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This Educator Teaches Pint-Sized Future Farmers to Love the Land

On a 20-degree morning in February, a group of 15 volunteers, both kids and adults, gathered at the nonprofit farm Land’s Sake to help tap maple trees and collect sap for making syrup. Volunteers learned how to drill holes into the maples to optimize sap flow while preserving the trees’ health. Children took turns poking through the tree bark, barely finished with one maple before dashing off to the next.

This is why Katie Metzger loves her job.

“It’s fun,” says Metzger, education manager at Land’s Sake in Weston, Massachusetts. Metzger’s personal life and work life complement each other nicely. She spent her most recent vacation visiting the farmland where she grew up. She has the passion and experience necessary to be both an educator and a farmer. Born in Ohio, Metzger moved to Massachusetts with her family when she was in the eighth grade. She studied ecology in Ecuador, earned her master’s degree in outdoor education and taught on a city farm in Scotland.

As a 501(c)(3) registered organization, Land’s Sake is on a mission to balance its dedication to food and resources with a commitment to the community. Farm funding comes from a variety of sources, including produce sales, educational program fees and outside sponsorships. Land’s Sake also has a year-round community-supported agriculture program. The farm focuses on sustainable growing practices while using the growing process to educate others. Throughout the year, the farm teaches 400 educational programs for both children and adults.

Metzger went to college to study environmental science and initially thought she would like to pursue a career in fieldwork. After graduation, she got a summer job as a camp counselor at Mass Audubon. “That kind of sealed it for me,” she says. “I didn’t know it at the time, but that kind of switched my whole career path. I just realized how much more fun it is to do all these outdoorsy sorts of things with kids.”

Six weeks after tapping the maple trees, on a slightly warming 36-degree morning in late March, Metzger huddles around the Bill McElwain Sugar House at Weston Middle School. Seventh graders excitedly ask her when it will be their turn to lead the next tour. The event, known as Sugaring Off, is a community gathering hosted yearly by Land’s Sake. Since their initial tree tapping in early February, Metzger’s students have been meeting after school to harvest the sap and guide it on its transition into syrup.

The sky is filled with smoke that billows out of the vents of the Sugar House and rises from the griddle, where pancakes are being flipped. The snow that once covered the roof of the house, like a layer of powdered sugar, has begun to drip off the edges as the sun rises higher in the sky.

Two weeks after Sugaring Off in early April, the farm’s growing season kicks off with the start of an eight-week educational program for grade-schoolers. Metzger’s personality is a mix of patience and excitement, and she answers questions from her first graders. She is glad to be joined by the farm’s newly hired education coordinator, Katherine Pater. Together, the two wrangle up the group of first, second and third graders, who are excited to be outside after a long winter of indoor play.

The post This Educator Teaches Pint-Sized Future Farmers to Love the Land appeared first on Modern Farmer.

from Modern Farmer http://bit.ly/2V7Yh0U via http://bit.ly/2xnQW0h

[annamanor]

An “Added Sugar” Label Would Save Billions of Dollars and Hundreds of Thousands of Lives

A new study ran complex computer simulations to find out the precise effect that this kind of labeling might have on consumer behavior. It’s not a perfect prediction—consumer behavior is tricky—but the model shows massive savings in healthcare costs, to the tune of $31 billion over 20 years.

The FDA already started down the path of requiring manufacturers to put added sugar figures in their nutritional information; the process has been delayed by a few years because food manufacturers say it’s tricky to figure out the numbers. So what exactly do we mean by “added sugar”? Let’s take, say, a Reese’s peanut butter cup. Peanuts and milk solids naturally have some sugar in them. But Hershey also adds a ton of sugar to both the chocolate and the peanut butter. So you’d have two figures, one for natural sugars and one for added sugars.

There’s nothing chemically different about added sugar; sugar is pretty much sugar. What advocates for an added sugar label have an issue with is the sheer quantity of the stuff. Americans eat, notes the New Food Economy, about half a cup of sugar per person per day.

This new study, coming from researchers at Tufts University, used figures from the effects of previous changes in nutrition labels. We do have some data on this by now: we can tell how consumption has changed with the addition of trans fat labels, say, or calorie counts in fast food. Using all that stuff, the researchers estimated that the labels would reduce the amount of added sugar Americans eat by 6.8 percent—nothing bonkers, but a significant dip with impressive effects.

