They just assumed that the eggs were the culprits. He said this was the same thing that happened with the tomato scare a couple of years ago. They never did prove the source of the contamination but that didn’t help the tomato farmers that went out of business because they got the blame for it. Yet another argument for buy fresh, buy local and to know where your food is coming from. However even that doesn’t guarantee complete safety because you are dealing with a perishable product and people need to realize that.

You know I believe part of the problem could be with the American consumer. It seems like Americans have all become germaphobics. We have hand sanitizer everywhere. We even have one in our church foyer! I thought most people come to church clean on the outside hoping for a little help to get clean on the inside. You know the swine industry went through this obsession with germs a few years ago. I live a couple of miles west of what was at one time the largest family owned hog farm in Missouri and for a time when they cleaned out their hog barns they tried to almost sterilize them by washing with antibacterial soaps and making sure they were spotless before the next bunch of sows were put in. What they found was they were causing themselves more problems because they were killing off the good bacteria with the bad. They instead went to washing down with very hot water and maybe a mild soap, I’m not sure, and just making sure everything was nice and clean. They got along a lot better this way. Now I’m not saying we ought to throw safety to the wind but I do think you can take anything to excess so we just need to use a little common sense. We try to wash all the produce we can here at the farm, sometimes as many as three times. There are some things we don’t recommend washing until right before use such as fresh strawberries because they don’t last as long after they are washed. However when you are out in the patch picking them and you find that great big juicy one that is simply too inviting to leave the patch there are a couple of remedies for non-washing. One is “a little bid of dirt never hurt anyone” or “don’t worry it is clean dirt.” We modify the last one on our farm and say “don’t worry it is organic dirt.”

Still along these lines there is a word that I think should be taken out of the dictionary, it is accident! It seems like when anything happens anymore we think somebody has to pay. I heard a news story some time ago about an injury of a small child and by the account on the news you could tell it was just one of those times when one minute everything is alright and the next instant your world comes crashing down. Then at the end of the story they said there had not been a decision about filing charges and I thought how ridiculous! People it was an accident pure and simple. I have been in Agriculture my whole life and I have yet to meet someone with the attitude that oh well it might hurt a few people but it makes me money. Now there is already some woman suing these egg farms before the source of contamination has been found. She is not doing it to make the industry safer she just sees a fast buck Even if these farms were the source no one would feel worse than the owners and I am sure they would try everything they could to make sure it never happened again. Now if they were like the guy with the peanuts I believe it was that knew he had E-coli and still shipped out product he should be hung from a sour apple tree. But until then let’s remember that accident is still in the dictionary and they still do happen.

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.

I knew it was really bad for a while because even the weeds weren’t growing like normal. When the weeds are having a tough time you know it is really bad. Weeds really are amazing. They come up in my little greenhouse during the summer after I stop using it for the summer and grow clear to the ceiling even though I never water them. If I were to plant plants in there and not care for them they would be dead in a week. But not the weeds no sir they continue to thrive. As hot as it has been this summer I know it has had to be 150 degrees in there some days. You just walk in the door and the heat nearly knocks you down and you think nothing could survive in here but those weeds do and pretty well at that.

Also now as I plant things I have to stop and figure if what I am planting will have enough time to mature before the frost gets it. Not so the weed however! A former boss of mine used to say that a cocklebur could tell when it was about ready to frost because no matter how big it was it would start to but burs on before the frost. Cockleburs that come up in the spring grow all summer and get chest high before they put burs on. In late fall I have seen them suckers not even an inch tall with two little bitsy burs on and it doesn’t take them long to do it either.

These genetic engineers are working on the wrong aspect. They just need to modify our plants to grow like weeds and that would solve all our problems. The plants would choke out all the weeds. The bugs would never bother them. However this year I have seen the bugs actually working on the weeds more than the crop they are in so I know we are really having a wacky year. And our plants would grow no matter if it was too hot, too dry, too wet, and too cold. They would germinate no matter what. In short all our problems would be solved. RIGHT. This last paragraph is all satire I hope you know! When they start messing with weeds I think we are really doomed!

Your friend in farming bring you food with integrity.

