August Fairs

August is fair month.  The grandchildren have been involved in county fairs.  Some of the younger ones had projects at the Brown County Fair in New Ulm and the older grandkids, here on the farm, were at the Kandiyohi County Fair.  Everyone worked hard on their projects and won several blue ribbons.  Granddaughter, Kirsten, won a 4-H state fair trip with her Ewe Lamb and will be there the first weekend.  The last weekend grandchildren, Jake, Andrew and Kirsten will go for the FFA State Fair Shows with their hogs and sheep.    Sunday, August 24th  at 11 am  Pastures A Plenty will be participating in the MN Cooks Event in Carousel Park near the grandstand.  This event has been going for over 10 years and from 9 am to 4pm every hour on the hour MN chefs and farmers will be on stage demonstrating and talking about local foods.    Hope to see you at the MN State Fair! 

cool

The cool nighttime temperatures for the last week or so, and predicted for another week are going to be a problem for the corn crop.  We can expect wet grain, I think, and perhaps a slightly reduced yield.  This shows the wisdom of diversifying a northern (or any) farm, making sure that the income streams in from a goodly variety of sources.  Nature runs her economy this way, using a great variety of plants and animals.  Diversity offers safety.

Jim

hysteria

Comes the word now from our professional governmental nannies that fist bumps, in the style of the somewhat younger (than me) set are a safer greeting than the old fashioned handshake.  I suppose this is because the palm carries more e-coli than the knuckle skin.  Somehow, it doesn't occur to these types that slowing down our homeless human drifting around across the globe, carrying with us our microbes as well as other fauna and flora would do more to arrest our drift toward serial epidemic hysteria than any amount of worry about which method of human greeting carries with it more risk.

And a butcher block came up yesterday in our endless conversation among ourselves here at Pastures.  I remembered one from my childhood sixty years ago that I greatly admired just for the amount of human effort that had been expended over it.  I claimed that it was sufficiently dished on the top from years of wear due to an endless series of knives cutting meat that it would hold without spilling a drinking glass of water.  Now, of course, such a tool is not allowed in any food production area due to the porousness of the wood.  Somehow, we do not worry about the integrity of the private inspectors hired by the chicken killing companies to substitute for the public inspectors they claim to no longer need.  Wood, in the service of cutting meat is suspect, but companies hiring their own inspectors is not.  Progress, I guess.

Jim