The study finds some truly insane stuff. On the health side, between 2018 and 2037 (if the label went into effect on January 1), the study finds that added sugar labels could prevent over 350,000 cases of cardiovascular disease, almost 600,000 diabetes cases, and save a total of $31 billion in healthcare costs from diet-related problems like these.

The post An “Added Sugar” Label Would Save Billions of Dollars and Hundreds of Thousands of Lives appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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[annamanor]

The Stoned Tourist: Weed-Themed Travel Companies Explode in Canada

Recreational marijuana use became legal across Canada last October, sparking a wave of new cannabis-based businesses. The hospitality industry took note, and now you can tour a giant weed factory or get high while helicoptering over coastal mountains in British Columbia.

1. Butiq Escapes, British Columbia

This luxury travel company will take you and your friends to a remote mountain wilderness via helicopter for a once-in-a-lifetime glamping experience. They’ll fly in a chef, DJ or yoga instructor—whatever you want—and supply a curated assortment of the best marijuana strains and cannabis-infused goodies from across Canada. Expect to drop at least 10 grand.

2. Canopy Growth Factory Tour, Smiths Falls, Ontario

Canopy Growth, the world’s biggest pot company, is headquartered in this small town, outside of Ottawa, in what was once a giant Hershey’s chocolate factory. According to its promotional materials, you can “enjoy a self-guided tour to see real grow rooms, learn about the fascinating history of cannabis and discover everything there is to know about our favorite little plant.” Sounds like a Willy Wonka–ish experience with weed instead of chocolate. Free.

3. Canadian Kush Tours, Toronto, Ontario

This is a one-stop marijuana tourism shop. Choose from joint-rolling classes ($25) to a stoned spa treatment ($250) to a six-hour vapor lounge tour by limo for you and five friends ($950). For business travellers, corporate event planning is also available: Consider a cannabis bar and edibles catering in a Moroccan-themed tent ($3,000) or hire Herbert “The Herb” Kushman, a guy dressed in a wacky pot leaf outfit (like some sort of parallel-universe sports mascot), to work the party ($133 an hour).

4. The Green Chef Marijuana Dinner Party, Toronto, Ontario

Serving marijuana edibles in restaurants remains in a legal grey zone, but until that gets sorted out, visitors to the Toronto area can hire this company to put on a cannabis-infused dinner party at their rental cottage. These guys will whip up everything from high Thai curry soup to standard pot brownies. They even have a technique to make marijuana cotton candy for parties.

5. Bud and Breakfast, across Canada

This website currently lists 24 stoner-friendly lodging options, from the Yukon to Newfoundland. Rates range from $45 a night for a room with a hemp bed in Hamilton, Ontario, to $1,150 a night for a six-bedroom heritage home in British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley, complete with a hot tub and basement arcade.

The post The Stoned Tourist: Weed-Themed Travel Companies Explode in Canada appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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[annamanor]

Garden On The Balcony

Landing in containers is a quick and easy way to create a green corner on a loggia, balcony or veranda. They can grow flowers, herbs, and even vegetables.

  More recently, the choice of vegetables for containers was limited - green onions and parsley and celery roots. What is grown now, is striking in its diversity and beauty. Recently, for example, small tomatoes from the cherry group have become very popular. They are not only tasty but also very decorative. 50–80 cm high, with long beautiful tassels and red or yellow fruits, these mini-tomatoes can successfully grow in large pots and pots, such as the F1 Kishmish hybrid. Compact varieties Mikron-NK and Florida Petit  20–25 cm high are suitable for small containers. Hybrid F1 Tumbler It is a cascade bush with a height of 0.9–1.5 m, which looks very beautiful in tall vases and flowerpots. Its sweet fruits ripen earlier than other hybrids within 80 days (for other varieties and hybrids, the ripening period starts 3–3.5 months after sowing).

  Another great variety of modern hybrids of pepper. They have a more clearly pronounced decorative direction, and they belong to hot peppers to taste. Spectacular hybrids with dark burgundy large foliage, like basil. These powerful cute plants (about 35–45 cm in height and width) will decorate the balcony or loggia all summer. Peppers with green foliage have other decorative features: different shape, color, and location of the fruit. Peppers can peek out from under the leaves or rise up above a bush like peak tips. The elongated wriggling fruits of such a hybrid as Medusa, Pepperoni, Chilly Chili look unusual. Their peculiarity is that fruits on one plant can be of two colors - yellow and red. And the variety Masquerade even three - yellow, red and purple.

