Fencing, water, processing, storage and the systems that make local food possible.
September is peak delivery season for CSA shares and restaurant accounts. Here is how to plan a route that pays, choose between a refrigerated van, a CoolBot trailer and iced totes, keep a temperature log buyers trust, and know when to share the route.
When a small town loses its grocery store, the nearest fresh food can be 30 miles away. Here is why rural stores close, the cooperative, nonprofit and city-owned models that reopen them, how a farm supplies one, and the money behind it.
How to plan one barn that shelters equipment, keeps hay dry, houses animals and holds a wash corner: pole barn or steel, siting for drainage, flexible bays, permits, the winter 2026 price picture and the USDA storage loan that fits part of the bill.
A third of the Lower 48 is in drought. How to size a stock pond that fills and holds, test a well before you trust it, bury lines below frost, build tire tanks and freeze-proof waterers, and what NRCS and FSA will pay.
Five years after the 2020 plant closures: why small plants kept disappearing, what the federal expansion grants built, where inspection and mobile units fit, and how a farm with no plant of its own secures its slaughter dates.
The holiday rush is when a home kitchen runs out of room. Here is how shared-use commercial kitchens rent time by the hour, what storage and licenses involve, how to move out of the cottage food exemption, and who funded new kitchens in 2024.
A practical guide to farm solar in 2024: sizing a system to your loads, what the REAP grant and tax credit cover, why net metering depends on your state, questions before leasing land to a developer, and what grazing under panels looks like.
The Produce Safety Rule lands hardest in the wash and pack shed. Who is covered or exempt, how the shed should flow, what floors, drains and tanks must do, the water test, the sanitizer, the logbook, and where to get a free walk-through first.
A walk-in cooler is the cheapest shelf life a small farm can buy. Here is how field heat works, how to size and build a converted-room cooler, which crops want which temperature and humidity, and where USDA's new infrastructure money fits in 2024.
The NRCS High Tunnel Initiative pays a per-square-foot rate toward a kit tunnel over your own soil. Who qualifies, what practice standard 325 requires, siting, ventilation, snow and wind loads, and what the extra weeks of harvest are worth.
Global food supply systems are what we all rally on for food and we usually don’t think about them or how they are structured. They just work and the food finds its place on our tables. That’s how things are most of the time, but the global...
The Big Meat industry provides most of the food Americans rely on to get by. These systems were long taken for granted, but the ongoing pandemic has made clear that they are rather fragile.
