Gene Logsdon's Blog, page 4

Your Favorite Farm Or Garden Job?

From GENE LOGSDON That’s an easy one for me— burning off the asparagus patch in the early spring. Just something about lighting up the new growing year. After so long staring out the windows at one snowfall after another, we can finally go outdoors and not have the wind freeze our faces. And it takes […]

Farm Success Brings Farm Failure

From GENE LOGSDON After years of belittling organic farming, some chemical farmers are exploring the possibilities of getting into it. Can’t blame them. Conventional grain is selling around $3.60 a bushel and in some cases even lower because of the glut. Alan Guebert, in his excellent national column, Farm and Food File, suggests there is […]

Farming Controversies Are So Complicated

From GENE LOGSDON ​I read an article on the DTN/Progressive Farming website that once again shows how difficult it is to resolve differences of opinion in farming disagreements. The article was an even-sided discussion of possible overproduction of organic crops, (which I plan to write about soon) but a respondent took the occasion to launch […]

Milk Is Going The Wine Route

From GENE LOGSDON ​The increasing interest in artisanal foods is opening up all kinds of opportunities in farming that could hardly have been predicted even a few years ago. Who would ever have thought a good market for small, backyard hen coops would open up. Or hops and malting barley farms starting up close to […]

Factual Science and Maybe Science

From GENE LOGSDON ​I am not against genetic modification but only against the way that herbicide manufacturers are using it to justify patenting any plant in nature that interests them and then, in my opinion, trying to use the patents to gain unfair monopolies in the food and farm economy. So whenever I see research […]

Scratch An American, Find A Farmer

From GENE LOGSDON ​Old sayings like “scratch a Christian, find a pagan” or “scratch a Russian, find a Tartar,” have a counterpart in agriculture: Scratch an American, find a farmer. There are a whole lot more people involved in farming than generally meets the eye or gets counted in the demographics. For instance, reading the […]

Shall The Meek Inherit The Earth After All?

From GENE LOGSDON ​I’m not what you’d call a Bible thumper, but I do like to quote it on occasion, inserting an appropriate passage into the conversation in a sonorous voice that makes me sound wise. The passage that I have found most hopeful and most unhopeful at the same time is about how the […]

New Age Farming Is Not About “Going Back” To the Land

​ From GENE LOGSDON One of the prejudices about artisanal, small-scale food farmers is that they are “going back” to the land. The truth is, they are going forward to the land. For several generations now the older people in our preponderantly urban population have handed down to their children an image of farming based […]

Organic Farming News Almost Too Good

From GENE LOGSDON ​I attended the annual conference of the Ohio Ecological Food And Farm Association recently and as usual it really lifted my spirits. We are so barraged by doom and gloom these days as presidential candidates yell insults at each other, that we tend to over-emphasize the bad news and ignore the good […]

Part-timers Do Most of the Farming

From GENE LOGSDON ​I don’t know how the idea got started that real farmers are full time farmers. We tend to think of part-timers as hobby farmers or beginners who will not be successful until or unless they get to be full time. Lots of part timers think that themselves. They think the advantage of […]