A week ago I walked out to my grape arbor behind the barn, to harvest the few basketfuls of delicious Concord grapes that grow there every year. Unfortunately, there were no grapes left on the vines! Although I had been inspecting the young grape clusters regularly all summer, (“counting my grapes before they were harvested”) and even though there had been green grape clusters developing as recently as three weeks earlier, here I was at harvest time with no grapes. It was mystifying.

Could it have been birds? Or a strange fungus? Did the wet weather bring them down? Could it have been some opportunistic children, discovering the grapes in the cool shade on a hot day? My pruning efforts? I’m not a grape-growing expert and only an amateur gardener, but whatever happened to those grapes made me reflect once again on the struggles of farming -- working with the vagaries of nature to produce food. My own successful and unsuccessful gardening efforts always give me a renewed deep appreciation for the skill of farmers, who produce food for the rest of us to eat year after year.

Innovators are coming up with new ways to compost cow carcasses such as the composting equipment developed by DAR, a family-run company in Myerstown, Pa. Read about it in Lancaster Farming on page E2 of last week’s special section insert, Ag Innovations.

Watch 10 days of ant-digging compressed into 40 seconds on this little homemade ant farm. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pb7MYA1Go8

- from Ag Scene guest blogger: Anne Harnish