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FarmerMike's comments:
on Maya Lin and the Confluence Project
Good show...but let's look at two not-yet memorialized Oregon stories. First, Canemah, the landing where the native peoples came to fish the Willamette Falls is also a Historic Registered town for steamboat captains that plied the upper Willamette. A large portion of the historic property is in Metro's hands. A place open to the public that has huge Indian significance and the only wagon road I know of in the Portland Metro area still intack. It puts that funky "wagon" to shame in Oregon City, where most of the museum space is from 19840s forward. Canemah is thousands of years of human activity. Lewis and Clark missed it.
Secondly, the Astoria project is over its 200 year mark. And no mention of getting anything ready. Here, you have the tragic Indian story of Concomley's daughters and the chief himself aligning with the Americans and losing, as the Hudson Bay company got the assets jsut before a British warship sailed into the Columbia to capture it as a prisze of the War of 1812.
The comments are right about Lewis and Clark being tourists. Why can't we show true history? Here are two examples with both sides making interesting stories.
posted 2 years, 7 months ago
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on Candidate Conversation: State Treasurer
There is danger in a CPA defending themselves as the only "Numbers" person in a race, as the classic joke between CPAs and Finance majors is that Finance majors use the windshield while the CPAs only drive using the rear view mirror.
posted 2 years, 8 months ago
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on Live from Enterprise: Logging
Sustainable timber harvest is related to how fast the trees grow. On the east side of the Cascades, many forests take much longer than the golden best 40 year cycle on the west side. At 40 years, a sustainable cut of replanted land is 2 to 2 1/2% a year. On the east side, an 80 year cycle make that number much, much lower. So any over cut, like we had in the 80's, echos for generations.
The second barrier to sustainable harvesting is that timber is a commodity in the eyes of its largest harvesters. In Scandanavia, it is a farm crop, where folks grow the best trees (gradually limbed up quite high so the timber is clear, so the few logs per acre per year bring in the best money, plus the forest land stays in duff, the necessary soil format for great tree growth.)
The cycles are out of whack because of past over cuts. And the echos will keep happening. Until small holders learn that they can make money making great wood, it will stay this way.
There are folks out ther promoting Sustainable Forestry, like "Forester Dan" in Yamhill County. (He invented tools and sold a company that makes handsaws that out perform chain saws in limbing trees, plus "arches" that allow small equipment to log what was once large equipment territory.)
What can be done? There is a solar kiln on Mt. Richmond in Yamhill County. Triming State forest and Federal lands is a great jobs program that reduces ladder fuels for fires and could lead to more products being "harvested" from a forest more often than just the commodity harvest of the trees and current "thinning." I know we are trimming trees and looking at alternatives, plus showing our children what we are doing, on our 239 acres of mostly fir and Valley Pondersosa in western Oregon.
The key issue is simple. Do we make rules just for large extraction type businesses or set up for small holders to grow the pie of jobs and work? If you depend on large firms for jobs, they go where wood is cheapest and that is not security for jobs "here." The equipment is there now for small holders. Our schools need to start teaching something besides monster company looging and manufacturing. It is a long term issue, not a quick fix that I look for.
posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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on Local Library
The painful thing I see at my rural library is fines. Folks run them up and because of hard times, can't pay, so stay away form the library in droves. It is sad. And the library does its best, holding food drives where cans of food can cancel past fines. But poverty keeps people away.
As far as rural folks voting against the library, in my county, I have to pay $60 a year to check out more than one item at a time. When you pay large amounts of tax, sometimes more than the "city" folks, this sticks in the craw a bit. Still, I've paid the $60, but I'm a rare case.
Then there is the "conservative" groups that see libraries as all things evil. They are sure anti library here. Too much "evolution" or childrens books with wiitches in them for local tastes. I know don't believe that way, but one has to see through the "anti" folk's eyes.
posted 2 years, 11 months ago
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on To The Woods
You can not live in isolation in the country. It is impossible, as there are tasks that force you to ask for help. You can't have enough equipment to do the job. You need to learn what animals work best. You can only "Isolate" yourself in the City, as there is an infrastructure that allows you to do this and ignore that this infrastructure that allows you to do it. In the woods, one is naked...and eventually needs to ask for help.
posted 3 years ago
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on To The Woods
I read the Foxfire series. But it was almost a review of what I had lived as a child. Living out away from "modern" allows you to choose. There are times that a broadfork is faster, quieter and easier to clear and prepare a garden bed than a mechanical tiller. A sharp shovel beats a string trimmer. The ways our ancient ones used to till the land had elegance, to use the term now of great applications in technology. The body feels better using them.
posted 3 years ago
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on To The Woods
I started out "in the woods." Two miles to the next town and it had 7 people and two gas pumps. Twelve miles to a sort of grocery store and 26 miles to "civilization." It was wonderful as place to grow up.