I wish all of you could go with me and spend some time talking with those that come to the clinic looking for help. Then you would understand the motivation that keeps me going in times like we have had this year. Most of these people have been searching for years for answers to their health problems and getting no answers from normal medicine. Because this illness seems to individualize its symptoms to each individual the main stream medical profession has a hard time comprehending it. In talking with Dr. Rea the last time we were there he did tell me that most of his patients started showing symptoms after one of two events, either a massive one time exposure to some chemical or a long time low level exposure. Many of our fellow patients came from farm backgrounds where they were exposed to chemicals used on the farm. In Rose’s case she showed cattle growing up and was exposed to the fly spray used at the fairs and then later helped on wheat harvest and took wheat to the elevator where malithion was routinely used. Our friend in Joplin was at the lake and was sprayed by an airplane and then built a new home that contained many synthetic compounds. We met a lady this time that was probably five foot ten and weighed only 98 pounds. Another lady was a pastor’s wife and she told Rose one time they packed up in the middle of the night and left one area because she told her husband she felt like she was going to die if they stayed there any longer. The next day he husband called and resigned the church because she could not handle the area. Many people have a hard time believing such stories and try to say it is all in these people’s head but it is not. Their immune system has been damaged to the point where it does not react in a normal fashion. Dr. Rea encourages people to learn to listen to what their body is telling them and after a while these folks can tell when they are in a bad situation. This is why the hair on the back of my neck stands up when I hear some government official state that while we have chemicals in our food they are below the USDA guidelines for what is considered safe. Well it is not below the guidelines that are safe for people suffering from this illness. It makes me wonder if it is really safe for any of us. I would like my food as free as absolutely possible from these things and not just below some industry set standard.

Something new I learned on this trip from Dr. Rea is that data is now starting to emerge that all of the chemicals we use in our society are starting to be linked to heart disease. You see we have been lulled to sleep because you never see cause of death listed as chemical exposure. You see things like cancer or heart attack. We as a society focus on finding a cure instead of looking for a cause. Finding a cure allows us to go on doing business as usual and then not having to suffer the consequences that caused the problem in the first place. Finding the cause and stopping that might force us to drastically change our lifestyle and we don’t want to do that. Also concentrating on a cure instead of the cause means people will continue to get sick and then of course can be cured for a fee. In the business world that is called job security!

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.

Now for the bad news part of our week. We had a good stand of orange cauliflower, broccoli, and cabbage on A-frames out under the trees to transplant when they got big enough. The rains came a little hard for those young plants and did a number on them. Then some kind of bug found them and about finished them. We have seed to replant all but the cauliflower, which costs ten cents a seed, but it sets us back two weeks.

I hope the rain will be enough to get what I planted up because boy was it miserable yesterday while we were planting. I would hate to think I put all that effort into a lost cause.

Your friend in farming bringing you food with interity.

Dave, a business friend of ours, used to make the comment that there was none as blind as those who would not see. I thought of that a lot this last week after an encounter my wife had this week. She suffers from Environmental Illness and is especially sensitive to the fungicide that many farmers in our area have used for the last three years. This is all applied aerially so one day we had four airplanes flying on three sides of our farm. Three years ago when this all started she was caught outside three times when the spray planes flew low over our house. This causes an illness reaction in her because of her severe sensitivity to those chemicals. We called the airport and requested that the planes avoid flying over our house. We also tried to keep a sharp ear and eye open so if we saw or heard them we tried to get Rosie out of harm’s way. For the most part it seemed to us as if the planes did try to honor our request. Last week though we had an encounter with one. I was up in one of our upper fields when I heard what at first I thought was a fighter plane from Whiteman airbase. As I looked for the plane suddenly a yellow spray plane flew over not two hundred feet west of me and tree top high. He was headed directly over where Rose had been that morning. I immediately headed there to check on her but saw that she was in the house at the time. As I was walking to the house to check on her I could smell the odor of chemical in the air and my face started to burn a little bit so I went in the house and washed my face. After this Rose could not get outside the rest of that day and part of the next. This frustrated Rose so she called the airport and asked if they would please ask the pilot of that plane to avoid our house. The man she talked to at the airport told her that the plane simply flying over her house could not affect her.

