Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Old McDonald Had a Farm…and He Got Arrested?
David E. Gumpert, The Nation
Just in time for the holidays, four beef carcasses hang from the improvised slaughterhouse at Greg Niewendorp’s 160-acre farm outside East Jordan, in the north of Michigan’s lower peninsula. It should be a happy Thanksgiving because, for the first time in eight months, his farm isn’t under quarantine by Michigan’s Department of Agriculture (MDA) and Niewendorp is free to slaughter cattle from his herd of twenty and fulfill contracts in time for the holidays to the couple dozen friends and neighbors who prize the specially bred grass-fed beef he produces.
Yet it’s also a bittersweet time, because the scars from his battle with the MDA are still fresh. Last February, he refused to subject his cattle to a mandatory state program to test cattle in his region of Michigan for bovine tuberculosis–a program he argues, among other things, is unnecessary because he distributes his beef privately to people who trust his animal-raising techniques, but which the state insists is essential to ensure the beef isn’t tainted.
…These should be happy times for owners of small farms. Not only are commodity prices way up, but the buy-local movement has caught fire around the country. Rapidly growing numbers of people are embracing the romantic notion of buying food directly from area farmers, sometimes driving hours into the countryside to buy veggies, meat and milk.
The number of farmers markets over the last five years has increased more than 50 percent, to nearly 4,500 from 2,800, according to the US Department of Agriculture. Since the European idea of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) was adopted by a handful of US farms twenty years ago, enabling consumers to buy shares in the output of local farms, the concept has been adopted by as many as 3,000 small farms across the US. Thousands of consumers are trekking out to dairy farms to purchase suddenly popular unpasteurized milk for its perceived health benefits over the pasteurized stuff, according to the Weston A. Price Foundation, a promoter of raw (unpasteurized) milk consumption. (Retail sales of raw milk are prohibited in most states).
But as the re-emergence of a farm-to-consumer economy draws increasing amounts of cash out of the mass-production factory system, the new movement is bumping up against suddenly energized regulators who claim they want to “protect” us from pathogens and other dangers.
(16 November 2007)
Farmyard Stills Quench a Thirst for Local Spirits
Susan Saulny, New York Times
ATCHISON, Kan. – The main still of the High Plains liquor company here was scraped together from junked parts of an old food processing plant. The tubing for the bottling equipment had been used to milk cows, and one of the tanks was actually an industrial vacuum cleaner.
The whole clanking operation, headquartered on a farm northwest of Kansas City, looks like a patchwork contraption out of the imagination. And that is basically what it was two years ago when Seth Fox, a cattle rancher down on his luck, decided to get a license to distill some vodka and a little whiskey.
“I talked to banks, told them I wanted to make vodka on my farm here, and they said, ‘Yeah, right you are,’” recalled Mr. Fox, whose company went on to become the first distillery in Kansas since Prohibition. “Well, I had a million dollars in sales last year.”
“I’m the seventh generation to be in alcohol,” he said proudly. “Just the first to do it legally.”
On the heels of the microbrewing boom, new microdistilleries are thriving from coast to coast. And some of the latest and quirkiest entrants to the industry are in places like Iowa, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Mr. Fox’s barn.
(25 November 2007)
So What’s So Bad About Corn?
Joel Achenbach, Washington Post
As Iowa Enjoys a Bumper Crop, Farmers Hear It From Environmentalists, Ethanol Skeptics and Other Critics
—
NEVADA, Iowa — To say that corn is king around here is to come close to demoting it. In the last couple of weeks, the farmers of this state finished harvesting an astonishing 14 million acres of corn, which is more than a third of Iowa’s surface. The yield: nearly 2 1/2 billion bushels. That’s about 420 billion ears of corn, or about 225 trillion kernels.
… And yet, despite the fabulous harvest and the boom in ethanol made from corn, corn farmers often sound beleaguered and aggrieved. Corn, they say, has been getting a bad rap.
“You have to wear a flak jacket,” said Bill Couser, who farms 5,000 acres here in the central Iowa town of Nevada (pronounced ne-VAY-da). “When we planted this crop, people said we were the villains of the world.”
This mundane plant, once arguably dull as dirt, its name useful as an adjective (“corny”) to describe something kind of lame and hillbillyish, has become improbably controversial. The gist of the criticism: So much corn, doing so many things, serving as both food and fuel, and backed by billions of dollars in government subsidies, has been bad for America and the rest of the world.
(23 November 2007)
The Pet Thing
Sharon Astyk, Casaubon’s Book
The average American has paid little or no attention to the horrors in Zimbabwe under Mugabe, but now he knows just how awful it is. Because, after all, a recent news story designed to get our attention finally made the rounds of the mainstream media. Is it about the skyrocketing infant mortality rate? The appalling conditions for prisoners under the Mugabe regime? The fact that there’s no food to be had and people are crossing the border in desperation?
Nope. This is something really, really terrible. People are (prepare to be shocked!) – eating their pets. The SPCA of Africa announces that it really can’t do much about it and they can’t humanely euthanize the animals instead of having them eaten by starving people. I’m not totally clear on why they’d want to euthanize them, instead of letting them be eaten by people who would otherwise starve. Death is death – I was taught that if you kill something, you’d damned well better eat it – that you honor an animal’s life by not taking it lightly or wasting it.
Now don’t get me wrong. I have 4 cats and 2 working farm dogs who I adore. They are all of them working animals, but that doesn’t prevent me from loving them. Right now, Zucchini, our youngest cat, is napping on my lap, while Minnie, our senior cat enjoys the warmth of the monitor on this cold day. One of the great pleasures of living on a farm is having animals. They share my bed, they provide us with pleasure and comfort. And to absolutely blunt, if my kids were starving, we’d eat our pets.
(25 November 2007)
