Photo with 1 note
This photo didn’t turn out too well, but this is the melon patch. We put in 2 different varieties of watermelon in here, about 70 all told if they all make it. Once thinned out that’ll drop to about 30 or 40 plants.
Put in a large quantity of pickling cucumbers. Far more than I’ll ever be able to process myself but we can always sell or give away the excess. Planted a large amount of dill as well for the pickles, of course.
Let’s see — beets, carrots a few hot peppers. The onions are just starting to pop out of the ground. They look healthy.
So much to do out there yet… Badly need to start mulching. Need to lay out walkways. Need to pick stones.
Building work — didn’t get the new window in the granary, just ran out of time. We did get the new dryer in the house and hooked up. As expected, we had to rip out the door at the bottom of the outside stairs and completely re-frame the whole thing. That took far more time than we had hoped it would, but that’s the way it goes.
Need to get a trailer! Something we can pull with the little 15 horse lawn tractor so we can haul mulch, stone, etc. Should have picked one up today while we had the truck, but we’ll still have it tomorrow.
Note to self — find cheap truck! Can’t keep begging Mark’s truck every time we need to haul something!
The trees we transplanted a few weeks ago are doing remarkably well. 4 of the 15 we put in didn’t make it, but that was anticipated. Those 4 were pretty rough looking when we put them in originally. The two hazelnut didn’t make it, and we lost one of the apples and one of the pears. So that leaves us with 11 that did, a mix of pear, apple and cherry.
I was afraid we’d have serious issues because we can’t get out there to water them, but Sara’s self watering technique seems to be working wonderfully.
Photoset with 1 note
Out at the farm all day today. The corn is up! In fact, could actually see the stuff growing. Was just barely peeking out of the ground at 10 this morning, and by 5 this afternoon it looked like this.
We put in 2 varieties of sweet corn. Today we put in a variety of popcorn that looks interesting. The ears are short, about 2-3 inches long, and cone shaped, like a strawberry, with a very striking red color when mature. It will be interesting to see how it turns out. I’ve never tried growing my own popcorn before.
Link with 1 note
Laboratory Equipment - Early-Planted Corn is Showing Blights →
Okay, so I admit I never heard of Laboratory Equipment News before. The site seems to be concerned primarily with, of course, laboratory equipment. But a May 24th article at the link above discusses a University of Perdue report that the corn crop, in the eastern part of the U.S. at least, isn’t doing too hot and may have to be replanted in some areas.
couple this with reports coming in that the wheat crop doesn’t look too good either in some parts of the world due to drought in areas of Russia, a major wheat producer, and I suspect we may want to prepare for a spike in grain commodity prices.
Link with 1 note
Dispute Over Labeling of Genetically Modified Food - NYTimes.com →
Warning: This is a New york Times article, and NYT does have a paywall. However, NYT also permits one to view several articles without triggering the pay-to-read stuff, so you might be able to see it.
It’s an interesting article about increasing pressure on the government to label foods that contain genetically modified materials (called GMO, GM, GE, etc.) At the moment, food processors are not required by law to list the fact that a product has one or ore GMO ingredients. Pretty much every country in Europe does require labeling, and some countries ban the stuff outright because of health concerns
As the story points out, something like 90% of people in the U.S. want labeling of GM ingredients, while the industrial farming industry, food processors and others with a vested interested in the stuff, are fighting the proposed labeling laws tooth and nail.
Photo reblogged from not ordinary, more like extraordinary with 6 notes
when I was a little kid, around 4 or 5 years old, I was utterly fascinated with how a cow could shove her tongue all the way up her own nose.
Source: ourjulyinrain
Quote reblogged from AgriThoughts with 8 notes
When it comes to connecting with consumers it is important not to preach and to remember that facts never trump emotions. It is also important to be relevant and to seek engagement even to the point of using entertainment to convey a message. Finally, agriculture really needs to focus on building trust.
Mary Shelman of Harvard Business School (via agrithoughts)
That last line, “agriculture really needs to focus on building trust”. That’s where our whole agriculture system is falling apart right now. Food poisoning scares, GMO scares, pesticide scares, herbicide scares, contamination scares…
Source: agrithoughts
Photo reblogged from Tidemarks with 10 notes
Put in a zipcode to see if it qualifies as a Food Desert.
