[the below was sent to our "students" email list of people who have taken our classes]

There's a ton of exciting stuff going on right now that I want to share with you.  I'll try to put them into rough order of importance, but please look through all the bullet points below in case the one you care about is at the end! 

Below is a short video demonstrating our first aquaponic setup, in our basement.  There are currently 9 goldfish in a 30-gallon aquarium providing fertilizer for a variety of houseplant cuttings and seeds.  It is still an experimental system, so we are not using it for commercial food production at this time.

revised 1/28/2013 for presentation at Butler Community College, El Dorado, KS.

(notes by Ben and Gordon Stallings on a talk given at the 2012 Land Institute Prairie Festival)

Agriculture policy has depended at least as much on political history as on considered thought. Historical imagination is the ability to see small and think big. The Green Revolution was not primarily technological but political. Term was coined in opposition to Red revolution of the Cold War.

(notes by Ben and Gordon Stallings on a talk given at the Land Institute's Prairie Festival, 2012)

35th anniversary of The Unsettling of America. Fields that have been in grass for a lifetime or more are now being herbicided and planted with corn or soybeans.

"Nature says keep the ground covered, and her best spokespeople have always said so." Annuals are nature's emergency crew, when there's a wound that needs to be covered, but you can't run indefinitely as an emergency.