Free Republic

The Weekly Gardening Thread is a weekly gathering of folks that love soil, seeds and plants of all kinds. From complete newbies that are looking to start that first potted plant, to gardeners with some acreage, to Master Gardener level and beyond, we would love to hear from you. This thread is non-political, although you will find that most here are conservative folks. No matter what, you won’t be flamed and the only dumb question is the one that isn’t asked. It is impossible to hijack the Weekly Gardening Thread. There is no telling where it will go and... that...

I was in Walmart the other night and saw something I did not know was available. As I was standing in the checkout line a woman was using her Food Stamp EBT card to buy stuff and at the end of the transaction she was able to get money back on the EBT card like you can with a debit card. I enquired about this and was informed that a change had been made by Government that permitted this. So you can get a cash back on a EBT Card then are able to buy things not on the approved...

The charts on this page depict the progression of the Solar Cycle. The charts and tables are updated by the Space Weather Prediction Center monthly using the latest ISES predictions. Observed values are initially the preliminary values which are replaced with the final values as they become available.

A storm system that buried parts of Wyoming and South Dakota in heavy, wet snow on Friday also brought powerful thunderstorms and possible tornadoes to the Great Plains. The storm dumped at least 33 inches of snow in a part of South Dakota’s scenic Black Hills, National Weather Service meteorologist Eric Helgeson said Friday afternoon. Later in the day, thunderstorms rolled across the Plains, and witnesses reported seeing tornadoes in Nebraska, Iowa and South Dakota. …

In a legal dispute over a champion sporting stallion, Wisconsin's Court of Appeals decided it was a case of a horse — or two — apiece. But the Viroqua trainer on the losing end of the ruling doesn't see it that way. "It's been pretty frustrating," said Amy S. Hunter. "Basically it means I live in the wrong state. Anywhere there's some knowledge of the industry this would be different." Hunter, 43, trained a sick horse back to health and productivity for a wealthy out-of-state owner, who Hunter says was so grateful she told Hunter she could keep it. But...

MCDONOUGH, Ga. (UPI) -- The Georgia Department of Transportation said a loose bovine causing traffic troubles at an interstate intersection has been caught after about six months. Jill Goldberg, spokeswoman for the state Department of Transportation, said the animal, found to be a cow rather than the bull it was originally believed to be, wandered into a pen built to ensnare it Monday near the intersection of I-75 and I-675, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported Tuesday. "We corralled it, then tranquilized it," Goldberg said. The animal was first spotted wandering in the area about six months ago and DOT workers put...

People living near pig farms or agricultural fields fertilized with pig manure are more likely to become infected with methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus (MRSA) bacteria, according to a paper published today in JAMA Internal Medicine(1). Previous research has found that livestock workers are at high risk of carrying MRSA, compared to the general population2. But it has been unclear whether the spreading of MRSA through livestock puts the public at risk of infection.

Crop rotation is the practice of growing different crops, on the same land, in sequential planting cycles ranging from 2 to 8 years...

In the rich world, each of us consumes or uses 30 or more animals a year (the bulk – 52 of the 59 billion – are chickens). We don't, in the nutritional sense, need these animals to feed us – certainly not in those numbers. Yet, in order to eat them at an acceptable price we have to imprison them, alter them genetically and chemically, and kill them. We have moved inexorably into ever greyer ethical territory. Any planning for a food future that still envisages using animal products and meat must debate the "moral cost". I am not sentimental....

More than 128,000 Giant African Land Snails have been found and eradicated in the two years since the highly destructive creatures invaded the Miami-Dade area, Florida Commissioner of Agriculture Adam H. Putnam says. While it's too soon to declare victory, "we are confident that we will win this fight," Putnam adds. Part of the credit, officials say, should go to "canine detector teams" that are sniffing out snails in places that are tough for humans to search. According to South Florida's WTVJ-TV, one of the Labrador Retrievers out hunting snails is Bear — a U.S. Department of Agriculture canine who...

Jay Carney, the president's paid liar, announced several changes in the protocols of the White House press conferences. Due to a declining formality on the part of the press corps, new rules for dress are as follows: no pajamas, no chicken suits, no clown suits, dresses for women or others claiming to be women, suits for men or others claiming to be men. When the president enters the press room, all press corps members will jump to their feet, clench their right fist, and raise their right arm and yell "Obama Akbar, Obama Akbar ...." until the president gives the...

