A short visit home

It's good to be home.
Seeing the familiar faces of family and friends, and the farm I call home, even for a short visit is always good for the soul.
Driving along dusty gravel roads, snow on the ground on the fields, a lone coyote loped across the road and then paused from a ditch to stare at my passing car. The last of the geese are migrating south, spending little time on these frozen ponds.
Driving past abandoned farmyards on these roads I know like the back of my hand, I thought of neighbors that no longer live here or have passed away.
There's where one of the old war veterans used to live. At Remembrance Day ceremonies, I recall him proudly wearing all his veterans.
Those yards represented past schoolmates, families long gone, the laughter of the kids disappeared.
Our school is now closed, an empty shell of learning.
There are some boarded up former stores ... old cafes ... businesses I loved to visit with my parents.
At an aunt's 75th birthday, the relatives gathered today. Familiar faces but we all joked about how we aged, changed, moved and yet returned for at least one day. The majority of us have strong farm roots or still farm. Most of the discussions were about agriculture: crops left still to be combined, how the hay crop was, how are the livestock.
Familiar topics we all understand.
The day ends. The last of the relatives drift away. Chores beckon, more chores to do tomorrow.
In a few days, I'll travel from Canada back to Oregon.
But for now I still linger, with memories and loved ones, and set my foot on soil I once tilled with my parents and brothers.
It's good to be home.

Agriculture

Of Mice and Men (and wine … )

If we’re looking for something to cheer us up, scientists have found a way to keep fat mice living longer, healthier lives.

Of course, we should be cheering on the news, especially if the research proves to be applicable to humans.

But if it isn’t — and the mice find out about this — we’re in trouble. And the last thing we want is obese, healthy mice with an attitude and ultimate new goal in life.

According to an Associated Press story, “Huge amounts of a red wine extract seemed to help obese mice eat a high-fat diet and still live a long and healthy life… The study by the Harvard Medical School and the National Institute of Aging shows that heavy doses of red wine extract lowers the rate of diabetes, liver problems and other fat-related ill effects in obese mice.

“Fat-related deaths dropped 31 percent for obese mice on the supplement, compared to untreated obese mice, and the treated mice also lived long after they should have, the study said.

“Astoundingly, the organs of the fat mice that got the wine extract looked normal when they shouldn’t have, said study lead author Dr. David Sinclair of Harvard Medical School. And Sinclair said other preliminary work still being done in the lab shows the wine ingredient has promise in lengthening the life span of normal-sized mice, too.”

The red wine extract is called resveratrol, and it’s found on the skins of grapes but also peanuts and some berries have it, according to the story.

Best of all, the mice — and presumably humans if more research proves to be correct — “get the good effects of cutting calories without having the pain of actually doing it.”

Forget jogging! Dieting! Suffering through all those other things hurled at people to lose weight and be healthier. Wine for everyone!

The researchers have been working their way up the research chain. So far, they have helped turn out healthier worms, fruit flies and mice, and next on their list is rhesus monkeys before presumably humans are scientifically tested.

When they’re looking for volunteers, there may be a line up. The mice were given doses of resveratrol that would “be the equivalent of an adult drinking 100 bottles of wine daily” said AP.

There might be some volunteers who just want smaller doses of the wine in bottles rather than be given the high dose extracts. Hold the hangover.

The winners of course are the grape producers who might have a new, healthy market for their product. And they’ll be the first to drink to that.

Link
http://www.nature.com/nature


Agriculture

Heads will roll over this one

This comes hot off the Associated Press wire.

Truck Spills 2 Tons of Pig Heads on Road

BERLIN (AP) -- A truck spilled two tons of pigs' heads on a road in western Germany, giving passing drivers a shock on the night before Halloween, police said Tuesday.

The accident happened Monday night after the truck turned off a highway in Herne, in the Ruhr region, police in Bochum said.

As the driver accelerated away from a traffic light, the door of his trailer opened, spilling the severed heads onto the road.

It took the fire service, helped by a fork-lift truck, an hour-and-a-half to load the heads back onto the truck.

I wonder where they were headed. Oh, is that a bad pun? Sorry, didn't mean to poke fun. Actually, yes I did. I'm glad I didn't have to clean that up, but that's pretty funny stuff there.

On a more serious note, here's some of the other agriculture-related items making the wires today.

***

Archer Daniels Midland is reporting that their first quarter profits have nearly doubled. Read the full story here. The story speculates that a recent executive hire may mean the agriculture company plants to venture even further into the ethanol game.

