This was published in The Land earlier this year. - Tim By Tim King The Land Correspondent Kutztown, PA, Rodale Institute, which is headquartered on its seventy year old 333 acre research and education farm near here, has opened its Organic Crop Consulting Services based at its Rodale Institute Midwest Organic Center near Marion Iowa. The Land talked to Dr. Andrew Smith, Rodale’s Chief Scientist and Chief Operating Officer, about Rodale’s expanded services in Iowa and about organic and regenerative agriculture in general. Smith is a former organic farmer and Peace Corps volunteer. The Land: Ca ..read more

It’s been a fairly dry spring. The only signifiant rain that has fallen came pretty much all at once early in April. Over four days nearly four inches fell. During that time the Long Prairie River almost reached flood stage and then went back to normal. It seems that heavy rainfall over short periods, followed by flooding that quickly recedes, is becoming normal. In the last few years more and more rainfall has come to us in big storms of two, three, and four inches at a time. Rainfall like that hardly ever happened when we were kids. Of course kids aren’t going to believe old-timers when we s ..read more

This was published in The Land this week. -- Tim By Tim King Garvin, MN The Land correspondent Pastured chickens and turkeys are part of the big regenerative picture at Heartland Heritage Farms, a multi-generation crop and livestock farm near this southwestern Minnesota town. “We’ve taken all tillage out of our practices,” Chris Schmidt, who farms with his son and his father Dale, said. “We stopped doing tillage in 2012 and are doing no-till and incorporating cover crops at that time.” Chris says that his father, who had always farmed with conventional tillage practices, was open to change but ..read more

By John King In Selma, Alabama, on Sunday, March 7, 1965, John Lewis, standing in the lead of a long line of marchers, looked down from the crest of The Edmund Pettus Bridge at the line of police armed with clubs, whips and truncheons and said, “I am going to die here.” Lewis intended to lead the marchers from Selma to the capital Montgomery, to demand access to voting for Black people in Alabama. Sheriff Jim Clark lowered his gas mask and led the deputies, some on horseback and some on foot, into the line of marchers. Under swinging clubs and hooves trampling, Lewis was the first to go down ..read more

I was glancing at an analysis of a livestock market report recently. The author wrote that livestock markets were improving because demand for product was increasing. Now we’ve all been weaned on the milk of capitalist eonomics so in less than a heart beat I knew that increased demand for beef product units by consumers translated into better prices for beef producers. I was reading a piece of proposed legislation this morning that referred to the people who grow food as producers. Producers presumably grow products or product units, also known as food. There is a trade magazine called the Veg ..read more

Late last month Senator Paul Gazelka, the Republican leader of the Senate, told the Minnesota Reformer that the Republican controlled Senate would likely fire the acting Commissioner of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, Laura Bishop, if the Agency, at the behest of the Governor, went ahead with the Clean Car Rule. The rule would require automakers to increase the number of electric vehicles they deliver to Minnesota auto dealers. Gazelka told The Reformer that he’d had “a conversation” with Bishop about the rule. Bishop has not been confirmed by the Senate. Gazelka, and his Republican co ..read more

U.S. airlines received a $15 billion subsidy in December’s COVID relief package. The subsidy was for the companies to re-employ thousands of their furloughed employees and keep them on the payroll until at least the end of the first quarter of this year. Congress, and the President, attached no other strings to the huge subsidy, even though airlines social costs, in terms of climate disruption, are huge. In 2018 airlines produced a billion tons of CO2 and benefited from a $100 billion subsidy by not paying for the climate damage they caused, a report published in the November 2020 journal Glob ..read more

Dream s United/Sueños Unidos as LP-GE high school student Itzel Salazar to interview some Long Prairie residents about how they felt aout wearing a mask. Three of the seven interviews, in Spanish and English, follow. Others can be found in the January La Voz Libre.Itzel took the photos. -- Tim Tony Burciaga - MN Fresh Supervisor Why do you wear a mask? I wear a mask to be safe and not to catch anything. How do you feel about wearing your mask? Seriously! Honestly? How do I feel? It's safe but I get anxious. I'm not used to it. Well, nobody is used to it. There is a time at work where we h ..read more

A claim that the terrorists that stormed our Capitol last week were actually led by antifa activists has gained a lot of momentum among right wing reactionaries and their media sources over the last days. The false claim originated from a group of well paid science deniers with a long history of climate science denial and propaganda, according to DeSmog, a blog that follows the PR in climate science denial. DeSmog also reports that it was the same groups that immediately began trying to shift the focus from the attack on the Capitol to the demonstrations against police killings of African Amer ..read more

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