Workwear Stories
In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, two farmers are growing industrial hemp to improve their topsoil—and their bottom line—as they face worsening drought.
How can Hispanic farmworkers become farm owners? For Mexican immigrant Javier Zamora, the sunup to sundown work ethic was already there—he just needed some support from his community.
Only 4 percent of US farm owners are Hispanic. Mexican immigrant and organic farmer Javier Zamora is working to change the narrative.
In Colorado’s San Luis Valley, worsening drought is causing farmers to face the prospect of losing their livelihoods. Two farmers are placing their bets on a drought-tolerant crop—industrial hemp.
Nicholas Herrera brings new life to old things on his ancestral homestead in El Rito, New Mexico.
On a small farm outside Minneapolis, Minnesota, a farmer takes a regenerative approach to keeping his community fed.
Two Patagonia styles this season use bison hide. Grazing bison help restore prairie ecosystems, whereas grazing cattle can damage native grasses.
Who made the first hammer, the thing that’s used to make other things? For blacksmiths, it starts with the forge—and it’s hammers all the way down.
Patagonia has 73 styles using hemp this season. Cultivation of hemp replenishes vital soil nutrients, prevents erosion and requires no synthetic fertilizer.
A colorful tradition of building and running Grand Canyon dory boats is passed to the next generation.
Some farmers, anglers and chefs are providing food for their communities during the time of COVID-19.
Making face masks in the time of COVID-19: when “breathable face fabric” takes on a whole new meaning.
A bona fide American hemp farmer/entrepreneur shares his stash.
In 2019, after a record Colorado avalanche season bulldozed millions of trees, a team of avalanche experts rallied to collect as much information as possible from these 300-year-old keepers of time.
Editor’s note: This post discusses anxiety and suicide. In a humble workshop in Washougal, Washington, a blind craftsman holds a locally harvested log that he has made into a blank with his miter saw. He turns it in his hands to feel its shape and weight. He measures and marks, measures and marks. A flick…
Doing the Dirty Work with the Oregon Natural Desert Association
Mike Wood’s last name is a wholly appropriate coincidence of birth. He’s got a fetish for the stuff. When building his off-the-grid log home masterpiece on the banks of Alaska’s Susitna River, he’d range out into the surrounding boreal forest, select each perfect tree, hug it at the chest in solemn ceremony and then gleefully…
As the seventh generation of her family to farm the same land, working from sunup to sundown comes naturally to Heather Darby. The fourth profile in our Workwear series takes a look at the perpetual motion required to be both a research agronomist at the University of Vermont and the backbone of a 200-year-old, certified…
“For us, the tide is the boss,” says Adam James of Hama Hama Oysters, a fifth-generation, family-run shellfish farm on Washington’s Puget Sound. “In late August and September, we’ll be out there on the beach harvesting at 3 or 4 a.m., and when the sun finally comes up you can’t help but pause. It reminds…
For British Columbia’s timber barons, the forests of Vancouver Island were too rich to resist: giant spruce, fir and red cedar trees that fetched top dollar on the open market. On the island’s remote and rain-soaked Pacific coast, mechanized logging kicked into high gear in the 1950s and continued through the decades that followed. “Before…
It didn’t take long for Ben Wilkinson to figure out that there was freedom to be had in working for himself—and that freedom was the first requirement if he wanted to go surfing whenever the waves got huge. “I left home when I was 16,” he remembers, “which was old enough in my eyes. But…
Industrial hemp is a crop that has the potential to lower the environmental impacts of textile production, empower small-scale farmers and create jobs in a wide variety of industries. Two non-profit groups, Fibershed and Growing Warriors, are working to reintroduce industrial hemp into Kentucky—and eventually U.S. agriculture.