To the tomatoes and peppers, you can add a variety of herbs. Especially beautiful is basil ' Clove aroma ' with a compact as if shrub bush.

  Until late autumn, containers are decorated with curly parsley, chard, and a variety of salads, some of them look like exquisite flowers. Chao Bambino varieties with claret-green leaves, Ruby lace with rich colors of strongly fringed leaves form a rosette up to 30 cm and will be able to decorate your decorative garden in 25–35 days. Cort Uno Momento c burgundy leaves can be sown not only in spring but in August, the plants pleasing to the eye until late autumn.

When planting a home garden, one cannot overlook the decorative remontant strawberries. Most of its hybrids - with white or unusual for strawberry pink flowers of various shades - form beautiful cascades of edible berries that grow all summer. You can grow them yourself from seeds or buy seedlings in the spring, the plants bloom and bear fruit in the year of sowing. Currently, there are quite a few such hybrids, for example, F1 Moscow delicacy  - with large white flowers and large berries, as well as F1 C-141 blooming until autumn  - with bright pink flowers and tasty berries. Particularly impressive strawberries look in hanging baskets.

All this magnificence can be supplemented with edible flower plants such as nasturtium and marigold. And you can make a composition of flowers and vegetables.

source https://herboponics.com/blogs/hydroponics/garden-on-the-balcony

[annamanor]

New Country for Old Cows

In March, at a restaurant along one of Toronto’s busiest corridors, the dining room was filled with 50-some guests for what promised to be a uniquely beefy evening. Tanto chef Julian Iliopoulos had planned a menu of 15 courses, from oxtail croquettes to a tongue-and-heart terrine, each using a different ingredient or part of a single animal. The pièce de résistance: tallow-aged striploins and rib eyes, cooked over the kitchen’s woodburning grill, each slice dotted with a tiny cap of pale yellow fat.

These steaks weren’t cut from a young Angus or Hereford, which is raised specifically to produce marbled steaks of maximum tenderness as quickly as possible. Like everything else on the evening’s menu, they were from a grass-fed Jersey cow — one that had reached retirement age after a life spent producing thousands of pounds of milk on a dairy farm in southwestern Ontario. “I wanted to give it a proper send-off,” says Iliopoulos.

The reality of retirement for most North American dairy cows is a speedy trip to auction and an immediate future as cheap, commodity-grade ground beef. They’re sometimes called “burger cows.” But Iliopoulos is among a growing number of fine-dining chefs in the United States and Canada who are beginning to rediscover what beef-loving cultures like the Spanish — who serve beef from old cows as a delicacy called txuleta — have understood for generations: What a mature animal’s meat lacks in butter-knife tenderness, it makes up for in intense flavor that can’t be replicated with anything but the passage of time. And, because most North American beef cows graduate from Bovine University by around 24 months of age, restaurants are turning primarily to dairy farms — and their older, smaller, pasture-raised Holsteins and Jerseys — for their mature-cow fix.

Claire Herminjard’s phone has been ringing a lot these days. She is the founder of Mindful Meats, a meat aggregator in Petaluma, California, that sources whole, live animals from certified-organic, non-GMO ranches in Marin and Sonoma counties, where the animals graze on the salty grasses of northern California’s Pacific Coast. “I assumed we would be a ground-beef company because that’s what I read dairy is really used for: America’s favorite burger,” says Herminjard. “Any rancher I talked to would say ‘Good luck getting a steak out of a dairy cow. Never gonna happen — it’s too tough. People are never going to eat it because it’s too tough. Who cares about flavor?’”

Tenderness is the benchmark for most steaks sold in North America. And when it comes to flavor, consumers unwittingly expect the taste of grain-fed beef. “People really love the flavor of corn, but that’s not what beef is,” says Jakob Anderson of Toronto’s Bespoke Butchers, who sources retired dairy cows for restaurants across the city.

Courtesy of Bespoke Butchers

But flavor — real beef flavor, unadulterated by the mechanics of industrialization — is staging a comeback.

At chef-restaurateur José Andrés’s Bazaar Meat in Las Vegas, the Vaca Vieja, or “old cow,” is inspired by the Spanish tradition. It comes from one of the eight- to 10-year-old Holsteins at Mindful Meats. “There is a flavor there that is more potent as time goes on,” says Alex Pitts, the restaurant’s executive chef. “It’s one we haven’t tasted in America in 60 years because we got used to raising animals only for consumption.”

