While I am on my GREEN rant, (yes Sue---definitely green, and not the sick kind of green, LOL)...Did you know that one acre of switchgrass, pelletized (like guinea pig pellets) is enough to heat the average American home for one year?

AND, it grows in poor soil, requires no pesticides or fertilizer. I am growing some in my front yard to prove it can be grown...same with the sunflowers, so maybe some one figures out it can be grown here. My sunflowers are feeding birds....too hard to shell!!!! (not all of my bright ideas work) Birds are happy.

Why, may I ask are we fooling around with wood and corn stoves when we can pelletize switchgrass? And yes, pellet stoves do use electricity, but can be run off a solar unit?

And sunflowers produce far more energy per acre than corn....it is a better option for biofuel...and they are PRETTY!

Thing is, you can take really good care of yourself and step off the curb and get nailed by a truck....so no need to go off the deep end worrying about mad cow...not in our generation anyway.

I see this as a matter of principle....if you are feeding this kind of bad meat to your most precious resource, your children....what kind of country are we turning into??? And you know what else....that CEO of that company will get fired if he is lucky and get a 100 million dollar golden parachute!

How do you get to those cherries before the birds do??? Sue

Cyclelops:

You almost had me ...until you said "we need the bugs".

And I almost lost it when you wrote about the chicken poo and the cow poo and where it goes.

You know, NOBODY EVER THINKS ABOUT WHERE THE FOOD COMES FROM!!!!

I truly believe this. We people in NYC, just go to our local supermarkets, pick up a packet of Perdue (hopefully they don't have antibiotics or hormones, at least that's what the guy on tv says". and we just take the food home and forget about it.

I bet if we had to live like the Amish day in and day out, we'd be a lot thinner and a lot healthier.

Bugs!!! yuck. lol

Yes tonight I was watching what that future millon ceo allowed
those workers to do to the poor cows ,who would'n stand up. Well
you know ceo,told them to do it,but the workers were fired,whoops
got caught on TV...Make the cows suffer,then pass the meat on to
are beautiful children...Bush is in Africa,he will not teach and pay
for condom's but will pay for those young Children Aid's med's
that was passed on from parents not having condom's.Where is
this world going,don't get me going there..This may have gone
to far,hope not...

I will be interested in hearing how your strawgrass works,the birds love
my sunflower seeds as well..I'm e-mailing my son in Min. about strawgrass,
and pelletts very cool. Sue

It's switchgrass.

Billye

oh shoot your right I'm wrong.. Hugs Sue

I am just growing a small patch...of switchgrass....it is useless. The only pelletizing companies are in Canada....LOL, I am not sending my little basket of switchgrass up there to get back 25 pellets.

Canada has several switchgrass pelletizing companies. We did wood and corn , which is not unreasonable, as we have wood and corn here in our state. However, you would think the great plains states, would get on the switchgrass bandwagon and build a switchgrass pelletizing plant and some switchgrass pellet burning stoves. Corn ethanol is king around here right now...for the time being.

It is just one small piece of a very large puzzle.

Oh--and the Amish---they are not that skinny....they make delicious noodles and CANDY. They have a lot of tooth problems. We have several Amish settlements in our state and I used to live in an area with a lot of them. (Contrary to popular belief, they ride in cars (yours) and they use phones (yours) and they even use power tools (yours) if building for you. They do use gas and oil, just no electric....and they do use outhouses. Some of them have huge, lovely homes....all white, but some of them are enormous...not all, but many. You can buy directly from them, many advertise their food on signs on the road, and they sell this cashew crunch stuff that is really really good.....I admire their self sufficiency, but, alas, I am not that 'devoted' and could not live without rubber tires or a computer.

Two decades and them some ago, one year I raised 175 chickens....I sold and bartered them, and butchered about 75 for myself. Hubby had to cut the heads off, I plucked them and gutted them. Never did it again. Stupid, massive undertaking. I bartered with local farmers for pork, beef and feed corn. I didn't have to buy feed, as the farmers gave me feed for chickens, even plowed up my garden for me, and plowed my driveway in winter. My older kids grew up on fresh milk.

