Looking for the Union Label

...d a highly catchy ad jingle from the roller disco era, “Look for the Union Label” (youngsters can watch it on youtube here). We looked for the union label and we were surprised to find it via a company called Union House which carries a functional, if unexciting line of apparel. Unless hipsters take to golf shirts in an ironic fashion judo move, these offerings will never be cool like the domestically made clothes made by the union busting folks o...

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Farming: One way to try and save Detroit – Dec. 29, 2009

...interesting. Can growing food in declining cities make them places people want to live again? Maybe the Homegrown Evolution team needs to pick up and buy a compound in Detroit. I guess we could do a lot of farming in the city. Land is cheap and abundant. But it sounds cold and we are weak in the face of temperatures below 50 degrees. Farming: One way to try and save Detroit – Dec. 29, 2009...

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A Review of Masanobu Fukuoka’s Sowing Seeds in the Desert

...And if you want to get the nitty-gritty how-to on how to apply his natural farming methods you’ll want to pick up a copy of The Natural Way of Farming. Sowing Seeds in the Desert serves as a deeply moving coda to his life’s work. And it got me to start sowing the seeds in my own front yard desert. Thanks to a winter rain, a mixture of clover and greens is now sprouting beneath the fig tree that graces our front yard. Thanks to the wonders of Youtu...

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Why Urban Farm?

...ing our total up to four. Such are the cycles of life and death on the new urban homestead. Bryan Welch, who raises livestock and is also the publisher and editor of the always informative Mother Earth News, wrote an editorial in the February issue called “Why I Farm” in which he says, “There’s a Buddhist wisdom in the stockman’s cool compassion. The best of them seem to understand that our own lives on this Earth are as irrefutably temporary as t...

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