About
What Farm Zone is for, who writes it, how claims are checked, and where to write when we get something wrong.
Farm Zone is a blog, and the line under the logo, Small farms, plainly explained, is the whole editorial brief. New articles go up when they are ready, and everything we have published stays available in the blog archive.
Farm Zone started as a private notebook. Somebody kept a record of what was worth the money and what was noise, and after a few years that notebook was more useful than most of what was published online.
Each piece sits under exactly one heading. Readers arriving from search mostly land in soil health, raising animals and growing food, so those sections get looked after first.
We write from notes taken while doing the thing, not from a summary of other summaries. Where we are unsure, the page says so in plain words.
We keep the commercial side visible. Some outbound links earn us money, and that never buys a change to the text around them.
If you want the mechanics rather than the summary, the editorial policy has them, including what we refuse to publish.
People ask about the name. There is rarely a good story behind a domain, and there is not one here either. Farm Zone was available, it was short enough to say out loud, and it has been the name long enough now that changing it would be more confusing than keeping it.
There is no house byline here. Each piece is signed, and each signature leads to everything else that person has put their name to.
Dario Fenn, Market garden and soil writer. Dario ran a market garden for ten seasons before he started writing full time, and he still tests his own soil every spring instead of trusting last year's numbers. He writes about vegetables and soil with the dirt still under his nails.
Mabel Ostrander, Livestock and pasture writer. Mabel grew up on her family's cattle farm and now keeps a smaller flock of chickens and a handful of goats on her own few acres. She writes about livestock the way a neighbor would explain it over a fence, not the way a textbook does.
Silas Kirkwood, Equipment and farm income writer. Silas services his own tractor and sells produce at the same farmers market every Saturday, which means his writing about equipment and pricing has to survive contact with an actual ledger. He is blunt about what does not pay for itself.
There are questions we routinely decline. Anything that depends on facts only you can see, and anything where being wrong would cost you real money on our say so.
Tell us which line is wrong and why, at info@farmzone.net or through the contact page. Small errors are corrected the same week. Anything that changes the advice gets a dated note at the bottom of the article.
