The food crisis I have repeatedly warned about on this site is closer than you might think.

American-styled Corporate Capitalism is not your friend as it is based upon squeezing, like a giant boa constrictor, the common people dry to the bone. Read On....

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Since we no longer produce very much food locally, our area grocery stores are stocked with products from other parts of our country and from other countries. So each time you read or watch about an environmental disaster that wipes out a grain crop or livestock, and because it happens far away, one might be tempted to dismiss it as "not affecting me."
WRONG- welcome to the global economy.
Droughts and fires in Texas and the southwest mean fewer cattle available for market.
Floods in Pakistan, Australia, and the American midwest mean less grain available, wheat, corn and soybeans.
And due to ethanol subsidies, whole corn now costs over $16 per hundred pounds. Corn is the base feed for chickens, (eggs) pork, and beef.
So what is the future of food prices? Higher and higher and higher, and lower and lower food quality.

We are uncoupling from the "global food system" by growing our own here at our farm. It's the only way we can afford to eat well. What about you?

FDA Says 29 Million Pounds of Antibiotics Used in Food Animals Last Year

I was interested to read Food Safety News and learn about the FDA’s new count of the number and pounds of antibiotics used to promote the growth of farm animals used as food.

Because this is the first time the FDA’s Center for Veterinary Medicine has produced such a count, it is not possible to say whether the numbers are going up or down. But the agency is now requiring meat producers to report on antibiotic use so we now have a baseline for measuring progress.

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that's dumbing us down.
Rome is burning, and the masses are lined up for some trickle down chump change that's falling out of the overstuffed pockets of the greedy. The country is literally bankrupt, but the White House Staff, The Federal Reserve, and Congress keep acting like we are still an industrial and financial power. The sun is setting on the American empire, and the GOP are out hawking sunglasses, claiming the coming darkness will be bright.

is restructuring its' business plan.

Our farm's primary mission has always been to model and teach principles of sustainability. To supplement our workshop and consultation income in the initial years of our farm start-up, we took on the additional aspect of actually growing food for sale to the general public.

Acceptance of authentic, organically grown local food has been a hard sell in a community poorly educated in nutrition and health care (as opposed to the current "sickness care"), and plagued by high rates of obesity and diabetes. In five years of producing highly acclaimed, quality food at very affordable prices, and attempting to educate each and every customer as to the advantages of "knowing your local organic farmer," we have concluded that producing commercial food for sale to the general public is not a practice we want to continue. Instead, we will return to the roots of our work, the art of sustainable living at a time when climate change threatens to disrupt agricultural production, and a faltering economy that continues to lower the health outlook and standard of living for the average American.

We will continue our plant breeding work, and will continue to sell our organic heirloom, open pollinated seed, plants and bulbs to interested buyers.

Thank you for your past and present interest in the
Broadened Horizons Organic Teaching Farm.

We now have pints and quarts of freshly extracted honey from our beeyard.
This honey is processed raw, unheated, unfiltered, non-pasteurized, in other words, all the good beneficial stuff is still there!
Both light and dark varieties.

Buy it at our farm stand on Rodgers Lane.

For those of you who have a hankering for the drive-through window at the Mac Shack (and other fast junk-food shops), you might want to watch a shocking documentary movie called "Super Size Me. It might answer the question of "why is my waistline size rapidly outpacing my age?"

Junk food = burger, fries and coke not only makes you sickly, it can prematurely kill you!

The movie is available on DVD.

You've tried the rest, now it's time to try the best. Naturally raised pastured poultry lay the most nutritional and best tasting eggs.
Broadened Horizons Organic Farm, home of heritage breed laying hens, now has eggs for sale to the general public.

A neighbor is kind enough to pass on her copies of the Roane County News when she stops by the farm to purchase produce. While the news isn't always new and fresh with this arrangement, it does allow us to keep somewhat in the loop concerning the happenings around the County.

As an unabashed "tree hugger" whose road frontage trees and boundary fences have been mutilated by the County's articulated arm bush hog, I was pleasantly surprised when I opened to page 4A in the December 10th edition. There a photo of the smoldering and ruined hulk of this machine greeted my eyes. There is a Santa Claus after all!

When one drives along our lovely tree lined rural roads, the scene is often marred by broken and shattered limbs of trees poking out from gouged and shattered tree trunks. I have watched the operator push his bush-hog high overhead into our neighborhood cedar trees, leaving them looking like victims of wanton and mindless destruction, and for no apparent reason as the road in question is a dead end gravel road with no school bus or mail route.

Visitors to our farm from out of the County look at the trees and ask me why Roane County hates its' roadside trees. I have no answer for this question, as I often wonder the same thing.

I am not against trimming trees in a scientifically sound manner, but the operation of this particular machine is an abomination to good horticulture. A good solution for this former tractor would be to beat this hulk into pruning shears.

"A lazy mind should be rested, and the brain shifted into park."

Okay I am back with my botanical question of the day. If plants (real ones, not misnamed factories) take in and convert CO2 to promote their cell growth, how is it that some people confuse fossil burning facilities which create CO2 as being plants?

If your answer is; "well everybody else calls them plants," or "that's how TVA refers to their coal burning facilities," then please go back to sleep. Sorry to bother you.

Change is the most difficult undertaking one could perform today!

Braving weather that could only be described as "hostile," over 45 people attended the 2nd Annual Open House at Roane County's only Organic Teaching Farm. With temperatures hovering in the mid-forties, a damp, bitter north wind, and a heavy overcast sky, folks continued to arrive throughout the day from as far away as Knoxville to the East, and Lookout Valley, GA. to the Southwest. A fair number of people came from the Kingston area as well.

