Tag: farms

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

Police Break Up Today’s Protest

This past Spring (Fall in Argentina) Argentina’s president, Cristina Kirchner, decided to raise export taxes on grains. This has led to more than three months of bitter protests by farmers, essayed here, and to shortages of meat, oil, flour and fuel.  Kirchner has refused to repeal the tax increase, which she claims will cut inflation and increase food supplies to the poor. Farmers have responded by cutting off transportation routes in an effort to strike back at the government. And the government has said in response to blockades of roads by farmers that it would guarantee free travel on all roads in Argentina.

As a result, food that normally ships to Europe and Asia has not made it to port, and hundreds of thousands of gallons of spoiled milk have been dumped on rural routes, and there are huge shortages of food in the capital city and elsewhere.  In other words, after more than 3 months, there remains a complete deadlock.

Please join me in Gualeguaychu.  

There are those nights where sleep just will not happen. As to the title? It was a Lenny Bruce skit, that someone animated, about what if the Lone Ranger was gay and has nothing to do with my post. The sky is full of stars, it’s a crisp 18 degrees with a steady wind blowing the trees.  The vet came to look at the horses, she said they looked good and their weight was right on track.  White salt lick, mineral lick, oats+grains and lots of hay along with plenty of fresh water seems to cover all the bases.  She has lots of horses too, she breeds Quarterhorses in the next town East.  

Today I fixed the electric fence by untangling it from some trees, fixing some broken connectors and driving in some new stakes. There was some old brittle lattice on the covered patio that had to come down.  An apple tree had a real bad case of “black knot” and had to be chopped down before the disease spread to the other trees, luckily I have two new apple trees on order.

Hi everyone, yup another storm has hit, this time promising up to 1 inch of ice!  So I had some time to research RoundUp, an herbicide made by Monsanto.  You’ve probably seen the bottle on the shelf at your hardware store or caught their ads on the boob tube.  Well, it seems that RoundUp is not just made for the home user.  Their largest market is in agricultural uses.  

RoundUp’s main active ingredient is Glyphosate which has been around since the seventies.  Guess what?!  It’s toxic to animals!  Guess what else?!  It has a half life of over 100 days when sprayed onto fields.  Why does this matter?  Well, besides poisoning the farmers and workers spraying the substance it can also get into waterways and still be on your hay when you go to cut, also killing an entire field at once is destroying habitats for many beneficial insects and critters.

It is apparently very common practice for farmers in my area to kill off everything before reseeding, their favored way to do this is by spraying RoundUp on the field.  In the old days the farmers would burn the fields, over plant, or use legumes to rebuild the soil. It looks like I’ll be doing one of the older techniques in order to grow better hay for my horses.  

This could mean having to get all of my own equipment so I don’t risk cross-contamination from other farmer’s equipment.  That would mean a bigger tractor, manure spreader, no till seed drill, drag rake, a hay elevator and a lot of back breaking work.  But it could be the only way to go.

For more information on the nasty side of RoundUp please visit Mindfully.org’s wonderful write up.

This is a politicized summary of a project I’ve been doing at the Pomona College Natural Farm, an urban one-acre farm in southern California and the subject of a previous essay here.  The focus of this essay will be mustard, and mustard-growing.  There will be more such essays.

Let’s see since I last updated I:

1. Fixed two broken lights in the barn, they were in the area originally intended for the horses but the previous owner found it easier to put them in another spot.  Now they’ll have the option of two places if I need to do work in one of the areas.

2. Took the ATV out to the farthest point of the property and tested the hand held radios.  The Cobras worked great but the Audiovox radios weren’t as strong.  It’s good to have the radios in case something happens and I need help.  The stories are many about men who were working on their tractors on the back 40 and had to lose a leg or an arm for lack of a communication device.

3. The birds are enjoying their sewet cake and feed, so far I’ve seen chickadees, winches, blue jays, wrens and there are some pigeons in the barn(note to self must fix cupola on barn), and an owl has decided to make the woods around here his/her home.