Don't mess with his sheep. And don't be riding your bike past his flock, or hiking too close, and don't be a coyote or a bear or anything smaller than a raging bull elephant. 
     Sam Robinson, a sheepherder like his father and grandfather before him, uses white Great Pyrenees dogs, like the one shown here, to keep his 1,300 sheep safe from predators. He pastures his flock on grassland leased from the Army near Camp Hale, Colorado. That state has become a mecca for whose lives are all about outdoor recreation.
     However, if you happen to run - or in the case of Renee Legro, bike - into a flock of sheep being guarded by dogs, you could be in trouble.
     Legro, who lives in Eagle, a town near Camp Hale, was participating in a bicycle race when she was attacked by Robinson's dogs, who saw as a threat to their flock. Her ER doc said he lost count of the number of stitches he used to sew Legro back up.
     Although Colorado law exempts livestock owners from lawsuits based on dog bites, the Legros successfully sued the Robinsons for harboring dangerous dogs. There was anger on both sides, and both sides had their sympathizers. It's an interesting story about the right to ranch vs. the right to recreate. Los Angeles Times writer Nicholas Riccardi wrote about the conflict in today's edition. You can read it here:  http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-and-world/la-na-sheepdog-attack27-2009nov27,0,7742604.story


     Getting charged up over electric rates, a group of farmers from Lebanon County met recently to talk about pooling their buying power to lower their electric bills. Organized by the Lebanon Valley Chamber of Commerce, the meeting was prompted by the impending removal of rate caps on electric generation that have been in place in the region since 1996. Lancaster Farming correspondent Sue Bowman was at the meeting and prepared a report for this week's issue. You can also read her story here:  http://www.lancasterfarming.com/node/2406


     What? You stayed home today? And you didn't turn on your TV? Well, here's what you missed: http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/black-friday-begins-count-to-x-mas/65j4w4r

     If you're climbing the walls to harvest your  strawberries, lettuce and chives, then you're part of the newest trend in urban farming. Green Living Technologies in Rochester, N.Y., is expanding their successful green roof business into a purveyor and installer of edible walls.
     George Irwin, CEO and company founder, got the idea for edible walls after his young son and daughter asked him to plant lettuce seeds in a  2'x2' panel headed for a green roof project.
     Irwin was skeptical, but he planted the seeds. And got a bumper crop of lettuce. Now his company has built edible walls in New York, Los Angeles, Detroit and other locations. The panels of either stainless steel or aluminum, are expensive, about $125 a square foot, but they can work in areas where space is tight. At a homeless shelter in Los Angeles, for example, clients tend a six-foot-high, 30-foot-long living wall that produces, among other crops, tomatoes, cucumbers and baby watermelons. 
     Watermelons? Just how "baby" are they, I wonder.
     New York Times reporter Ken Belson wrote about living walls, and you can read his story here:  http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/19/business/energy-environment/19WALLS.html?scp=1&sq=green%20wall%20rochester&st=cse 

     What if there's a light at the end of the tunnel, and then there's another tunnel? That's the question Manheim, Pa., dairyman Steve Hershey asked the audience at the monthly Ag Issues Forum sponsored by the Lancaster Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
     He said that while he and his two brothers are in fairly good shape, it's only partly because they sold a farm in 2009 to reduce their debt load and expenses.
     Two other speakers at the Forum, John Frey from the Center for Dairy Excellence, and Lowell Fry, an ag lender with Fulton Bank, agreed that the dairy picture is grim and nobody knows for sure when it's going to get better. One thing they all agreed on - not everybody is going to make it. There's a story about the meeting by yours truly in our current edition.


     Talk about fouling out...  http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/marriage-proposal-rejected-at-basketball-game/83621A661DA53E6B11E283621A661DA53E6B11E2










     

   Saying he's "...tired of buying the same horse twice," U.S. Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and other Obama administration officials have pledged to not offer food aid to North Korea as an inducement to sit down for nuclear disarmament talks with Russia, China, Japan, South Korea and the U.S.

    In the past, food aid has been offered on condition that the North Koreans talk, the aid has been delivered, and the North Koreans reneged. It happened 13 times during the Bush and Clinton administrations.

    But not this time, the administration is saying. Talk or go hungry. South Korea has already gotten tough on food aid to their neighbors to the north. Under President Lee Myung-bak's direction, the south in 2007 ended a decade-long run of food shipments, depriving the north of a million tons of food a year, and enough fertilizer to let North Korea grow an additional half-million tons on its own.