On the East Coast, a rib eye from a six-year-old Holstein, raised on a farm in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, has been featured as the centerpiece of the $325 tasting menu at the two-Michelin-starred restaurant Pineapple & Pearls. The steak’s fat cap glowed like Cheddar cheese after the cow’s grass-fed existence ingesting beta-carotene. “While eating steak is something that most of us have experienced, eating that of a dairy cow isn’t as common,” says head chef Scott Muns. “While its texture might be slightly tougher than what the general public is used to from younger cows, the flavor is much more robust. Even the fat is richer in flavor, almost like bone marrow.”

Dairy cows are the most common source for mature beef, but they aren’t the only one. The Meat Hook, a butcher shop in Brooklyn, buys Angus bulls whose breeding days are behind them from Kinderhook Farm in upstate New York. “After you taste a 12-year-old animal, you realize that the steak you’ve been eating your whole life from the supermarket was like a 1 or 1.5, if you had a volume knob of zero to 10,” says co-owner Ben Turley. “And these are like Marty McFly at the beginning of Back to the Future, where he cranks up the guitar and it blows him against the wall.” Last year, the shop began hosting themed dinners at New York restaurants built around the concept of “single-source vintage beef,” a descriptor that sounds borrowed from the vocabulary of artisanal coffee beans or wine. The notion of terroir — being able to taste something about how and where the product was raised — is common to all three. This flavor-first philosophy presents an opportunity to meat purveyors and farmers alike.

“There are 29 steakhouses in Las Vegas right now, and everyone’s serving the same stuff from Nebraska,” says Pitts. “Let’s not serve the same steak as everyone else; let’s do something different. And the results spoke for themselves.” At Bazaar Meats, the menu at José Andrés’s brand-new Mercado Little Spain market hall, in New York’s Hudson Yards, features steak from mature dairy cows from Mindful Meats.

Courtesy of Bazaar Meat

For farmers, a larger market means an opportunity to reap a premium for what would otherwise be sold at bottom-of-the-barrel prices. “We would sometimes pay 50 to 75 percent more than what the market was paying for them,” says Clifford Pollard, owner of Cream Co. Meats, an aggregator and food hub in Oakland, California, that works with dairy farms to identify their choicest pasture-raised organic animals, which are marketed under Cream Co.’s Antique Beef label. “For a ranching partner who was selling us 10 head of cattle every other week on this program, they would make an additional $150,000 to $200,000 a year selling them to us.”

Herminjard and Pollard emphasize that not just any old dairy cow will make the cut. Beyond exacting standards at the dairy farm level, the key is to target specific animals that meet high standards for qualities such as body condition. “There’s nothing convenient about it,” says Pollard. “It takes a long time to raise. Not every animal is equal. There’s a lot of handling and a lot of aging to actually get it to the point where it’s going to be this incredibly special experience.”

For the mature-meat movement to continue to grow, education is key for restaurants (about the culinary benefits of working with older animals), for consumers (who have long been conditioned to prize tenderness over flavor in their beef) and for individual farmers (who may, for the first time, consider the financial and ecological benefits of raising dual-purpose animals — in many cases, they might not realize the value of the by-product that’s roaming in their own fields). “Some of our suppliers had never tried their own beef before, so we would take them meat,” says Herminjard. “One supplier came out a week or two after we dropped it off and said, ‘Man, that’s so good, it’s like the beef I had when my grandma was around.’ It has that flavor and nostalgia because it isn’t anything new. People had been doing it for a long time, but they stopped. Now, we really are looking back to move forward.”

The post New Country for Old Cows appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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[annamanor]

Spicy Herbs On The Windowsill

Greens and spicy herbs are planted by many, and even the opponents of the beds still find a place in the country for basil, dill, and cilantro. However, to season the salad with your own spices, it is not necessary to wait for the summer - at any time of the year, the greens grow well on the window.

     Fragrant herbs have been valued at all times. They were eaten, used as medicine. And interestingly, they have always been attributed to some magical properties. So, the Egyptians considered dill to be a symbol of grief. In ancient Greece, the winners of sports competitions put on his head a wreath of celery. And the wine infused on its leaves, the soldiers drank before the fight - it was believed that it kindles the fighting fervor. The Romans believed that the smell of rosemary relieves bad dreams and preserves youth. Dill in antiquity decorated with bouquets of roses - "for flavor". From lemon balm, they made a love potion. Sprigs of hyssop moistened with water, the Jewish priests used in the ritual of ritual purification. In the Middle Ages, ladies embroidered thyme sprigs on the shirts of their knights - so that they remembered their lover. And cumin in old England was the main component of love potions. A lot of different diseases were treated with a brawler in Russia, and those who drank his decoction were strictly forbidden to swear.

