April 4, 2008 Newsletter

Welcome to this Rodale Institute web update newsletter, our first opportunity to respond to your comments on our new website. We’ve been gathering feedback about all our changes and making adjustments accordingly. At your request we’ve rekindled the Classifieds and NewFarm Forums, which we will be making improvements to in the near future.

You are asking: “Where did New Farm go” and “How do I get to the old archives?” So we thought it might be a good time to take a moment and walk you through the new site.

From both the Rodale Institute homepage and the “New Farm” tab at the top of the homepage, you can access our Organic Transition Course, Organic Price Report (OPR) and Crop Conversion Calculator. Additionally from New Farm, you’ll find a whole suite of tools that include the Organic System Plan, the No-Till Revolution Page, our Organic Certifier Directory, Farm Locator, Resource Directory, the NewFarm Forums, Classifieds and Farming for Credit Directory.

Just below these tools, under the “Information” heading, we’ve divided our existing New Farm stories into named content groups that made the most sense to us. In the coming weeks and months we will be archiving our diverse and rich New Farm collection into these “buckets,” as we’ve come to call them. In the meantime, you can still find these same stories under “New Farm Archives,” which are searchable by date and column or under the old “1,000 Stories” heading.

Rest assured all our New Farm content remains within our new design. The farmer-centered writing of New Farm now has been joined by three new content streams to document and explore the Rodale Institute’s claim that organic agriculture has the capacity to solve the pressing challenges of global warming, feeding the world’s hungry and providing sound nutrition at home and abroad. Within each of these content areas you will find feature stories, news items and research reports.

Look at the lead photo of our homepage to instantly link to our features of the week. At right you’ll find an at-a-glance rundown of organic news under the themes mentioned above. In the left side navigation column, you are only a click away from information on donating, volunteering and employment, an exciting section for kids and families (including recipes, garden activities and science projects) and a calendar of events, directions to our eastern Pennsylvania farm and details about what you’ll find when you get here.

Fresh this week, learn how: some weeds and insects seem to get a competitive boost from higher carbon dioxide levels (Global Warming feature and news)… 100 bushel-per-acre organic wheat in Montana stumps researchers with its high protein level in a hot, dry year (Famine Prevention)… Anthony Rodale remembers growing up with his father, Robert, who so influenced today’s organic reality (About Us)… and Christina Ziegler Ulsh, Institute science editor, experiences the dynamic pro-food, pro-health, pro-local farm outreach of People’s Grocery in downtown Oakland, California.

New extras give you something to bake (Spiced African Yam Waffles, at Kids and Families); something to explore (Learning from Labels, also at Kids and Families) and something to act on (Action Alert for the Environment and Public Health, at the Advocacy tab in the New Farm section). Help us to identify critical public issues relating to organics and sustainability for weekly updates to our Action Alerts.

Please take time to familiarize yourself with the ins and outs our new site. You can be sure that not only are all the old New Farm stories, photos and tools still readily accessible, there’s much more to come. As always, your suggestions are welcome and will be considered carefully as we fine-tune our site to make it as useful as possible for the valued community we serve.

Celebrate Spring!
Greg Bowman and the Rodale Institute editorial team