Category: News, etc.

So we finally have this raptor guy convinced that we need to do something with the bird. I tell Miguel to put a box over the bird and he sends me back this.

When I send this picture to the raptor guy, I think he finally believed that the bird was injured. He said he’s have someone there in about 30 mins. In the meantime I called SWMBO who was home schooling the kiddos and told her there was a meat eating bird in a box in front of the house if the kids wanted to see. Boy did they!

School immediately became a bust for the day. The kids all wanted to see the bird. The Princess (and all the kids) recently saw the movie Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and now proudly owns a “Save Ferris” t-shirt, which makes her the coolest 9 year old I know.  With this background, she promptly named the hawk Ferris. I thought it was an awesome name since we were working so hard to save Ferris. Save Ferris, get it? Eh, oh well. Moving on.

By this time, the raptor lady was arriving and it was time for Ferris to actually be saved.

Turns out the bird had a broken leg and something wrong with his wing. He couldn’t fly and he couldn’t walk. He was a juvenile, this being his first season. The mortality rate for hawks in the wild is about 90% their first year so Ferris, despite his injuries, will most likely get a better chance at life than most of his peers. Sometimes when bad things happen to you, it brings about good results. I’m sure he wasn’t too happy through this whole experience, but now he’ll go into recovery and be released back into the wild probably next spring. In the mean time, we’ll likely go take the kids to see Ferris in recovery so they can check up on him.

Just another day on (or in the case for me) off the farm.

I was out of town yesterday (more on that later) and I received a text from Miguel that we had somebody new on the farm. He wanted to know what I wanted to do about it.

Miguel said he was hurt and could not fly. Well heck. These things, besides eating chickens, are Federally protected. I grabbed my trusty smart phone and started looking up Wildlife folks. I wanted to talk to a State agency because they are locals and generally more helpful but I figured this guy was Federal so I’d start with the Feds. I found the local number for the US Fish and Wildlife folks and a voice mail answered that rattled off the NC state agency number and a number in Atlanta for the Feds. Oh well, I tried.

So then I looked up the State wildlife crowd and as expected I had a nice lady on the phone in about 30 seconds. She emailed me the number for their “raptor specialists” and wished me luck. Two numbers actually for two different people. So I called the first guy. I told him who I was, what was going on, and the state folks had given me his number. He spends a few minutes trying to convince me that the bird is actually ok, it’s just sitting over food. I said that my guy who is actually looking at it is smarter than the average bear and can tell the difference between a hungry animal and an injured animal. Then he tells me he’s actually going to the beach so I could I call the other number they gave me.

Sure.

So I call the second guy. I tell him I have a picture of the bird and he says to send it over. I send the picture above and he calls me back and says, “That bird is sitting on food. That’s the classic pose of a bird over food.” I explain again that being farmers and all, we can tell the difference between feeding and dying. Reluctantly he says to throw a box over the bird and he will send a volunteer out.

We’ll see how that goes in the next post.

In case you haven’t heard of the New England Journal of Medicine, it is a very prestigious peer reviewed medical journal. The opening line of the wiki page about it says, “The New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) is published by the Massachusetts Medical Society and is among the most prestigious peer-reviewed medical journals^[1] and the oldest continuously published one.^[1]“

This article doesn’t read a dryly as I thought it would so don’t let the beginning put you to sleep. It also doesn’t read as scientific as I thought it would based on where it’s published so read everything with a grain of salt. Lastly, the New England Journal of Medicine, while over 200 years old and very prestigious, isn’t without some history of political bias although it’s very limited and well in the past.

With those caveats in place though, here is some interesting information from a respected source on GMOs, crops, and herbicides. If you don’t want to read, there is also an audio interview link with the author.

And finally, if you want to see a rebuttal, here is another opinion piece published on a blog by someone who spends his time dealing with weed control. He of course claims that the first article is biased and incorrect.

Happy reading.

On the left you can see the front of the shirt. On the right, you can see the back.

These are the same shirts you see me wearing when you come for a tour. Well, mine aren’t pink, but everything else is the same, down to the manufacturer. We ordered in a bunch of new shirts in all sizes both adult and children’s sizes. They are $20 each and we will have them in stock till we run out.

We also have our license plates available for those who want to represent as they drive around daily. These are the same plates we have on all of our farm vehicles. They are also $20 each.