Of course, all this is long past. But spicy herbs are bred today too - mostly for the sake of taste and aroma. And not only in the garden. Pretty easy to grow greens in a city apartment. But in order for your room to be filled with the smell of fresh herbs, it is not enough just to throw the seeds into the ground. These seemingly unpretentious plants also require some attention.

Perfect for a mini-garden kitchen is always moist air -. In winter, the "beds" is better to break on the south windows, in the summer - on the east and west. You can even expand the window sill if you are especially "herbivores."

On the window, it is easiest to grow dill, Kuper, white mustard, boletus, and leafy salads. Cress will be able to plant even a beginner. Just do not forget that the greens do not like too wet soil and suffer from a lack of light.

Seeds of dill, leaf lettuce, Kuper, white mustard, peppered are sown on the surface of moist soil and sprinkled on 1 mm of light humus soil.

Forcing onions can be carried out in the water or a layer of soil with a thickness of 7-10 cm. Bulbs of the same size are chosen for forcing - then feathers will grow evenly. They are soaked for 12 hours in hot water, and after planting, they are shed with warm water so that the roots sprout faster. When the leaves grow by 25-30 cm, they can be cut. It is necessary, to begin with extreme - greens accrue from the center of the bulb.

Rosemary - light-loving evergreen shrub. He is quite unpretentious but does not like sudden changes in temperature. Water should be moderate.

Watercress can be grown in the soil mixture, and you can use paper towels or napkins - they will fit for watercress. Seeds need to sow pretty tight. Sprouts will appear in just a couple of days, and after about two weeks, when the salad grows to 5-6 cm, you can harvest the first crop. If you sow the seeds at an interval of fourteen days, you will always have fresh cress.

source https://herboponics.com/blogs/hydroponics/spicy-herbs-on-the-windowsill

[annamanor]

How To Grow Vegetables At Home?

The big advantage of the home garden is that the plants are under our daily control. But for such gardening, there are a number of features. Vegetables can be grown even year-round. But the expected result will not always be obtained, you will have to work hard and even spend money financially. What moments need to be considered?

Varieties of vegetables for growing in the apartment

The range for growing on the balcony (loggia, windowsill) is very diverse: dill, basil, indau, spinach, cress, parsley, coriander, mint, rosemary. There are excellent representatives for container growing among the nightshade: tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, and even potatoes. From climbing crops a good crop will turn out at cucumber, beans, peas, even melon and watermelon will form a decent crop with proper care. With root vegetables at home growing more difficult, but realistic. Homes on the balcony can grow carrots, radishes, daikon.

Selection and seed companies have created a special series of seeds for home gardening - the “Four Summers” series, for example. But you can choose varieties and hybrids themselves, taking into account some features. Choose early-ripe, small-fruited, high-yielding hybrids and varieties with a compact form of plants.

  Ramblin Gold Stripe, Yellow Cap, Megabyte and  Red Placer show themselves well out of tomatoes at home. Parthenocarpic F1, Matilda F1, Santana F1 are successful among cucumbers. From the basilica worth trying fine-leaved forms Naughty, Fresh, Bush.

Optimum dates for sowing seeds

Enthusiastic plant growers do not stop the difficulties, and at home hydroponic technologies and modern phytotrons with controlled microclimate, especially for growing plants, take root for a long time.

For a guaranteed harvest, it is recommended to sow the seeds in the same traditional terms as when growing vegetables at the dacha. First, it is fully consistent with plant biology. Secondly, you do not have to configure a long additional supplementary lighting, maintaining the right temperature and use a large number of fertilizing plants.

So, in the middle band greens can be sown from late March to late August. Tomato, pepper, and eggplant - at the end of January, cucumber and root vegetables - from the end of March.

Container size and soil

For a tomato and cucumber, a 5-liter pot is enough, 2–3 l of beans, 5 l of a zucchini, greens - any container is 7 cm high or so.

It is desirable to use soil for plants ready, universal for vegetable cultures. It excludes the presence of fungal and bacterial diseases. It is often filled with fertilizer complex, which is important at the initial stage of growth. If there is a desire to use the "garden" soil, then it must be taken from the site where similar crops were not grown before. And it is better to disinfect it in one of the ways: calcined in the oven, shed with boiling water, disinfect with a weak solution of potassium permanganate. It is important for each plant to provide drainage in the container so that the root system does not rot out due to an excess of moisture.