I wanted to experience what it feels like to 'do in' your own food, so I appreciated it. So I learned it isn't that easy. Some folks have less emotional investment in animals than I, but it was hard for me. I 'hypnotized' each chicken before its demise and I could not watch the actual demise....You hypnotize a chicken by putting its head under its wing and rocking it rapidly....it goes limp, kinda passes out, so it doesn't know what is coming. Chickens do have personalities.

If I had chickens again...I would get layers and keep them for the two year life span and just, do them in at the end....and I would only have a dozen or so. Nothing is harder than hauling feed out, keeping water unfrozen, and cleaning up after animals when it is ten below zero. A lot of people who keep chickens do not overwinter them unless they 'force' laying. As light wanes, chickens stop laying....and you have to do some stuff to get them to 'molt' and then to lay....I don't know, I never did it....sounds too complex.

The chickens we raised were meant to be butchered between 8 to 12 weeks of age, as they were bred to get huge...their legs would not support the weight of the chicken beyond that age. They were not layers. I had layers but they didn't do all that well for me....probably because I did not know what I was doing...but I got a few eggs, enough to know they are really, really good.

A real egg from a free range chicken tastes totally different from a generic store bought egg. Home grown chicken really taste good. I have not found any store bought chicken to equal it.

This was back when there were more 'family' farms....now, there are far, far fewer family farms and just big 'corporate' farms. They are owned by the families that had enough resources to buy out the farmers that went under. This was also when our population was 200 million....now it is 360 million. Feeding more and more people on less and less land, will require some ingenuity.

On the bright side, due to organics and local markets, smaller family farms are re-emerging, but, at least one spouse must have a darn good job to survive on. It is hard to find any amount of acreage, near jobs....and you pay dearly for it. The more desirable the community, the more you pay for the land, of course.

We have some co-ops you can belong to and sell your foods to folks who enroll and pay the co-op....they get a box of in season veggies every week and the farmer member gets a small payment from the coop. We also have several nationally known organic brands that come from our state. So our state is actually at the forefront of the organic movement. It is not where it should be yet, but I think if the public demands it, it will get it.

But, Mel, it still involves poo. LOL.

People do not realize that there are acceptable levels of rat poo and rat hair in your goods....and yep, there always were, and we have survived.

BTW, I grew up a city girl!!! Both places have their advantages and disadvantages and I feel blessed to have experienced both...it has been kinda fun.

My gosh---I sound like my grandma when she would tell stories of the 'good old days'.

I'm trying to imagine myself killing a chicken. I'm trying to imagine myself doing ANY OF THE STUFF THAT YOU HAVE DONE!!

My god, you've certainly done a lot more interesting stuff than I ever have done in my entire life.

I feel like I should pack up my belongings, move to a farm and start rounding up chickens, chopping off their heads, and plucking the feathers.

Know why I can't do this?

Because one day last year, I was in a fish store not too far from my house.

I had always bought fresh fish that was laying on the ice. All nice and no fishy smell. Well, little did I know that this was NOT THE FRESHEST WAY TO BUY A FISH.

So I had not noticed that there were fish tanks WITH LIVE FISH swimming in them, right underneath the place where the fish were laying on the ice. The fish laying on the ice had been cleaned, no bones, no fins, no nothing.

So I walked in there and I was looking at the nice fish laying on the ice, deciding to buy either flounder or fillet of sole.

WELL!!!!! this chinese couple walks in, bends down and they are staring at the fish tanks. I followed where their eyes were looking and I exclaimed "oh, they have an acquarium in this store". Wow I exclaimed: "REALLY BIG FISH"Yeah, I'm that stupid!!!

So the people point to one of the fish and quicker than a jackrabbit, the guy behind the counter, picks up this live, flopping fish, and takes a mallet and bops him in the head. I just stood there and screamed.