If you don’t know what a ‘food desert’ is, click on the link above to go to a wiki article explaining it. Then click on the map to go to a USDA website that shows where these areas are located.
Back in the 90s, I serviced and sold cash register systems for larger stores, primarily grocery stores, and I learned quite a bit about the food retail industry, including what has become known as food deserts. There are a lot of areas in Wisconsin where access to food is difficult.
When I was a kid, every little town had some kind of grocery outlet. Clark Mills, the village closest to the farm where I grew up, had two tiny little stores, and Clark Mills had a population of maybe 150 people. In bigger towns like Manitowoc, there were corner grocery stores all over the place. Most people in Manitowoc lived within a few blocks of a small grocery store.
As the major supermarket chains began to grow, places like A&P, Red Owl, Piggly Wiggly, etc. began to expand in small cities, competition drove prices down to the point where the small mom & pop stores could not survive and closed down. The stores themselves began to migrate to the outskirts of cities, into dedicated shopping districts, making it more difficult for people to get to the stores, especially those who didn’t have cars.
This trend is continuing to this day. I won’t go into the reasons why it is happening because it is all rather dull for atone except people like me who are fascinated with the reasons why we, as a society, do what we do.
The end result, though, is decreased access to retail food outlets, as grocery stores become fewer, and are increasingly concentrated in large shopping districts located further and fourth away from the areas where people actually live. It means that a large number of people are left with little access to food except at so-called ‘convenience stores’, where they pay vastly inflated prices for heavily processed, salt and fat laden convenience foods simply because they have no other choice.
Source: ers.usda.gov
Photo reblogged from The Impulsive Farmer with 23 notes
New Method Finds Animal Drugs in Baby Food
The quantities are very small, but in milk powder and in meat-based baby food, residues of drugs given to livestock can be found. Researchers from the Univ. of Almería have developed a system to analyze these substances quickly and precisely.
Antibiotics or antiparasitic drugs are given to livestock in order to avoid illness, but they can remain later in food. Scientists from the Univ. of Almería have confirmed this, whilst checking new methodology to identify the minute quantities of these substances that remain in baby food preparations.
Read more: http://www.laboratoryequipment.com/news-Method-Finds-Animal-Drugs-in-Baby-Food-052112.aspx
Just a side note about drug residue and safety. Even as far back as the 1970s when we were still in dairy farming, there was concern about drug residue in milk. When the truck driver picked up the milk, samples were taken from the bulk tank. Later, at the plant, the samples were tested, and if there was any sign of contamination, the entire truck load of milk was discarded (and the farmer whose samples tested positive paid for the entire truck load).
Every time we treated a cow for anything, the milk was discarded for a specific period of time, depending on the drug being used (usually an antibiotic to treat the cow for mastitis, an infection in the milk producing glands of the udder.) We were paranoid about it, and generally discarded the milk for a full 24 - 48 hours beyond the recommended withholding time just to be on the safe side. Every cow is different. The amount of time it takes for drug residue to flush out of her system depends on her diet, water consumption, overall health and other factors.
But I’m sure that there was still some getting into the milk supply that wasn’t being caught in the testing, either from farmers who weren’t as cautious, genuine mistakes, or deliberately doing it in the hopes it would be diluted enough that the testing wouldn’t detect it.
The fact of the matter is that there is always going to be something in our food supply that we would prefer not to be there, whether it is a man made pollutant like a drug or chemical, or a naturally occurring substance the animal picks up from plants it eats, in the water, etc., or in the case of vegetables and fruits, substances, either natural or man made, taken up by the roots of the plant during normal growth.
So when stories like this pop up, we need to take a careful look at what’s going on. Some of the new testing methods are detecting levels of materials in products that are so tiny they’re bordering on the ridiculous. I’m sure that if I were to pull a radish out of my garden, which has never seen any commercial fertilizer, never been sprayed with herbicide or pesticide, I would find trace amounts of such things as PCBs, petrochemicals, various herbicides and I don’t know what all else. Even the tiniest bit of some of this stuff is undesirable, but you aren’t going to get away from it. Not even on the strictest organic farm in the world.
Source: laboratoryequipment
Photo reblogged from Tripping over nothings with 3 notes
Yes / No? looks fun :) x
I think you could call this “extreme farming”
Source: lfyinglions
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