    Kim Jong Il, North Korea's "Dear Leader" can never be counted on for a rational reaction, but maybe it'll work if he ponders the idea of his countrymen starving to death. Or maybe not.

    Another question is this: Can we be counted on to withhold food as we watch North Korea's children starving to death?

    We already know the answer to that one.

    There's a story about the situation in yesterday's Washington Post by reporter Blaine Harden. You can read it here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/18/AR2009111801532.html

    Privy bags come in from the cold tomorrow at a first-ever in the world/universe museum exhibit in Ephrata, Pa. The outhouse, long a staple of rural and small-town existence was no place for decoration until young women from Lancaster County developed this unique way to demonstrate their needlework skills. Privy bags were intended to hold a supply of paper and the occasional Sears catalog, but many of them never made it out to the back of the house. They looked too nice. Anne Harnish, Lancaster Farming food and family features editor, visited the Theodore R. Sprecher Museum for an advance look at the exhibit, and did a story for the issue due in your mailbox tomorrow.

A Hail Mary for the record books: http://rivals.yahoo.com/ncaa/football/blog/dr_saturday/post/-Trick-or-panic-NAIA-college-completes-the-w?urn=ncaaf,203690

     I signed up for Facebook's Farmville today, and it doesn't look like a whole lot of fun. I am in a definite minority. There are more than 65 million Facebookers signed onto the Farmville site. They do things like grow and market a strawberry crop in four hours. They exchange gifts. They help each other out - harvesting, planting, branding calves, slaughtering chickens, hacking rattlesnakes to pieces and hanging cattle rustlers.

     Actually, I don't know if any of that's true, because I don't have time, REALLY, to play massively online games (is that a MOG?), and I suspect that few of the roughly 960,000 actual u.s. FARMERS HAVE TIME TO DELVE INTO TIMESUCKEY COMPUTER GAMES.
     dON'T GET ME WRONG. i LOVE COMPUTERS. rEALLY. BUT IF I SPEND TIME ON MY COMPUTER, I NEED TO BE EITHER DOING SOMETHING USEFUL OR LEARNING HOW TO DO SOMETHING USEFUL. lIKE, IF YOU'RE A MECHANIC, DO YOU PUNCH OUT AND THEN GO JUGGLE YOUR WRENCHES?
     SOMETIMES THE LEARNING PART IS FRUSTRATING.
     DID YOU NOTICE, FOR EXAMPLE, THAT THE COLOR OF THE TYPE IN THIS POSTING IS WEIRD? AND THAT IT'S ALL IN CAPITAL LETTERS? AND THERE'RE SOME STRANGE THINGS GOING ON WITH THE SIZES OF THE TYPE? i DIDN'T TRY ANY OF THAT. aND YOU'RE NOT SUPPOSED TO POST IN ALL CAPS BECAUSE  

     IT'S JUST LIKE SHOUTING! IT'S RUDE!

     hOWEVER, TODAY WHEN i SIGNED ON TO BLOGSPOT, IT WOULDN'T LET ME TYPE IN UPPER AND LOWER CASE LETTERS. I DON'T KNOW WHY. I TRIED TO FIGURE IT OUT. EVERYTIME I COME HERE, I GET A NEW SURPRISE AND USUALLY I CAN FIGURE OUT A WAY AROUND IT. BUT TODAY, AFTER SPENDING SOME ANNOYING TIME ON FARMVILLE, AND THEN COMING OVER HERE TO BLOGSPOT AND MORE FRUSTRATION, I FIGURED, I'M JUST GOING TO DO IT THIS WAY. MAYBE I'LL HAVE BETTER LUCK TOMORROW.

     I'M NOT THE ONLY ONE, BY THE WAY, NOT TOTALLY ENCHANTED WITH FARMVILLE. THE FACEBOOK SITE CALLED "NOT PLAYING FARMVILLE" HAS 1.6 MILLION FOLLOWERS, ABOUT DOUBLE THE NUMBER OF ACTUAL FARMERS. MAYBE I'LL MESS AROUND IN FARMVILLE FOR A BIT LONGER, SEE IF I CAN CATCH THE MAGIC. I MIGHT EVEN TRY TO SEND YOU A GIFT.

     I'LL BE BRINGING IT 'ROUND IN A SPREADER.

