a man and his hoe

every day is a good day

Tag: Agriculture

  • What Laying Hens Deserve

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    This is how one hen lays her egg. Afterwards, she spends a few minutes doing a little nesting, and then she leaves the nest. Each hen is different. Some leave the nest soon after laying their eggs. Others will settle down afterwards and sit for awhile.

    What they all need are quiet, soft, clean nests with plenty of straw. What no hen deserves is to be locked in a wire cage, unable to be outdoors and enjoy the sun and rain, or unable to lay her egg in a soft nest.

    What no hen deserves is to be housed with tens of thousands of other hens in crowded laying houses, where there is no peace and quiet, no quiet walks in the woods, no hunting for food through tall grass, and no sunshine.

  • How Apple Pie Starts

    This is how apple pie starts – as a small flower. It’s late April and the apple trees are blooming several weeks early. Soon, wild bees will pollinate these flowers, and all summer long the apples will soak in the sunshine and grow until they are ready, in early fall, to be eaten right off the tree or made into apple pie. From now into fall, the air buzzes with the sound of wild bees. According to Wild Bees as Alternative Pollinators, by the Penn State:Fruit Research and Extension Center, there are “3,500 bee species other than the honey bee which are also important pollinators of most specialty crops in the U.S.” 80% of bees are ground nesting, so it’s critical to have undisturbed land to provide habitat for these bees to thrive.

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    The elderberry bushes are also in full bloom. Come June, they will provide plenty of red fruits for wild birds to eat.

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    LuckyBillyImelda

    The garlic patch is nearly knee high. Lucky, Billy, and Imelda are looking for something to eat along the edges of the garlic patch. Lucky is the most curious hen at a man and his hoe®. No matter where we go, she is sure to come along to see what we are doing. And Imelda seems to have been smitten with Billy, the five year old rooster. Wherever he goes, she follows. At a typical egg or poultry farm, hens and roosters never get to develop these romances. It’s one of the benefits of being a chicken at a man and his hoe®.

    Articles on wild bees:

  • Far, Far Away

    These are the train tracks I pedal across nearly every day as I go fetch the mail, deliver eggs, and make other errands. And further down this page is the quiet driveway to a man and his hoe®, the forest floor blanketed with bleeding hearts, and a vegetable bed with fresh greens. Idyllic scenes far, far away from the heavily contaminated farmland of China, or so you would think.

    But everyday, along those steel ribbons of railway, which just a few miles away, wind along the breathtaking Chuckanut Coast with stunning views of Guemes, Cypress, Orcas, and Lummi islands, trains more than a mile long haul coal, carved out of the ground in far away Wyoming. The trains take the coal to Vancouver, British Columbia, where it is loaded onto ships and taken across the Pacific Ocean to China. There it is burned in coal-fired power plants which billow out toxic clouds, which then poison the land which grows the garlic and fruit trees and many other crops which then get shipped to the US to be eaten by many of us.

    And someday, all the CO2 emissions, burning that coal pours into the atmosphere, will warm the earth enough to cause the sea nearby to rise so much that these tracks will be under water. When that happens, there will no longer be any coal trains traveling through this idyllic countryside.

    We know all these terrible things we are doing to the earth. But for some reason we can’t stop destroying the only home we have. We keep saying we can’t afford to stop our polluting ways, but when we read that nearly twenty percent of China’s farmland is now toxic, how can we justify such destruction? There is no economic activity worth destroying a fifth of a country’s farmland.

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  • Contaminated Farmland

    Today there were many articles like this one from NPR: China Admits That One-Fifth Of Its Farmland Is Contaminated. The details of the report by the Chinese government are stunning.

    The report, issued by the ministries of Environmental Protection and Land and Resources, says 16.1 percent of the country’s soil in general and 19.4 percent of its farmland is polluted with toxic heavy metals such as cadmium, nickel and arsenic. It was based on a soil survey of more than 2.4 million square miles of land across China, spanning a period from April 2005 until December 2013. It excluded special administrative regions Hong Kong and Macau.
    In a dire assessment, the report declares: “The overall condition of the Chinese soil allows no optimism.”

    Earlier this year we saw images of large portions of China smothered with heavy smog as in this article by Scientific American.

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    When reading reports regarding pollution or global warming, some often comment that the report is being alarmist and imply that we should disregard the report. This report by the Chinese government is more than alarming, it is calamitous. But will things change tomorrow? Will the industries and coal power generators that are causing the Chinese farmland to become toxic stop polluting tomorrow? And so ever increasing amounts of Chinese farmland will become toxic.

    So what does that have to do with me living many thousands of miles away from China? For one, the air pollution in China doesn’t stay there. For one, according to The Smithsonian, some of that air pollution is reaching the west coast of the US where I live. Two, the US imports some four billion dollars of food products from China every year. Here are some numbers from the US Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service, these are a listing of food products whose imports from China exceeded $350 million in 2011:

    Agricultural Product US Dollar Value Imported from China in 2011
    Fish $2,646,757,166
    Fish Fresh Or Prep $1,817,861,314
    Shellfish $804,745,740
    Vegetables & Preps $626,224,026
    Fruit Juices $547,044,940
    Grains & Feeds $527,784,428
    Fruits & Preps $518,397,511
    Apple Juice $504,059,866
    Fruits – Prep Or Pres $499,317,088
    Other Fruits – Prep Or Pres $478,258,430
    Animals & Prods $449,291,071
    Vegetables-Prep/Pres $382,588,727
    Feeds & Fodders, Ex Oilcake $372,015,556

    The US imports a huge amount of agricultural products from China, and if nearly twenty percent of the farmland in China is contaminated, what percentage of the agricultural products imported from China are also contaminated with heavy metals and other toxins?

    Enjoying a beautiful day here at a man and his hoe® it’s easy to think this is a problem that doesn’t affect me, but it affects all of us, not matter how far, far away.

  • First Post Child Rearing Egg

    Hens lay special eggs at times. There is the very first egg they lay, which is a tiny egg. There is the first egg they lay after their winter lull. These eggs also tend to be smaller. And then there is the first egg they lay after raising chicks. And today this mother laid her first egg after raising chicks for three weeks. That is on the early side. Most hens take more than a month before they go back to laying eggs.

    I get the sense that this mother may not be raising her chicks much longer. They are getting very independent and at times during the day they stray tens of feet from her. When she was up on the nest laying her egg, her five chicks huddled together and waited patiently for her to come back down.

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