Emergency crews in Pennsylvania had to put on their thinking caps to successfully carry out their latest rescue mission: a horse stuck — and still sinking — in a mud pit. Fairfield Fire and EMS were called Sunday morning to help extract the distressed 18-year-old horse. When the crews arrived, the horse named “Wrangler” had mud up to his shoulders and was having trouble keeping his head up, according to a news release. The department’s Assistant Chief Dave Millstein told TheBlaze the rescuers had never encountered a situation like this before, but that their first thought was to evaluate what...

Ron Stidmon sells more than 20 varieties of garlic and grows about 40 on the Darlington Township farm he purchased with his wife, Rosemary, in 2003. They left behind white-collar jobs and a condo in New York after re-evaluating their priorities. Ron worked as an executive coach and consultant. Rosemary was a manager in the securities division of JPMorgan. The decision was prompted in part by the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Ron lost one of his best friends that day. In Cleveland for a business venture at the time, he had trouble getting in touch with Rosemary and had to...

Quantity of cow intestines used in manufacturing airships was so enormous that making of sausages was temporarily outlawed....To millions of sausage-starved Germans,... Zeppelins were perhaps less harbingers of a new kind of warfare than colossal reminders of the culinary sacrifices required by the fatherland..... the military appetite for the dirigibles so strong – that the making of sausages was temporarily outlawed ...With the guts from more than 250,000 cows needed to produce the bags that held the hydrogen gas in each Zeppelin, the German war machine had to choose between long-range bombing and wurst. It chose the former...

Eating too much red meat could trigger Alzheimer’s, suggests new research. Scientists found that a buildup of iron—abundant in red meat—could cause oxidant damage, to which the brain is particularly vulnerable. Researchers say this could in turn increase the risk of Alzheimer’s. Professor George Bartzokis, of UCLA in the United States, said that more studies have suggested the disease is caused by one of two proteins, one called tau, the other beta-amyloid. …

Justine and Brian Denison sat they adhere to all the growing practices required for organic certification, yet if they label their beans and tomatoes "organic" at the farmer's market, they could face federal charges and $20,000 or more in fines.

This would seem to embody the USDA’s advisory, “Know your farmer, know your food,” right? Not exactly. For the USDA and its sister food regulator, the FDA, there’s a problem: many of the farmers are distributing the food via private contracts like herd shares and leasing arrangements, which fall outside the regulatory system of state and local retail licenses and inspections that govern public food sales. In response, federal and state regulators are seeking legal sanctions against farmers in Maine, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and California, among others. These sanctions include injunctions, fines, and even prison sentences.

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Phrases like “lessons from the past” or “learning from ancient history” are apt to make our eyes glaze over, and we flash to memories of boring history classes or droning TV documentaries. But in the case of aquaculture, a little historical knowledge can be both entertaining and enlightening. Fish farming is not new; it has been practiced for centuries in many cultures. Ancient Chinese societies fed silkworm feces and nymphs to carp raised in ponds on silkworm farms, Egyptians farmed tilapia as part of their elaborate irrigation technology, and Hawaiians were able to farm a multitude of species such as...

Obama issued an Executive order on August 1, 2013 that will effectively ban Ammonium Nitrate in the USA. It will become too expensive and create too much possible civil and criminal liability to manufacture, store, or transport it. Hope everyone is ready for $12/gallon gasoline and $20 a box corn flakes.

Does your dairy herd get skittish every time you hit the milking parlor drenched in Drakkar Noir? Does a splash of Hugo by Hugo Boss have your flock of sheep heading for the hills? If so, the answer to your fragrance faux pas may well be Portland General Store's new Farmer's Cologne. When I first caught wind of the cologne -- made by the same Maine-based company that makes manly grooming products like tobacco-scented beard oil, whiskey-scented aftershave and a soap called "Hunting Camp" -- I was intrigued by the notion that the potion was formulated to be "aromatherapeutic and...

My wife and I went semi-nomadic in 2010, traveling the mountain West for almost two years. Not having a settled home was eye-opening, and taught me a lot about one of my perennial themes: how much humans lost when we became domesticated by agriculture. For a committed permaculturist to give up a home and yard seems almost hypocritical, since a core tenet of permaculture is to deeply know a place and community. But our nomadic yen was strong. We were ready to leave the buzz of Portland, and in that fiercely Greened city I was feeling redundant. Yet no other...

