Sustainable farming depends on sustaining farmers
By Mai Nguyen | Sustainable farming depends first on our ability to sustain farmers. Our country has never equitably compensated farm labor, and has too often worked actively against it.
Marketing my grain is a mouthful
By Mai Nguyen | My grain is a mouthful. It is identity-preserved, non-Plant Variety Protection (PVP), incrementally upscaled heritage seed grown using rain-fed, on-site fertility, carbon sequestering, integrated pest management, nonsynthetic sprays, low fossil fuel, no-till practices and brought to
Farming is all about timing, but climate change is changing the rules
By Mai Nguyen | There was a worrying absence of metronomic clicks. I took out my voltmeter and detected only a faint current in the sheep fencing.
The one thing my farm training never covered: racism
By Mai Nguyen | When I started farming grains and vegetables in California in 2014, I already had a lot of the knowledge, skills, and experience essential to farming. But no farm conference, internship, or book prepared me for the
Heart and Grain: Farmers are matchmakers between land and seed
By Mai Nguyen | There aren’t plenty of fish in the sea of heritage grain, so I started growing out and scaling up the varieties I need. To start, I requested a batch of seed from the USDA germplasm, and
Heart and Grain: Meet Mai
By Mai Nguyen | I grew up knowing my roots in stories of loss. Though their home had been destroyed and their country lost, my family shared these stories and the traditions around them so that they could keep our