Lancaster Farming blogs

AgScene has moved to Blogspot.com

Dick Wanner — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:44:47 -0400

To read the latest AgScene blog, click here:

http://lancasterfarming.blogspot.com/

AgScene has moved to Blogspot.com

Dick Wanner — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 12:27:18 -0400

...Yes it has.

AgScene has moved to...

Dick Wanner — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 08:15:28 -0400

To read the latest AgScene blog, click here:

http://lancasterfarming.blogspot.com/

Just don't stick your finger in there. I SAID JUST DON'T STICK YOUR...

Dick Wanner — Thu, 13 Aug 2009 16:34:52 -0400

If you have a bog on your farm, and you like having it there, you might be interested in keeping track of its health. Which sounds like you'd need a lot of expensive monitoring equipment, a research assistant and maybe a grant or two.

Actually, all you need is a population of pitcher plants, those carnivorous little horrors that trap hapless insects. And eat them. Pitcher plant varieties grow in wet spots all the way from near the Arctic Circle to Florida. They eat meat to compensate for low nutrient levels in their usual growing environments.

A couple of Canadian scientists hit on the pitcher plants as ecological monitors a few years ago when they were looking for a way to monitor the health of bogs in Cape Breton Highlands National Park. And when they embarked on their project, they discovered other scientists who were also interested in the pitcher-plant-as-ecological-monitor phenomenon.

You can read more about their work here: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/08/pitcherplantsensor/

They're cookin' in Philly, and it ain't cheesesteaks. Five Philadelphia moms decided a couple of years ago that they wanted to get a little bit closer to the food they feed their families. They started out not knowing how to cut up a whole chicken, and now they're gardening, canning and cooking up a storm. Anne Harnish, Lancaster Farming food and family features editor, visited the West Philly Cooking Club and wrote about them for Section B of the issue due in your mailbox Saturday.

Okay. The Humane League won't like it, but nobody gets hurt and maybe it'll give Michael Vick something legitimate to do. http://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=hilarious+camel&qs=n&docid=1103438151771&mid=1D6FCB51FBD651A5B7A91D6FCB51FBD651A5B7A9&FORM=VIVR34

Before there was Wii...

Dick Wanner — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 11:39:30 -0400

I did that! I did that when I was a kid! I was born shortly after the invention of movable type (fortunately, because ink-on-paper has been the focus of my life) and the world was a completely different place. It was the middle of the last century, and I roamed the streets, the woods, the fields and the streams around the Lancaster County town of Ephrata with no limits other than being home in time for supper.

None of the kids I know today can do what my peers and I did. Today's kids are monitored, organized and rarely left to their own devices. And with reason. There are people and forces more potent than those we faced swimming in abandoned quarries or going from one end of town to the other by walking through the partially underground storm sewers. Or throwing rocks at rats running around in the town dump. Jumping from the hay mow into loose alfalfa. Catching snakes. Tackle football without equipment. Bikes without helmets. Swimming without lifeguards.

I was a town kid most of the time, and I know farm kids today have fewer restrictions than town kids today, but I think kids everywhere are more watched. I am thankful I had the freedom to be a total kid.

I was reminded of that delicious time in my life by a column in today's Lancaster Intelligencer Journal-New Era written by Larry Alexander who also grew up in Ephrata, but maybe a few years later. He and his peers swung from ropes, jumped from train trestles into huge piles of pea coal (that was on a par with jumping from a hay mow), and other stuff you just can't do today. Thanks, Larry, for the trip back. His column, if you're interested, is here:

http://eedition.lancasteronline.com/pages/news/edition/CEAM/20090812/B/1/2164304

Conservation districts across Pennsylvania are facing hard times with budget cuts causing program reductions, staff cuts and fewer farm visits. The Berks County, Pennsylvania, district faced the worst-case scenario when the county commissioners stripped nearly all their support from the current budget. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres wrote about the situation in our current edition. His story is here: http://lancasterfarming.com/node/2158

Aren't you glad you work in a barn? http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=527620

The Revolution continues...

