One in five eligible North Dakotans turned out to vote in June’s primary election. My county did better than the state average with 43% voter turnout in Kidder County. But little Billings County in western North Dakota, home to Theodore Roosevelt National Park and 945 people, did better than all of us with 59.25% voter turnout. Teddy would be proud.
For 27-year-old Joanna Larson, the desire to return home to take part in the family farm operation in Sheyenne has as much to do with building community as it does farming. A strong independent streak also doesn’t hurt.
She’d like to see things done differently and wants to put her stamp on the farm and further afield.
That includes eventually transitioning to more sustainable agricultural practices at the family farm.
Some people say they sense their deceased loved ones. They see them in a cardinal, smell them in a soup recipe or hear them in a Johnny Cash song.
Tony Fisher and his family will sense his grandfather with every row tilled on the family farm near Ypsilanti.
Described as “neat, orderly and innovative,” Tony’s grandparents, the late Darwin and Helen Fisher, kept an organized farmstead – where every item has a place. Many of the items are original Darwin purchases and still in use on the Fisher family farm today.
“I don’t know that we could have did it without her,” says Corey Hart, a Bowdon area rancher who in 2010 desired to have a local meat processing facility in his community.
Many wouldn’t have thought it could be done. Period.
Bowdon’s population was 127 in 2010. The project faced challenges. A lack of people and capital, but not a lack of heart.
If the community of Bowdon wanted it bad enough, Lori Capouch was willing to try.
A 5-gallon bucket of carrots, “unwashed and dirty,” and three ice cream pails of chokecherries.
“That’s how my business got started,” says Diane Schmidt, recalling her first sales attempt at the Mandan Farmers Market nearly 40 years ago.
Schmidt was a single mom at the time. She’d haul kids and carrots to the farmers market on Saturday mornings. She can still picture her young boys, in 1986, sitting on the curb while Mom made sales.
Another dream streaming from the imaginative mind of sculptor Gary Greff, “Sir Albert” now majestically guards the castle, fending off a fierce fire-breathing dragon.
The 41-foot-tall knight, clad in shining armor made of tin, towers over the grounds of the Enchanted Castle in Regent. Nearby is the knight’s nemesis, a green dragon measuring 42 feet tall and 100 feet from nose to tail and clad in chainlink fence to replicate scales.
Eamon Alido lifts the canola plants from a tray, enthusiastically explaining hydroponics as a technique of growing plants using a water-based nutrient solution rather than soil.
In the music room, Mikaela Fattorini ripples her fingers over the piano keys, then settles into singing “Let It Be” to the heavens.
While Alido and Fattorini ventured from a world away to teach in the rural community of Mott, science and music know no boundaries.
A U.S. Marine Corps veteran with a worldly palate, Jayson Parsons put a pinch of this and a pinch of that into a seasoning jar for an outdoor survival trip, and discovered the recipe for a new business.
Originally from Arizona, Parsons and his family had moved to Hebron, where he and one of his sons explored the outdoors in survivor style.
As the sweet vanilla scent of the Bells of Ireland fills the air and the morning dew settles on the ranunculus blooming among many specialty flowers on their 11-acre farm, the Dessonvilles start each day deeply rooted in the glories of nature.