Soil Health
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…
Read MoreWhere 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…
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 MoreTour Plum Creek Garlic in New Video
Check out our new video that chronicles a garlic field day of one of our stalwart members! We visited Plum Creek Garlic near St. Cloud, Minnesota on June, 2022. Now in their 14th year of growing garlic, they are active members of the Sustainable Farming Association and follow best practices including rotation and building soil capacity…
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: Soil lab tests for regenerative ag
There are many tests you can do yourself on your farm to measure soil health, and we’ve talked about some of them before (check out Episode 47: Four DIY Soil Health Tests). In this new episode of Dirt Rich, Jared interviews Lance Gunderson of Regen Ag Lab on the utility of lab soil testing, particularly…
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…
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