Livestock
Dirt Rich: Wintering Cattle Roundtable
Winter can be the most expensive time to own a cow in the Midwest. As the season changes, we’re going back in the Dirt Rich archive to revisit a roundtable of five of our staff who also raise beef and dairy cows: Angie Walter, Jared Luhman, Doug Voss, Tyler Carlson, and Kent Solberg. Back in…
Read MoreSeeing the farm with fresh eyes
A wonderful aspect of our farmer-to-farmer network is the energy and idea generation that happens when we’re together. Sometimes getting a new set of eyes on a challenge that you’re experiencing can spur a sustainable solution. Beyond our group field days and workshops, SFA has a team of farmers that offer individualized, on-farm consulting to…
Read MoreSupport farmers like Kate, Amy, and Dayle
This Give to the Max season, our goal is to raise $15,000 for our on-farm consulting work. Community leaders have generously posted a $5,000 matching grant! Can you help us meet it? Give here! What’s an on-farm consult? Upon request, one or two of our farmer consultants spend several hours walking your farm to get the…
Read MoreDirt Rich: Enchanted Meadows – In Transition
Chad Crowley firmly believes that for those who want to get into dairy or farming in general, grazing is the way to go. That route has certainly gone well for him. He was told many times that he couldn’t find success in farming because he didn’t grow up on one. But today he and his…
Read MoreDirt Rich: Old Farm, New Visions
A new episode of Dirt Rich features farmer and SFA board member Scott Haase of Blue Earth, Minnesota. Haase grows crops with his brother Brent and raises pasture and woodland pork on Blue Dirt Farm. Their German ancestors “walked here from Wisconsin back in the 1860’s,” and they still farm some of the land where…
Read MorePaddockTrac Draws a Crowd
We hosted a pasture walk with the Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship (DGA) and NRCS Cooperative Agreement at Walter Organic Family Farms on September 22. This event featured the PaddockTrac technology that was developed at the University of Missouri and is being tested on DGA farms around the country. The PaddockTrac is a unit that mounts onto…
Read MoreDirt Rich: Fundamentals of Adaptive Grazing
In the latest episode of Dirt Rich, you’ll hear a presentation that our Soil Health Specialist Jonathan Kilpatrick gave on adaptive grazing at a recent field day. He’ll bring you through the fundamentals, always keeping in mind the importance of context in grazing management. Jonathan believes that grazing is one of the most powerful forces we…
Read MoreDirt Rich: Get to Know Jonathan Kilpatrick
In the latest episode of our podcast series, Dirt Rich, Jared Luhman sits down with our new Soil Health Specialist, Jonathan Kilpatrick. Jonathan comes to Minnesota after several years in several states, where he built a diverse background in agricultural work. He grew up farming with his family, eventually building up a 250-300 member CSA…
Read MoreLuhman: Value Added Marketing
In a past Connect I discussed how in this region, according to University of Minnesota FINBIN data, the average cow/calf producer in Minnesota lost $275 in 2021. We talked briefly about some of the ways that you can reduce your cost to raise a calf, but for some, perhaps the question ought to be “should…
Read MoreDirt Rich: Designing Cover Crops for Late Season Grazing
It’s about that time to plant for late season grazing. Take a listen back to our episode on the topic from 2020–one of Dirt Rich’s earliest episodes! Kent Solberg and Doug Voss discuss the biological benefits of grazing complex cover crops (nicknamed “biological primers”), and will walk you through the process of designing a seed…
Read More