farm
sastyk | January 4, 2010Note: This is the beginning of a multi-part series on agricultural education, the farming demographic crisis and the question of who will grow our food - what the problems are, how we will find new farmers, how they will be trained. To me, this is one of the most urgent questions of our time.
A quick, Jay Leno style quiz for the man and woman on the street.
Who will grow your food in the coming decades?
A. My friendly neighborhood agribusinessman will grow my food on a plantation the size of Wyoming using nearly enslaved non-white folks who are deported minutes after harvest. Or maybe…
Once You've Got the Chickens, You'll Hardly Notice the Yaks: Re-Inventing the Diversified Small Farm
sastyk | December 29, 2009Over at ye olde blogge, on one of my Independence Days updates, a reader commented on something that I'd posted. I'd mentioned that we are having trouble with goat parasites - most specifically, meningeal worm. Meningeal worm is a parasite is hosted by snails and transmitted by the feces of white tailed deer. It is worst in camelids like llamas and alpacas, but goats are a secondary host, and two of does, Selene and Mina, have it. It is most common after a wet summer and warm fall - this past summer was the wettest in living memory here - we had almost 20 inches of rain in June alone, and…