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On Becoming a Savory Institute Accredited Holistic Management Professional
As many of you know, we’ve been practicing some facsimile of Savory’s holistic livestock management on our farm since 2012—to tremendous effect. Our yields are up. Our resiliency is up. The nutrition of our forage is up. Our sheep are incredibly healthy and now 100% grass-fed. Our dollars generated-per-acre is WAY up. And our inputs…
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Of Hogs and Hugels: Creating a Perennial Food Forest
As regenerative farmers, our top priority is to sequester carbon into the soil. There are many methods to do this—and the most effective method for a piece of land depends upon the makeup of the land being regenerated. Since our farm is mostly pasture, we use sheep and poultry to holistically manage the land’s water,…
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Personal Thoughts on the Upcoming Vermont Regenerative Soils Program Legislation
Today, Senator Brian Campion will introduce to the Vermont Legislature our second attempt at a bill that, if passed, would incentive the responsible stewardship of our state’s ecosystems through the regeneration of our state’s soils. I’m immensely proud of this bill and will publish a post tomorrow with the nitty-gritty details and text. For now,…
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The Regeneration at Studio Hill: A Slideshow
I had the pleasure of presenting the story of our farm—from it’s roots as a dairy in the ’30s right up to it’s current iteration as a regenerative farm—at this year’s Vermont Energy & Climate Action Network (VECAN) Conference at the beautiful Lake Morey Resort in Fairlee, Vermont. I was joined in our workshop by…
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Jesse Discusses Regenerative Agriculture in this Upstream Podcast
This spring, Mark Phillips, on a tour of regenerative projects in the northeast, was kind enough to stay in our area for a night and spend the day walking around our farm. In the afternoon after our tour, I had the honor of sitting down with Mark in the studio on top of Studio Hill and talking about…
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Our Public Comment on Vermont’s Required Agricultural Practices
We submitted the following letter to the Vermont Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets on the last day that they were accepting public comment on the Required Agricultural Practices—or RAPs. Now that the rule has been formally submitted by the Agency, we thought we’d publish our final comments. See the bottom of this post for an…
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Room to Romp, Room to Roam with Studio Hill’s Pasture-Raised Pigs
Last week was a big one for our pigs—they graduated! Assured that they had reached a good size to fend for themselves and were sufficiently trained on the electric fence, we let them out of the training paddock of their piglet youth and into the 5 acre parcel of pasture and woods prepared for them…
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Economy, Ecology, & the Launch of a Regenerative Food CSA
Farming is slow. It’s not often “relax-in-the-sunshine-with-a-frosty-beverage” slow. It’s more like “your-mortgage” slow. Or, “walk-in-ski-boots” slow. Or “build-the-pyramids” slow. Farming requires tremendous repetitive effort. And, the progress produced by that effort is incremental and, often, imperceptible. But every once in a while, after years (and generations) of planning and work and preparation and building and…
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Our Response to Vermont’s Proposed Required Agricultural Practices
I applaud Vermont’s Agency of Agriculture, Food, and Markets—herein referred to as “The Agency”—for trying to move the state’s water quality in the right direction. When our wonderful Senator Campion stood in my barnyard one morning a year or so ago and asked me my thoughts on a hypothetical program, I was all for it.…
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2015 Winter Lamb Harvest Pickup
Hi everyone! We will be picking up the lamb orders from the butcher on Wednesday morning. Yesterday, Cally and I went and saw the meat hanging in the coolers…and it looks wonderful. I have no doubt we’ll have some tasty lamb chops for the holidays.
