This summer's efforts

Summer has come and gone and we are quickly moving into the fall harvest season here in Southern Minnesota. This summer was busy as usual - traveling around the state promoting Productive Conservation on Working Lands, and keeping the other programs here at Three Rivers going. This summer we hosted our annual grazing management workshop series. The report can be viewed here. As part of the grazing management series I hosted a fence construction demonstration at our farm. We also helped organize a pasture walk in Brown County.

In addition to keeping things running here at the Three Rivers office, my Wife and I have nearly completed a house recycling project. While not directly an RC&D project, my own housing project fits well with the idea of resource conservation. We moved an early 1900’s farm house onto our farm site as replacement for the existing dilapidated house. The old house will be deconstructed and as much of the lumber salvaged as possible. The process has taken over a year from start to finish, and has been a lot of work but we are starting to enjoy the fruits of our labor. In order to make our new home as energy efficient as possible we decided to install a ground source heat pump, also known as a geothermal heating system. I will post pictures of the project soon.