Michelle Obama's Newest Initiative: Using Hip-Hop to Fight Obesity A nonprofit launched with the Let's Move! program plans to put hip-hop music videos in schools to get kids moving The full album, includes songs with names like "Veggie Luv," by Monifah and J Rome, "

Plants Use Underground 'Fungal Internet' to Communicate by Jeffrey Tomkins, Ph.D. * Researchers have just documented how plants use underground fungal networks to warn neighboring plants of impending insect attack, uniquely illustrating the complex and highly designed interconnected cooperation found in nature. The research study—just published in the July, 2013 issue of Ecology Letters—is the first such report that confirms and reveals how plants have uniquely co-designed physiologies that internetwork with other plants using an underground fungus as an information conduit.1 This amazing and intricate system allows the plants to readily and effectively communicate as a community, like a natural...

A bee removal expert took care of the thousands of bees that had been busy building a huge hive in a Cypress woman’s front yard. One beekeeper told Cheryl Best that 100,000 bees were living in the hive. That all changed Friday with the help of bee expert Anthony Samilo. “We call this a tree hugger, bees that build on the sides of trees,” he said. “The bees are going to get plenty aggressive when I get up there, and they are probably going to attack anybody on the ground.” When the bees started to swarm, curious neighbors who were...

CSIRO wants to stop methane emissions: but can they get a grant to stop El Nino’s and cap volcanoes?This type of trans-Siberian cow used to emit a lot of methane. Tom Quirk sent me a short note to point out that the big rise in global methane almost certainly was man-made — at least up to the mid 1980′s, but in the last 20 years, the culprit for rising methane appears to be volcanoes and El Ninos. (Note the timing of the spikes in the graph below, as methane pours into the atmosphere some years, but barely changes in...

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak set off an explosion Thursday, launching an ambitious and controversial plan to make the Western Desert bloom with water channeled from the Nile River. When the canal is done, if all goes according to plan, water will wind its way 190 miles (310 kilometers) across the Western Desert to irrigate 500,000 acres (200,000 hectares) of virgin land. And, if all goes according to plan, the newly irrigated land will be populated by hundreds of thousands of people. The explosion Thursday was the first step in the construction on a pumping station that Egypt claims will be...

In the 1970s, archaeologist Peter Bogucki was excavating a Stone Age site in the fertile plains of central Poland when he came across an assortment of odd artefacts. The people who had lived there around 7,000 years ago were among central Europe's first farmers, and they had left behind fragments of pottery dotted with tiny holes. It looked as though the coarse red clay had been baked while pierced with pieces of straw. Looking back through the archaeological literature, Bogucki found other examples of ancient perforated pottery. “They were so unusual — people would almost always include them in publications,”...

A carpenter friend recently showed me a gruesome scar on his arm that was the result of some surgery he performed on himself with a sewing needle without any form of anesthetic! He said he played doctor and sewed up the nasty cut himself because he had no insurance and felt qualified because he’d once sewn some sails. From the looks of his arm I can only assume the sailboat subsequently capsized or ran aground. It’s only in the last 100 years that people, like my friend, haven’t had to be their own doctor. If a cowboy in the 1800’s...

SALINAS, Calif. (AP) — On a windy morning in California’s Salinas Valley, a tractor pulled a wheeled, metal contraption over rows of budding iceberg lettuce plants. Engineers from Silicon Valley tinkered with the software on a laptop to ensure the machine was eliminating the right leafy buds. The engineers were testing the Lettuce Bot, a machine that can “thin” a field of lettuce in the time it takes about 20 workers to do the job by hand. The thinner is part of a new generation of machines that target the last frontier of agricultural mechanization – fruits and vegetables destined...

Microbiologists are trying to work out whether use of antibiotics on farms is fuelling the human epidemic of drug-resistant bacteria. The sight of just one boot coming through the doorway cues the clatter of tiny hoofs as 500 piglets scramble away from Mike Male. “That's the sound of healthy pigs,” shouts Male, a veterinarian who has been working on pig farms for more than 30 years. On a hot June afternoon, he walks down the central aisle of a nursery in eastern Iowa, scoops up a piglet and dangles her by her hind legs. A newborn piglet's navel is an...

