Many are familiar with the phrase “stop and smell the roses,” which encourages us to take a break from our usual hustle and bustle. A presentation at Cultivate’22 , however, flipped that notion on its head. Cathryn Fageros, the business process improvement manager at Ball Seed Company, spoke about u...

I just finished an excellent book, “ Mountain Man: John Colter, the Lewis and Clark Expedition and the Call of The American West ” by David Weston Marshall; now I am reading “ Guardians of the Valley: John Muir and the Friendship that Saved Yosemite ” by Dean King. The breadth and intensity of the w...

Fun fact: agriturismo is how you say agritourism in Italian. It is an enormously popular enterprise in Italy, so much so that the first International Workshop on Agritourism was hosted there in 2018. (The most recent one took place in Burlington, VT; it returns to Italy in 2024.) However, as the des...

A 530-acre gem of a farm, hidden away but not far from densely populated areas of Howard County, MD, is drawing customers for more than one reason. In addition to growing a variety of greenhouse crops, Sharp’s Farm at Waterford is dedicated to education. Alexander Harrell, who’s currently in his sev...

As the face of America continues to evolve, sometimes it can be easy to forget those who aren’t always at the forefront of our thoughts. For example, the CDC notes that 11.1% of U.S. adults have a mobility disability with serious difficulty walking or climbing stairs. Another 10.9% have a cognition ...

Imagine you’re stopping at a farm stand with the goal of buying local jelly. Which would you be more likely to purchase – a jar on a shelf against the back wall, caught in the shadows, or one on a table near the front, glistening in the sunlight? Now imagine you’ve made that jelly and in addition to...

Heat stress happens when your body has excess heat it can’t get rid of. Heat strain is how your body responds to the excess heat. And everyone is at risk when the temperatures climb. The trend in recent years has been longer, hotter summers – so how do you protect yourself and your farmworkers? Talk...

If you sell plants from a brick and mortar store but don’t offer them online, should you? In a webinar presented by AmericanHort , three horticultural professionals shared what they learned from a research project comparing e-commerce to in-store marketing. “E-commerce as a percentage of total retai...

Here’s an intriguing number for those thinking about growing herbs: Annual sales of herbal dietary supplements in the U.S. totaled $12.35 billion in 2021, according to the American Botanical Council’s 2021 Herb Market Report. But, like all other areas of horticulture, jumping right in is ill-advised...

ROANOKE, VA – The Virginia Association for Biological Farming (VABF) hosted its 23d annual conference recently. This year’s edition was one of the largest in its history, with over 500 attendees. The event spanned three days and included several networking opportunities, a trade show with over 50 ex...

“Social media puts the ‘public’ into PR and the ‘market’ into marketing,” said Chris Brogan, president of New Marketing Labs. And while you make think of yourself as a plant person first, if you run a business, you also need to devote time to PR and marketing. Not everyone jumped on every bandwagon ...

One of the best things about NAFDMA, the International Agritourism Association , is that it’s truly a global organization. At the most recent annual conference in Austin, Texas, Heather Copley of Farmer Copleys in Pontefract, Northern England, shared her “Techniques from Across the Pond” regarding f...

Episode 49 of the Farm Commons podcast is titled “Legally sound internships on your farm.” “I’ve been at Farm Commons for a little over four years now, and over that time we’ve gotten the questions over and over again in various forms, but what the questions boil down to are: Can I have interns? And...

What’s the most effective way to communicate with your farmworkers? Is it early morning meetings? Flyers posted in a break room? Videos that take valuable work time out of the day? Have you considered texting? Building a food safety culture requires repeated reminders about farm policies and procedu...

Fire blight’s causal agent, the bacterium Erwinia amylora , has shown resistance to the antibiotic streptomycin, which is one of three antibiotics utilized to control this destructive pathogen. While most commonly known as a pest of apple trees, fire blight also effects pears and other plants in the...