Lee Rinehart
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Small Steps, Big Vision: Oyster Farming on Long Island’s Great South Bay
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Mike Miezianka and Ray Smith, founders of Toasted Oysters, are building a viable farm business on Long Island’s Great South Bay. Mike Miezianka and Ray Smith have found a way to beat the average Long Island commute time by almost seventy-five percent. They take a boat. After a fifteen-minute crossing of Great South Bay, their…
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For the Love of the Wild: Livestock Pastures as Wildlife Habitat
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Our agricultural landscapes are habitat for wildlife, and we have a large toolbox of practices that can help us be better stewards of our land and all its inhabitants. One of these tools is adaptive grazing. Farmers, ranchers, and researchers have come to understand the functionality of ecosystems on farms is largely dependent on plant…
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Independent Farmers Explore Seaweed for a Marine Based Economy
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There are now opportunities for entrepreneurially-minded people to enter the seaweed farming business and have a chance to succeed. The article is part two of a two-part series on ocean aquaculture. In part one, we learned about Bren Smith’s system of regenerative, multispecies ocean farming with sugar kelp and shellfish. Here, Todd Jagoutz, co-founder of Sea…
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Developing a community of ocean farmers for healthy seas, healthy food, and healthy economies
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Small-scale ocean farming is restorative and provides valuable ecosystem services through nutrient extraction and carbon sequestration. There are opportunities to put skilled, entrepreneurial people to work for a more sustainable, less exploiting use of the sea. I boarded the skiff with my camera strapped to my neck to keep it from plunging into the depths…
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Add Diversity to Your Pastures with Multispecies Grazing
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Much has been written on diversity of crops, forages, and soil biology but the diversity of grazing species is just as important. “The presence of multiple species of large herbivores is the typical condition of grassland and savanna ecosystems,” says John Walker, a range ecologist who wrote on the subject more than two decades ago…
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Building Healthy Pasture Soils
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The following article is an excerpt from the factsheet “Building Healthy Pasture Soils” available in full at www.ATTRA.org and can be downloaded as a free PDF at the website, along with many other guides and resources. Let’s consider the agricultural practices that help build healthy soil. In essence, we want to increase aggregation, contribute soil organic matter, increase biodiversity,…
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Building Healthy Pasture Soils
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Focus on biology to build resilient soils that sustain production and deliver profitable yields with reduced inputs. Soil fertility in pastures goes well beyond a simple discussion of soil samples, fertilizers, and the nutrients needed to produce high yields. Rather, soil health is an ecosystem concept: it is holistic and complex, and involves regenerative,…
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