We decided to sell the herd
Daily Yonder - 2/3/2010. By Nancy Smith – Our dairy herd is for sale. My husband has been a dairy farmer his whole life, up until a few weeks ago. Ivan worked his way through school at his uncle’s dairy farm, then worked as dairyman on several farms before buying his own herd. We eventually built a barn and milk room on our farm. The farmer’s price for milk has been down for months and dairy has not been profitable for most farmers for a long, long time. Even the glimmer of hope we were seeing in anticipated price increases wasn’t enough to keep us going. |
|
Maine shrimp are swimming
Zester Daily - 2/3/2010.By Nancy Harmon Jenkins – It’s shrimp season in Maine. In these coldest days of winter, when small, sweet, tender Maine shrimp – aka Icelandic shrimp and Pandalus borealis – head south from the Arctic into the relatively warmer waters off the Maine coast to reproduce. Actually, reproduce is not quite the operative term, at least not in the conventional sense. |
|
Residents join forces to feed themselves
The Guardian [UK] - 2/3/2010.By John Carvel – A village on the western fringes of Hampshire is well on the way to becoming the first in England to defy the power of the supermarkets by achieving communal self-sufficiency in food. The parish of Martin lies on good agricultural land beneath the chalk downs of Cranborne Chase. In past centuries, its 164 households would have been sustained by the output of local farms and dairies. But, over the last 60 years, the dairies closed and the farmers directed their harvests towards the vast hoppers of agro-industry. The people of Martin continued to be surrounded by fields growing food, but none of it reached their plates. And after the village shop closed in 1982, they had to travel to buy provisions. |
|
Small is beautiful (and radical)
Grist - 2/3/2010.By Eliot Coleman – When a friend told me of two of the proposed discussion topics for a major agricultural conference – “What is so radical about radical agriculture?” and “Is small the only beautiful?” – I told him that that I thought both questions had the same answer. The radical idea behind by organic agriculture is a change in focus. The new focus is on the quality of the crops grown and their suitability for human nutrition. That is a change from the more common focus on growing as much quantity as possible and using whatever chemical techniques contribute to increasing that quantity. |
|