We bought a sheep from one of our neighbors, planning to fatten him up for a month and then take him to the butcher. Sheep are easy to raise, right? As soon as we got him home, he found a hole in the pen and escaped. So ensued a four-mile, two-hour trek back and forth [...]
Posts Tagged ‘Farming’
…And I Rebut
Dear Commissioner Blackham: Thank you for your response to my email to Gov. Herbert regarding HB 187. While I appreciate your time, I disagree with your position on several points. First, I have seen videos of animal mistreatment taken by workers that that have been used to expose the owners of dairies and other animal [...]
HB 187: The Commissioner Responds
Dear Mr. Mitchell Thank you for the recent email regarding HB 187. Governor Herbert is aware of the bill and asked me, the State’s Commissioner of Agriculture and Food to directly respond to you. I see that you are a small dairy operator who works with animal agriculture too. I’ve been raising turkeys all my [...]
On Criminalizing Documentation of Animal Abuse
Today I sent the following message to my Governor and State Legislators regarding HB 187, the “Agricultural Operation Interference Act”: Dear Sir, I am writing to ask you to oppose HB 187. I run a small dairy outside Paragonah, and we are proud of how we treat our animals. We always welcome visitors – with [...]
Climate change is costing you money
Flooding in the Midwest, followed by a heat wave… severe drought across the south into Texas… these are the largest of a series of unusual weather that is hurting the farmers that grow our food. The USDA warns that crop yields will be sharply lower than it had previously predicted. This is not an isolated [...]
Local Food Fallout
(In finger2006 photo.) An 11th generation NH farm, founded in 1632, gets ready to sell, and lists the local food movement as one of the reasons. The reason: as more people grow and sell local vegetables, there’s more competition for market space. Apparently NH is hitting the saturation point where supply has caught up with [...]
Local CSAs in the News
“Connection to the Earth is something that every American used to enjoy but has lost. It feeds a person on many levels to have a direct connection to the place where their food is grown.” –Marthe Levie of Peacefield Farm CSA. Our friends at Red Acre Farm CSA made the paper this week with a [...]
The facts about food and farming
“On the one side, the hard-line aggies seem convinced that a bunch of know-nothing urbanites want to send them back to Stone Age farming techniques. On the other side, there’s a tendency by agricultural reformers to lump together all farms (or at least those that aren’t purely organic, hemp-clad mom-and-pop operations) as thoughtless ravagers of [...]
Farming (and shopping) as environmental indicator
(Image source) “[F]armers in 1941 wanted high-value grains like wheat and corn that they could sell off the farm, [but] they didn’t yet have the mined and manufactured fertilizers needed to get high yields from those crops. Instead, they colected nutrients from large areas of land using low-value crops like grass and alfalfa, fed them [...]
Absentee Farmers in Chile
Another glimpse into the past, this time to the fundos of Chile in 1949. “Almost all of Chile’s arable land is in single great land holdings of 5,000 to 50,000 acres, in vivid contrast to the small farms of North America where the owner and his family do most of the work.” True perhaps [...]
