Fig. 01 — The root pull, Kentucky
Agronomy, heritage, and honest numbers —
every Thursday morning.
Dispatches from working farms, seed-saving collectives, and county extension offices — stitched together for people who still read with dirt under their nails.
4,200+
Subscribers
23
Issues this year
47
States reached
Three recent issues — the personal, the structural, and the seasonal. This is what lands every Thursday.
A profile of Vera Combs, who has maintained a living seed library in eastern Kentucky for 31 years — trading envelopes of Cherokee Trail of Tears beans and Mortgage Lifter tomatoes with farmers she's never met face-to-face.
"If the seed dies out, the knowledge dies with it. I'm not a curator. I'm a custodian."
We read the 47-page guidance document so you don't have to. Here's what FSA Operating Loans actually cover in 2025, who gets bumped by the $600k cap, and the one exception most county offices won't volunteer.
"The rate looks good until you read the acreage cap. Most of our readers won't qualify unless they restructure."
We pulled 30-year NOAA averages and cross-referenced them with this season's soil temperature readings from 214 weather stations. The result is a county-level frost calendar you can print and pin.
"Zone 6b isn't a date — it's a range. This year the variance is wider than usual."
Five questions. We'll recommend a past issue matched to your operation — and give you a subscription form that already knows what you grow.
Five short questions about what you grow, how you farm, and what you're watching this season. Takes about 90 seconds.
Most agricultural media is either too academic or too promotional. We write for the person who has already made the decisions the experts are still debating.
Every market figure is traced to its origin — USDA NASS, CME settlement data, or a named farmer. We don't aggregate aggregators.
The letter assumes you already know what a bushel weighs. We don't explain what a pivot is. We tell you when to move it.
In four years of publication, the letter has been late twice — both times due to server issues, both times acknowledged with a note. We keep our word.
Seed companies can take a classified line at the back. They don't shape the reporting. The only people we answer to are subscribers.
"The frost-date piece alone was worth the subscription."I've been farming this ground for 38 years and I still learned something in the third issue. The frost-date piece alone was worth the subscription.
Dale Hutchins
Row-crop farmer, 640 acres
Champaign County, IL
Thursday mornings. No noise. Just what matters to the ground beneath your feet.