That statement brought my friend’s statement to my mind. One of the advantages of aerial spraying is the way an airplane affects the wind currents. It creates a rolling affect so that the material being applied not only lands on top of the crop but also gets up under the leaves of the crop where the stomas are located. This gives excellent coverage and allows the plane to use less water thus making a more concentrated solution. Now I ask you to think about something else for just a minute. If you are addicted to the weather as I and most farmers are, you know that many local weathermen give a allergy report during the summer. It starts in the spring with the grass pollen, then trees, then weeds and in a wet year like this one the mold count is usually high. Think about this for a minute. The grass is never more than a few inches off the ground when they start counting and where does mold grow? It is usually right on the ground or very close to it. Then how do mold spores and grass pollen get high enough for people to ever be affected by them. Are these people just imagining they are affected by them? How is it that the meteorologists can go out and sample the air and give a count of how much is out there? Now if all this is true and I have never heard anyone bring it into question, why is so hard to believe that a plane flying overhead could affect air quality. As that plane is dispensing his load on the field he is flying up and down and making sharp turns. Don’t you suppose that as he is doing this that some of his chemical gets mixed up in the air and then as he makes his next approach the plane travels through the chemical. Isn’t it reasonable to assume that some of that chemical sticks to the plane especially because many solutions contain a sticking agent that helps it adhere to the plant. Then wouldn’t it be reasonable to assume that as that plane was flying to and from its target at probably not more than 100 feet higher than when it is actually spraying that fumes from that plane could be noticed especially by someone highly sensitive to it. Those that refuse to see act like once the chemical is applied it goes right to the plant and that is the end of it. If that were true then how does it keep working for months. Why are workers not allowed into fields for days after some chemicals are applied? Why could the old chemical 2,4-D under the right weather conditions pick up and move and kill not targeted crops as much as ¾ mile away. Yes there are none as blind as those who will not see!

I would also like to clear up some misunderstanding about the difference between organic and commercial crops. Someone asked a friend of mine the difference and he told them that organic uses no sprays. That is not correct. There are some organically approved sprays we can use. The difference is in their chemical makeup and in their residual affect. Most if not all organic applications have no residual which means that they are easily removed from the plant, usually with water. Commercial sprays usually have at least a season long residual which means the product remains active all season long regardless of the weather. In the case of bt corn the only way to remove that chemical from the plant is totally reverse the genetic makeup of the corn plant. So if you hear an organic farmer mention spraying, don’t think he is lying about being organic. Just ask him what he was using and how it is safe to use.

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.

typical crop duster

If you have been checking for a new posting it has been a couple of weeks since we have been up to my sister-in-laws to help out with care for her mother. There was some spraying next door to her house which prevented my wife from going up there. She had to have help to get in the house today and we are not sure how long she will be able to make it in here, so if this newsletter seems to come to an abrupt stop you will know why. I had to get her out of the area in a hurry.

Dave a business friend of ours used to make the comment that there was none as blind as those who would not see. I thought of that a lot this last week after an encounter my wife had this week. She suffers from Environmental Illness and is especially sensitive to the fungicide that many farmers in our area have used for the last three years. This is all applied aerially so one day we had four airplanes flying on three sides of our farm. Three years ago when this all started she was caught outside three times when the spray planes flew low over our house. This causes an illness reaction in her because of her severe sensitive to those chemicals. We called the airport and requested that the planes avoid flying over our house. We also tried to keep a sharp ear and eye so if we saw or heard them we tried to get Rosie out of harms way. For the most part it seemed to us as if the planes did try to honor our request. Last week we had an encounter with one. I was up in one of our upper fields when I heard what at first I thought was a fighter plane from Whiteman airbase. As I looked for the plane suddenly a yellow spray plane flew over not two hundred feet west of me and tree top high. He was headed directly over where Rose had been that morning. I immediately headed there to check on her but saw that she was in the house at the time. As I was walking to the house to check on her I could smell the odor of chemical in the air and my face started to burn a little bit so I went in the house and washed my face. After this Rose could not get outside the rest of that day and part of the next. This frustrated Rose so she called the airport and asked if they would please ask the pilot of that plane to avoid our house. The man at the airport was very rude to her. First he told her that the plane flying over could not affect her and then he told her that we all have to die of something.

I have known this man for most of my life and to my knowledge he has no more than a high school education from the late 50’s era. He is not a specialist in environmental medicine and does not have a medical degree. So where does he get off giving my wife medical advice that a chemical covered airplane flying low overhead cannot affect a severely chemical person. That is simply a pinheaded biased opinion from someone who knows nothing about the subject. He would be well to heed the advice of Benjamin Franklin when he said,” It is better to keep ones mouth shut and have people think you a fool than to open it and remove all doubt.” After the second comment he had the nerve to tell my wife he had just got out of the hospital for I believe was treatment having to do with his lungs. My question is if he really believes we all have to die of something then why did he go to the hospital? Why did he just not stay home and die? Isn’t amazing when it is our own health we are talking about we are more willing to take corrective action than if it is someone else. He had just done the very thing he was so rude to my wife for trying to do, protect her health. Yes there are none so blind as those who will not see.

