R Ant

I started writing the Farm Side, a weekly farm column in the local daily paper, 14 years ago, served for many years on the local Farm Bureau board of directors, and even started this blog, largely with the intention of helping others understand agriculture. I truly love what we do, wanted to be a farmer since I was a kid (or at least a cowgirl), the outdoors and animals are my life...not just my job.


 It has been a great run and I have met a lot of people who feel as close as lifelong friends even if I have never met them. It has given me an opportunity to communicate with experts in the field from all over the world, whether they be farmers, ranchers, folks involved in ag publishing or researchers. I have learned to bite my tongue....a lot.


With a mere one percent of the population actually engaged in producing food for the other 99%, as well as providing an unimaginable amount of sustenance for millions around the world, promoting and explaining ag seemed like an honorable goal.


However, I am about ready to give up. For every farmer trying to offer a voice of reason about how farming methods have evolved for literally thousands of years, as better and better ways of producing food were discovered, there are thousands, maybe even millions, of armchair agronomists regurgitating animal rights tripe. They would like nothing more than a vegan world...or better yet a world without humans at all.


 I'm tired of ill-informed people watching HSUS ads and sending in their money for the poor puppies and kitties, with no clue that almost all their dough goes to lobby Washington against hard working, truly caring farmers and ranchers. I am tired of people who have never shared space with a farm animal casually deciding that they know more than generations of successful farmers about caring for them. I'm tired of always being told to make nice when the other side has the gloves off and is flinging dirt in all directions.


Just plain tired.

These days it seems I have a strong inclination to just write...and think...about counting birds and taking photographs of same and let the activists change the world as we know it to suit themselves. As my late mother-in-law, born and raised on a farm, and a farmer all her life, said quite often...when the shelves in the grocery store are bare they will see things differently. Meanwhile, we know how to produce food and so we will just keep plodding along at same, with or without the well-meaning, but useless, and often even dangerous, advice.


Yeah, there is a cardinal sitting on the front porch, using the two story front hall as a sounding board for his whistled song...I'll go listen to him! He is probably the loudest cardinal in the country right now, and he knows what he is talking about.

Not

Not for sale
Not Argersinger Road
Not a through road to Lusso
Not a gravel bank either.

Waited all yesterday morning for the clamor to die down around here...chores and milking, people off to work and school. People home and gone again, phone calls, men in and out for checks etc, until it was all quiet on the northview front so I could boil up a third batch of grape jelly. Alan helped me get the grapes down Monday afternoon and I made the juice before that night's milking.

You jelly makers know that once that last big boiling begins you shouldn't stop. So of course, just as I was setting the timer for that all important minute didn't some turkey with a great big truck and flat bed machinery trailer come cranking in behind my car, nearly running over poor old Gael in the process. And I do mean close call.

First words out of his mouth when I go boiling out the door after turning off my almost finished jelly are, "I'm not here to rob you or anything."

I lost it. I admit it. He drove past those signs up there in the photo, minus the vulture I suspect, and right up to the back door of the house. And claimed to be looking for a gravel bank. Missed our poor old dog by inches. I said very unpleasant things to him, made him back down the driveway rather than moving the car so he could just tool right around, and turned his plate number into the state police. Rather than complaining that I might have wasted their time the nice young officer thanked me for reporting the incident.

Am I sorry? Not one bit. After the theft of our generator cables and with this kind of thing becoming too darned common, I will call the next time too.

Did the jelly turn out all right? I don't know yet. It is kind of funny looking but it tastes pretty good. A lot darker purple than the other two batches..

Facebook Hates Me

After all the time I waste playing there, making money for them.

Below are some of the site's rules, which are posted here

Section 2. Prohibitions

You may not publicize or administer a promotion on Facebook if:

2.1 The promotion is open or marketed to individuals who are under the age of 18;

2.2 The promotion is open to individuals who reside in a country embargoed by the United States;

2.3 The promotion, if a sweepstakes, is open to individuals residing in Belgium, Norway, Sweden, or India;

2.4 The promotion’s objective is to promote any of the following product categories: gambling, tobacco, dairy, firearms, prescription drugs, or gasoline;

2.5 The prize or any part of the prize includes alcohol, tobacco, dairy, firearms, or prescription drugs; or

2.6 The promotion is a sweepstakes that conditions entry upon the purchase of a product, completion of a lengthy task, or other form of consideration.

