Shannon Berteau

Dovetail Workwear Review

Dovetail Workwear Review

by:
from issue:

Growing up I lived in overalls – my favorite being the railroad striped ones, but I had them in various colors. I had started to have a hankering for a pair of overalls again. As you can imagine, finding overalls that are comfortable when you are a four to twelve year old string bean is much easier than finding them as an adult. Now it isn’t just comfort that I’m interested in but they have to be complementary in other ways too, of course. So with my expectations set really low, I let them know that I would be interested in trying out their Freshley Overalls.

Heartland Review

Heartland: A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth

In this era when everyone seems focused on the growth of our cities we know that our readership is still heartily invested in our rural landscape. The people Smarsh writes about are our neighbors, and maybe even ourselves. Heartland is touted as a memoir but it is a life study, an ethnography if you will, of farm-based families that struggle to get by.

Horse Sense for Plain Farming

Horse Sense for Plain Farming

Book Review – The New Horse-Powered Farm by Stephen Leslie: Working with horses is not something you can learn exclusively through watching DVD training videos and attending workshops and seminars. These things and experiences can be very useful as auxiliary aids to our training, but they cannot replace the value of a long-term relationship with a skilled mentor.

The Best Way to Grow Trees

The Best Way to Grow Trees

by:
from issue:

Every year my family has to alternate between two methods for how we get our Christmas tree. My husband, having grown up acquiring trees from regular Christmas tree farms, loves the perfectly pruned and bushy variety. I love tromping around the forest to find the perfect Charlie Brown version to take home. The farm owned and operated by Emmet Van Driesche in western Massachusetts might have the best of both worlds. It is a wild place, yet cultivated. His Christmas tree farm is unusual – as stated in the title – because it is a coppiced Christmas tree farm. Coppicing is a traditional method of woodland management where the trees are periodically cut down to their stumps in order to entice them to put out new shoots that form into trees in their own right, given proper care and time and space.

The Paintings of Liberty Proffit Day

The Paintings of Liberty Proffit Day

by:
from issue:

Her paintings aren’t the more traditional, romantic, panoramic vistas of life in the west but rather true portraits of people she knows, taken from moments in everyday life. Her main goal with her art is the preservation of the ranching lifestyle and culture and she contributes to that not just with her painting but her daily life as well. She can be found just as often riding out to help neighbors with branding and other tasks on their ranch as in front of a painting.

Stay of Execution for Farmland

We Need a Stay of Execution for Farmland…

…until farmland preservation gets figured out. A pardon for farmland! Amnesty for farmers! And the world court for large banks! Below is a summary from the most recent AFT analysis of the loss of farmland to development. We have asked a few Journal readers and editors to share thoughts on the topic. A conversation with Lynn Miller, Paul Hunter, Shannon Berteau, Klaus Karbaumer, Ryan Foxley, Ken Gies, and Ferrel Mercer representing Oregon, Washington, Missouri, New York, and Virginia.