The Feed Store

Bees’ Wings & Zerks

Supportive efforts can steer this ingenious workforce toward better stewardship and environmental integrity by reclaiming that awe that life on the land should inspire.

Against Obsolescence

Family-centered trades are not only the most durable throughout history; they are also the ideal context by which parents can pass their values, faith and culture on to the next generation.

Notes on a Mad Hunter’s Morality

The act of hunting makes hunters guilty—and so it makes them moral.

Meat in Due Season

A freezer and pantry full of meat, a season without having to buy any beef: for this a deer died.

Please Eat Cows

Animal agriculture, we hear over and over, is horrific for the environment and horrific for the livestock involved. Yet most of us can’t or won’t change our ways. There may be a general sense that beef is horrible, but there is a literal sense that steak is delicious.

The Growing Pains of a Small Farm: Kristin Kimball’s Good Husbandry...

In some ways Good Husbandry stands as a kind of bildungsroman for Essex Farm and, by extension, the support-your-local-farmer movement.

Fitting into the Bigger Picture

Mayweed is a persistent gift that teaches me how to thrive in unlikely places.
Garth Brown house

The Irreducible Reality of Pork Belly

When cut into chunks, tossed with salt and some brown sugar, and then roasted all afternoon in a very low oven, perhaps with a bit of sauce for the last bit, pork belly becomes a gateway to the real.

The Allure of Old Tools and Vintage Machinery: Memory, Meaning, and...

Building or re-building things taps into deep and elemental desires embedded in the human experience that in some shadowed sense mimic the Creator.

In Defense of Okra

I doubt okra tops many people’s list of garden must-haves, which is a shame since it is such a determined grower. Gardens are only guaranteed to produce one thing year in and year out: humility.