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Why in the world would I write a story about a guy like Walter Lyon? That was the question I got today on the phone from a conservationist in Maryland. He was polite and thoughtful, and wasn't quite that blunt, but I got the message. One of his farmer contacts in Baltimore County had brought him a copy of the article to prove, once and for all, that farmers are not the culprits in the problems of the Chesapeake Bay.

My caller was distressed and wondered whether or not when I, as a journalist, wrote that kind of story, did I check out the facts or didn't I really care about that. Well, I do care and I do check out the facts as well as I can. Fact one is that Walter Lyon has prepared a compelling presentation that he is sharing with interested groups and individuals, some of them in high places.  Some of them see some sense in what he says.

So you think giant agribusiness in the U.S. gets too much in farm subsidy dollars? Guess what. They are not alone. The news out of Brussels yesterday was that 712 European Union agribusiness firms received payments of more than $1.33 million (one million Eurodollars) in 2008. Firms in Italy (189 payments), Spain (174), and France (149), split the lion's share of government largess.
 
FarmSubsidy.org (http://farmsubsidy.org) was one of the organizations campaigning for public disclosure of the subsidy payments. Of the 27 EU nations, 18 countries paying subsidies, and who and how much they were paying, were listed in the first ever subsidy report. The New York Times ran the story of the released figures. The report is at http://www.nytimes.com/2009/05/08/business/global/08farm.html?_r=1

A reader called this morning to talk about my food safety story in the current issue. He was a thoughtful guy, a farmer, who wanted to know if the newly appointed Pennsylvania Food Safety Council was going to be passing laws and issuing regulations affecting farmers and the food industry in general.

No. It's an advisory group with no legislative, regulatory or enforcement powers, and I apologize if that wasn't made clear in the article.

Is it going to eat up a lot of tax dollars, he wanted to know.

Again, no. I think. I hope.

I could find out with a quick phone call to PDA, and if this were an article in the paper, that's exactly what I'd do. But I'm occupying this tiny spot of ether to lay before you my opinions and observations and not always the facts. So here's my opinion about the Council's funding - I think participants should get lunch and mileage for attending meetings, and that's it. And I think PDA staffing should be kept to an absolute minimum. Someone at PDA should send an email to call a meeting and then get back to his or her regular job.

Then the farmer wanted to know about the Council's makeup, which is a question I had when I was writing the story. And for that answer, I did call the PDA. Because it was going to be in the paper. Simply put, PDA wanted to get a broad a representation of the entire food industry, as many people with as many viewpoints as they could get around one of those giant boardroom tables. If the council needs to address a specific issue -  making sure that a farmer's pawpaw crop, for example, moves safely to market - then they will assemble a group from that particular niche to talk about the issue.

My personal opinion is that the most effective committee is a committee of one. Get six people around a table and things start to drift. Get 22 people in a room with pitchers of water and carafes of coffee and onlookers and microphones...well, I'm glad they didn't ask me to be on that council.

Traditional farm operations are scattered here, there and everywhere. Organic farms are clustered here, there and back to here, according to an article this week in the New York Times. A map accompanying the article showed the nation's 10,000 or so organic farms heavily clustered on the West Coast, the upper Midwest and the Northeast.

The map of the 2.2 million traditional U.S farms looks as though the mapmaker shook a pepper shaker over all the states from the Mississippi watershed east. A lot of the pepper hit Lancaster Farming's main readership area, of course. The map also shows that some of the tightest clusters of organic operations exist in a circle around our office here at 1 East Main Street in Ephrata.

I saw an amazing thing the other morning when I stopped at the Weis Market in Ephrata, Pa., not far from the LF office. I was finishing my morning cup of coffee, or maybe it was my second, listening to the end of an NPR report before dashing into the store, and thinking, "Should I be a sissy and dig out my umbrella or not?" And in the  space of just  a few minutes, I saw maybe half a dozen people - youngish people, oldish people - bring their carts back to one of those cart parking places.

Did I mention it was raining?

I gave my heart away when I got married, but...I got my driver's license renewed last week, and told them to put me down for an organ donor, but then I thought, "Who'd want any of this 68-year-old stuff?" And I remembered a lot of the newspaper people I've known. Some of them smoked, they drank, they kept weird hours, got stressed out over deadlines, didn't exercise, ate french fries, cheese steaks, didn't exercise...

That's not me, of course, except for the occasional cheese steak and deadline stress, so I called The Gift of Life, an organization that promotes organ donation, and asked them, "Who would want what I've got?

You're never too old to be an organ donor, I was told.  The man on the phone told me about an 84-year-old who'd been a liver donor. The liver, it seems, is constantly regenerating itself. Your skin, your corneas, your bones and many other parts are harvestable - that's what they call it, harvesting, like wheat. My heart, lungs and kidneys probably wouldn't make the cut, to coin phrase, but I was surprised at how many useful parts can be put to use.

So if you're getting your license renewed, think about checking that "yes" box. And then hope that it's a long time before anybody has to look at it.

U.S. rider is an upset winner in World Cup dressage. Steffen Peters and Ravel, his 11-year-old mount, bested the best in this year's competition, held April 18 in Las Vegas. Horse and rider are featured in this month's edition of Mid-Atlantic Horse, included in this week's Lancaster Farming.

They make cars too well. But nobody seems to mention that fact. My wife and I were at a party in 2004, the evening after Thanksgiving, at a house across the street from our house. It was about seven o'clock, we had sampled the various crackers, cheeses and spreads, said hello to everybody, and my wife said, "Let's go buy a car."

"Now?" I asked, and she nodded.

So we walked across the street, climbed into our gray - she claims it was teal, but I'm not that colorblind - Ford Escort wagon, drove to a couple of dealers who sold the kind of car we knew we wanted and had been talking about. The sales guys at both places were sitting around, looking totally bored, and the guy whose turn it was brightened up when we walked in and asked if we could get a better deal than we'd been offered someplace else. They gave us a better trade-in for the Escort, knocked a bit more off the MSRP and threw in free pinstriping.

The finger of blame can point anywhere when it comes to food safety.  Lolly Lesher, board president of the Center for Dairy Excellence is a dairy producer and also a retailer of milk from the family's dairy farm in Berks County, Pa. Sometimes she talks to her customers about what they're going to do after they load their three gallons of farm fresh milk in their and minvans.

Well, maybe they're going to drop the kids off at soccer practice and violin lessons, get the dog groomed, stop at Walmart and maybe stop for a quickie lunch before heading home to put that milk in the fridge. And it's maybe July. So maybe they were really planning to have three gallons of yogurt when they got back to the house, but probably not.