October 9: Stories That Caught Our Attention This Week

Pumpkin lovers around the world can freak out now, because it turns out we might be in for the Great Pumpkin Shortage of 2015. Peoria, Illinois, where 90 percent of U.S. pumpkins grow within a 90-mile radius, was hit with enough rain this year to wash out as much as a third of the crop. Some farmers have taken to buying pumpkins at auction. Better stock up, punkin’heads.

Speaking of wet places, our thoughts are with the folks in South Carolina, dealing with intense damage from recent flooding. Farms throughout the state are having trouble staying afloat with losses expected in cotton, soybeans, peanuts, and possibly even livestock.

Winemakers on the West Coast, which is famously much drier than the places already mentioned, have had to be inventive in the face of the ongoing draught. NPR covered Free Flow Wines, a wine kegging company, which has started to reuse the water used to sanitize wine kegs thanks to an expensive but efficient water treatment system. Not only does Free Flow allow you to get wine by the keg, it does so in a sustainable way. We dig that.

Lastly, Minnesota’s Star Tribune released an impressive and comprehensive four-part series on family farm deaths. The likelihood a farmer will die in a farm-related incident increases with age – a scary reality given that one-quarter of Minnesotan farmers are 65 or older.

Bonus: Check out the goats we introduced you to a few weeks back just north of Modern Farmer HQ. Looks like they were successful in their task of clearing brush by a public reservoir! Nice job, kids. (Cute pictures of goats behind the link.)