Photos from a week on our farm — Medium is full of intense discussion on important topics. This post is not that. I live with my partner Jen on a farm owned by a Montessori school. We are teacher/farmers and have a new challenge every day. Here are some photos from our week. Recently I heard a podcast…

What the comeback of lake sturgeon in Wisconsin means to me — In April of this year sensors in the Milwaukee River detected five lake sturgeon moving upriver. These are some of the first adult sturgeon returning since restocking began in 2006 as part of a multi-year effort to return the sturgeon to Wisconsin rivers and lakes. In 2021, a 100 year…

Using family tree research to understand my epigenome — When I was a kid and would visit my grandma, I was interested in why she had stacks of used margarine containers in a cupboard in the kitchen. I learned from my dad about how my grandma had lived through the Great Depression, and how she saved things that might…

Is it a Republican strategy to try to force liberals to leave Purple states? Perhaps this was their game all along? — This week the leak from the Supreme Court proved what liberals have been saying for years: that the Republicans have been trying to pack the court to overturn Roe and make abortion rights law into a State Legislature issue. In my own state of Wisconsin, there is an old law…

Short fiction from the near future — Last year, a piece of farmland in Iowa sold for record prices. The sale price didn’t have anything to do with the price of the corn one can grow on that land. Instead, it was part of a trend we are seeing of farmland being bought as investment property. Rich…

This week I hit 1000 followers! — You are all wonderful people, and I am glad to meet you and read your stories. Keep them coming! I know many of the 1000 people who have clicked “follow” are not readers, but the metric milestone is still exciting to me. I’ve seen it coming since January, and I…

Can real work connected to the land reunify the United States? — I carry two five-gallon pails of maple sap from the forest to the gravel road by my house, where our tractor sits parked, waiting with a trailer full of empty 55-gallon barrels. On one of my trips, a neighbor, driving a pick-up truck with a big plastic tank full of…