"We are both surprised and greatly encouraged by the wonderful turnout on such a miserable weather day," said farmer Cielo.

"Ol' Butch," perhaps the most famous rooster in Tennessee, will be featured at the Broadened Horizons Organic Farm Open House on October 17th. Read his story below.

I feel that as the person who kept "kicking the can down the road" in regards to the "bumper sticker campaign," it is time to give the concession speech. After weeks of voluminous discussion, we are looking at poll results that put "None of the Above"
far ahead with over double the votes of a distant second place entry which merely states the legal obvious. "TVA - Making their own rules since 1933."

I am not sure exactly how to proceed after viewing the anarchist and libertarian impulses that seemed to be at play when we tried to line the people up to submit entries.

Attempting to direct some of the creative energy and wit from posters on this site is like herding chickens.

Masked vandal fatally wounded by homeowner.

Not satisfied with vandalizing our patch of just ripening flour corn, a rogue raccoon broke into our farmhouse by ripping through a window screen in the wee hours of the morning.

to submit your TVA ash-hole related bumper sticker entry. Don't miss a chance to have your creative wit gracing the bumpers of many Roane County residents' vehicles.
So put your brain into gear and head over to the the Official Bumper Sticker Entry site and get your entry posted.
And please-read the guidelines before posting.
Thank you and good luck to all you aspiring authors.

Official Site
- Be an Author, craft a catchy, memorable slogan and be immortalized on a bumper sticker.
If we do this in an orderly fashion, we can pull it off without too much difficulty.

A few guidelines:

1) Please just submit one entry per person.

2) Please refrain from posting comments here on the various submissions in this thread. Everyone will get an opportunity to vote on the final selections. To keep it manageable, we are asking that only bumper sticker entries are posted in this thread. Other comments can be posted at the Bumper Sticker ideas thread.

2) Number your entry in chronological order. I will submit Entry# 1. The next
poster will be Entry # 2, the next Entry #3 and so on.

3) Since you just get one entry, try to make it "different" from the others
so that we have range and diversity to choose from.

4) If after you post your entry, you come up with something better, go to the
court house, legally change your name, file all necessary documents, then
submit new entry. :>)

This Wednesday, we will then set up a poll so we can vote on the entries. Good luck and thank-you everyone for your cooperation!

BLUE CROSS

By Frank Jacobs of Mad Magazine

I don't have many "must see" TV programs, but Friday night, I faithfully tune in to Bill Moyer's Journal on PBS at 9 p.m. This past Friday, he did a segment on the hate mongers on Talk Radio.

Some of you may remember a thread on "so-called daylight savings" that was posted back at the time of the Spring equinox. We were emerging from the long nights of Winter and people were glad they could change the hands of their watches and clocks and gain some extra daylight. Of course some of us said this was just shifting "time" to make it appear different.

There are many naysayers among us telling us what is not possible. They are wanting to limit our dreams of a saner, cleaner, more peaceful world.
To refute their negativity, I offer a profoundly intelligent and optimistic speech by environmentalist and author, Paul Hawkins, who gave this Commencement Address at the University of Portland in May of 2009.

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While we were busy trying to beat back bad Food Safety Acts by Congress and their Agri-business allies, a new bil HR2749 alipped in, has been voted out of committee and is headed for a full vote soon. Once again, this bill targets the solution (to food contamination) small farmers and farmer's markets, and not the problem, industrial agriculture and factory-like CAFOs (Confined Animal Feed Operations)
A provision in this new bill would make me a "food processing facility" if I baked a loaf of bread or canned a jar of tomatoes and sold it to one of our customers. Registration for a food processing facility is pegged at $500 for 2010. Chump change for industry, a crippling expense for a small family farm.

Help save your local food grower and processor, i.e. Amish bakeries, sorghum growers, County Fair preserves, etc.

Please go to this link and voice your opinion.

Thank you.

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Perhaps it is because we have become so cut off from the natural world, that we have skewered the lexicon to confuse biological with industrial.

how to build a solar heated sauna for $50 or less?

It is a sad commentary that some 58,000 Americans and perhaps up to 2 million vietnamese had to die in a War that the chief architect belatedly acknowledged was a tragic miscalculation, based on flawed assumptions.

had we been paying attention.

Do you consider yourself environmentally conscious and responsible?? You might not know that all those colorful explosives used to celebrate special occasions.... (your firecrackers, skyrockets, Roman candles and yes even those so-called "harmless" sparklers)... pose a serious environmental and health danger from heavy metals and other toxic firework fallout.

With all the hoopla in the news about who gets custody of the "King of Pop" children drowning out the other news, you might have missed the fact that there has been another beef recall. This time 380,000 pounds, which any way you grind it, it is a heck of a lot of cows that had wasted lives.

If the ground beef was contaminated with E-coli, one can only imagine what little pathogens went into the all beef "tube steaks." This fourth of July, I think I will focus more on the blackberry cobbler, and ignore the stuff sizzling on the grill.

It turns out that besides rotting teeth and contributing to user obesity, Coca Cola has a beneficial use for gardeners. According to a recent news item in an agricultural journal, many farmers in India have been using Coca-Cola as a pesticide for at least five years. Britains's Guardian reported that Gotu Laxmaiah, a farmer from Andra Pradesh is delighted with his cola spray. "I observed that the pests began to die after the soft drink was sprayed on my cotton," he said. He and others say their cola spray is invaluable because it does not need to be diluted, is many times cheaper than conventional pesticides, and is safer to handle by a country mile.