November 1, 2013

In November of 2010, Steve and I attended our first national conference of the Association of Specialty Cut Flower Growers in Tulsa. At the airport, waiting for our plane home, we sat next to Dave Dowling of Farmhouse Flowers in Maryland and tried to soak up what last bits of information our brains could hold.  […]

Wherever water comes into contact with produce, it has the potential to violate the most fundamental of food safety tenets: keep the poop off of the food. Whether it originates from a pond, a stream, or a well, water has the potential to carry and spread the foodborne pathogens that can make people sick. For

We already have safe food. Even the large, centralized mega-farms and distribution centers in the desert west produce safe food. In 2006, over 50 billion servings of fresh-cut salad greens and spinach were sold in this country – but an E. coli 0157:H7 outbreak that fall killed five people, and spinach sales still haven’t recovered

No-till cover crops are grown to flowering, then killed by mowing or rolling, and left in place to become mulch for the following crop. The advantages, challenges and how-to are spelled out below. We have a one-year-in-ten no-till segment in our crop rotation that works really well for us that I will describe in detail.

If you have high tunnels, chances are you already have them planted and are looking forward to a long season of delicious winter crops. But if you’re like me, you’ll start worrying every time snow is forecast. We lost one last winter to a heavy, wet snow — that’s our tunnel in the photo below.

In June, shoppers at a Target in Wilsonville, Oregon, reported a massive death of bumblebees in the store’s parking lot. Scientists from the Xerces Society and Oregon Department of Agriculture determined that the bee deaths were related to a pesticide sprayed on flowering linden trees to control aphids, which secrete a sticky honeydew that was

As farmers have known for years, honeybees and native pollinators are experiencing catastrophic declines from a host of factors including pesticides, parasites, pathogens, and habitat loss. Now, the public has awakened to the issue, thanks to increasing media coverage of the plight of pollinators. Time magazine drew attention to the issue with an Aug. 19