OnMyHonor.Net Final Naming Survey After conducting multiple online and email surveys, conducting Focus Group testing in two cities with both parents and scouting age boys, and running initial trademark searches on selected names, we have narrowed the names down to the following selection. The list of names below has been carefully evaluated to address the goals contained in the Mission Statement. Please read through the following names and cast a vote for the ONE name you think best typifies the mission of the new organization. That's it! Based on your input and the recommendations of our steering committee we'll be...

A new study says Europe's first farmers used far more sophisticated practices than was previously thought. A research team led by the University of Oxford has found that Neolithic farmers manured and watered their crops as early as 6,000 BC. It had always been assumed that manure wasn't used as a fertiliser until Iron Age and Roman times. However, this new research shows that enriched levels of nitrogen-15, a stable isotope abundant in manure, have been found in the charred cereal grains and pulse seeds taken from 13 Neolithic sites around Europe. The findings are published in the early edition...

An old Washington joke goes that an employee of the Department of Agriculture sees a colleague sobbing and rushes to ask what's wrong? The man replies, "My farmer died." So it goes with this week's House rebellion on the farm bill, which has Democrats wailing in protest. Their latest vehicle for subsidies and food stamps died. House Republicans passed an historic farm bill on Thursday that for the first time in about 40 years separates food stamps from farm policy. This bids to divide what has been a political alliance of urban Democrats and farm-state Republicans that has bloated the...

The English colonists who landed at Jamestown 400 years ago undermined an ecosystem and changed the continent forever. It is just possible that John Rolfe was responsible for the worms—specifically the common night crawler and the red marsh worm, creatures that did not exist in the Americas before Columbus. Rolfe was a colonist in Jamestown, Virginia, the first successful English colony in North America. Most people know him today, if they know him at all, as the man who married Pocahontas. A few history buffs understand that Rolfe was one of the primary forces behind Jamestown's eventual success. The worms...

Latest in series of profitable transactions involving rare sheep at farm in NuairiyaA Saudi farmer has been offered SR one million (Dh990,000) for a rare sheep, but he has refused to sell the animal, a newspaper reported on Monday. Fahd bin Khattaf said he had just sold a “relative” of the sheep for SR320,000 (D317,000), the latest in a series of profitable transactions involving rare sheep he has at his farm in the eastern town of Nuairiya. “I have just received an offer to sell this ram for SR one million but I refused. I am making a lot of...

"Millsap is a calendar girl for the Bare Knuckle Babes (Miss May 2014), and on Saturday she served the Babes proudly by wrestling a 72-pound flathead catfish onto the banks of Oklahoma’s Lake Texoma."

Plants have a built-in capacity to do maths, which helps them regulate food reserves at night, research suggests. UK scientists say they were "amazed" to find an example of such a sophisticated arithmetic calculation in biology. Mathematical models show that the amount of starch consumed overnight is calculated by division in a process involving leaf chemicals, a John Innes Centre team reports in e-Life journal. Birds may use similar methods to preserve fat levels during migration. The scientists studied the plant Arabidopsis, which is regarded as a model plant for experiments. 'Astonished' Overnight, when the plant cannot use energy from...

WAPELLO, Iowa -- The winds came to Wapello on Monday. Damages to trees and some roofs were evident around the Wapello area. Probably the most devastating damage hit grain bins in this rural area. Farmers Elevator and Exchange sits along highway 61. They had two grain bins succumb to the high winds. A 200,000 bushel grain bin was totally disintegrated while a second bin of the same size was seriously damaged. The second bin was close to being lifted off of its foundation too.

he possibilities when it comes to marketing meat made from marijuana-fed animals are close to endless, but the man who came up with the idea has decided to simply call them “Pot Pigs.” William von Scheneidau, owner and founder of BB Ranch in Seattle, didn’t come up with the idea to feed pigs and other animals weed while sitting around a bong in the basement with his buddies. In fact, he doesn’t even smoke, he said. Von Scheneidau said the notion came to him when he met the owners of a weed dispensary who told him that, ever since marijuana...

