About

Locally Grown is a blog about the Northfield Minnesota area.

Its broad mission is similar to Northfield.org’s, i.e., using the internet and its related online tools to strengthen the civic fabric of the Northfield area. The blog is part of Northfield’s civic blogosphere, and is focused on

  • convening civil but opinionated conversations with citizens and community leaders
  • showing the community to itself via photos and video; and
  • delivering it all in a way that’s fun and at times irreverent. That keeps it interesting to write and hopefully for the site’s visitors, as civic engagement should have hefty and regular doses of fun.

Currently the blog is authored by Griff Wigley, but for most of its life, Ross Currier and Tracy Davis have been co-bloggers.

We were three citizens blogging with our citizen hats on. Our views didn’t necessarily represent the views of the organizations where we wore our other hats. We were never a company nor a non-profit. We were three separate individuals.

Many newspapers publish editorials where the senior editorial staff collectively author opinion pieces. We never did that. The opinions we expressed were specific to each of us, not a collective “Locally Grown” voice. We sometimes disagreed with one another.

We refrained from sarcasm and satire where there was a conversation going on in the comment thread of a blog post. It’s insulting to be sarcastic when conversing with someone. But we occasionally used sarcasm and satire in our blog entries, as a blog can be a pure publishing medium. If a conversation (comment thread) was triggered by one of those posts however, we were sure to switch off the sarcasm and expected our site visitors to do the same. See our Guidelines page for about our policy and our expectations.

We posted faux news items from time to time. You might be able to tell we’re spoofing. You might not. If you’re fooled, we hope you don’t take it personally. We used profanity on occasion because some of us talked that way and we thought it could be done in an effective and entertaining way.

Morgan and Cameron

We’re indebted to former KRLX news director Morgan Weiland and former KRLX station manager Cameron Nordholm (click image to enlarge) for their help in launching Locally Grown radio show/podcast in early 2006 (we ended the show in mid-2010 after 189 episodes). Both graduated from Carleton in the spring of 2006 and then promptly abandoned Northfield for other climates and lives of quiet desperation.

We are indebted to Carleton College, the KRLX staff, and KYMN for letting us use their studios during our years on the radio to record our show and their help in producing it.

Tracy and Griff have a long history with Northfield Citizens Online (NCO)/Northfield.org. See our Historical Roots of Locally Grown page for more.

Click to play audio
“Transmitters? We don’t need no stinkin’ transmitters.”