Beginnings and Endings and Beginnings
In business, success and growth are generally synonymous. There’s a generalized feeling that if something isn’t growing it is dying. Think of Amazon, which lost money for nine consecutive years...
Garth Brown |
Blog
Beginnings and Endings and Beginnings
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Deceptive Marketing
By Edmund Brown I’m grumbly and grouchy right now. My baseline mood is generally upbeat and optimistic, but perhaps my tapering coffee intake or something has me looking askance at...
Garth Brown |
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How Many Farmers Should There Be?
By Garth Brown I’m not at all sure how many farmers there should be. Rolling back the clock 100 years to a time when more than a quarter of the...
Garth Brown |
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Purity or Complexity
By Garth Brown We all want a pure food system, at least in the narrowest sense of the word, and so we have built up a mass of regulations aimed...
Garth Brown |
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Agrarian vs. Local
By Garth Brown It’s a testament to agrarianism's intuitive appeal that so extreme a perspective continues to have any currency at all. As the lives of most people move further...
Garth Brown |
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Trees of Power Book Review
I met Akiva Silver at the NOFA conference last year, where he gave a talk on the history, uses, and cultivation of hazelnuts and chestnuts. I very much enjoyed the...
Garth Brown |
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Egg-In-A-Hole, Shame of the New York Times
It’s blessedly rare, but there are moments when you see or read something that isn’t just wrong, but is wrong in a very particular way, a way that gives a...
Garth Brown |
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Invasive Sheepcies, Part III
This winter I wrote about invasive species in Part I and Part II of this series, and how I think they’re only the serious threat they’re made out to be...
Garth Brown |
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Fox Vs. Turkey
There are mornings when the cold is as brittle as a burnt match, with an acrid, dry sting when it blows across your face. These don’t just feel like nothing...
Garth Brown |
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How to be Good at Everything
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall,...
Garth Brown |
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New Roof
Last month Garth wrote about our manageable “catastrophe” when the plastic sheet over our pig hoop structure ripped during a 50 mph wind gust. I quickly ordered a heavier duty...
Garth Brown |
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What Is Clean Meat?
One of the primary concerns with industrial agriculture is that it produces unhealthy food. This can be a fear of additives or pathogenic contamination, but just as often it has...
Garth Brown |
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Pigs Are Terrible Game Theorists
At first glance feeding time for the older pigs is a classic zero sum game. There’s a limited amount of grain, and when it’s gone there won’t be any more...
Garth Brown |
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Great Eggs in January
If you look at the label on a carton of Cairncrest Farm eggs you’ll read that they are ‘truly pastured.’ It’s not my favorite phrasing, but the word ‘pastured’ alone,...
Garth Brown |