As we work on our displays in the newly revamped farm store, we’ll be putting these swag items out for your viewing and shopping pleasure. Of course, I have to build all the displays first, so I’m not sure which month it’ll be before that happens. It will most likely be cold. Until then, ask me if you are looking for some swag. I have it, it’s just not displayed correctly yet.

I remember distinctly someone telling me that once I sold my business, I’d be bored in 30 days. With a farm, I won’t be bored in 30 years!

As of this morning, there are zero broken links in the queue of our website broken link checker.

As far as I can tell right now, everything that should be live is live, and everything that should be not conflicted has been fixed. If you see something broken, please let me know.

Oh the joy of the interweb. I don’t even know how many hours that took. But it’s back and now I’ll go back to posting stuff that is going on.

Thank you for your patience.

Just to let you know that I do in fact know the pictures are missing from many posts. We are working diligently (been up since 1:30am) on getting everything restored and will post something once the full recovery has been accomplished.

 

Update from 8:06am.

I’m uploading a few hundred more photos. Almost everything that is current is fixed and as these upload the older posts with broken links should fix themselves. In an hour or so things should be back to normal. In the mean time, everyone has shown up for work so good bye computer, hello farm work. It’s time for Miguel and I to spend our first day working on our new leased farm!

This morning I sat down at my desk to do some posts on the website. We’ve had lots going on that was post worthy and I suddenly had some free time because:

• I got over here about 5am, so I had some time till the sun came up.
• We were going to move the cows today, but because we had more grass than we thought we are moving them tomorrow.
• The market has been slow so Miguel and Vicente are somewhat caught up at the moment, freeing me to do some of my own work.

With all this free time and a fresh start, I knew I could get some good writing done before the sun came up meaning the posts for the next few days would be done in advance, plus I could run payroll, and deliver some meat this morning to boot ( Hi Kara!). It was going to be a good morning. Then I noticed this.

Huh, a new version of WordPress. A quick look shows it has some new features but nothing I’m jumping up and down about. Usually it updates automatically but for some reason it’s asking me to update manually. Meh, I’ll run the update since it’s way early and nobody is looking at the site anyway. Takes less than a minute. Then I’ll do my post. A quick update later and…

The site wasn’t down, but it was seriously wounded. Error messages displaying on every screen and general crankiness. Usually it’s a plug-in so I’ll just deactivate plug-ins until they get updated. It’s recoverable. After deactivating all the plug-ins we had.

Sigh. Good thing I have a backup program that runs daily. I’ll just restore the backup and go back to yesterday’s setup which is pre-updates. I started restoring the backups, and then things got worse.

After much consternation and a call to hosting tech support, I finally ended up moving the entire website to a sub-directory. Then installing a fresh copy of WordPress, THEN running a backup restore from offline storage, then hooking all the plug-ins back in that stopped working. It’s now 10:16 and I can start my day.

So guess what today’s post is going to be about… 

 

I’m always ready for spring. By the end of winter I’ve had enough and I am watching for any sign that spring may be coming. Summer I’m always watching out for because it means going to the lake with the kids, plenty of produce, fat cows and pigs, etc. Winter gets here whether I want it to or not but at least I’m looking forward to weather that makes it fun to be in the shop with a fire going, or cold enough days that we can fire up our smoke house and smoke some bacon or whatever we are planning on smoking.

Fall for some reason always sneaks up on me.  In my head, it’s 102 on August 31st and 81 on September 1st. It’s one of my mental blocks I guess. I have to remind myself that the end of August is the beginning of September and September is fall weather. Nowhere has this mental block been more apparent in the past than with our grapes.

Muscadine and Scuppernong grapes ripen in late August, early September. In my head it has always been September and I can’t tell you the times in my younger days I’ve gone out to the grape vines in early September to find all the grapes gone because it was the first time I’d thought about the grapes. I’m older, wiser, and hungrier now and I know to start keeping an eye on the grapes in mid-August. That experience was rewarded yesterday with this.

I generally give a few grapes a squeeze once they start looking dark purple. The first one I grabbed was almost ripe. I was surprised and thought maybe I was late in checking the grapes but it was just luck. I’d grabbed the one grape that was ahead of the others and the next few grapes confirmed they were still pretty hard. We have a few weeks before it’s time to pick grapes although I did go back and pick that one grape. Yum! The first grape of fall!

But you can’t take the farm out of the boy.

I feel just like this guy. Well, except for the 28 million dollars. And the good looks. And the world class athletic talent. Or any real athletic talent really. And all the hair. Especially the hair.

Yep, just like him.