***

And speaking of ag-based energy, a Vermont college is now getting half of its energy from methane produced by farms in the region. You can read the story here. They may call my alma mater (Oregon State University) Moo U, but my old cow college can't hold a candle to Green Mountain College. Then again holding a candle may not be a great idea around all that bovine-supplied methane. You can read the college's take on getting energy from dairy cattle here.

***

If in your Halloween preparations you found that carving a jack-o-lantern hit a glitch when your pumpkin's stem popped off, an agriculture company is trying to fix that. A scientist with Monsanto is trying to breed a better, sturdier stem. Don't flip your lid until you read this.

***

OK, so I'm full of bad puns today — or mental methane, depending on your perspective.

Is it a linguistic trick or an amusing treat? You decide.

Happy Halloween.

Agriculture
News
Associated Press
Puns
Halloween

Wonder why the mail is slow these days?

On the farm, we rarely expected our mail to be delivered to the local post office on time.

After all, it was such a long route. The mailman originally loaded his truck 45 miles away, then started quite a long circular journey that involved a lot of little towns and a lot of miles before it was over.

The roads weren’t the best. There was pavement, gravel roads and the occasional dirt roads, and mud, snow, hail and dust storms were all hazards of the route.

Occasionally, slow moving farm equipment, cattle, deer or even elk or moose may cause a few unexpected delays. We would keep an eye on the road past our farm for the familiar mail truck, or sometimes we would even call the local postmaster to see if the mail had come.

We were especially anxious on the days that the weekly farm newspaper came late. That day mattered the most to us. After all, we didn't want those classifieds to be stale by the time they reached our kitchen table.

This was before cell phones, but even now in the world of cell phones our area has little cell phone coverage. So even if the driver wanted to say, “The moose isn’t budging, so I’m not sure what time I’ll get the truck around him,” there was no chance to call the post offices ahead. Also, usually the road conditions needed the driver to have both hands on the wheel and not holding a phone.

The city life spoils us. We expect mail 6 days a week, and seem lost when there is a holiday. We also expect our mail at a certain time. Whenever it’s late, our neighbors and us worriedly peer into the empty mailboxes and ask each other “well, did YOU get any mail today?”

During the last few weeks, the neighborhood had noticed that our mail is being delivered hours later than usual, and it seemed like with each day the length of time grew. Getting mail three hours later than usual was quite noticeable. Back on the farm during bad winter blizzards, we were lucky if the mail came through three days later.

But here in the city, we quizzed each other and looked for clues. At first we pondered whether it was a new delivery guy. No, same guy. Also, seemed to be the same route when we’d see the little truck in the neighborhood.

Finally, someone asked today at the post office what was going on. Was it serious? Did we need to do a formal complaint to someone higher up in the post office?

No, we were assured. The problem was … the election.

So many governments, politicians, special interest groups and others attempting to educate and influence voters had flooded the post office with their literature that it was slowing down the whole postal system and they were struggling to keep up with it all.

Surely the post office must be making a lot of money from this, correct?

Wrong. The post office said the bulk of the mail is going … at the bulk rate. It isn’t just my neighborhood that is being flooded with enough election literature to heat the house’s fireplace for the whole winter.

With that mystery solved, my neighborhood will return to more challenging questions that face us like how to catch the raccoons, possums, nutria and other critters visiting our yards at night.

Maybe we can barricade ourselves behind the mountains of mail.





Agriculture

Define ag … in 100,000 words or less

It has been more than four years since I first walked into the Capital Press building in Salem, met with Mike Forester, and walked out with a new line of work.
And this foray into agricultural journalism has meant a somewhat-late-in-life learning curve, quite steep at times. Uncomfortable at times. Dang near impossible at times. But never – never – has it been dull.
One thing we keep coming back to here in the newsroom has fascinated me: How do we define ag?
I don’t know how long that issue has been a subject of discussion around here, but in the past four years it has brought out some real concerns, some great laughs and some discernible changes in the Capital Press.

Pony up the news space

For instance: Are horses agriculture?
There was some real reluctance to extend our coverage to what some folks have long considered as pets. Well, that may be true here in the Willamette Valley, where most horses are pleasure animals.
But as we peered here and there, we discovered there are more than a few farms where draft horses – not tractors – pull the plows. And out in the ranch country to the east, horses are valuable employees as well as genial companions.
So if working horses are agriculture, how about pleasure horses? How about racehorses? How about saddle makers and harness makers and farriers and trainers and breeders?
(Biographical aside: My Granddaddy Brown was a harness maker back in Stillwater, Okla., until he saw that the internal-combustion engine was quickly overtaking the alfalfa-combustion horse. So he took his leather-working skills and opened up a shoe-repair shop, figuring folks would always need shoes. His motto: “Brown’s Shoe Shop – Where We’ll Save Your Soles And Heel Ya.”)
So horses have gotten their feet … hooves … in the agricultural door, and they have gotten their photogenic selves firmly entrenched in the pages of this newspaper. Often you’ll find a page with a “Horses” label at the top, and the annual Livestock special edition has a horse-focused section of its own.

