News and blog
"using agricultural pesticides is more dangerous than atomic fallout."
Jerome Weisner - a science counselor to President John F. Kennedy, May 1963
"Weeds and insects - and bacterial and fungal attacks - all point to the degree of degeneration in the soil. Although everything in eco-agriculture is connected to everything else, the whole fabric of interrelatedness is too complicated to permit straight-line connections (cause and effect) very often. Nevertheless we can offer a few notes.
Fungi involved with plants during the past 15 million years were designed to take down plants that did not deserve to make seed. Such plants do not live up to the Creator's plan, so they must go. Insects and fungi are the first steps in taking, say, the wheat plant back into the decomposition cycle. If, indeed, insects went after the strongest, most thriving individuals, then there wouldn't be any strong seed - the worst possible natural selection. As it is, insects would rather die of starvation than eat plants grown in a healthy field."
An Acres USA Primer, Charles Walters Jr, and C.J. Fenzau 1979
Are you eating food grown in a healthy field?
Draw your own conclusions...
Holiness lies spread and borne over the surface of time and stuff like color.
Anne Dillard, For the Time Being, p. 172
Heritage turkeys love asparagus beetles.
Fire ants don't like rain. Turkeys like fire ants too.
Foxes eat field mice (and they'll grab a turkey!)
Bees are in the apple blossoms...
Wild harvest v. organic
Noah's ark.
Began fencing eight acres of new pasture Monday.
Othello and Desdemona born late Sunday night or
early Monday morn. They had no problem with much
rain and cold. Love my Barbadians!
In Sichuan, China, thousands of laborers cling to the branches of blooming pear trees, pulling themselves carefully from limb to limb. They dip "pollination sticks" - bamboo twigs with chicken feathers and cigarette filters attached - into plastic bottles of pollen that hang in the trees, then touch the sticks to every blossom, hand-pollinating billions of flowers. The pollen comes from anthers that are plucked from flowers about to bloom, then dried in cardboard boxes under bare lightbulbs or on electric blankets until the pollen grains are released. Though it is spring and the hillsides are a lacework of white blossoms, no bees buzz through the orchards. The farmers say they haven't seen any insects in years, since pear orchards were planted on every hillside and massive spraying of insecticides began. Migratory beekeepers won't bring their bees anywhere near the area. So the "human bees" must go to work. Women - and children, when they're not at school - are best at reaching the thin upper branches.
From Fruitless Fall by Rowan Jacobsen p.201
Now that's full employment!