the magazine that is by graziers, for graziers
By Allen Williams
The Covid-19 pandemic has created significant upheaval across the world, and certainly right here in the U.S.
With the shelter-in-place orders, restaurants closing to inside dining, and schools and universities shutting down in-person education, the impact on agriculture and the food industries has been monumental.
Continue reading “Weak links”
By Allen Williams
Consumers are being bombarded with ads for various forms of what are being boosted as “clean proteins”, but what I call “fake meat”.
It’s pretty much impossible not to see, hear or read about fake meats. There is much publicity about these plant-based proteins and their supposed benefits for human health and animal welfare, the environment and climate change.
Continue reading “Telling the real story about fake meats”By John Arbuckle
Grazing multiple species provides many benefits, not the least of which is enterprise stacking that allows each acre to create more than one saleable product in the same growing season.
Our topic here is how to make multi-species grazing regenerative in the biological sense. We custom graze replacement heifers in front of our pigs, with 37 heifers and slightly more than 100 finisher pigs moving in a leader-follow pattern.
Continue reading “Regenerating soils by grazing cattle and pigs”
By Joel McNair
The headline above Timothy Egan’s column in the June 21 edition of The New York Times assured that “Fake Meat Will Save Us”. I was very relieved, as it seems that we do need saving, and the idea of a fake savior is appropriate for the age, I guess.
Seriously, this was just another example of a well-known intellectual — Egan is an award-winning environmental and political writer — falling into the trap of employing trendy, but bad, information and faulty logic in reaching a popular “big picture” technological solution that makes absolutely no sense. Continue reading “The savior may be fake, but the money is real”
by Allen Williams
When you ask American farmers what they are doing on their farms, they will often tell you they are “feeding the world”.
This is stated with considerable pride. We feel we are doing the world a huge favor through the sacrifices we make as farmers. We are continuously told that by some not-too-distant date there will be 10 billion mouths to feed, so we have to ramp up production even more. Continue reading “The fallacy of ‘feeding the world’”
By Joel McNair
Saxapahaw, North Carolina — Quite frankly, what is taking place here at Reverence Farms is almost too much to describe.
There’s the 45-cow dairy herd with its rapidly growing raw milk sales program, plus the possibility of a further-processing venture at some point in the future. There’s the Jersey linebreeding program and bull/semen sales based on genetics that do well on no-grain rations and mediocre forages, along with a variety of milk qualities ranging from ultra-high solids to A2A2 genetics.
Continue reading “Rebuilding soils and community”