We use cookies to provide you with a better experience. By continuing to browse the site you are agreeing to our use of cookies in accordance with our Cookie Policy.
This article was #1 of the Top 25 most well-read articles on www.progressivedairy.com in 2012. to jump to the article. It was published in the November 21, 2011 issue. Click here for the full list of the Top 25.
When we put Leontien VandeLaar on the cover of our 2011 “Women in dairy” issue, we knew she had a powerful story – but we were blown away by just how many connected with the Indiana dairywoman.
The recent political debates over who is Christian and who is not, or who belongs to a cult and who does not, reminds me of Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels, wherein Gulliver finds himself drawn into a war between the Big Endians and the Little Endians.
When I was little, I sat on the armrest of the tractor while my father ran the TMR mixer. I asked him many things throughout the course of my childhood, but one of the questions I returned to the most was, “Why don’t farmers protest low milk prices?”
At this writing, the harvest season is here. The autumn temperatures and the cloudy days with slow drawn-out rains are right on schedule. I am home in Alma, Michigan, corn and soybean country, where harvest is underway. Most of the soybeans are harvested. Combines are working in corn fields.
It is hard to believe this is our final issue of 2011. Last year, we introduced our plans for a new Canadian edition at Canada’s Outdoor Farm Show in Woodstock, Ontario.
One year later, we returned to celebrate accomplishments made thus far and announce bigger plans for the future.
In some parts of the U.S., digesters are a four-letter word. I’ve heard about the good, the bad and the unsure outcomes from installing them. Few have been installed without some type of seed money invested or partnership created to set them up.
Post-Civil War, the nation’s industry rapidly grew and expanded throughout the continent. Telegraph lines linked every corner of the country, providing nearly instantaneous spread of news.
Railroads brought distant places within a few days’ train ride. Railroads required steel, coal and money. In the center of that expansion, geographically and financially, was Pittsburgh.
Pittsburgh’s most notable citizens included the contemporaries William Thaw (Pennsylvania Railroad), Andrew Carnegie (U.S. Steel), Andrew Mellon (banking) and Henry Frick (all three).
The Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration held a hearing on Oct. 4 that focused on the agricultural labor crisis and the existential threat American agriculture faces by efforts in the House to pass mandatory E-Verify laws without addressing the immigration status of the current agricultural labor force.
Mandatory E-Verify legislation, H.R. 2885, was passed out of the House Judiciary Committee on Sept. 21. Pending E-Verify legislation has also been introduced in the Senate (S. 1196).
Occasionally my work as a dairy magazine editor takes me to places that are exotic, like a trade mission to Dubai, or bumps me into famous people, like the interview I completed last week.
Dr. Peter Ostrum is currently a veterinarian in a mixed animal practice in New York's Black River Valley. You will recognize Dr. Ostrum as Charlie, the main child character from the original Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, starring Gene Wilder (1971).
RSS
