Outcome of Searchable Library of Articles on Organic Growing

Practical information on organic agriculture in the northeast United States is in great demand. Despite the growth of organic farming in the area in the last few years, most new farmers have only a few years of experience as apprentices and lack consistent means of continuing their education.

Hundreds of useful articles have been published in The Natural Farmer (TNF), the quarterly journal of the Northeast Organic Farming Association (NOFA), which has been edited by Jack Kittredge, a certified organic Massachusetts farmer, since 1988. Each issue of this award-winning journal presents timely and practical information focused on a particular topic related to organic agriculture, written by experienced farmers and educators, making it of special value to people interested in that topic.

Although copies of each issue have been available online at the NOFA website, the issues and topics had never been put into a format that was searchable by internet search engines, so a search for a specific topic would not bring up any of the related TNF articles. For example, a Google search for “organic potatoes” would not have yielded any of the nine articles on organic potatoes that were published in TNF.

Through this project, Searchable Library of Articles on Organic Growing, there are now 100 articles from twelve issues of The Natural Farmer online in an indexed, searchable format. In addition to making this extensive collection of valuable organic farming information readily available, this project enables NOFA to track the number of visits to these articles online. If they are widely used, NOFA can seek to put more issues into the searchable archive.

Here are the topics that are covered in these informative articles:
  • Organic Cucurbits
  • Organic Potatoes
  • Organic Minor Fruit
  • Climate Change and Organic Farming
  • Labor on Organic Farms
  • Manure & Organic Farming
  • Internet Marketing
  • Winter Production & Sales
  • Organic Mulches
  • Building Organic Soil
  • Crop Nutrient Density
  • Alternative Organic Animal Feeds