Wine is a gateway drug to environmentalism.

Like my grandpa, who dropped out of school to farm, I have a 4th grade education. Of course, I have a college degree, too. Both require the same reading level.

What to wear on a Minnesota farm? The older farmers I know wear brown polyester jumpsuits, like factory workers. The younger ones wear jeans, but the forecast was for ninety-five degrees with heavy humidity. The...

Grow up, Bailey.””That is precisely what I’m doing,” Bailey says. “I don’t care if you don’t understand that. Staying here won’t make me happy. It will make you happy because you’re insipid and boring, and...

We got a saying around here about our corn, ‘it grows knee-high by the Fourth of July.

A determined Yankee book drummer once told a Southerner that ‘a set of books on scientific agriculture’ would teach him to ‘farm twice as good as you do.’ To which the Southerner replied: ‘Hell, son,...

It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or...

I’m a farmer of love. Just add water.

Raw ingredients trump recipes every time; farmers and ranchers who coax the best from the earth can make any of us appear to be a great cook.

As a working definition of art, I lean toward Tolstoy’s: “Art is a human activity having for it’s purpose the transmission to other of the highest and best feelings to which mankind has risen.” It...

As Gill says, “every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be an artist.” The small family farm is one of the last places –...

Writing is conscience, scruple, and the farming of our ancestors.

It’s not the deprivations of winter that get you, or the damp of spring, but the no-man’s land between.

I like to wear a suit and tie and say things like, Well, I’d better be getting back to the farm. The crop’s not going to grow without my encouragement.

I do not particularly like the word ‘work.’ Human beings are the only animals who have to work, and I think that is the most ridiculous thing in the world. Other animals make their livings...

It is not as if farming brought a great improvement in living standards either. A typical hunter-gatherer enjoyed a more varied diet and consumed more protein and calories than settled people, and took in five...

Why does no one speak of the cultural advantages of the country? For example, is a well groomed, ecologically kept, sustainably fertile farm any less cultural, any less artful, than paintings of fat angels on...

Why do farmers farm, given their economic adversities on top of the many frustrations and difficulties normal to farming? And always the answer is: “Love. They must do it for love.” Farmers farm for the...

Check your environment and be sure that it is supportive. Some environments do not support progress. Hiroshima and Nagasaki are not fertile lands for a farmer’s dream seeds. Change location.

More grass means less forest; more forest less grass. But either-or is a construction more deeply woven into our culture than into nature, where even antagonists depend on one another and the liveliest places are...