An example of Suzanne Wainwright-Evans' sweet handiwork.

     It's very clear that Suzanne Wainright-Evans is serious about her candy-making hobby. Clear toy candy was a Christmas treat for Colonial-era yougsters, and Wainright-Evans is a stickler for historical accuracy when it comes to making her modern-day versions. She eschews refined sugar and high fructose corn syrup, for example, in favor of organic sugar which she grinds by hand with a mortar and pestle. An entomologist by trade, she makes clear toy as a Christmas fund-raiser for the Upper Lehigh Historical Society in Schnecksville, Pa. Lancaster Farming reporter Lou Ann Good called on the bug lady/candy maker and wrote of her visit in our current edition, which you can see online at Lancaster Farming.com. For more information on Wainright-Evans, check out her website at BugladyConsulting.com.

Attendees at a Lancaster conference
 on manure digesters.

     Manure digesters are a hot topic these days, and are considered part of the answer to cleaning up the Chesapeake Bay watershed. And while large-scale on-farm and regional digesters costing many thousands of dollars are a focal point, small-scale digesters have been in use around the world for a hundred years or more. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres attended an anaerobic digester conference recently in Lancaster and discovered that Chinese farmers alone have 37 million small-scale digesters. They don't work as well as the scientifically designed and professionaly installed digesters on 500-cow U.S. dairy farms, but they provide biogas for heating and cooking. The story starts on page one of our current edition.


     Who gets the margin? If a consumer pays $3.20 for a gallon of milk, and the dairy farmer who produced it gets $1.20, what happens to the $2 that the farmer doesn't get? The U.S. Departments of Agriculture and Justice have held joint meetings meetings in Alabama, Colorado, Wisconsion, Iowa and D.C. to help farmers - and not just dairymen - answer that question about milk and other food commodities. Lancaster Farming staff writer Chris Torres attended the Washington meeting and wrote about it in our current edition.


     Curious what we learned from the 2010 corn crop? Greg Roth, a Penn State agronomy professor active with the Pennsylvania Corn Growers Association, shares his thoughts about the subject in Corn Talk and Foraging Around, a special section in this week's Lancaster Farming.

A quarter-mile of cow munchies, captured by staff photographer
Stan Hall lining a farm lane near Ephrata, Pa.