The Barefoot Farmer (Jeff Poppen) uses his farm (Long Hungry Creek Farm) as an example in demonstrating good farming principles. The landscape and atmosphere of the 21st century is leaning away from a small farm economy, bucolic scenery, sustainable agriculture and homegrown meals. The health of ourselves and our environment can only be enhanced by a reliance on local small farms for our needs. To learn more about these principle join Jeff Poppen with his weekly column - Barefoot Farmer.To e-Mail Jeff - Click Here

Onions are the first crop to go out in the fields. Four boxes of bunches arrived via UPS, and I knew it was time to get busy. I loaded the manure spreader and quickly had a breakdown. So I unloaded it by hand. The other spreader flung three loads out before it messed up and…

“For there is a hidden alchemy in the organic process. This hidden alchemy really transmutes the potash, for instance, into nitrogen, provided only that the potash is working properly in the organic process. Nay more, it even transforms into nitrogen the limestone, the chalky nature, if it is working rightly. The fact is that under…

It is disheartening to see a garden with a yellowish hue, denoting a lack of nitrogen, or an abandoned, ungrazed pasture begging for manure. Nitrogen has to be available for plants to grow, but luckily it’s everywhere. Air is 79% nitrogen, it is in every breath you take. Steiner has a lot to say about…

I’m a manure connoisseur. Good quality manure is not offensive and I’m happy to see a field full of cow pies (so are the earthworms). Manure has too much nitrogen to rot properly; we can smell this as ammonia. So we look around the farm for carbon to add to the manure, and we find…

“A farm needs cattle,” Dad informed us. It was 1974, and we’d just settled into our new (old) Tennessee homestead, which had obviously revolved around livestock. Dad had experienced the deterioration of the soil, and the local rural economy, in the Midwest during the previous decades, and attributed this to the removal of livestock from…

I finally got a job, and it’s right up my alley. I’m managing three new biodynamic gardens in the Bell’s Bend neighborhood, near Nashville. A tight-knit group of conscientious folks have banded together in an effort to keep their community rural and clean, and their next step is to feed themselves. We’re going to grow…

Wood ashes make a valuable contribution to the soil. A tree’s root goes deep into the earth to pull up the nutrients it needs. Many years of growing have left minerals in the wood. These are not destroyed by fire, but are still in the ash.

“In Nature, all things are in mutual interaction; the one is always working on the other. We must take the finer interactions into account. Otherwise we shall make no progress in certain domains of our farm work. Notably, we must observe those more intimate relationships of Nature when we are dealing with the life, together…