Dave Bishop

Harry was my close neighbor. “Close” in rural lingo generally refers to an adjacent landowner, as opposed to folks living several miles away who are still considered neighbors. The distinction is purely geographical. Harry occupied a tiny one-room cabin, situated precariously at the edge of a bluff, whose most notable feature was a front porch […]

It’s hard to find a food with a longer history than milk, a staple of the human diet. For at least 10,000 years, milk and foods made from milk have nourished children and adults in nearly every culture on earth. During the 1930s, pasteurization was introduced as means of making the milk supply safe from […]

This past year, the Illinois Department of Agriculture and local health departments offered financial incentives to assist in the sealing of abandoned wells. It’s a worthwhile cause that I sometimes become involved with. Often they’re old dug wells, barely visible in such places as the middle of a field or hidden in a thicket where […]

In November, the last autumn colors vanish into piles of dry leaves and the prairie hardens itself for the coming winter. Here at Prairierth Farm, the crops are at last all gathered and the cattle will soon be coaxed in from the summer pasture. The once-magnificent summer prairie has become a dismal brown and gray, […]

The big bluestem, dressed in its fall red-wine colors, glows in the late-afternoon sun among the bright-blue New England asters and a scattering of yellow goldenrod. From the center of this acre of prairie, nothing is visible except the sky and the tops of the oaks and cottonwoods along the creek. I like to imagine […]

Maybe it’s just me, but fall 2004 closed in a little faster than the calendar suggests. If you haven’t done so already, now is the time to organize your fall composting project to deal with the annual lowerin’ of the leaves. If the ultimate goal is to return the compost to your yard as next […]

‘Tis the season to be wooed. Ardent politicians, like new lovers, fill the air with promises crafted to push our hot buttons and spend money as if it belongs to someone else. Millions are spent on polls to figure out what’s important to us, millions more to convince us they have the solution to whatever […]

“You can’t do just one thing.” So goes the old ecology adage, meaning, of course, that each change that occurs in the natural world precipitates a series of other — often unknown and unexpected — changes. You may know it as the ripple effect. Much of the concern about genetically modified (GM) crops has to […]

One afternoon a sudden squall line sneaked up on us while we were working in the field. You know that feeling — goosebumps on the back of your neck, and you look up cautiously, expecting to see the dark stalker two strides behind. Within seconds, lightning crackled over the timber a half-mile distant and we […]

Most of us natural-farmer types were pleased when the USDA announced that it would develop a set of regulations — the government’s form of a blessing — for organic farming. But many small, diversified producers are now backing away from certification by the U.S. Department of Agriculture. It’s not so much a problem with the […]

Although I’m an advocate of compost as a “complete feed” for most lawn and garden settings, some situations require the application of additional natural fertilizers. Earth-wise use of any fertilizer requires more information than the so-many-pounds-per-100-square-feet recommendation on the label. We need to know (1) the existing level of fertility in our soil and (2) […]

Funny how we sometimes see the value of things. I’ve never heard of someone shopping around for the cheapest doctor or the cheapest hospital — after all, when it comes to our health we want the very best, and hang the cost. But when we go to the supermarket, we want cheap! Most people would […]