Let ’er print

Is rodeo ag? I honestly didn’t see the connection until I went to cover a youth event: Rodeo Bible Camp, in Tygh Valley, Ore. A fellow there said something like, “I’m glad to see Capital Press covering rodeo. It’s a big part of agriculture.”
And it hit me: Half of “agriculture” is “culture.” What our readers love to do is an integral part of their culture.
How far we go with that often butts up against our main focus of production agriculture. Rodeo season coincides with a very busy part of the growing season. So it’s a balancing act, especially when nearly every county fair has a rodeo, and the 10-year-old barrel racer in Tarnation, Idaho, is just as much a part of the agri “culture” as the pro bull rider at the Pendleton Round-Up.

Decanting the crop

How about wine? Vineyards are certainly agriculture, and we’ve got grape ranches popping up all over our four-state coverage area. (“Yep, I’ve got about 500 head of Syrah out there, all fattened up and ready for market.”)
But for a long time, there was debate (never heated debate, not in this laid-back newsroom) over whether wine is ag.
If wine is a value-added product that comes out of a vineyard, then by that definition chewing gum is a value-added product from a mint field; and toothpicks, from a forest; and salmon, from irrigation runoff; and amber ale, from a hopyard … there’s no end to how far we journalists will carry a thing to make our point. Especially when we’re print journalists, not limited to the 30-minute TV news hole faced by our broadcast counterparts.
Back to wine: It seems we’ve taken the bottle in hand here at the Capital Press, covering everything from research, pests, irrigation and harvest (which is where the “traditional” definition of ag would end) to processing, bottling, labeling, marketing and international trade.
Maybe that’s the word we’re looking for: “traditional.” Are we going to stick with what was long considered agricultural? Or are we willing to look at it from every aspect we can find?
Well, this is our newspaper and we’re refining our working definition of ag as we go along, and we’re looking out for the folks who are our readers. If we go too far, we expect our readers to let us know that.
Please! Before my managing editor puts me on the toothpick beat!

Agriculture

More trick than treat

I don't have a lot of fond memories of Halloween trick-or-treating as a kid. Halloween just wasn't the same experience growing up out in the country in rural Eastern Oregon as it was for my classmates that lived in the nearby town of Echo.

While technically I didn't live on a farm, we lived out in the country surrounded by farmland. So it strikes me as ironic that all so many urban dwellers tend to equate Halloween with a rural feel of pumpkins and corn stalks and scarecrows — evoking all this rural imagery. Halloween wasn't a very big deal in our part of the country. At least not that I remember.

That's not to say there weren't attempts at trick-or-treating. But most of our neighbors were several miles down the road. So trick-or-treating meant hopping in the car and having mom drive several miles down the highway that went past our house and then sometimes a half mile or mile down a dirt-and-gravel road to read a neighbor's house.

There were no doorbells to ring. Barking dogs and a cloud of dust announce the pending arrival at someone at the door. And it didn't really matter if you wore a mask or not, you couldn't be anonymous. The neighbors all knew each other's cars (or rigs as we called them on Buttercreek).

"Oh, look Mike, it's the West boys come to trick-or-treat."

What fun is that when everyone can tell who you are in your costume? And who wants to trick-or-treat with their two kid brothers?

As my brothers and I were back in the car, pawing through our candy, and impatiently wanting to get to the next house to add to our sugar stash, Mom was still standing on the porch chatting with the neighbor lady. There's no such thing as a quick visit out in the country.

So, an hour of trick-or-treating would mean a journey of several miles and stops at maybe 3 or 4 houses. I soon learned you'd get more candy by staying home and eating all the leftovers from the candy Mom bought for trick-or-treaters than never showed up at our house. Some years, depending on the age of the offspring in a 5-10 mile radius, there would be no kids show up at all. And if I went to town with Mom on her shopping trip in late October I could help pick out the candy for the dish, which eventually found it's way into my private collection.

One year some neighbors up the creek had a great idea to get around the high-mileage trick-or-treat trips. They hosted a Halloween party for all the kids up and down the creek, complete with a haunted house and lots of activities, like bobbing for apples.

But beyond that, Halloween wasn't much fun for this country boy. I still don't get into it. So don't come trick-or-treating at my door kiddies. I'll probably be at the movies.

Agriculture
Halloween
Trick-or-treating
Rural life