nifty site

A local friend turned me on to this -- if you're looking for local, organic or heritage-crop foods, farmer's markets, and so on, a great resource is the LocalHarvest site. It looks like the information is somewhat skewed towards New England and the upper Midwest, and judging by my area, they're missing a lot of farms, etc (probably all the non-computer-savvy folks), but there's still definitely a lot of good info there.

From their site:

About LocalHarvest
LocalHarvest maintains a definitive and reliable "living" public nationwide directory of small farms, farmers markets, and other local food sources. Our search engine helps people find products from family farms, local sources of sustainably grown food, and encourages them to establish direct contact with small farms in their local area. Our online store helps small farms develop markets for some of their products beyond their local area.

And this clearly expained rationale for supporting your local farms and farmer's markets (besides fresher, tastier food):

Why Buy Local?
Most produce in the US is picked 4 to 7 days before being placed on supermarket shelves, and is shipped for an average of 1500 miles before being sold. And this is when taking into account only US grown products! Those distances are substantially longer when we take into consideration produce imported from Mexico, Asia, Canada, South America, and other places.

We can only afford to do this now because of the artificially low energy prices that we currently enjoy, and by externalizing the environmental costs of such a wasteful food system. We do this also to the detriment of small farmers by subsidizing large scale, agribusiness-oriented agriculture with government handouts and artificially cheap energy.

Cheap oil will not last forever though. World oil production has already peaked, according to some estimates, and while demand for energy continues to grow, supply will soon start dwindling, sending the price of energy through the roof. We'll be forced then to reevaluate our food systems and place more emphasis on energy efficient agricultural methods, like smaller-scale organic agriculture, and on local production wherever possible.

Cheap energy and agricultural subsidies facilitate a type of agriculture that is destroying and polluting our soils and water, weakening our communities, and concentrating wealth and power into a few hands. It is also threatening the security of our food systems, as demonstrated by the continued e-Coli, GMO-contamination, and other health scares that are often seen nowadays on the news.

These large-scale, agribusiness-oriented food systems are bound to fail on the long term, sunk by their own unsustainability. But why wait until we're forced by circumstance to abandon our destructive patterns of consumption? We can start now by buying locally grown food whenever possible. By doing so you'll be helping preserve the environment, and you'll be strengthening your community by investing your food dollar close to home. Only 18 cents of every dollar, when buying at a large supermarket, go to the grower. 82 cents go to various unnecessary middlemen. Cut them out of the picture and buy your food directly from your local farmer.

living in the woods

My morning started with a capsule summary of my world:

Walk, coffee cup in hand, to the end of my road with F to get him off to the school bus on time. Drizzly, and chilly (50 degrees) enough to toss on a good Irish wool sweater. Ah-yup, definitely very Irish weather this week so far, bringing naturally to mind sweetly melancholy trad. Irish tunes and WB Yeats poems in my head. Come back, find the cats playing with a mortally wounded, but not yet dead, mouse, probably driven inside by the wet weather. Go cats (mice in the house is *not* a good thing), but now I have to take said wounded beastie out into the woods and dispatch it humanely (vexing the cats, but being cats, and well-fed, their interest waned as it started to move less). Swing by the stream which is running very high from all the rain, thinking about how lovely it is, and also where best to put in a small microhydro turbine with minimal disruption to the brook trout and other wildlife. Hike to the part of the land over by the "dolmen" where such things (burials, offerings, etc) are done, apologize to the mouse, do the deed, head back towards the house. As I approach our road, I hear a vehicle, which means someone's coming down our drive (otherwise, all you hear is wind and stream), intercept FedEx truck half-way down our road, get a medium-sized package from him, feel unaccountably irritated as he drives off that this truck, bringing stuff I had in fact ordered, actually came down our road and disturbed the peace and quiet. Note that I haven't left my land since my drumming session last Monday night and wonder at how very easily I could become a serious hermit ;> Walk back to the house, note with some excitement that the box is from Bailey's -- some Kevlar chainsaw chaps, a dozen felling wedges, and a videotape on horse logging (using teams of 2-4 draft horses with Amish-style harnesses to pull logs out of the woods -- not for now, but maybe in a few years...). I think I have all the wood for building and heat that I'll ever need right here, just from the deadfall, but I have to get it from wherever it falls to where it needs to go. That's tractor work now, but tractors eat diesel and poop pollutants and used oil, while draft horses eat things I can grow, and poop good fertilizer. I notice with pleasure that the box was addressed to me at "CC Hermitage Farm" (CC is Casa Chaos). No, not a farm yet, unless you count trees, kids and cats as crops, but, perhaps not too far down the line... Dive into the day's writing work, so I can finish in time to install the new oven, take a walk up to the barn, and maybe build a nice fire in the fireplace before everyone starts coming home from work and school and the house gets full and noisy again ;>

un-frickin-believable

Clearly, these are the kinds of balanced, unbiased judges with which Bush & Co would like to flood the judiciary. Sounds like a potential Supreme Court nominee to me...

(thanks to idragosani for the link)

Judge: Parents can't teach pagan beliefs

Note that neither parent involved in the divorce proceeding asked for this -- the judge decided to impose the order all on his own, for "the good of the child." Amazing.