Melissa Schneider didn’t set out to become a shepherdess. She left Los Angeles looking for something quieter. A life with a slower rhythm, a life closer to the ground. What she found on her Maine farm ...

If you haven’t had the chance or pleasure to grow heirloom tomatoes, try it this year. There are slicers, beefsteaks, cherries, and more to explore when it comes to the passed-down, open-pollinated ...

Sweet potatoes are great. It doesn’t come down to much more than that. Classified botanically as Ipomoea batatas, this crop has a longstanding history among people of the Americas, and that is largely ...

The first year I worked at the Dupont Circle Farmers Market in Washington, DC, I was enthralled by the atmosphere and the dance between customer and farmer. I’d been to many markets before as a ...

If you live in an arid climate without easy access to water or just want to skip the work of running drip lines, it’s worth exploring if you can dry farm tomatoes. This type of growing involves ...

The industrial standard in agriculture involves heavy use of herbicides and pesticides to meet the bottom line of production. However, over time, it is increasingly apparent that these are not the ...

RIP honeycreeper birds, Mariana fruit bat of Guam, Bachman’s warbler and the rest of the 21 species lost to extinction in the US alone in 2023. They join a growing list of animals in the process of ...

There are some 90 million dogs in the US alone, and their protein needs are rattling the human food chain. Humans are worried about what’s in dog food, not to mention what dog food is in––way too much ...

The work starts when I put my whites on. The long coat and apron are required by the federal health inspector, who shows up daily. I’m surrounded by the rasp of knives being sharpened and slid into ...

Today, more than 620,000 miles of fence branch across the western United States. That’s equal to a trip to the moon and back—and halfway there again. Maintaining and building fences is a yearly job on ...

In a second building on his property in Springfield, Oregon, Gared Hansen grows mushrooms containing psilocybin, a psychedelic compound that grows naturally in the environment. Hansen harvests the ...

When Leanna Maksymiuk started keeping sheep at Lone Sequoia Ranch, her business in British Columbia, she did it with a direct interest in fiber art. Today, she has a flock of 25 sheep, mostly ...