Extension Service Webinars on Organic Agriculture

...just discovered a treasure trove of Extension Service webinars on organic farming practices that you can watch here: http://www.extension.org/pages/25242/webinars-by-eorganic. You can watch archived sessions or sign up to participate live. While the webinars are aimed at small farmers, there’s a lot that gardeners can learn. Having co-founded a bread baking club, the Los Angeles Bread Bakers, I was particularly excited to watch the webinar on anc...

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The Chicken and the Egg

...ntails more risk (mainly from predators such as hawks and loose dogs) than confining them to a cage. It’s definitely easier and more economical for commercial producers to confine chickens. But consider the consequences of the economic and quality race to the bottom of factory farming’s economy of scale–an abundance of cheap, tasteless and nutritionally deficient eggs that like the endless flood of shipping containers full of plastic crap from Chi...

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Baker Creek Invites and Un-invites Cliven Bundy to Speak

...had the budget to keep threatened protestors at a distance. It’s not the first time I’ve witnessed some haphazard curatorial decisions on a Baker Creek event roster. Speakers at their Santa Rosa Heirloom festival, in past years, included many well known experts in gardening and farming but also pseudoscientists such as “Food Babe” Vani Deva Hari and Joseph Mercola. This week’s Bundy kerfuffle leaves me scratching my head about Baker Creek’s ideolo...

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Saturday Tweets: Bike Rants, Super Monster Wolf and Marginalia

...enForkTV) March 4, 2018 BBC News – ‘Super Monster Wolf’ a success in Japan farming trials https://t.co/QjOF7Wkwj7 — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 8, 2018 Why Manhattan Beach is forcing this beekeeper — and her hives — out of town https://t.co/dS8Amp7E6p — Root Simple (@rootsimple) March 7, 2018 Of Mice and Men [Hieronymus Bosch, Garden of Earthly Delights] pic.twitter.com/nFHhZhoqu3 — Damien Kempf (@DamienKempf) March 5, 2018 The Beast of the Ap...

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Organic Seed Growers Webinar

...(and the impact of those foraging ranges on crop isolation), bee-friendly farming practices, development of pollinator habitat on working farms, accessing USDA technical and financial resources for pollinator conservation, and more. Speakers: Eric Mader, The Xerces Society Saturday, February 1, 2014 3:30-5:00PM: Managing Seed-Borne Diseases in Seed Production Production of high-quality, pathogen-free seed is particularly important in organic seed...

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