Posted: 25 May 2009 – 1:05 pm
Spent some part of this weekend with a good friend of mine over in Garrard County. We did our usual of talking a lot over some tea as well as talking some more while one or the other of us helped out. It was my turn this time, as he was planting some stuff in the garden. He and his family have finally gotten it going toward selling for a couple of different farmers markets around the area. Some of things in regards they had to go through for that are kind of interesting though.
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Posted: 28 April 2009 – 9:09 pm
Proposed by President Obama in the not so far off past, cuts to farm subsidy programs, particular the Direct Payment program that seems to largely ignore market conditions would have cut payouts as proposed by the White-house by 9.7 billion dollars over the next ten years. Anyone that has read my stuff over on mephistos.com knows that despite having been a farmer and really being in tune with the rural lifestyle, I am very against the notion of farm subsidies of any kind and strongly felt that this cut effecting only farms with revenues over $500,000 seemed like a step in the right direction.
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Posted: 11 April 2009 – 6:00 am
I am sure if you are alive, eat anything from the grocery store or from a food establishment that prepares it for you, unless you are currently under a rock you have heard about the suspected tomato salmonella scare. Just in case you have not a brief bit of background. There were a bunch of cases of salmonella, over the weekend I believe. The FDA (though I believe the CDC was involved too) released warnings and recommendations to not consume certain kinds of tomatoes, specifically Beef Stake and Roma or plum types. Since then the tomatoes have disappeared from fast food chains like McDonald’s, Burger King, Taco Bell and others, as well from the shelves at Wal-Mart, Winn-Dixie, Kroger, and so on. Today at some point the recommendation has been determined that it is safe now to eat tomatoes from 19 states of origin but you should still hold off from other states.
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Posted: 4 April 2009 – 6:00 am
News flash (maybe not so much)… Monsanto is increasing capacity in order to produce more Roundup.
Read that in a week old RSS feed relating to agriculture current events this morning. Kind of scary when you think about it. Genetically manipulated and modified crops that withstand the application of the herbicide (weed killer for those that think like me) to the crop without harming the crop itself. It has been going on for a while now which is scary in its own right. Now add to that the increased usage of such practices and it is even more scary. What is there to be scared about?
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Posted: 3 April 2009 – 6:00 am
So I am currently re-reading parts of the book entitled The Complete Agrarian Reader, a collection of essays by agrarians and their opinions on things. Probably the book that first introduced me to the idea. Actually, I should say, that made me realize it was not necessarily a some romantic notion that I alone had, that there were other people with similar thoughts on things.
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