Moose – Update 7/11/10

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Used to be, if you wanted to see moose you drove 200-300 miles north from here into Northern Maine, New Hampshire, or Vermont. This year they’re here in Warwick ( Mass.). Yesterday, three miles from my house, I came upon this young fellow. If I’d been speeding I’d have hit him; [...]

Box Turtles and the Power of One: A Sweet Story

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Mary moved to our town a couple of years ago. A retired dog trainer, she brought ten dogs with her and rented a house from perhaps the only man in town with the courage to allow such a menage move into the house he’d grown up in — and next door [...]

Internet helping boost rural entrepreneurship

from The Rural Blog Entrepreneurship is up across the country, but with the help of non-profit organizations and the rise of broadband Internet access, rural areas may getting more than their usual share of business startups. “From 2008 to 2009, the number of self-employed Americans increased by 200,000 to 8.9 million, according to Challenger Gray [...]

Selling Our Pony

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Soon after we got to Tiny Town in 1985 it became apparent that life would be easier if we had a tractor. My husband Ed, who grew up on a dairy farm about 20 miles east of here, as the crow flies, learned to drive a tractor before he learned to [...]

‘Friday Night Lights’ lets viewers look ‘through the looking glass of rural America’

By Al Cross “Between cartoonish reality shows and grotesque game shows, there isn’t much dramatic television giving big, clear windows into America,” David Masciotra writes for the Daily Yonder. “However, on the rare occasion that TV does get it right, it is often the stuff of pure emotive and intellectual brilliance.” Masciotra’s first example, his urban one, [...]

Twenty-four Gold Stars

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson Rep. Marcy Kaptur (D-OH09), the longest-serving woman in Congress, has filed a bill meant to increase the supply of fresh produce in America’s cities. H.R. 4971, the Greening Food Deserts Act, was filed March 25 with 23 co-sponsors. It’s now on the docket of both the Education and Labor and Agriculture [...]

Hungry for a Better School Lunch? Pick Up the Phone

By Miryam Ehrlich Williamson While school is in session — and, in some places, through summer vacation, too — about one-third of the energy a child takes in during the day should come from the lunch he or she eats at school. And the food that provides that energy shouldn’t be all starch and fat.  [...]

Mark Your Calendar for Spring!

by Daphne Bishop It may not be spring yet, but 1000 Radishes are about to sprout up, and with them potentially far-reaching ways to connect local growers with the people who crave their wares. You may recall, we told you about 1000 Radishes last summer. It’s a high-tech way to find what’s in season, connect [...]

Sustaining Agriculture: One HAPPYBABY at a Time

By Daphne Bishop As the old song says, “You must have been a beautiful baby.” But how does a baby stay beautiful and grow healthy and strong if all she eats are heavily processed commercial foods. That was the challenge facing Shazi Visram, CEO and founder of HAPPYBABY, a company in Brooklyn, New York that [...]

Studies agree: Climate-change bill would help U.S. agriculture in the long run

By Al Cross University studies of the House-passed bill to limit climate change generally agree that American agriculture “would gain more than it would lose” in the long run, Charles Abbott of Reuters reports on a review of the studies by Kansas State University. “All of the studies said that costs of production would rise [...]