     Warren Buffet's new train set cost a mere $26.3 billion. Buffett has Montana farmers worried, and he has environmentalists scratching their heads. Buffet's train set is called the Burlington Northern Santa Fe line and it has a virtual rail monopoly in Montana. The company owns 90 percent of the tracks in Big Sky country, and has tended in the past to act the way you would expect a monopoly to act.
     When diesel prices went up over the past two years, shipping rates for a bushel of wheat or barley went up, sometimes as much as 20 cents overnight. When diesel prices fell earlier this year, so did the cost to ship a bushel of grain. But it took awhile - four months, Allen Merrill, president of the Montana Farmers Union, and it didn't come down very far. A mere two cents.
     And the environmentalists? Well, sure, trains use less fuel per ton mile than trucks. But Burlington Northern's car are filled mostly with coal. So you're using a fuel-friendly method to move mountains of one of the world's biggest pollutants. That's almost as complicated a calculus as cap-and-trade.
     Merrill and his fellow growers are hoping Buffett will pay them a visit and listen sympathetically to their concerns.
     A couple of posts by Wall Street Journal blogger Michael Corkery outlined the concerns of farmers and environmentalists. You can read them here http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/11/04/maybe-buffett-just-likes-playing-with-trains/ and here http://blogs.wsj.com/deals/2009/11/04/big-issues-with-burlington-northern-in-big-sky-state/

     Thieves have been hitting farm equipment dealers hard in recent weeks, with a couple of Pennsylvania dealers reporting losses of $100,000. According to Dave Close, operations manager for the Northeast Equipment Dealers Association, they are currently cooperating with a dozen police departments and 30 or 40 dealers who've been robbed. A surveillance camera caught these images of a tractor trailer pulling into a dealership and apparently making off with some pricey equipment. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres interviewed  area dealers about the situation, and prepared a report for tomorrow's edition.

     When chickens go bad, people can act like dumb clucks. http://www.bing.com/videos/watch/video/when-chickens-go-bad/uf7f2sdc

     

     If Sam Mahon ever asks if you want a cup of coffee, say, "I think I'd rather have tea." Mahon is a sculptor in Wellington, New Zealand, who recently polished off a likeness of Nick Smith, the country's environment minister. Mahon's medium was dried cow manure from an organic dairy farm. The Associated Press story about the Nick Smith bust didn't go into much detail about the artist's method except to say that he first ground his medium in a coffee grinder.

     Mahon's starting point with the piece was his belief that Smith isn't doing enough to reduce dairy farm pollution. Mahon listed his artwork on TradeMe, a New Zealand auction web site. The item drew a torrent of comments, and a spirited bidding war. "Boxerlady" earned the right to put Nick Smith's head on her mantle with a winning bid of $3,080 of New Zealand's dollars, or $2,200 US.
     According to Mahon, he mixed the manure with resin and polished it with beeswax so it looks like bronze. It doesn't smell and should last forever, he said. And it's hollow. Which he says is fitting.
     Smith took the "tribute" with good humor, but called it crap art. And the picture that accompanies this posting? Yep. That's the straight poop on Nick Smith.
     And about that coffee grinder....
     A bidder asked Mahon if he still uses it for its intended purpose. Here's what he said:
     "yes. But we live in an old flour mill, and tainted coffee is small beans to the fact that we have a resident rat population who seem to think they are paying the rates. One walked past two nights ago while i was watching Friends. He was shuffling a bar of soap across the floor. I asked my partner if she would mind terribly if i shot him (the rifle is always close at hand:You know, dairy farmers; Ku Klux Klan) She said no, that it would wake the baby. Tainted coffee? No big deal."

     One way to deal with climate change could be to plant more crops, according to a study by researchers from Purdue University and the universities of Colorado and Maryland. According to their report, conversion to agriculture results in cooling, while conversin from agriculture generally results in warming. Urbanization and conversion to bare soild have the largest warming impacts. Their report is summarized in the current edition of Lancaster Farming.
      Waterbeds for cows? Next thing you know they'll be watching reruns of "HappyDays."
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vw5Gko78Y0


 

     






"A Song for the Horse Nation"  should have museum visitors singing the praises of Smithsonian Institution curator Emil Her Many Horses, a member of the Ogalala Lakota nation. The 98 artifacts in the exhibit include the horse mask shown here.
     There's also a narrative about the history of the horse in the New World, which begin and ends before there even was a New World. Originally native to the American continent, horses became extinct there. They were reintroduced first by the Spanish, the by the French, the Dutch and the English.
     The traveling exhibits opens for an eight-month stay at the National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, after which it will move to the Smithsonian until 2013. Then it is expected too tour the country.
     You can read more about the exhibit in the Mid-Atlantic Horse section in the Lancaster Farming edition due in your mailbox tomorrow. Or there's an online story you can read here:   http://blog.nmai.si.edu/main/a-song-for-the-horse-nation/
     Ohio voters on Tuesday cast a decisive vote for the establishment of an animal care standards board that will determine minimum standards of care for farm-raised animals. The vote was 64 percent in favor of a board, and 36 percent against. The board would consist of agricultural, consumer and technical members. For the full story, read the Lancaster Farming issue due in your mailbox tomorrow, or read the article by staff writer Chris Torres here: http://www.lancasterfarming.com/node/2370
     Baby has her cousin over for lunch.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kH8MIKni3Dg