I would also like to clear up some misunderstanding about the difference between organic and commercial crops. Someone asked a friend of mine the difference and he told them that organic uses no sprays. That is not correct. There are some organically approved sprays we can use. The difference is in their chemical makeup and in their residual affect. Most if not all organic applications have no residual which means that they are easily removed from the plant, usually with water. Commercial sprays usually have at least a season long residual which means the product remains active all season long regardless of the weather. In the case of bt corn the only way to remove that chemical from the plant is totally reverse the genetic makeup of the corn plant. So if you hear an organic farmer mention spraying,don’t think he is lying about being organic. Just ask him what he was using and how it is safe to use.

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.

I heard an illustration one time about a father who was walking along and his young son was following along behind. The father looked back and his son was stretching his legs to the limit to step in the exact footprints of his father. My Dad told me one time, “Son, it takes a lifetime to build a reputation but only a few seconds to tear it down.” I have tried to follow in my Dad’s footsteps throughout my life because I have found no better human example. If I follow in those steps I may die without any success according to the world’s standard of success but make no mistake I will have been a success at life! For those of you who are a part of my CSA family. The reason I consider our relationship such is because my Dad taught me when people are counting on you, you don’t let them down. CSA is more than a business arrangement to me it is a commitment.

Because I am a junior in name as I was growing up people always called me Little Jimmy. As I got old enough to receive calls at home when someone would call and ask for Jim they would be asked little or big Jim and latter it was changed to young or old Jim. I know some parents who will not name their sons after the father for that very reason but let me tell you I have always been proud to have those titles. Even thought my Dad and I are somewhat different in personality the greatest compliment anyone ever pays me is when they say, “You are just like your Dad.” I love you Dad! Happy Father’s Day!

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.

Then came the announcement that never ceases to amaze me. When they announced that the water was once again safe they did not say that the atrazine had been removed from the lake but that the levels were below the levels deemed safe to consume. How much comfort do you think it would provide if the public announcement were to read something like this? We would like to inform the public that while there is still atrazine in your drinking water there is no need to worry because we have determined that a certain level of poison will not harm you even if consumed over a long period of time.

This kind of logic really bothers me because while it may be true for a vast majority of the population my wife is one of the ones for whom it is not and it has caused me much money and time over the years. She has to drink a special brand of bottled water and we haul water from 20 miles away to cook with. Just because they say the water is safe it does not mean it is pure.

As a young man on the farm most farmers used few if any chemicals and most weed control was done mechanically. As soon as the crop germinated you tried to get over it with a rotary hoe. I used to like to use this implement because for it to work you needed to go as fast as you could. I can remember hoeing corn one whole day with the old 51 John Deere A that had been my dad’s and then was my uncle’s whom I helped after Dad left the farm. That tractor had no power steering and was notoriously hard to drive. Because you wanted to go as fast as you could you hoed in “road gear” which was the same gear you used running on the paved or gravel road. It was probably about 10 miles a hour for that tractor. After hoeing the field I drove home and thought as I was nearing home that that tractor didn’t seem so hard to drive after all. It was not until I had turned off the tractor and started to the house that I realized that I could hardly open my hands because I had been griping the steering wheel so hard all day. Then as soon as you could you were on the field with the cultivator. I hated this job because while you hoed in the fastest gear you had you cultivated in the lowest gear you had. You would work all day long to just get over a few acres. While with the hoe you just had to keep the tractor pretty much on the rows with the cultivator you had to be meticulous. If you got off the row the least little bid or went a little too fast you would tear up the corn. As much as I hated that job it was still rewarding to pull into a weedy field of corn and start down the rows of corn and look back and see those rows of corn with those clean middles after going through them with the cultivator. Then farmers started using chemicals and they no longer had to rotary hoe because while the early chemical did not last all season they held the weeds back until you could cultivate. You could usually cultivate when the corn was a little bigger so you could go faster and it was harder to cover up the corn. Today the chemicals are designed to last all season and kill everything but the desired crop. Now the only farmers that consider the rotary hoe and cultivator two of their most valuable implements are organic farmers.

Sometimes I think chemical farmers think organic farmers really don’t mind weeds but that is not true. I wish the chemical industry’s assumption was true that chemicals are really not that dangerous or harmful to health and environment. That any time we had a problem we had a chemical that would solve it. It would be nice to be able to simply treat the crops and still have all the benefits I believe organics bring. No I think if anything organic farmers hate weeds more than our chemical counterparts for many times we are battling weeds in hand to hand combat and not from the cab of and air-conditioned cab with 100 foot booms!

My friend Melinda Hemmelgarn stopped at our market booth and was telling me how much she appreciated us trying to continue being certified organic. I needed that because at that time I was feeling like organic farmers were the only farmers dumb enough to pay a third party thousands of dollars just to be a pain in our rear. My agency was questioning some things that I believed they had already approved and I was frustrated to say the least. Also in a year like this year that hand to hand combat is rough.