Dick Wanner — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 08:50:11 -0400

   Cuba's farmers have an opportunity to open up government-owned fallow land, but only if they step down from their tractors and use teams of oxen for field work. President Raul Castro feels that may be the best way to ramp up the country's food production while at the same time conserving energy.
   Cuba's economy was devastated by three hurricanes last summer, and the global recession has left the government short on cash to cover debts. As a result, it has slashed spending and cut domestic production and foreign imports, causing shortages of such basics as cooking oil, ground beef and toilet paper.
   Though the island gets nearly 100,000 free barrels of oil a day from Venezuela, it also has begun a campaign to conserve crude, according to a report in the Winnipeg Free Press by AP writer Will Weissert. You can read his report here: http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/business/agriculture/Economic-cuts-in-Cuba-may-mean-more-farmers-will-replace-tractors-with-oxen-52836042.html

Empire Farm Days starts today, in case you didn't know, and runs through Thursday. It's at the same place it's been since 1988, the Rodman Lott & Son Farms outside Seneca Falls, New York. It's packed with exhibits and bursting with events. If you're going, you will probably want to take along the special EFD supplement that arrived with your current edition of Lancaster Farming.

So if Castro's ox gets tired, maybe he could call on this guy. http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=46830690

European dairymen are also struggling.

Dick Wanner — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:12:38 -0400

    Milk price woes have European dairymen in a state of near riot. Farmers hold the European Union - rather than the worldwide economic collapse - responsible for their plight. According to an article in last Thursday's edition of The Economist dairymen want to preserve strict production ceilings on milk, even though some countries aren't close to hitting their ceilings, and even though production quotas are on the road to gradual phaseout.
   Some want immediate new production curbs to make milk scarcer and thus more expensive. Others attack supermarket chains, accusing them of profiteering. They note that retail prices for milk have hardly fallen while prices at the farm gate were plummeting.
   There are some interesting parallels to the U.S. dairy situation, and some differences, too. For the full article: http://www.economist.com/research/articlesBySubject/displaystory.cfm?subjectid=478044&story_id=14170799

An organic dairy farm outside Indianapolis, Indiana, has been drawing customers not just for the milk - which is pasteurized but not homogenized - but also for ice cream, lunch and safari rides through the pastures at $10 a head. And on their way out the door, the customers very often stop to pick up some Traders Point milk for $3.50 a quart. Repeat: quart. The Traders Point Creamery milking herd is 100 percent Brown Swiss and 100 percent grass fed. Organic grass that is. The operation began in 2003, when Jane Elder inherited a corn and soybean farm from her parents. She and her physician husband determined that they wanted to farm in harmony with the land. Lancaster Farming correspondent Lou Ann Good visited the farm, took some pictures and wrote a story, which appear in Section B of our current edition.

If you try this at home, call me. http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=9134498

Thoughts after a dog show.

Dick Wanner — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 18:50:52 -0400

That's the way the ball bounces. We took our dog Louie to the annual breed show at the Pennsylvania Farm Show complex earlier today. My wife, our grandson and I went to the show to see some dogs, but mostly to visit with the breeder we'd bought Louie from, and to let him do doggie stuff with his sister and grandmother, who were also at the show.

Sponsored by the Harrisburg Kennel Club, the Keystone Cluster Show this year featured 1,940 dogs representing 151 breeds. We could have made that 1,941 dogs except for the fact that we bought Louie as a pet. And one of the conditions of buying a purebred puppy from a serious breeder is that you can't use a pet quality dog as breeding stock. So Louie's been neutered. He doesn't have all his parts. And even if he'd had all his parts, they'd have had to have been the same size for him to be a serious contender in the showring.

Which means judges have to be really, really friendly with the animals they're judging.

Remind me to never judge a dog show.

Well, not to dwell too much at length on Louie's former testicles, but one of the reasons he didn't make the cut from pet quality to show quality was that one of his goodies was a bit stuck. The other reason was that at the tender age of two months, he was showing signs of an overbite. At four months, our vet was pleased to announce that Louie had a regulation scrotum, which made the neutering task a lot easier. And now, at seven months of age, his overbite has pretty well straightened itself out.

And the rest of him appears to be, from comments made by the breeder and her professional handler, quite stunning. The line of his back, his coloring, his overall conformation are what you'd expect of a show dog. Maybe a champion. And he is, after all, descended from canine royalty. His grandmother, Fairchild, is the winningest PBGV in the history of the breed. (That's petite basset griffon vandeen. It's French for something.)

So, he coulda been a contender.

I'm glad he's not.

It sounds like I'm bragging about my dog, and maybe I am a little bit, but what I'm really doing is celebrating our good fortune in being able to connect with Louie. His breed is supposed to be healthy and happy and not plagued with many of the breed-related health problems that descend on other purebreds. Had it not been for that one wayward part, we couldn't have even considered buying him. Pet quality prices can get into the rareified air territory, but the price tag on a two- or three-month old show quality dog can be stratospheric.

