As sharp autumn winds whip the remaining corn stalks in our fields, The Rodale Institute’s NewFarm.org is entering a time of transition.

In the past three years as the outreach arm of The Rodale Institute®, NewFarm.org pioneered a new kind of website to a global audience. Our goal was to inspire and help greater numbers of sustainable, organic/regenerative farmers in any way we could in our electronic medium. We sought to bring the enduring legacy of The New Farm magazine (1979 to 1995) to a new generation of farmers and those who want to support them.

In 67 updates of our magazine-format homepage, we published stories on production, marketing and building support for sustainable agriculture. Our new web tools served a growing audience.

Our staff’s major work in the months ahead will be to create a very practical, farmer-to-farmer knowledge site which will respond to what we discovered through surveys that you want: shorter stories in a cleaner format allowing you to learn more in less time.
We will continue to work in our areas of greatest expertise: promoting and explaining the importance of soil health to ecological and human health (a connection central to the vision of J.I. Rodale, who helped launch the global organic farming movement), as well as covering in detail the practical farming management and marketing decisions that flow from that regenerative foundation.

You’ll see stories you can apply directly in your fields -- on building up soil, useful tools, integrating more natural processes, and growing under plastic. You’ll also see stories on marketing to help you capture more value for farming well.

Our editorial team will gather stories within The Rodale Institute from:

• Our professional training staff, who are engaged globally with educators, entrepreneurs and corporate leaders who want to understand how healthy soil and organic farming work in the real world.
• Our research team, which continues to harvest the best scientific findings from our own fields and from their colleagues around the world.
• Our farm team, which developed the no-till roller that allows direct seeding into rolled cover crops and is now being tested by farmers in eight states.

We’ll be focusing our web site coverage as we devote substantial staff time to developing our on-line transition to organic course funded by the US Department of Agriculture's Risk Management Agency. The course will combine insights from 25 years of research at The Institute’s 333-acre organic farm with the shared wisdom of organic farmers and researchers across the US.

We will continue to link with regional farmer organizations forging new ways to make sustainable agriculture succeed throughout the US. And we will continue to maintain our suite of web tools, including The New Farm Organic Price Index®, The New Farm Locator®, The New Farm Guide to US Organic Certifiers, our Classifieds section, Resource Directory, Farming for Credit Directory and the New Farm Forums.

As always, we welcome your responses. We especially look forward to your suggestions for ways to bring new support to the Institute for the farmer-focused, how-to oriented NewFarm.org of the future. Write to info@newfarm.org.

Want to go directly to The New Farm® home page? Click here.