Can Small Farms Produce All Year Around?

From the left-wing environmental magazine Grist comes an essay by staff writer Tom Philpott, a farmer and cook at the North Carolina-based Maverick Farms.

In the essay, Philpott calls for the some of the masses of US government funding that goes to "conventional agricultural research" to go more to promoting "sustainable agriculture research". Specifically, he calls for more research to enable local small farms - especially in America's northern regions - to produce food year-round without using as much fuel and energy as their "corporate farm" counterparts.

This is a great field of research that Distributists should support. We believe in keeping the food supply local and de-centralized as possible. Promoting such research as extending small farms' food-growing seasons cheaply will go a long way to achieving such a goal. And such lessons learned can be adapted to other parts of the globe, to aid localizing the food supply there. Kudos to Mr. Philpott.