This just in: @kenforkish is coming out with a new cookbook! Evolutions in Bread, coming 9/20, is now available on pre-sale at the link in our bio. Covering artisan pan breads, Dutch-oven loaves, and a new efficient sourdough method, these are recipes that you’ll want to use every week. Let the countdown to September begin! ⁠

After over a year of documenting our work in the regenerative community, we are thrilled to be releasing this short film about who we are, who we work with, and what we do. In short—this is us, these are our people, and this is our story. Welcome to the revolution.

Craft beer makers from five states in the Northeast are making efforts to source their grains from regional farms. It's not only economical but also good for the planet.

Increasingly, the Sonoran and other dry places are showing us what a heat-and-drought-riddled future has in store for more of our food systems. These examples suggest that deep knowledge of dryland farming practices could blunt the impacts, giving some farmers a workable path forward. Whether conventional agriculture is willing to learn anything at all from these systems, however, is the question.

Their affordable lease in New Paltz, N.Y., negotiated in 2015 with the help of a farming nonprofit, had just ended, and they were suddenly thrust into a market where buyers were paying above asking price. “Folks who were trying to leave the city were making all-cash offers,” Ms. Morley recalled.

In order to be more resilient, the food system of the future needs to be more distributed and local. Having more capacity to gather, process, move and store food in different geographic areas of the country will provide more options for producers to create value-added products and sell locally, which will support new economic opportunities and job creation in rural communities.

In this episode, Zhorov talks to Cogswell, Lapidus, and Jensen all about how they learned to tend the fire and live by the rhythms of wood-fired sourdough baking. She also talks with Rob Segovia-Welsh, who runs Chicken Bridge Bakery with his wife, Monica, about what benefits he sees in working with fire. Throughout these conversations, she explores how baking this way offers a potential for connection to a community—and makes the baker’s life a pretty good life. 

An easy way to sample a variety of grains grown, milled, and transformed by artisans in our regional #grainshed is the Mid-Atlantic Grain Share, a Common Grain Alliance and @freshfarmdc project. Sign up for the summer session running from June through October at four D.C.-area farmers market locations.

What this says is that agricultural imports are soon expected to be greater than agricultural exports. Within the next year or so, the United States will be a net importer of agricultural products.