The choice of the place of cultivation

The best lighting will be on the balcony or window located in the south or east.

In the future, not every culture prefers direct sunlight. To ensure comfortable conditions, you need to shade the balcony windows so that the leaves do not get burned.

If the balcony is on the north side and there is a desire to grow vegetables and herbs with your own hands, then there is no need to do without light. This is especially necessary for the period when the seedlings are grown. There are several solutions: use home lamps, purchase specialized ones. For good growth, plants need light from 8000 lux. To date, such a number of suites can give a lamp type "Reflax".

  Watering and feeding plants

Watering the plants need water at room temperature (+20 ... + 22 ° C) and ensure that the soil did not dry. Due to the drying out of the soil, the development of the plant will be uneven, during flowering it can throw off flowers and buds, and sometimes even leaves. As necessary, you need to loosen the soil crust, if watering is carried out over the ground.

Feeding on green cultures, as a rule, do not hold. They need more tomatoes, peppers, eggplants, cucumbers, and watermelons. The main thing here is not to overfeed: due to excessive intake of mineral fertilizers, the roots can suffer and the plant will die. It is better to “underfeed” their wards. Feedings are carried out with any complex fertilizers once every 20 days after 2-3 weeks after transplanting seedlings to a permanent place. The norm specified in the instructions can be divided into 2 times. At the time of budding need to feed fertilizers with calcium, magnesium, and boron, then the fruiting will be abundant.

Forming plants

Considering that plants from special seed series are often compact, they do not need to be formed. But a number of cultures have their own characteristics. Thus, as it grows, basil needs pinching of the shoots, due to this technique, it will acquire a spherical shape. Cucumber and tall tomatoes form in 1 stem, removing all side shoots. At the melon and watermelon, they tie up all the lashes, carry out pollination manually and leave 1-2 fetuses on each lash. Low-growing tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants do not need to be formed.

Love what you do

The right choice of variety and timely care is half the battle. Without love and creation success is not achieved.

Tasty and healthy crops all year round!

source https://herboponics.com/blogs/hydroponics/how-to-grow-vegetables-at-home

[annamanor]

Fewer Farms, Smaller Farms, and Lower Incomes: The Agriculture Census Is Out

That census is the largest-scale data-gathering project of its kind, examining who owns farms, how much land they have, what sorts of farmers the country has, how much money farmers make, how much farm expenses are, and more. It’s vital for understanding where food and fiber in this country is.

The 2017 census was released on Thursday—it takes a little while to aggregate all the data, hence the delay—and it contains both good and bad news, though if we’re being honest, there’s more bad than good. One major difference this year is how the census defines who works on a farm; previously there could be only one principal operator of a farm, while this survey allows for multiples. That’s good for accuracy, though it might skew some numbers when compared to previous years.

The total number of farms is down 3.2 percent from the 2012 census, as is the total amount of land dedicated to farms and ranches. Yet the average size of farmland is up, meaning that the few farms that do exist are bigger—either expanding, or the smaller farms just haven’t been able to survive.

Of the over two million farms in the United States, just over 105,000 of them combine for 75 percent of sales, which goes along with the idea that consolidation is creating fewer, more powerful, larger farms.

Average income is down two percent; the average yearly income of an American farmer is now $43,053, which is below the average of American workers in general. The average age of the American farmer remains concerningly high, increasing by 1.2 years to 57.5.

The number of female farmers is up significantly, from about 970,000 in 2012 to 1.23 million in 2017. But this is one of those figures that could be skewed by the new rules: before, when a family farm was required to name a single principal operator, it’s possible that a man was chosen by default. Now, women might be more likely to be added as a farmer—but these aren’t necessarily new female farmers.

There is some good news. The number of farms using renewable energy has more than doubled. Internet access—more rare than you might think in rural areas—is up, too, from 69.6 percent to 75.4 percent. The number of organic farms increased from about 14,000 to about 18,000, but the amount of sales in organic produce has more than doubled. And small farms are increasing in number, along with the massive farms—it’s the middle size that’s being boxed out. (That one might not be good news, exactly.)

You can check out the full census here.

The post Fewer Farms, Smaller Farms, and Lower Incomes: The Agriculture Census Is Out appeared first on Modern Farmer.

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