It's not often that I walk into my small public library and see a book about Michigan's agricultural history--finding this on the new books shelf was a wonderful surprise! “As Dad sips his coffee, he tells us we’re going on a vacation to Lake Leelanau, Michigan.” That’s how Robert “Carlos” Fuentes begins his new book, The Vacation: A Teenage Migrant Farmworker’s Experience Picking Cherries in Michigan (Self-published, 2025). “He tells us on our vacation, we will camp in a ten

After spending weeks looking at Albrecht's soil and climate maps, it was fun to drive across them. The red line is the route I took from Michigan to Kansas. I never expected that I would be the one editing the last few volumes of the Albrecht Papers. But one of my major work projects for Acres U.S.A. this year has been to sort through and scan the photocopies of articles that William Albrecht gave to Charles Walters back in the 1970s. It’s been an interesting and educational

We can build freeways. Can we provide healthy food options for people traveling on those freeways? Between research trips, conference travel, and vacations, I spend a fair amount of time driving on interstate highways. I marvel at the engineering skill it took to build and maintain those ribbons of concrete that cut nonstop for thousands of miles through mountains, valleys, rivers, and plains. The interstate highways transformed American society in the 1950s by providing safe

The bestselling book ( The Late Great Planet Earth ) and the top song ("Wish We'd All Been Ready") of the Jesus movement were both about the Rapture Ever since I started researching the history of organic farming, I’ve been trying to find connections between Christianity and the organic movement. I have found connections with Catholic and mainline Protestant churches. But the type of church I’ve always attended—the evangelicals—is conspicuously absent. And the reason why has