Ben Harris Email RSS

is JTA's former associate editor.

Latest

• This Week in Jewish Farming: Hankering for heirlooms

  August 1, 2014 10:52am

  Heirloom tomatoes are an elusive pleasure, available in most of the country for only a few weeks each year. But when they do appear, people tend to lose their heads a little.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: The community thing

  July 25, 2014 11:12am

  It’s common to talk about the potential of food and farming to build community, but it’s hard to say whether the kinds of ties created by farmers markets and locavore eating are worthy of the name.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: The cardinal truth of tomatoes

  July 18, 2014 10:07am

  Fear of insufficiency led to the planting of 1,000 — yes, 1,000 — tomato plants that are now beginning to ripen in the back of a borrowed box truck.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: The moral quandaries of bunnies

  July 11, 2014 10:45am

  Finding a small litter of bunny rabbits prompts a disagreement over how to protect the farm while upholding our respect for life.

• Zalman Schachter-Shalomi brought old world gravitas to New Age Judaism

  July 6, 2014 3:40pm

  Before he died last week at the age of 89, Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi was one of the world’s most innovative and influential living Jewish spiritual leaders.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: The deer threat and an electric solution

  June 27, 2014 12:47pm

  Countless warnings from neighbors spurred the purchase of electrified fencing to keep those beautiful — and damaging — deer away from the vegetables.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: Sex, violence and vegetables

  June 20, 2014 10:23am

  After months of work and worry, eight vegetables were taken out of the ground, washed, packed into boxes, loaded onto a truck and delivered to CSA members.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: The pests arrive

  June 13, 2014 10:52am

  With the summer solstice fast approaching, it’s as if some magnetic force is drawing the energy up from the earth, swelling roots, expanding foliage and filling our fields with luscious green.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: Market day

  June 6, 2014 10:05am

  The first farmers market of the season served as something of a coming-out party for Root Down Farm.

• This Week in Jewish Farming: The suburban homestead

  May 30, 2014 10:30am

  Leaving New York for the suburbs felt like a fall from grace, but a farm’s demands on time and attention turned out to be surprisingly liberating.