In the year 802 C.E., the founder of the medieval Khmer empire, Jayavarman II, anointed himself "king of the world." In laying claim to such a grandiose title, he was a little ahead of his time: It would be another few centuries before the Khmers built Earth's largest religious monument, Angkor Wat, the crowning glory of a kingdom that stood in what is today northwestern Cambodia. But Jayavarman II had good reason to believe that his nascent kingdom, in the sacred Kulen hills northeast of Angkor, was a record-holder. Airborne laser scanning technology, or LiDAR, has revealed the imprint of...

I just bought two milk goats, and I'm thrilled with them! Are you thinking of a similar purchase? If so, you may want to read up on goats and milking. This article is meant to help new goat owners by giving them an outline of sorts. Think long and hard before buying a goat, but enjoy them if you get one!

India's environmental and food security activists who have so far succeeded in stalling attempts to introduce genetically modified (GM) food crops into this largely farming country now find themselves up against a bill in parliament that could criminalize such opposition. The Biotechnology Regulatory Authority of India (BRAI) bill, introduced into parliament in April, provides for "single window clearance" for projects by biotechnology and agribusiness companies including those to bring GM food crops into this country, 70% of whose 1.1 billion people are involved in agricultural activities. "Popular opposition to the introduction of GM crops is the result of a campaign...

In 1970, an organic chemist named John E. Franz was working at Monsanto when he and his team made a remarkable discovery: that synthesizing N-(phosphonomethyl) glycine produced glyphosate, a systemic herbicide that had the potential to rule them all. In 1974, the herbicide hit the market as “Roundup”, and since then the chemical has become the most-used herbicide in American agriculture...

CLICK HERE FOR PART 2 - CLICK HERE FOR PART 3 - CLICK HERE FOR PART 4APRIL 27, 2012, APPLE RIVER, IL – The little town of Apple River in northeast Jo Daviess County, Illinois is the hometown of a big man - Terrence Ingram. Though not big in a physical sense, when it comes to saving the American Bald Eagle, there is hardly anyone in the United States held in higher regard than Ingram. His years of documented research and expertise regarding eagles and the work of the Eagle Nature Foundation, founded by Ingram, is in great part responsible...

The animal-welfare group People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals says Austin ranks first on its list of most vegan-friendly cities in the United States. Paul McCartney presented the award to Austin Mayor Lee Leffingwell while in town for a concert two weeks ago. Los Angeles, New York and Chicago round out the top five. Seattle is No. 6.

The booming deer population in the northern United States is bad for the animal's beloved hemlocks, a new study finds. During Michigan winters, white-tailed deer converge on stands of young hemlocks for protection from winter chill and predators. The same deer return every year to their favorite clumps of the bushy evergreens, called deeryards. The high concentration of deer in a small space saturates the soils with nitrogen from pee, according to a study published online in the journal Ecology. While deer pee can be a valuable source of nitrogen, a rare and necessary nutrient for plants, some deeryards are...

Danish Farmer Reverses Illnesses in pigs by reverting to a GM-free diet for his animals, which is yet further evidence for the toxicity of glyphosate tolerant GM crops Dr Eva SirinathsinghjiA Danish farmer has gained huge public recognition for publishing his simple method for ridding his pigs of illness- removing genetically modified (GM) ingredients from their diet.Published in the farming magazine Effektivt Landbrug on 13 April 2012 [1], the farmer Ib Borup Perderson describes how his pigs suffered from symptoms including chronic diarrhoea, birth defects, reproductive problems, reduced appetite, bloating, stomach ulcers, weaker and smaller piglets, and reduced litter sizes....

The ice served in six out of ten of Britain’s most popular high street restaurants contains more bacteria than the water found in their toilets, an investigation by The Mail on Sunday has found. Scientific tests have shown that ice from branches of McDonald’s, Burger King, KFC, Starbucks, Cafe Rouge and Nando’s all had higher levels of bacteria than samples of water taken from their lavatory bowls. Experts say it could be due to them being cleaned more often than the ice machines. None of the samples found presented an immediate health danger, but four contained such high levels of...

–The U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) announced today that test results of plant samples from an Oregon farm indicate the presence of genetically engineered (GE) glyphosate-resistant wheat plants. Further testing by USDA laboratories indicates the presence of the same GE glyphosate-resistant wheat variety that Monsanto was authorized to field test in 16 states from 1998 to 2005. APHIS launched a formal investigation after being notified by an Oregon State University scientist that initial tests of wheat samples from an Oregon farm indicated the possible presence of GE glyphosate-resistant wheat plants. There are no...