Small Farmer's Journal

If I'm not mistaken, our good bud Wendell has been a contributor to Small Farmer's Journal for a number of years. My recollection is that when I first read his "The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture" back in the 1970s, he made some mention of the magazine. Anyhow, thanks for spotlighting it.

Over the years, it has been interesting to compare Small Farmer's Journal with mainstream farm and ranch magazines. The hopeful thing is that the mainstream publications are beginning to run articles on subjects SFJ has been addressing for years. Example: here in the Northwest, the farm and ranch weekly (Capitol Press) now routinely runs articles on organics, alternatives to pesticides, GMOs, etc. But they address these from a purely practical standpoint: how to make the transition from conventional to organic, how much organic certification can "add value" to a farm commodity, how to find organic hay at a decent price, how to build direct supplying relationships with local restaurants, how to connect with a farmer's market, whether "country of origin" labeling is good for producers, how to qualify your crop as "salmon safe," etc. That's really encouraging stuff, demonstrating that a paradigm shift is beginning to occur at the grassroots.

For a long time, I've thought that environmentally concerned folk should spend less time reading explicitly "green" publications and more time reading the farm and ranch press. If we're serious about food, and about restoring some kind of agrarian vision (reconnecting town and country), then we urbanites need to understand what farmers and ranchers are thinking.

So, more power to Small Farmers Journal, and to any farm or ranch publication that wrestles with the challenges of agriculture in the year 2008.

Thanks for the link, Rod! Farming Magazine is one of my favorites to browse when I going to Tractor Supply. I'll have to look into the one that Rod posted as well.

Matthew

My father-in-law was born in 1910 and he said the best day of his life was when his Dad traded in the horses for a tractor. Horse-drawn implements would not have interested him, but the other articles might have.