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agriculture
Winter’s Hope Brings Summer’s Bounty
It’s called the seed catalog effect. It’s when outside the January winds blow and inside we cozy up with seed catalogs, and it’s then that our green thumbs become their most ambitious. There’s something about those glorious displays of bounty that brings hope to the new year. They’re a promise that spring will most certainly come and, yes, this will be the best gardening year […]
Iowa Evokes Passions
Last weekend, while presenting my Marketing Your Uniqueness workshop at the Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI) Convention, I posed this question: “Why do you do what you do; what drives you?” Put another way: What is your passion? My workshop attendees were business owners, ranging from farmers selling directly to consumers, to agri-tourist operators, to […]
Looking Back at 2019
Isn’t this a cool tractor? It’s a 1939 Ford 9N, packing in 80 years of all-purpose, workhorse reliability. These days its main jobs are moving our chicken coops in summer and hauling wood in winter. With a bit of patience on the startup, this ol’ boy has as much get-up-and-go as the day its treads […]
Bees Motivate Gratitude and Giving
I’m into my fourth year of beekeeping and while I still consider myself a newbie, I do feel I’ve come a long way. For one—and an important one at that—I can now find the queen. Finding the queen—or queenspotting, as they say—is huge in beekeeping. There are books on the subject, like this cool Where’s […]