I said 'what the hel* are you doing, you just killed that poor fish, oh my god".

The couple who picked out the fish didn't speak english so they didn't know what I was saying. The guy behind the counter, after bashing the fish's head in, took a long knife, beheaded the fish and filleted him right there on the spot. After composing myself (after all I had never seen anything murdered before), I simply began to comprehend that THIS WAS HOW PEOPLE BUY FRESH FISH. They pick out the fish, the guy kills the fish, and the fish is gutted and cleaned and you take it home.

I never in all my life had seen this and I was close to 60 at the time.

I'm telling you, people have no idea that this happens. I think people go to stores and say "oh, here's a nice piece of fish". They don't look around at the tanks and ultimately comprehend what's going on.

I left that day, came home and told Alan I saw a fish get murdered. He looked at me like I had lost my marbles.

Now, when I go to my local fish store, I see all the tanks around me. I have developed a friendship with the fish store people (it's a brand new fish store.).

So when I go there as they are opening up, I usually go to the Red Snapper or the mackeral and I say "Lam, what's good today"? He goes, "No Melody, you want what is coming in the store". And I get the first delivery of the morning.

So I guess I'm getting the second best thing to picking a fish out of a tank and having Lam bop it on the head.

I really don't think I can ever do that. lol

C? Don't get me started on the whole 'ethanol thing'!!! So short sighted and has such wide spread effects on the whole food industry! Sad backwards thinking? Lets recycle all that french fry oil and use that instead, it'll be like used tires or plastic bags, folks get them for free, process them into something useful and then can charge premium prices which some folks gobble up because it's 'green'. Melody, ever watch the show 'Dirty Jobs'? Theres one on recycling poo into plant pots, among other things. Good farmers compost their poo and put back on their fields, it's important to revitalize or at least, maintain good land and crops.

As for where food comes from? I do think there has been a disconnect between the cow, pig, chicken or fish to the table for decades. Frozen & pre-processed foods disassociate us from the whole 'process'. I remember at age 6 or 7 being taken to 'the turkey farm' to see turkeys before Thanksgiving. Birds alive and on the run really. All I remember is the smell of turkey poo! It is not a nice poo smell. Some poos actually DO smell nice, at least to me. I grew up 20 miles from the Empire State Building and there were farms then. Not now tho.

As for how animals are treated when being butchered? I believe that some 'plants' ' managements simply do not care-to a degree, it's all been a well calculated risk [of getting caught or creating some 'epidemic']. I suspect they will now be a bit more careful. This will probably be the second or third plant to take a risk and go bankrupt in the process. FDA clearly states that any animal that cannot walk MUST be tested and not fully processed until test results come back-they have almost the same # of meat inspectors now as they did in 1975 or so!
It is a mark of a good consumer to KNOW how this stuff in going from 'cow' to 'meat' should be done. Usually it's lesser grades of meat/poultry stuffs that are affected. That's why they are lesser grades. I'm sure meat industry associations can provide information about the 'ideal' quality controls. Or, buy Kosher?
While we all ponder on all the supplements we need to replace what is missing either in our diets, lifestyles or due to medical issues, we really are as GOOD as what we eat! Or, for some, can get into ourselves. Wish this all didn't have to be so. Enough of my soapbox! Good eating however you can achieve it! - j

Mel ha,we didn't chop off there heads ,you went out in the yard grabbed
awhole of there neck spun them around ,you had there head in your
hand and the chicken 's body is flying all around the yard...My eyes
got very big first time I saw it to.. But when you up early,help feed the
hands,then help collect the chicken eggs,they have been known to
peck..Then run to the dairy barn,before the machines..and so on
your hungry for that chicken,and home made biscuits..Hated that
outhouse,at night snakes,by the chicken coop too..Come right up
out of holes in the ground. ha They had to light the area up.
Poo not so bad and you didn't need anything to sleep,at night.,
mom snake!!!! Hugs Sue