Adrian White

Discover the art of herbal healing with this charming gold-embossed guide, decorated with gilded page-edges.
Did you know that stinging nettles are a natural anti-inflammatory? Or that pine sap can clean wounds or be used as a mouth wash? Or that hops can help your digestion?
From Aloe Vera to Valerian, expert herbalist Adrian White introduces the uses of plants and herbs in medicinal healing, spirituality and magick. She covers the fascinating history of herbalism in different cultures acros...

Essay included in ebook "Organic Food and Farming Reference Handbook" published by ABC-CLIO and written by Shauna McIntyre.

Farmers are driven by a desire to be productive. But as running a small farm feels increasingly precarious, many are being driven into the ground.
Photography courtesy of Ben Saunders.
I noticed it when first learning farming 14 years ago, traveling around small diverse vegetable farms in the US and Ecuador. Small farms that made all their household income from the farm struggled the most, despite selling something we all need—food.
This especially applied if farmers weren’t wealthy beforehan...

By Adrian White
As we step into this first year of the United Nations’ International Decade of Sciences for Sustainable Development, the world still circles around the issue of global poverty. By one estimate, from 1990 to 2015, extreme global poverty fell from affecting over one third of the world population to only one tenth, decreasing about 1 percent annually. With the COVID-19 pandemic, it picked back up: from 2020 to 2022, each year pushed 1 percent back into poverty.
As progress revers...

On a recent chilly afternoon, Natasha Hegmann, 28, and her husband, Pete Kerns, 27, tended the fire of a giant copper boiler holding some 250 gallons of maple sap. The sap had flowed into the boiler overnight through a series of pipes from nearby trees. Turning the gooey sap into syrup will take days.

A native Iowan, Hegmann worked at a number of local community farms before her and Kerns set up their own, Turkey River Farms, in 2015 to grow vegetables in warmer months and harvest maple sap d...

It’s early Saturday morning. When the clock hits 7 AM, farmers market goers will arrive, trickling through empty streets before summer’s sun touches nearby rooftops. By 6:50, my stand and produce are all set up. I have 10 minutes to kill, so I peek at my phone behind the table.

I read a comment on an Instagram photo of our farm: “Beautiful—so jealous of farm life!” My husband and I own a small, diverse vegetabl...

Edmund and Tricia Jackson have run a poultry and beef operation near Honey Creek, Iowa, for over a decade. Then, last year, they added a new piece of land with a plan to grow organic feed—corn and hay—for their animals.
“It has been a learning process,” says Tricia. “The more we studied, the more we were in awe of how it made so much sense to work with nature, and not against it.”
Organic certification is just the latest incarnation of the Jacksons’s ongoing work to make their operation susta...

Almond milk is a popular plant-based alternative to dairy for vegans, the lactose-intolerant, and the eco-conscious among us. It’s also a low-fat alternative to conventional cow’s milk.
Recent reports paint a different picture, however. In January 2020, The Guardian published a story with a more complete accounting of the almond world: one where farming practices cause monumental damage for the sake of that glass of almond milk.
The creatures these practices affect? Bees—both domesticated and...

Our series “Cultivating Compassion” explores how you can be more empathetic and compassionate toward yourself and others.
The term “empath” has become a popular way to describe an empathetic person. Some traits of empathetic people are instantly recognizable trademarks, but, according to some experts, being an empathetic person is something we could all be, to some degree.
A true empath always goes out of their comfort zone and starts thinking, feeling, and acting for other people.
Like many ...

Farm data isn’t anything new. Since the dawn of agriculture, farmers have been learning how to grow bigger, better, and more profitably with records of their year-to-year observations.
The real revolution isn’t in data itself, but in farm data technology: how farmers log data, receive data, and use data in ever-increasingly efficient and convenient ways, and for greater yields on-site. However, when faced with the opportunity to acquire more advanced farm data technology— and to gather yet mo...

Bloom is the most integral stage of the citrus life cycle. Long before the success of a fruit crop can be ensured, growers must be strategic about the care and protection of flowers in order to ensure a profitable season.
Some approaches to facilitating citrus bloom and yield happen long in advance of the actual season, requiring planning and log-keeping from the year (or years) prior. Other approaches can happen right in-season on the spot to help citrus bloom along. Though some approaches m...

Striking a balance between effective food packaging and hitting sustainability targets is a challenge. No matter what option you go for, any sort of food packaging that actually works for agricultural produce— whether it’s broccoli, citrus, or cucumbers— must be manufactured. This can create waste and use energy to be produced. The trick is to choose the one that hits all targets, and at the lowest possible impact on the environment.
This is why corrugated packaging is quickly becoming one of...

As worsening climate change and unpredictable weather patterns become a bigger reality for growers, none are more drastically affected than the growers who depend on water the most. Somewhere towards the top of this list are viticulturists and vintners: the growers of the world’s grapes and the labor behind many of the world’s most renowned wines and vintages, though they are by far not the only agricultural professionals who need to think about how they can resist water shortages.
Effects of...