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.

It has been a interesting week at the farm. We were working in the field Tuesday when it started to rain lightly so we moved into the high tunnel for some weeding and soil preparation so we could plant more tomatoes and peppers and our celery. I was tilling when I heard Rose holler and I looked her way to discover her, my cousin, and my brother-in-law trying to hold the high tunnel roof down. A big wind had come up and was literally lifting the roof off of it. It lifted part of the bows off and set them back down and tore the plastic up. I never dreamed of it doing it now because I had the sides down 5ft. up so I thought any wind would simply blow right through. Chalk one up to inexperience and plain old stupidity. The strange part was that for all of the destruction it caused, the storm only gave us two tenths of rain. Then Tuesday night we got 8 tenths more. Also the storm came from the north but the wind came from the south. Then Friday as we were picking for market I had a row of potatoes dug and two buckets picked up when we got 9 tenths of rain in maybe 45 minutes. Did you ever try to pick up potatoes in fresh plowed ground that had an inch of rain on it! It reminds you of your childhood making mud pies and as I recall I was never that fond of making mud pies. It took me three hours to finish that row that normally would have taken 30 minutes. Then Saturday we were having a very active market in Blue Springs. That is until about 10:30 when another big storm hit and all we could do was try to hold our tents down and wait for it to let up, which was about an hour later. By the time we got out of there we were all sufficiently drenched.

For those of you who have been looking for my update each week, we have been away from our web connection for a couple of weeks so I haven’t been able to write my newsletter. I think we are back on our regular schedule for a least a while anyway. After market on Saturday we were in a Wendy’s so those with dry clothes could change and a family eating there asked if we sold at the farmer’s market. They said they had bought some greens from us a couple of weeks earlier and told us how good they were. That was a ray of sunshine in our otherwise dismal week and it is those kinds of comments that keep us going sometime. A friend of mine called Saturday and was discussing the storm during market and he commented that this was sure a fine way to try to make a living. I told him the key word was try. Well I am going to close for now and try to get a little rest before Church tonight. After the week we have had I am tired.

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.

One topic I would like to touch on this week is vegetable and fruit quality in these types of seasons. Three years ago when we went through our first wet season we had lost one of our best vendors. He decided to focus on his less labor intensive interests in farming, row crops and cattle. That season at market my wife overheard one of the customers comment the produce just wasn’t as good since that vendor had stopped the market. It was an assumption that I could not let go unchallenged. I told her that while this vendor was an excellent grower and a good friend of mine it really would not have been any different had he been at the market that year. He would be having the same struggles the rest of us were having. You see 90% of any crop is air, water, and sunshine and only 10% is soil nutrients and management. When you have these adversely wet years like the last three have been it affects vegetable production in several ways. An ideal soil complex should be about even on the amount of air and water in the soil and then a smaller percent of soil nutrients. When you get wet years the water replaces the air in the soil and the roots can’t breathe so they can’t function properly. This affects the uptake of nutrients into the plant thus affecting its performance. Sunshine is required for photosynthesis which is the growth process of the plant. When you have poor photosynthesis you also have lower brix readings in the plant which adversely affects the taste. Strawberries will not taste as sweet and tomatoes will lack that rich tomato flavor. We have some of the best soil in the world here in the Mid-West and most of the time we can grow some wonderful crops but we do have the disadvantage of extremes in weather some years. During these times please don’t blame us, for it is largely out of our control. Just keep supporting your local farmer’s market and when the weather improves, so will the produce!

We get a weekly paper in our county called The Plainsman that is produced by the Sedalia Democrat in Sedalia, Missouri. They have a syndicated columnist, Alan Guebert, who writes on farm issues. His column this week was on the report of a study commissioned by former President Bush on cancer. The headline to his column was,”Ag. Highlighted in Cancer Report.” The report brings out what I have been saying for years. There is a link between chemicals and cancer. This is one of the reasons I am an Organic farmer. It is interesting and if you care about your health you should look it up and read it (www.thelandonline.com). If you come to one of the markets I attend to have a copy. It was amazing to see how many carcinogenic compounds are in farm chemicals and various ways you can be exposed to them besides direct contact. It will be interesting to see what becomes of the report. I do not have the article with me as I write this newsletter so I’m not sure of the figures but it said that farmers and their wives have a significantly higher risk of getting cancer. Also there are over 1,400 registered pesticides now. Scary huh!

Your friend in farming bringing you food with integrity.