Slate of Experts to Convene at 2023 Midwest Soil Health Summit

Dave Brandt, Gene Goven, Dr. Elaine Ingham, and local experts including Anna Cates, PhD and our own Kent Solberg are among the presenters at the 2023 Midwest Soil Health Summit: Pioneering the Future: The Soil Health Mavericks. SFA’s premier soil health event will be held at the Holiday Inn in Alexandria, Minnesota on March 8 and…

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Season 3 Comes to a Close

Somehow we’ve already reached the end of our third season of Dirt Rich. This month we released two episodes with our staff, finishing out the year with some food for thought as folks plan for the next growing season. In Episode 61: What’s on your mind?, Jared Luhman, Doug Voss, Kent Solberg, and Jonathan Kilpatrick…

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Pioneering the Future: The Soil Health Mavericks

SFA’s premier soil health event, the Midwest Soil Health Summit, will be held at the Holiday Inn in Alexandria, Minnesota on March 8 and 9, 2023. Join pioneering experts in the soil health world from near and far for our 10th annual Summit! Featured speakers include Dave Brandt, Gene Goven, Dr. Elaine Ingham, and local…

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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…

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Supporting Farmers and Giving to the Max

We’ve been the farmer-to-farmer network for over 30 years, and we know farmers learn best from other farmers. We also know that context is key. It can be challenging to return home from a workshop and figure out how to implement what you just learned! That’s why it’s important to us to be able to…

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Seeing 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…

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Support 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…

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Where do you want to see our Fruit & Vegetable efforts go?

In the past, SFA’s work on fruit and vegetables has largely centered around garlic and asparagus (for good reason). Both garlic and asparagus have significant demand from local food shoppers and also help us, as farmers, follow the six principles of soil health. However, this is just a small piece of the collection of specialty…

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Dirt 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…

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PaddockTrac 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…

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