"Don't contaminate your grill with anything less than a Pastures A Plenty brat!" This comment was overheard at the Slow Food Minnesota event at the Callister farm in SE Minnesota last Sunday, the 13th. It is bragging, I suppose, to mention it on the website, but we are extraordinarily proud of this brat and the hot dog, (both of them "No added Nitrite") because the spice recipe used to make them was devised by us, namely Josh and Cindy, who then found the additive free sausage base mix to use in the process. All this was done in response to a customer who noticed something on the label she did not like the looks of. The entire process took not more than three months. No one in the meat industry responds this fast! But we did. Try the brat!
Jim

Health care reform is, of course, critical to us farmers. We must buy individual policies at well above the group rate, or we must sponsor our own doctor visits and hospitalizations at rates fifty percent higher than are charged to insurance companies.

Most farmers, and I would be one of these, do not think much of insurance anyway, because we pay far too much of our incomes out in insurance to cover vehicles, crops, livestock, farm liability, fire, wind and on and on. This most often without seeing any payout. That is why this "reform" effort puzzles me. Without government involvement in paying for health care, we are left with the promises of a bunch of insurance and drug companies that they will not jack up prices too much, they will not kick us off when we are sick, they will not disallow payment for necessary care and so forth. Government supposedly will regulate this. Regulation didn't work very well on Wall Street, did it?

I don't think government will be able to decently regulate anything until we the people develop some pride in aspects of our character that don't have to do with accumulation of wealth and power. Then we can encourage and honor honest behavior in jour public servants and thus encourage a job well done.

Jim

Most notable about the Time article on cheap food is the statement about needing more people on farms. Has anyone ever heard before that more people are needed in any form of productive work in this economy? Such language is against the faith for the economists running our government and corporate systems. For them there is no place for people except as consumers, which is an animal something like a feedlot steer. Bottomless appetite.

Jim