     

     French farmers are always up in the air about something. But this is something they're happy about. It's a service that lets them analyze soil quality from orbiting satellite imagery. According to an article in the Nov. 5 edition of The Economist, a company called Sevepi provides detailed analyses several times a year of hectare-sized (about 2.5 acres) areas for about $15. Precise prescriptions for growing crops can be obtained quickly, and less expensively than with traditional methods, by measuring electromagnetic radiation reflected from farmland. 
    The spectrum of this radiation can reveal, with surprising precision, the properties of the soil, the quantity of crop being grown, and the levels in those crops of chlorophyll, various minerals, moisture and other indicators of their quality. If recent and forecast weather data are added to the mix, detailed maps can be produced indicating exactly how, where and when crops should be grown. To read the full article, click here http://www.economist.com/sciencetechnology/displaystory.cfm?story_id=14793411

     An NPR business reporter interviewed a specialty glass manufacturer last Friday morning as I was driving to a PASA conference in Chambersburg, Pa. The business owner is against the ropes. A collapsed economy took away his market - replacement windows for existing commercial and institutional buildings, and new product for new construction. At one time, there were 80 workers at his plant, operating the towering and expensive machines he needed to produce for his market.  He's going to hang on, he hopes, until business picks up. But he's never going to get big again, he said. Instead of 80 people, he'll got back to 15, tops.
     When I started writing about agriculture, way back in the last century, the  mantra you heard over and over again, was "Get big or get out." Some of the guys I knew, back in the day, got big AND got out, and not of their own free will.
      Sometimes I think in agriculture even when we know the history we tend to repeat it. Maybe the times they aren't achanging.


     For me, this video laid an egg.      http://www.metacafe.com/watch/1439023/funny_chicken_video/

     

     You absototally need one of these credit cards. It comes with a concierge. That means that if you are anywhere in the world, and need to know where to pick up a pound or two of pate de foie gras (which is French - without the accents - for "chopped liver from a grossly abused goose"), then whoever answers the phone in New Delhi will help you find a source for your favorite mean meat. You might be on your own, though, if you need your pate purveyor to add a little lard and some truffles to your precious little market bag, hand-knotted of the finest hemp by a deserving mother in some tropical fair-trade enclave.
     Or maybe you're not in the market for pate. Maybe you need new inflations, a set of Tingley's for the ones the pig chewed, a 10-gallon drum of WD-40, or a tube of rust converter for your Sunday-go-to-meeting F-150.
     Call your concierge. Or if your barn help calls in sick some afternoon - call New Delhi. Maybe they'll send Ashley Shelton, their spokespersperson, whoever that is. All I know is Ashley must be a heckuva' guy and in the top one percent of all the people in America, because only the best of the best get to carry the Black Card. And for only $495 a year. Which is only slightly more - $495, in fact - than you pay for your regular card which doesn't even come close to having a concierge.
     Oh, and did I mention that the card is black because it's made with carbon? Actual precious-grade carbon that could be diamonds with enough pressure and time? But you don't have to wait a million or two years for your black card to pay off. And it's because that carbon is sequestered. So you know where I'm going with this, right? 
     I'm thinking cap and trade, baby! Cap. And. Trade.
     So what are you doing just sitting there reading this? Get out your checkbook. Make one out for $495. Send it in. You say you're worried about not being among "the best?" 
     Hey. You're a farmer, right?
     What could be better?
     For more information about this incredible offer, click here  www.youvegottabekidding.com  Or you could just Google Visa Black Card.

     
     If you want to race your goat in next year's Falmouth. Goat Race, you'll need an entry fee of $4 and you'll need a goat. Fido's owners here didn't quite get the goat message, but a good time was had by all anyway, because the point of the 30th annual Falmouth Goat Race was for a good time to be had by all. Because, when you really stop and think about it, what's the point of racing goats? Lancaster Farming correspondent Michelle Kunjapu stopped in to visit the merriment, took a few pictures and wrote a story. You'll find it in our current edition, and also here http://lancasterfarming.com/node/2347 


     This guy has a dog that dribbles. I have a dog that drools.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1mIyMRPV8kg
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