News

Keeping Those Fields Covered

For the Ortmans, crop diversity & rotations are essential

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Rural Revival Display at Schmeckfest

This year, Rural Revival will again have a display table at Schmeckfest. This year, the display will be in the Heritage Hall Museum building instead of Sterling Hall as in years past. All are encouraged to visit the display to learn more about Rural Revival. Local producers will also have information at the table. The theme of this year’s display is Beekeeping, and there will be an informative video playing during the festival.

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Farm Transitions

A recent issue of The Land Stewardship Newsletter (No. 4, 2013) featured articles highlighting a new initiative of the Land Stewardship Project (LSP), the well-established, Minnesota-based “rural revival” effort to keep “land and people together.” The initiative is “farm transitions.” It is designed to counter “current land consolidation trends,” and provides tools to assist farm owners and would-be farmers transition land to the next generation. LSP and the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture (MISA) have developed a Farm Transitions Toolkit for this purpose which can be accessed by calling 800-909-6472 or at www.

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Tending The Margins

The margins in mind are those boundaries between human habitation and cultivation and the wild places of nature, those intersections between settled places and wilderness. It may be nothing that more than that patch of weeds in the corner of the garden or field, or the few scrub trees and bushes springing up along the fence lines. It may be the roadside ditches on country lanes. Or it may indeed be the boundary between farmland and a state park or between the field and the creek or river or prairie or forest.

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New Raw Milk Rules to Take Effect Dec. 11

South Dakota’s agriculture secretary says new rules covering the production, testing and labeling of raw milk sold in the state will take effect Dec. 11. The Agriculture Department had been trying to pass the rules since last spring and has held three hearings on the issue. The Legislature’s Rules Review Committee approved the changes earlier this month.

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SDSU Extension to host Soil Educational Forums

BROOKINGS, SD – SDSU Extension regional centers in Sioux Falls and Watertown will host soil health educational forums next month. The SD’s Soil Health Challenge: Don’t Get Left in The Dust events will feature information on soil organic matter, weeds, cover crops and wet soils. Each will also feature a panel of farmers who will share some tips on what has, and what has not, worked on their farms.

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Wasn’t This a Treeless Prairie?

So why should it be troubling to see more and more shelter belts and fence lines and pioneer wood groves being bulldozed and burned and buried? Or hasn’t anyone else noticed the disappearance of landmarks that have graced our landscape for some 100 years now? Even those of us native to this place find ourselves lost on familiar country roads when we come to intersections that used to mark a farm or a grove of trees, as my brother who now lives in Michigan and I discovered when we were out for a drive a few weeks ago.

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Land, Crops, Livestock, Family: An Integrated Agricultural System

Last August, Dick Thompson of Boone, Iowa, died. Thompson was an “alternative farmer” before that came to be a common thing, as it is today. A founder of Practical Farmers of Iowa, Thompson and his wife Sharon believed strongly that a healthy agriculture/rural community involves an integrated system of land, crops, livestock and family. I remember him speaking at rural life conferences in Iowa during the farm crisis of the 1970s, though it isn’t clear to me that that crisis has ever stopped.

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Community Rooted in Agriculture

My part-time work at Heritage Hall Museum reminds me at every turn of the history of this rural community, and its agricultural roots. The larger Freeman community was established mostly by Germans from Russia, who arrived here in the 1870s, now 140 years ago. They were an agrarian people, with a long history of living on the land, coming here as faith communities of Lutheran, Reformed, Catholic and Mennonite faith.

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Land Auctions and Our Future

It’s alarming for someone like me, who grew up in this community, to see the disappearance of landmarks familiar from my childhood—groves of trees, fence lines, farm places, schoolhouses, churches. This trend has accelerated in recent years as corn prices have risen due to the artificial ethanol bubble with its demand for corn. Perhaps it could be argued that the landscape looks more like it did when settlers first arrived here 140 years ago—flat open prairie with nothing obstructing the view.

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