I cannot imagine why dairy products would be classified under the same heading as gasoline and gambling....well, I suppose gasoline is sold by the gallon too, but still. They don't ban other drinks

I am not pleased with them! I won't say that I am going to quit playing Mafia Wars but....

This Oughta Raise Your Eyebrows

John Bunting had this today:

Organic Foods Made in China

Oh, yay. I don't see much point in organic myself (sacrilege I know, but there it is). However, with all the fine quality control that particular nation exerts over its dairy products and food ingredients, I can just imagine what their organic standards are like. I think if you pay a higher price for a premium product you probably ought to have some assurance that you are actually getting it. Doesn't seem to be the case here.

Oh, and it is pouring this morning, torrential, all-consuming, all-soaking downpours. I haven't even had the doggies out yet. And dag nab it, the boss just fixed the driveway the day before yesterday after the last set of monsoons took it out. I know even though the sun isn't up yet that it is gone again.

Thomas Sowell on Dismantling America

This is a great column and I thank Jeff at Alphecca for pointing it out.

"

Voter Intimidation

Even at the farmer level.

Yesterday I saw farmers who were afraid to sign an independent petition requesting an increase in milk prices. They belong to a certain large, national, so-called "cooperative", which told them they would lose their market if they signed it. That company controls a ridiculous portion of the market so they had little choice but to comply.

Something is rotten and it ain't in Denmark.

Meanwhile, check out this article. (HT to John Bunting)

Having someone flip your senator for you

Amounts to nothing more than flipping off the voters who elected that senator. It infuriates me to hear about our governor cheerfully going around the state looking for someone willing to betray the folks who elected them by changing parties in return for whatever payback he has to offer.


Sorry if this is confusing to readers outside New York State, but it REALLY gets to me. There is much cheering going on over the upset election of Darrel Aubertine to the state senate, making the Republican majority there easily destroyed by the flipping of just one person. However, I believe that Aubertine was elected because he was the better candidate, pure and simple. I don't think toppling senate leadership had anywhere near as much to do with it as is being claimed (although word is that Spitzer's 2010 election campaign headquarters in NYC ran a phone bank in his behalf).


I heard Aubertine speak at a dairy meeting when he was an assemblyman and I was pretty impressed. He had a decent grasp of rural issues and the realities of farming and seemed sincere about wanting to fix problems. If he ran around here I probably would have voted for him.

However, I have not and certainly never would vote for someone who flipped...even if they flipped to a party I preferred. Let them do it when they are out of office rather than offering voters one position, then choosing another.

And how people can continue to hold our trusty governor, Elliot Spitzer, up as a shining beacon of change when he has spent most of his short tenure in office pulling such tricks, is beyond me. It certainly doesn't say much for the moral climate in state government today.

Almost a meeting

You will need to click to see how thick the snow was...

Liz and I ran Becky over to college this morning, after milking (and after the motherperson got up at four to finish the Farm Side for Friday), and then headed to Oneonta for a farm meeting (the boss stayed home to calve a cow.).

It was put on by our feed company.
With good speakers.
Brook's Chicken.
Great door prizes. We really wanted to be there.




We hopped on I 88. There was rain predicted. There was squally wind predicted. However, nothing that we heard prepared us. Or not enough anyhow. It was a boy who cried wolf sort of thing. We have canceled several tempting outings this winter because the forecasters called for blizzards and other apocalyptic weather conditions and nothing happened. We decided to ignore them (or I did...Liz wanted to stay home) and we paid the price. The wind was so fierce on 88 that Liz could barely hold the car on the road. We got off onto 7...not much better. We made it to Richmondville, called Becky and told her to skip class, picked her back up and headed home (with a quick detour to Wally World for dog food.)



What followed was 30 or so miles of the worst driving we have seen this winter. It was bad. I have pictures. I didn't take them until it had actually let up some.....The snow was horizontal! Now that we are home it is sunny again.....

****Update...to add insult to injury, not one, but two milk inspectors just stopped in to tell us that our milk hauler will be charging us another $300 bucks a month to haul our milk and we can't change haulers. Milk is about the only commodity where the producer pays the hauling to the buyer. (Everyone but milk buyers pays their own darned shipping and handling.) On the positive side (and there always is one) one inspector said that the barn looked good. Milk inspectors NEVER tell you that your barn looks good. (I think they just didn't want to get us any madder than necessary.)