagine that the beef we eat came from a cow living a happy-go-lucky life, frolicking on lush green pastures until a gentle and painless end. Obviously the average American does NOT want to meet their dinner while he/she is still standing. However, the idea that you could, if you wanted, meet the farmer who raised your dinner, is not so far fetched.
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.
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!
Support your local winter market! Yes, winter market! So often we think of farmers markets as a summer thing. After all, summer is the growing season. Here in Montana we’re not ready to give up on markets when the snow starts to fly.
The Bozeman Winter Farmers Market runs from the end of September to the end of April, and you can get your “fresh local food fix” every two weeks through the season. While you’re not going to find tomatoes and cucumbers on offer, you will find a wonderful array of products from 30 plus vendors.
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.
