Dirt Rich: Grazing Management, Drought, & the NRCS

Jeff Duchene is a Grazing Specialist for the Minnesota NRCS, which offers both financial and technical assistance to producers to help them meet their land management goals and address their natural resource concerns. In conversation with host Jonathan Kilpatrick, Duchene shares how his formal education combined with years of learning directly from producers has been…

Read More

Dirt Rich: Dealing with Drought

July has seen swaths of Minnesota move into increasingly intense drought conditions, per the U.S. Drought Monitor. With the 2021 drought in the rearview mirror, five SFA farm consultants from across Minnesota gathered for a roundtable drought discussion on our latest episode of Dirt Rich. Listen in to hear how Angie Walter, Derek Schmitz, Doug Voss,…

Read More

Meet the Emerging Farmers Office

By Katie Feterl • Communications Director In 2022, the Minnesota Department of Agriculture (MDA) opened the state’s first Emerging Farmers Office. On today’s episode of Dirt Rich, Lillian Otieno and Assistant Commissioner Patrice Bailey of the MDA Commissioner’s Office share how it came to be, the value it brings to our agricultural landscape, and the impacts…

Read More

Dirt Rich: Grazing Tech – Paddock Track

On the latest episode of Dirt Rich, Organic dairy grazier Angie Walter shares her experience using PaddockTrac, a grazing tool being developed by the University of Missouri. Angie’s family runs a 100-cow organic dairy in Villard, Minn., grazing 80-100 acres at any given time. Theirs and 12 other Dairy Grazing Apprenticeship farms are piloting the PaddockTrac…

Read More

Tune in to the Latest Dirt Rich Podcast Episodes

Dirt Rich Podcast

For me, winter is podcast season. It’s when I sit down and really listen and think critically about what other farms are doing, why it works for them (or doesn’t), and if it could fit into my own farm. Podcasts have been a really important part of the development of our farm and have contributed…

Read More

Season 3 Comes to a Close

Somehow we’ve already reached the end of our third season of Dirt Rich. This month we released two episodes with our staff, finishing out the year with some food for thought as folks plan for the next growing season. In Episode 61: What’s on your mind?, Jared Luhman, Doug Voss, Kent Solberg, and Jonathan Kilpatrick…

Read More

Consults & Conferences

In this episode of Dirt Rich, Katie Feterl and Jared Luhman discuss SFA’s on-farm consulting offering, Give to the Max and SFA membership, and highlight two big upcoming events: Annual Conference and Midwest Soil Health Summit. Listen to Dirt Rich anywhere you get your podcasts, including Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, Podbean, YouTube, and on the SFA website.…

Read More

Dirt Rich: Wintering Cattle Roundtable

Winter can be the most expensive time to own a cow in the Midwest. As the season changes, we’re going back in the Dirt Rich archive to revisit a roundtable of five of our staff who also raise beef and dairy cows: Angie Walter, Jared Luhman, Doug Voss, Tyler Carlson, and Kent Solberg. Back in…

Read More

Dirt Rich: Enchanted Meadows – In Transition

Chad Crowley firmly believes that for those who want to get into dairy or farming in general, grazing is the way to go. That route has certainly gone well for him. He was told many times that he couldn’t find success in farming because he didn’t grow up on one. But today he and his…

Read More

Dirt Rich: Old Farm, New Visions

A new episode of Dirt Rich features farmer and SFA board member Scott Haase of Blue Earth, Minnesota. Haase grows crops with his brother Brent and raises pasture and woodland pork on Blue Dirt Farm. Their German ancestors “walked here from Wisconsin back in the 1860’s,” and they still farm some of the land where…

Read More