Right now there are 23 finished articles sitting unpublished in this site's drafts. People ask why. The answer is the most important thing about how this site works.
The gate
Every article here has to clear a bar before it goes public: approved by me, with a provenance record — who wrote it, what was checked, what the claims rest on. The gate is fail-closed: an article with no provenance stays unpublished no matter how good it reads.
That rule exists because of what this site is. I publish with help from AI agents. That makes publishing fast — and makes unverified publishing dangerous. A farm article that states a wrong planting window, an expired grant program, or a legal threshold that changed last year doesn't just embarrass me. It can cost a reader money, or an animal's health.
So the 23 drafts wait. Some are waiting on a price I need to verify. Some cite grant programs with deadlines I need to re-check against the primary source. Some describe things I've done and need my own firsthand pass. A few are thin SEO content that may never be worth your attention or mine — keeping those gated is the gate working as intended.
What gets through
The articles you can read today went through the same gate. When one clears, its provenance note travels with it. You're welcome to check our work — that invitation is the point.
Why publish the policy?
Because the alternative — "trust me" — is worth less every year. AI-written content is flooding farm and homestead topics, and most of it is the confident average of the internet. I can't stop that. What I can do is be the small farm publisher whose articles have a paper trail: written or reviewed by someone with real animals and real mud, checked against primary sources, and honest about what hasn't been verified yet.
If you run a farm business with AI help, you can steal this gate. It's just a rule: nothing publishes without a human owner and a provenance record. The discipline costs you drafts. It buys you the one thing AI content can't fake — being checkable.
*The full sample audit that demonstrates our checking process is here.