Tractor tune-up day:

8 dreamscape hours when you know you’ve earned your keep.  Lying on your back, grease in the nose…face…hat…palm…looking for zerks, cursing the 4th wrong-sized wrench, satisfyingly comparing bleach-white new filters with tarred old ones. 

Whoowe...

Weeding numbs the human mind.  Chemical-free hop farming has included many hours on hands and knees, dig-chasing networked spindles of grass, twisting impossible roots, and mostly beating up knees. The satisfaction of honest work quickly gives way to the mental challe...

What a pleasure to announce that Lovehops Farm’s 2015 harvest will be available to Kansas City palates through Green Room Burgers and Beer!  According to the proprietors’ strategically targeted public announcement

(to me),  “We put your hops in a cask of our Papa Louie...

I took the Gallup Entrepreneurial Strengths Finder recently.  As an entrepreneur, I am ROCKING these characteristics:

• Delegator……..mmmmmmok…….great.  I’m good at getting others to do stuff.  No matter that I did endless hopsyard weeding last year on my hands and kne...

Today I planted a mix of cereal rye, hairy vetch, and daikon radish in the lanes between hop rows.  (Vetch!  Daikon!  Plants got the best names after all.)  The rye and Hairy V will buckle down like college kids waiting for spring break.  The radish will take that lo...

 Life started on Earth 3.8 billion years ago.  To give perspective on this:  if the entire history of Earth was condensed into one calendar year, life doesn’t appear until almost spring, on Feb. 25.  Sexual reproduction doesn’t come around until near autumn, on Septemb...

Today we received good news via analyses of the Lovehops 2015 harvest. Our alpha and beta acids look fantastic relative to industry averages.  Cohumulones are a little low, but in the ballpark.  Special thanks to BrewLaboratory for super quick turnaround time with the...

This represents HOURS saved.

We can see the past but not influence it.

We can influence the future but not see it.

--Stuart Brand, The Clock of the Long Now

I think Stuart must have had independent contractors (ICs) in mind when writing this.  Since February, I had identified no less than 5 ICs to h...

In 3 short years, I’ve done some dumb things for hops.  I’ve hand-spaded 600 feet of row edge because I couldn’t get the 1950 Farmall H to start, and the rhizomes were On Their Way.  I’ve perched precariously atop a ladder…which was itself perched atop a tractor bucke...