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Tag: Farming
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In just the last couple of months, food manufacturing and distribution plants seem to be catching fire – now a train derailment carrying potash. There have been more. This at a time when food prices are skyrocketing. Have you heard of any in your area? Theories? This seems excessive and very concerning. A train derailed […]

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Farm Life and the American Work Ethic
If you pay attention to the trends in agriculture in rural America, you are probably aware that the number of farms in the country, which consolidated sharply between 1950 and 1970 and declined markedly in the 1980s, has been steadily declining since 2000, hovering around 2 million but slowly declining after a significant uptick in 2007. Two million farms are feeding a nation of 300 million and indeed the world. We are the top exporter of all agricultural products worldwide, far ahead of #2 (the Netherlands) and #3 (Germany), and doing it with an astonishingly tiny farm workforce. You might think that this means those few people work like, well, workhorses.
And you’d be right. I had the pleasure, no, the advantage of growing up on a dairy farm that had survived that consolidation between the ’50s and ’70s that I mentioned above. We mostly kept that iconic breed of American dairy cow, the Holstein, with some Brown Swiss, some Jerseys, and some Guernseys to keep the gene pool healthy.
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You may believe that climate change is man made or natural – or maybe a little of both, which is where I fall in. I don’t think 50-50, but it is clear that things are changing. Political entities on both sides have grabbed the concept of climate change and turned it into a heated political […]

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A man has 10 trees and wants to line them up in 5 straight lines with 4 trees per line. What shape do the trees make? I was in college when a math professor gave me this riddle. It took me a weekend to solve. How can you get 10 trees into 5 rows with […]

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Yesterday was the anniversary of Robert Frost’s birthday lo these many years ago in 1874. I wrote about The pasture, the opening poem of his first famous book. For those who care enough about this matter to wish for more thoughts, I would like to explain a few things I think I have learned about […]

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Every so often during the manufacturing process, you can find a synergy where the byproducts of one product can be recycled at low cost to contribute to the production of a second. Unless, that is, the uncompromising Nanny State gets involved… “New federal rules may cut long-standing ties between beer makers, farmers Preview Open

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