We enjoyed reading about organic farmers Mike Reid and Tibby Plasse of Paradise Springs Farm in Idaho’s Teton Valley and you will too.
This featured family farm is doing a good job at stewarding the land. But the fact remains, the growing corporate takeover of organic places them – and virtually EVERY organic family farmer – at serious risk. Large and politically powerful corporate operations put pressure on USDA to bend the rules causing USDA to ignore fundamental organic REQUIREMENTS, some as very, very basic as ACCESS TO PASTURE.
Please help family farmers stand up to the corporate takeover of organic. Thanks! Jim & Megan https://www.washingtonpost.com/…/708ce5bc-ed76-11e6-9662-6e…

Due to overuse, weeds on 60 million acres of American farmland have developed resistance to Monsanto’s flagship deadly herbicide “Roundup.”
In a desperate attempt to protect their GMO monopoly, Monsanto has quickly – way way too quickly – tried to shift to hapless pinch-hitter “Dicamba” herbicide. Unfortunately, Dicamba is fatally flawed with a tremendous tendency to drift off-target, trespass onto neighboring land and damage the non-target crops of innocent adjacent farmers.
In a here-we-go-again situation, Monsanto has yet once more served up another heaping helping of disaster to American agriculture. Jim

So, is our civilization in decline?
Using themes fleshed out in John Greer’s 2008 release, “The Long Decline,” the Weekly Sift uses the impact of punishing hurricanes as the lens to address this question of ‘where are we?’
In civilizations on the rise, dominant positive energy (‘Construction’) outweighs the negative (‘Destruction’).
A study of civilizations in decline identifies similar telltale shortcomings – including the steady inability to keep up with infrastructure demands.
History teaches us to expect the decline to not be precipitous (“the Long Descent”). As well, the human drive to make things better for our children and grandchildren is a powerful countering and mitigating force in and of itself. Jim

The new field study – soon to be released in the scientific journal ‘Advances in Agronomy’ – pulled together over a thousand soil samples from across America and looked at the effectiveness of organic soils to sequester carbon in the soil where it belongs and out of the air where is magnifies climate change. Jim

“A new groundbreaking study proves soils on organic farms store away appreciably larger amounts of carbons – and for longer periods — than typical agricultural soils. The important study, directed by Northeastern University in collaboration with The Organic Center, provides a new significant proof point that organic agricultural practices build healthy soils and can be part of the solution in the fight on global warming…

Yesterday on the way to our daughter’s first college soccer game (Yes, local Univ of Maine – Presque Isle won beating visitor Univ of Maine – Machias, 2-0) we passed a farm truck on the side of the highway manned by a young man going-through-the-motions of trying to direct-market vegetables grown by his farmer-employer.
Our ten years’ experience selling at local Farmers Markets during the 1980s allowed us to take one quick glance which then instantly explained to us the reason for his absence of customers.
Sitting there literally on-top-of-the-display, swinging legs covering and kicking the farm’s vinyl banner, head lowered and consciousness hypnotically entranced with his “smart” phone, the vibe given off was anything but one of really wanting to engage with paying customers.
That young man would have benefited from reading this good, clear and surprisingly zeroed-in article which offers 25 Tips for successful selling at a Farmers Market. Jim & Megan

https://smallbiztrends.com/2017/08/selling-at-farmers-markets.html?utm_source=SAWG+Seeds+Digest+Sep+2017&utm_campaign=Sep17+Digest&utm_medium=email

Holy Smokes! It’s hard to imagine heads won’t be rolling soon – and it will be with good reason
Equifax, one of the country’s three largest consumer credit reporting firms, has been in the recent news for getting hacked and fumbling the confidential financial info of a whooping 142 MILLION AMERICANS.
However, the extent of this scandal – rating a “10” on a scale of 1-10 – and the non-stop greed profiteering of the disaster is absolutely breathtaking.
But you will miss the details of what went dismally wrong, and how it will affect you, unless you catch this hard hitting interview with Missouri economics professor and white collar criminologist Dr. William Black. Jim

“The experts in cybersecurity say on a scale of 1 to 10, where 10 is the worst, that this is a 10, and it’s almost comically bad. It’s another demonstration of our family rule that it’s impossible to compete with unintentional self-parody, and that’s certainly what the executives of Equifax have demonstrated in this scandal…

“First, this is the third major breach in about two years, so they had plenty of warning that their security, cybersecurity, was incompetent, and they obviously didn’t fix it. Second, they now say that the breach began in May and that they didn’t detect it ’til July, while they were, as you said, stealing at least 142 million people’s worth of data, probably multiple times. Along the way, by the way, they said proudly, ‘Ah, but there was no breach of our core system.’ Before you ever get to the core, 142 million customers are thrown under the bus. God only knows what the core is. Presumably their own personal data is what they consider the core.