So, we're happy with Louie, he seems happy with us, and when we go to dog shows, we're happy to be watching from the sidelines, rather than jogging around the ring.

Bernie Sanders is at it again. The feisty senator from Vermont, wants the Department of Justice to launch a federal antitrust investigation of dairy giant Dean Foods, another increase in the USDA's support price for cheese, and tighter quality standards for milk going into processing plants. And that's not all...but you can read the whole story for yourself in the Lancaster Farming edition due in your mailbox tomorrow.

Speaking of dogs... http://vids.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=vids.individual&videoid=6429566

It happened in Ithaca...

Dick Wanner — Thu, 06 Aug 2009 18:14:36 -0400

Why don't they call it an "ice cream Tuesdae?" Glad you asked. It was April 3, 1892, and the Rev. John M. Scott paid his usual after-sermon visit to the Plate and Colt Pharmacy in downtown Ithaca, New York. Chester C. Platt, who co-owned the drugstore and was the church treasurer, and the Rev. Scott, often occupied seats at the soda fountain after services to chat.

You might think that church members in 1892 might have been scandalized by the fact that two of their leaders frequented a commercial establishment every Sunday morning, but these were Unitarians. They were allowed.

The story goes that Platt asked his soda fountain clerk to fix them up two bowls of ice cream. And instead, of two bowls of plain vanilla, the clerk, DeForest Christiance, topped the bowls with cherry syrup and a candied cherry. The trio declared it divinely good, named their discovery after the day of the week it was concocted, and the rest is history. Except that they couldn't get patent rights to "Sunday" - and you don't really want to mess with the guy who really owns Sunday anyway - so they called it "sundae."

This kind of story normally is accorded folklore status, but this one comes with all kinds of documentation. You can read about it here:

http://www.visitithaca.com/Media-Services/Birthplace-of-the-Sundae.html

"Cooperatives are doing whatever they can to help their members through tough times," according to two officials of the National Council of Farmer Cooperatives, headquartered in Washington, D.C. Yours truly stopped by the NCFC for a chat on a recent visit to the Capital, and there's a report on the visit in the issue due in your mailbox on Saturday.

How come all the best dog acts are on English TV?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1kKnNyJvRAY

No squawks from hatcheries about backyard flocks.

Dick Wanner — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 10:24:22 -0400

Urban and small town back-to-the-land foodies spurred an uptick in backyard flocks two or three years ago. They were looking for better eggs, better poultry meat and bragging rights for their enlightened whole-earth points of view. And they are still among us.

But they are now being joined by a group less concerned about the taste of grasshopper- and worm-fed eggs, and more concerned about surviving hard economic times. In a New York Times story yesterday, reporter William Neuman says hatcheries are struggling to keep up with the demand from backyard flockers, and the the postal service said that in the first six months of this year, it shipped 1.2 million pounds of packages containing chicks (mostly chickens but also baby ducks and turkeys), a seven percent increase from the comparable period last year. That volume equals millions of birds, as the average chick weighs slightly more than an ounce.

Lloyd Romriell, who manages a feed store in Annis, Idaho, started keeping chickens as a hedge against job loss. "If you lose your job, you've still got food," he told Neuman.

Jasmin Middlebos raises her family's chickens in a rural area outside Spokane, Washington. She has 26 birds and sells her surplus eggs for $2 to $3 a dozen. She recently started tracking her income and expenses, and has taken in $457 from egg sales, but she spent $428, mostly on feed. Her books don't account for the cost of buying chicks at $2 apiece, nor the $1,500 she spent on a coop.

Backyard flocks may not fly in a spreadsheet, but it's a phenomenon that doesn't seem about to go away. You can read the NYT article here: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/04/business/04chickens.html?_r=1&pagewanted=2&th&emc=th

A dairyman speaks out about price gouging, no punches pulled, on our editorial page this week. He is Nate Wilson, who farms in Sinclairville, N.Y., and asks the question: Why, when the average retail price for cheddar cheese rose from $4.61 to $4.92 per pound between February, 2008 and February, 2009 , did the Federal Class III farm milk price plummet from $20.60 per hundredweight to $9.31 in the same period? Where did the money paid to processors go, he wants to know, if consumers were paying more and farmers were getting less?

Cledus Judd and Toby Keith tell you how to milk a cow. Sort of.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x5oYVsQTD-c&feature=player_embedded