A little-known fact about the rise of chemical-intensive agriculture in the United States is that it was motivated by doomsday fears....

While many people went back to the land because of an impending societal crisis, for others the crisis was personal. Such was the case...

In the twentieth century, each major wave of the back-to-the-land movement has been triggered by some kind of crisis. In 1939, that...

I find connections to organic farming in the most unexpected places. This time, it was in a random book I just picked up from the library...

After completing my master’s degree at UW-Madison and moving home, I spent over a year trying to understand why highlighting a connection...

There’s a big difference between graduate and undergraduate college classes. In most undergraduate classes, you sit and listen to a...

To fund my second year in graduate school at UW-Madison, I applied for several different teaching assistantships. One was to teach...

I am a Bible-believing creationist Christian. I am also an environmentalist and an organic farmer. I see no conflict between the two. But...

“On Monday night, July 26, Koinonia Farm’s roadside market was dynamited. About 10:15 p.m. a car evidently came into the driveway, tossed...

Along with the National Catholic Rural Life Conference and Catholic Worker, there was a third organization involved in the Catholic...

An urban organization of activists devoted to social justice and racial equity decided to form a commune and go back to the land. This...

Homesteading was huge in the 1930s. With a shortage of jobs in urban areas and a lack of market for large-scale farmers, many New Deal...

Progressivism had failed in the 1930s. Despite technological innovations, all of the social problems of humanity were just as bad as they...

All of the historical narratives that I’ve discussed so far have one thing in common—they are secular. They focus almost exclusively on...

I was a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Madison from 2020 to 2022—during some of the most tumultuous years politically in...

There’s one more major narrative about agricultural history that I haven’t mentioned yet—not because it isn’t important, but because it’s...

Organic farming has always questioned the progressive narrative of history. It has to. After all, if the progressive narrative is true,...

History is storytelling, and there are different types of narratives that can be used to frame a historical event. Last week, I...

One of the most important things I learned in graduate school was that history is storytelling—and that there are different ways to tell...

When I first started writing about the past, I had lofty ideals. My goal was simple—to find the truth and tell it. I often wished that it...