Posted on 07/15/2016 4:19:38 PM PDT by upchuck
I have a very LARGE garden, probably an acre and a half of plants, and I just was out doing my daily morning harvesting.
Nothing is perfect. I don't know how some farmers do it, but since I eat, can, freeze and/or dry everything I grow, I know that nothing is perfect.
Here's my morning harvest. A lot, as you can see, but there's a whole 'nother half as much in the compost pile because it was rotted, deformed or half eaten by vermin.
Thanks, I appreciate your post.
And we are on the same side with irradiated and GMO foods.
We are really missing the boat by not irradiating more of our foods.
The great thing is that food wise, our country is so wealthy that the (irrational) desire for ‘natural’ foods can easily be met, and still we have surplus food to burn to fuel our cars and heat our homes.
Self protection; if you can plant and harvest your own you don't need them. Short sighted on their part though; not that many people bother to do for themselves what they can pay to have done.
In your years of growing up and being around farmers there may be something important you were unaware of.
You may not know it, but farmers have been ‘forced’ to go to Pioneer, DeKalb, and other seed companies for their corn seed for more than 60 years already.
That ‘force’ is supplied by the absolutely unbreakable laws of economics.
The seed companies use the breeding methods which appear to be used in Texas Eagles situation.
For corn that method resulted in what is called a single cross plant. That plant produced a seed which outperformed anything and everything else ever seen, and farmers bought the seed in droves. They were driven to it by the economics of a seed that was relatively cheap to buy, and produced mountains of crop.
Since that time many breeding methods have expanded that economic leverage to soybeans and all sorts of crop.
No one is forcing farmers to buy those seeds, and if they have multiple millions they can even grow their own seed stock. But those who don’t use the methods employed by Pioneer and others and grow their own seed stock using the simple method of keeping seed from the crop produced in turn produce crops of the 1940s.
I know. Ethanol. It is crazy. Burning food.
I have training in Nuclear Physics so I understand a little about the subject of irradiation, and if one took into account the huge amount of food-borne illnesses and the wastage of food going bad due to spoilage...the risk versus benefit analysis is a no-brainier.
I think the whole organic foods thing is a scam, but if it makes people feel better and safer, and they have the extra money to spend to satisfy that, then power to them. Just don’t impose it on me!
Sigh. We live on a standard quarter acre, and have a major woodchuck problem. I borrowed a trap and just picked it up yesterday, but...it is just closing the barn door after the cows are out!
Maybe next year!
By the way, I love your harvest!
I wish I could lend you my old dog Susy, who I had when I was a boy back in the 1960s.
That dog was an expert at killing groundhogs. When she spotted one, she would watch it for a while, and look for it’s den hole. As soon as she found it, she would run at top speed—not at the wood chuck, but for the hole. A wood chuck, when sensing danger, ALWAYS runs to its hole.
Susy wasn’t a big dog, about beagle size, but she would time her run so she intercepted the groundhog right before it reached the hole, and send it sprawling ass over teakettle, as it were, without stopping. Then she’d wheel around to the stunned beast and give it the coup de grace.
Growing up in the country, I liked nothing better than to hike and explore around the forested hills and grassy fields, and she’d always tag along. I’ve seen her kill dozen of ground hogs this way.
Only two times were then any problems:
One time, she went after the biggest dang wood chuck I had ever seen; almost her size. It recovered enough to fight her, and took a good chunk out of her ear. The hog then ran UP a tree; something I had never seen before. Well, I, like a fool, knocked it out with a stick, and Suzy once again tore into it, but she was losing! I had to use the same stick to wallop the chuck, again and again, until it was dead. I was only around 8 years old, and I felt really bad, but seeing my dog’s happy, victorious face, covered in her and the wood chuck’s blood, made up for it. She seemed to be saying, “Master, you and I hunted and killed TOGETHER! Way to go, young human! I’ve taught you well!”
The other time was funny but to me worse. One morning we were out walking in a large hayfield, just at first dim light, and the grass was very tall, up to my chin in some places. Well, I couldn’t see the dog in the high growth, but I could hear her. Suddenly something ran by my feet, and she was in hot pursuit! It was a dang skunk, and she hit him sprawling it right into me! I still remember actually seeing his spray in that dim light; it was greenish-yellow, and I was drenched in it! The dog hardly got any on her, while I had to have my clothes thrown out in the woods, and my mother made we take a bath in tomato juice. My Dad was angry because he had to spend money on ten large quart sized cans. Ever since the smell of skunk spray makes me gag.
I loved that dog; wish I could lend her to you for your chuck problem!
I like ethanol. What I don’t like are the government subsidies, including the ones which mandate how much should be blended into our gasoline.
Ethanol needs to stand on it’s own.
I would like to see a four or five year phase out. An immediate phase out would bankrupt the farming industry and seriously disrupt our food supply chain.
What would we then do with all our surplus food? I don’t know, but I’m sure a solution would be found.
Yeah. I agree with all those things...I just don’t think it is financially beneficial. You can’t pipe it, it has to be trucked, it absorbs water, it is corrosive...well, you know all that.
A car cannot get the same MPG out of it, so it has to be blended to gas.
It is, to me, a Rube Goldbergian approach to an energy problem.
Like you said, though, we have the problem now, a lot of farmers are invested in it, and we have to find a way forward.
By the way, I find myself in many of same threads you are in, and I always enjoy your commentary. Keep up the good work!
Those are great stories, and I can imagine how proud that dog must have been with each kill! It was funny to read your account, after I complained to a co-worker (my other co-worker lent me a trap!) he pulled out his phone and showed me two pictures of his dog with dead groundhogs!
I suspect dogs get the measure of a groundhog pretty quickly!
With mustard?
+1
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