Jake Guest grows organic strawberries at his farm near Montpelier, Vermont. He hires about 20 local workers to help around the farm, but when it comes time to pick and weed the berries, he advertises for help in the local newspaper, plus one newspaper from each of two neighboring states, plus a newspaper in either Florida or Texas. He plans to hire two workers from Jamaica, spend $1,000 to transport them to Vermont, pay them at least $10 an hour and provide them with housing. The way Associated Press writer Lisa Rathke explains it, Jake Guest must be an awfully nice guy. And perhaps he is, and he might do all of the above and more even without the Department of Labor H2-A regulation covering the use of immigrant labor. Domestic workers, Guest says, won't do the work. He pays the price, he says, because..."If you've got strawberries to pick, you hire professional pickers." You can read Rathke's story here: http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/sns-ap-us-food-and-farm-farm-labor,0,6088431,print.story


     Ancient White Park cattle are a threatened breed, but that's a big step up from the critical category they were assigned to earlier in the decade. Sandy Lerner brought 31 cows and a bull to her Loudon County, Virginia, farm in 2003, and now has a herd of 160, with 55 cows and two bulls producing up to 65 calves a year. The animals are self-reliant, can forage for themselves, and the cows are good mothers. You don't want to get close to a White Park calf, especially if you're a predator. Lancaster Farming correspondent Shannon Sollinger reported on her visit to the Lerner farm in our current edition, or you can read her story here: http://www.lancasterfarming.com/node/2944 

     Here's a deer little kitty.  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vv_5M9LfSbc