Ep 035 The Akhal-Teke Horses: Hollywood, Hidalgo, and the Special Effects are Just the Beginning

Winter is a pretty bleak time most everywhere right now. And even though it just started, this year it seems like the gray skies are going to go on forever. Yes, there’s a none-too-subtle parallel to the difficulties on planet earth right now. But Spring is coming. Sooner or later, winter will end, and a new season will arrive. We can all take a lesson from those that have learned from the practice of agriculture, and gaze out at the bareness, but imagine things as t...

28 Dec 20206min

We’ve been waiting four years to say it: We’re done. Well, “done” once the technical, legal and distribution people have their say, but we’ll be handing it over to them within the next two weeks. We’ll make sure to keep you posted on how to see the film in the upcoming months. We’d like to thank you, our audience, for sticking with us here at Backyard Green Films, and for sharing the journey with us on this road. But as we wrap up this film and start to think about wha...

21 Dec 202028min

This week we take you back to one of our earliest interviews, and one of our most formative experiences in the Backyard Green Films universe. We learned the fundamental joy of buying handmade things, and doing so face to face. And when we say that, we actually mean face-to-face not only in the kitchen where the soap was made, but with the farmer who made it and the goat who produced the milk for the ingredients. Holy cow (or, in this case…okay, you get it). How often d...

14 Dec 202035min

We haven’t talked about horses for a while, and they’re definitely one of our favorite creatures, so today we’re off to Wisconsin, to talk about one of the most majestic animals in the equine world: The Friesian. Native to Holland and beloved by film producers everywhere for their striking looks, there’s a very long history on these animals, and they have gorgeous movement to boot. We met up with Nicole Porter Salvato and her husband Dan on their beautifully-remote hilltop ranch i...

7 Dec 202032min

When we went to Martin and Joy Dally’s Shepherd’s Lane Farm in Oregon last month for a Laproscopic A.I. Sheeping Bonanza last month, the one thing we didn’t think we’d come home thinking about was…cheese. Not that we’re complaining, of course. The people we met there were enough to keep us busy interviewing for days, and we’re going back for the lambing part, so we obviously didn’t get enough. Dr. Joe Klopfenstein, DVM, DABVP, sat down to talk with us in a bustling pasture w...

30 Nov 202029min

What are you thankful for? It seems like the Thanksgiving table will be pretty empty, and pretty bleak for many people this year. And what kind of hope is there in the midst of so much death and pollution and destruction and isolation in the world today? What are we supposed to learn here, anyway? The answer: We learn from Fungi (mushrooms, to most of us). This amazing organism has been around long enough to be in the fossil record, and has been doing the same th...

23 Nov 202011min

There is finally a chill in the air! Some of us here in warmer climates look forward to the time each year when cold weather arrives, so we can cozy up on the sofa in front of the fireplace without melting from the heat outside. 60 degrees is probably a very reasonable temperature to start up the fireplace, we think. But in other places, cold is a constant reality, and it is not to be taken lightly, especially in the area of food production. In the far north in places...

16 Nov 202035min

2020 has been a year filled with catastrophic disasters of all types, and the only thing unclear is which movie we’re reenacting at the current moment. Backdraft meets Twister meets 2012, with a dash of the Day after Tomorrow and a near miss by Armageddon. If those weren’t crazy enough, there were a few reports of brushes from Orca and Jaws tossed in for variety, with slices of Yul Brenner and Chuck Heston in The Ten Commandments (Locusts and plagues, no less). I could point...

9 Nov 202021min