When I was a college student in Columbus, I decided to find out for myself if it was possible to eat healthy on a very tight budget Twenty-one years old, bursting with energy and high ideals, I had three goals when I moved to Columbus, Ohio, to go to college at The Ohio State University. I wanted to live as sustainably as possible, eat a healthy vegetarian diet, and live a frugal lifestyle. In my mind, all three were completely compatible. Yeah, the first two months were a bi

When I signed up to make a map of food availability in Columbus, I didn't expect to be scouring grocery stores looking for elusive cans of bread crumbs. Visiting six grocery stores in one day was an experience I hope I’ll never have to repeat. Well, maybe I should clarify that we didn’t just pop inside the stores, buy a bag of apples or gallon of milk, and head to the next one. I wish. No, we marched in armed with a list of eighty-seven food items and went on a scavenger hunt

Despite not using the term "health equity," the new Dietary Guidelines are an important step in that direction. The 2025-2030 Dietary Guidelines for Americans , just released last week, are the first ever in American history to prioritize natural, whole foods and take a strong stance against highly processed foods and added sugars. In a recent news article for Acres , I describe how these guidelines, despite their overemphasis on meat, are the closest thing the USDA has ever

Was Milton Whitney a villain or an early advocate of regenerate farming? Milton Whitney is the closest thing soil science history has to a villain. Not only did he have an abrasive personality and get in serious conflicts with most of his colleagues, but he’s gone down in infamy for making the following statement in a 1909 USDA bulletin titled Soils of the United States : “The soil is the one indestructible, immutable asset the Nation possesses. It is the one resource that ca

The OEFFA conference is only six weeks away! For this first week of 2026, I’d like to highlight some of the new and exciting things that are coming up—soon!   First of all, I am giving the keynote, “Together for Organic,” for the Ohio Ecological Food and Farm Association’s 47th annual conference , “Finding Common Ground,” on February 14 in Newark, Ohio. I’ll be highlighting the past, present, and future of how we can bring people from diverse backgrounds together to build an

If we could all live like this, would it solve all the world's problems? Imagine for a moment that we could actually, in the next decade, meet all of our environmental goals. It won’t realistically happen, but let’s say that all of our electricity came from renewable sources, all our cars were electric, and somehow we’d figured out how to sustainably source and recycle the rare metals to make electric cars, solar panels, and wind turbines in a way that wasn’t fueling environm

Scooter the cat understands stewardship now--after I tamed him! One of my favorite lectures that I attended at the Acres U.S.A. conference was Keith Berns’s session on “Stewminion: A Biblical Approach to Environmentalism.” Keith coined the word “stewminion” by combining “stewardship” and “dominion.”   As Keith pointed out, a lot of people get uncomfortable with the word “dominion.” “Some people think dominion means we can do whatever we want to creation because we are suppose

Almost everyone I talked to said that the 2025 Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag conference was one of the best ever. I spent most of last week in Madison, Wisconsin at the annual Acres U.S.A. Eco-Ag conference. Although I’ve been writing articles for Acres for years, this was the first time I made it to the conference. That’s because I work for Acres now and they paid for me to go so I could work the bookstore, introduce speakers, etc. But they didn’t  pay me for writing this post or tell

Fear appeals like Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth were very successful in scaring people about climate change - but has overemphasizing the possibility of catastrophe backfired? Read almost anything written about the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and you’ll find bone-chilling forecasts of how terrible things will be by the year 2000. If all the things they predicted had come true, the world today would be a horrible, polluted, overpopulated nightmare where w

I'm thankful that we had a great harvest of beautiful mini popcorn this year! The year that is drawing toward its close has been filled with the blessings of fruitful fields and healthful skies. To these bounties, which are so constantly enjoyed that we are prone to forget the source from which they come, others have been added, which are of so extraordinary a nature that they cannot fail to penetrate and even soften the heart which is habitually insensible to the ever-watchf

The amazing ecosystem recovery after the 1980 eruption of Mount Saint Helens inspired Bob Rodale's concept of regeneration. Regenerative agriculture has been the hottest “buzzword” in the alternative ag movement  since about 2019. Before that, all the focus was on “sustainable”—a word that’s often criticized as meaning nothing because everyone defines it differently. Regenerative, I quickly discovered, was suffering the same fate. Some define it as soil health or sequestering

US carbon emissions have declined 20% since 2005--mostly because natural gas has replaced coal in electric power generation. Data from US EIA. It might have seemed unattainable in 2005, but we’ve done it! We have successfully lowered US carbon emissions below 1990 levels. In fact, CO 2  emissions from fossil fuels in the United States have dropped 20 percent since 2005 and are the lowest they’ve been since 1987. And that’s with a population increase of 14 percent—a 30 percent

Per capita milk consumption has plummeted since the 1940s. Does it have anything to do with processing? Data from USDA-ERS. As someone who spends a lot of time studying the past, I’ve found it very interesting to compare today’s movement against overprocessed foods to the natural foods movement of the 1940s. There are a lot of similarities, but one major difference is that today’s movement seems excessively focused on beef and beef tallow, which weren’t considered “protective

I've always wanted to visit Warren Woods - the last stand of old-growth hardwoods in Michigan This week I finally visited a Michigan state park I’ve been wanting to see for years. It’s not very big or very well-known, but Warren Woods State Park is , as far as I’m aware, the only stand of old-growth beech-maple forest left in southern Michigan. Back in 1879, a visionary man named Edward K. Warren  purchased this 311-acre tract of forest solely for the purpose of preserving it

When settlers came to southwest Michigan in the 19th century, they found long-abandoned Indigenous garden beds. I’m often asked why I don’t write more about historic Indigenous agriculture when I’m discussing the history of organic farming. One reason is that nobody today really knows much about Indigenous agriculture before European contact. That’s why a recent archaeological discovery on the border between Wisconsin and Michigan’s Upper Peninsula  is so interesting. Using l

The AMA's 1959 film "The Medicine Man" discouraged people from eating whole wheat and other healthy foods. I’ve run into all sorts of unexpected things in the course of my research on organic farming history. Some are funny, some are intriguing, and some are disturbing. And now that I’m up to the late 1950s in drafting my book chapters, I’m in the most disturbing time period of all—when government agencies and trusted scholarly authorities withheld important health informatio

J.I. Rodale decided to take a humorous approach to the critics of organic farming. So, apparently, did cartoonist Joe Genovese, who drew...

I've been waiting for a book like this for years! For over forty years, there’s been a stereotype that only liberals care about the...

J.I. Rodale's original chicken house at Founders Farm is a work of art. After dropping my luggage in my room, it was time for my tour of...

J.I. Rodale's original farmhouse--birthplace of the organic farming movement--is now owned and maintained by the Rodale Institute and...