“Once they did discover, finally, the breach, the very first thing that happened, you mentioned part of it, which is three senior executives sold roughly $2 million-ish in shares, including the chief financial officer, who they’re now claiming wasn’t told of the breach. Now, this would be the number-two person, typically, or number-three person in the entire corporation. If they didn’t tell the senior ranks about the breach, when they discovered one of the largest and most destructive breaches in history, you know, well, you can choose to believe that. No one else does.

“On top of that, there was also an immediate … in the same time period that these senior executives were selling their stock, there was a massive increase in sales of stock options compared to the normal for Equifax, and that almost certainly was again because people had been tipped about what had happened in the breach…

“Right, and again this is the point, is all of these things have massive effects on the entire population, or virtually the entire population, but they’re secret, right? There is no real regulation of these matters. There’s nothing that really forces these companies to be honest with us about the scope of the breach and the risk that they have now inflicted upon us. That is outrageous, but it is again not just the norm. It’s becoming virtually the only situation that exists…

“… you read a publication like ‘Wired’ about this, and it gives you the steps it suggests to take. Maybe 2 percent of the population would do that. We can’t fix this if we put the onus on 142 million Americans to become computer-literate and credit-literate and such. It will never work, so don’t let’s be pushed towards, “Well, you know, you should have taken care of it because, hey, I took care of it, and so screw the other 140 million people that were left unprotected.”

“Again, to do that, you’re going to have to actually have regulatory disclosure requirements. You’re going to have to have an office at the federal level that is in charge of investigating these kinds of breaches, like when a plane crashes. Find out what the hell happened, publish it, so that people know and draw generalities in terms of here are the kinds of exposures to look at. Even if you breach a company, they should never be able to come away with the crown jewels as they did at Equifax, much less the crown jewels on 142 million Americans.”

http://therealnews.com/t2/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=31&Itemid=74&jumival=19960

Given its unavoidable significant FATAL-FLAW of drifting off-target, EPA SHOULD IMMEDIATELY BAN DICAMBA.
However, what EPA may do instead is severely limit its use. While not a perfect solution, this now anticipated EPA action is absolute acknowledgement that this loser alternative for glyphosate (Roundup)-addicted GE crops is its own untenable can-of-worms. Jim

Yes, says this interesting video (5:33) produced by organic farmers in Argentina.
Bitcoin appeals to independent-minded organic farmers: decentralized, independent of multinational corporate control and freedom from high middleman fees are intriguing.
The video relates the genesis of this Bitcoin project when an entrepreneurial Argentine organic farmer hooked up with an idealistic young techie motivated to use his talents to help farmers and the organic community.
Family-scale organic farmers remain under threat like never before. With the march towards further corporate consolidation the status quo is increasingly untenable. Watch this video and gain a sense of some hopeful possibilities ahead. Jim

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fBLpx6gQtUU&feature=youtu.be

Working hard we’ll bet, but not as hard as young Joe McConaughy. On Thursday, Joe completed his “ultra-marathon” and summited Maine’s Katahdin, setting a record in TRAVERSING THE ENTIRE Appalachian Trail – 2190 miles – in just 45 1/2 days. Yes, that’s an average of 48 miles a day.
We heard Joe’s breaking story on the local news late last week. Then last night, we heard levelheaded Joe’s interview on the CBC (https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2017/09/01/grad-breaks-appalachian-trail-record-with-final-push-sleepless-hours/dyTBwcA1pjiaUIRUvfiAQO/story.html), His drive and capabilities are phenomenal. And refreshingly, so is his humility, groundedness and absence of a big ego.
Last Thursday on Katahdin’s Baxter Peak (photo below) it was hailing, and the temperature was +38oF plus a 75 mph wind. Joe completed the last 111 miles in 37 non-stop non-sleep hours.
Two months ago we hiked up the same Abol Trail to Baxter Peak but in much, much more pleasant July conditions.
Here is ‘Boston Globe’ coverage of the driven – and humble – young man’s miraculous accomplishment, Don’t miss all the photos! Jim & Megan

“He finished with 37 straight hours of running and climbing, soaked by rain, whipped by wind and sleet, inside a cloud that lay upon the mountain.

“Former Boston College track and cross-country runner Joe McConaughy, known by the trail name Stringbean, clutched his girlfriend at the rugged summit and silently wept, his mind empty, at the end of what appears to be the fastest known traverse of the Appalachian Trail.

“Then he screamed into the fog, let out an extended ‘Ahhhhh,’ and summed up: ‘That was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.’

“Traveling with no outside help along the way, McConaughy completed the 2,190-mile trail from Springer Mountain, Ga., to the top of Maine’s highest peak in 45 days, 12 hours, 15 minutes. That’s an average of about 48 miles a day.”

Our friend, the pioneering organic dairyman Albert Strauus of ‘Strauss Creamery’ in northern California is making a difference both in the organic community and across the country.
Albert proves the point that “big” does not have to always be “bad.”
Catch the details in the TV video interview. Jim

“Albert’s energy innovations are an example of his leadership and wisdom in turning farm waste cow manure into a major energy resource.