Gene Logsdon's Blog, page 14

Have You Seen A Skinny Farmer Lately?

From GENE LOGSDON Last week when I was researching what a well-dressed farmer of the mid- twentieth century was wearing to work, I paged idly through my old Farm Quarterly magazines from the mid-1950s which, incidentally, I got from Bob Evans of fast food fame.  (He knew a really good farm magazine when he saw […]

Let’s Train the Next Generation of Farmers…

From Grange Farm School The crucially important purpose of the Grange Farm School is to help aspiring farmers learn the skills they need to pursue their dreams as small farmers and to provide healthy local food to their communities. You know the bad news: America’s farmers are aging, and their children are not replacing them on the […]

Sunbathing On The Tractor

From GENE LOGSDON It seems to me that more than the usual number of young men are appearing in upscale fashion magazines stripped to the waist. Nudity can hardly prevail in the bodily attire business but I guess it works when said young men are standing next to  young women wearing the latest from Madison […]

Hanging Out The Wash

From GENE LOGSDON Several readers recently mentioned that they dried their laundry on a clothesline outdoors which reminded me that I had more to say on that subject than I wrote here a few years ago. It seems to me that drying wash out in the sun is one of the easiest ways to save […]

Cornstalks Floating Down The Highway

From GENE LOGSDON Surely we are into the Great Era of Unintended Results. A most recent example: the folks who helped bring us 300-400 bushel corn per acre thought they were saving the world even though, worldwide, people are starving to death as fast as ever. The plant breeders would not have believed, nor would […]

Food Farming As Artistic Endeavor

From GENE LOGSDON Commercial print book publishers are viewing the future with gloom while paradoxically the number of new book titles published yearly grows by leaps and bounds— over two million last year if the statistics can be believed. I doubt anyone really knows the exact number as self-published books flood the marketplace. At the […]

Bird Manners

From GENE LOGSDON Watching birds at the feeder outside the kitchen window is still our favorite pastime and continues to yield more information as the years go by. This spring we watched a drama unfold that I would not have believed if I had only read it somewhere. Our kitchen window faces out on a […]

Pink Pistol Packin’ Mommas

From GENE LOGSDON My twenty-two caliber rifle is almost as important a tool on our garden farm as my hoe. I need it to dispatch overpopulating wildlife that would otherwise make our way of life almost impossible. You don’t need to agree with me on that to get a laugh out of the irony that […]

Will Society Spurn Animal Factories?

From GENE LOGSDON For years I have written that large, confined animal factories would fade away eventually. Every time I repeated that statement, the number and size of animal factories went up again, take that, you dumb old-timer, Gene.  So I was more than a little surprised when an Internet billionaire, very much not an […]

Working Too Hard At Farming To Succeed

From GENE LOGSDON Last week I ruminated about how so many people hate hard physical labor and how society invariably rewards sitting down work with better wages than standing up work. Then the sitting down people sweat themselves into pain and misery in sports and “leisure” activities. Your responses were wonderful. I have the same […]