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The flames of the fire hold my senses hostage. Staring at the orange flames dancing upward I hear the crackling release of carbon entombed in the hardened cell walls of the log. I feel the heat, a byproduct of the transfer of energy as the log is transformed from a solid to a gas. I […]

I was in the Farm Coop store the other day in line to buy some garden seeds. The farmer in front of me ordered fifty pounds of Kentucky 31 Tall Fescue. I thought, “Oh my God, you poor dear, haven’t you heard”?

“Well-managed” farmland and other working “open-spaces” should not be taxed when they provide ecosystem services  exceeding the cost of  public services for the land. In many states including Virginia, local governments have a special way of collecting revenue from their constituents that have farmland or “open-space” called “land-use” taxation.  It’s a method of calculating a tax […]

Virginia Wildlife Magazine published my article “Fish Need Leaves” in their Jan/Feb 2015 issue.  More information about Virginia’s premier wildlife magazine can be found here: www.dgif.virginia.gov/virginia.wildlife Excluding livestock from streams is a first big step for agriculture in restoring water resources and complying with the law that the US Congress passed in 1972 – The Clean […]

Maryland: The newly elected republican governor, Larry Hogan repealed the Maryland  Department of Agriculture’s “Phosphorus Management Tool”.  Read my rant here. This trashes decades of phosphorus research and will further pollute the streams in Maryland and the Chesapeake Bay. It basically allows farmers to continue applying poultry manure to fields already saturated with phosphorus.  The […]

Tofu. That’s what most people think soybeans are grown for. But most soybeans in the U.S. are grown for oil and livestock feed. It’s big business. America is the world’s largest producer and exporter of soybeans with almost 75 million acres planted annually.

It’s happening.  Throughout the 64,000 square miles of the Chesapeake Bay watershed, there are small watersheds being restored, one by one, slowly but surely.  We are going to achieve a restored Bay, one small watershed at a  time.

Beef cattle biosecurity and stream exclusion are very important to this large animal veterinarian. His First Week on the Job On his first week on the job as a veterinarian back in 1993, Scott Nordstrom treated a case that would stick with him the rest of his life. Shockingly, half of a herd of cattle […]

In our quest to profit from the land and feed a hungry planet with annual crops such as corn and soybeans, we have abandoned one of the most powerful conservation practices known to science – contour farming.

Rachel Carson…she’s one of my heroes. This year for Earth Day (April 22, 2012) it is fitting to honor the 50th anniversary of Rachael Carson’s book, Silent Spring.