Then college. Then 30+ years in the center of the belly of the beast in Portland. Now, back to three miles off asphalt. Folks go "why?" And then they come to the farm and their answers are right in front of them. Animals give the cycle of life every year. The wood stove gives me warmth twice: once as I cut it and another as a I burn it. When PGE puts us on the long list of power out folks, we are at the bottom because there are so few of us for so long of a wire. That's ok, we've stocked up on oil lamps and books. The fire makes wonderful stews. Neighbors check on each other, even if they live miles away. That is because folks out here know you can't make it by yourself all the time. And we share surpluses.
It is easier for someone who has grown up in a place where one has to be one's own best friend to go to the City and yet turn around and go back to the place where one can't see its light or see its traffic. You know what? Mars is really red when you get away from City lights. And there is depth and width to the Milky Way. And I feel whole, over rushed, hidden, in the groove or just coping.
Besides, folks think you know what you are doing when you are older and living on the earth lightly. Can you say that living in the City past a certain age? We show up once in a while to sell folks backyard chickens, as many are trying to bring a little of our life to the City now. The only thing I miss is the connection speed...rural dial up sucks. But the rest, ... heaven.
posted 3 years ago
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on The Fight Over Sugar Beets
There is a huge difference between classic gentic work and GM genetic work. GM allows things to happen that would never or rarely happen in nature. For example, RoundUp folks whould have to spray field after field to find resistant plants in a species and then breed those out in the old fashion way. (Note certain bacterias and germs naturally select well in this style against medicines.) But that is expensive compared to GM paths of incerting a genetic piece that allows the changed that is the goal.
The genetic work of the Americas is hidden from us in a Western history bias. Farming in the Willamette Valley, for example, is 10,000 or so years old, when Indians burn the valley to select where deer roam and help the oaks spread to assure acrons. Our history tells of farmers pouring in to the valley in the mid-1800s and finding a virgin land. But they advertise in fliers the vast oaks for hogs to feed on acorns, so miss that the virgin land was far from it.
The true work in this hemisphere shows in corn or maize genetics. The original plants are not near where they are now. In fact, unrecognizable to the average person. The time that genetic shift took is rarely calculated. Barley and wheat, for example, have wild fields in the lands they first were "cultivated" that look much like the modern varieities.
If you want to get a good view of a good view of agriculture in the Americas, read "1491." There, you find the eastern forests planted to produce a cornicopia of "native" foods. And even the Amazon Basin shows organization long before Columbus showed up with his boat loads of germs.
posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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on The Fight Over Sugar Beets
No, the farmers don't have any right to sue Monsanto. Quite the contary. Monsanto then owns any seeds they produce as the seeds have Monsanto's patented genetic material. It is obscene. This is how they took seed from Indian farmers who had not planted their seeds, but who were in the same airshed. Monsanto has the right to make the seeds, sell the seeds and all that. But what is lost is that they do not have the right to pollute the airshed, but there are few laws against this. So they just do it.
posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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on The Fight Over Sugar Beets
This invasion of an air shed is really upsetting of such non-natural active genetic materials. As a farmer who has spent over 50 years fighting standard breeder's (think Burpee, Burbank...) monsters (think blackberries,) I worry about another thing Monsanto doesn't want: responsibility. It doesn't want the responsibility of polluting virgin airsheds organic growers and seed savers use. And more importantly, it will deny any ownership the minute patents expire for any damming spreading of the gene. So the barn door is not yet closed on these two issues. Making them reponsible for the spread switches the current curse, where they can claim all seed contining their gene. We know who put these genes in the environment. The patents are still current. So let's legislate now.
How else are we going to encourage small, near city farmers? The folks growing sugar beets are not our solution to huger and getting local foods. Local farmers are. So how do we protect their airshed?
The battle over canola, alfafa, and others are right here now. It is not small farmers. One alfafa seed grower took 1,100 acres of production to Canada. But how far away from airsheds with the wrong pollen in it can we live? Think of all the weeds we have now from somewhere else. Why have more?
posted 3 years, 2 months ago
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on No Place to Call Home: Youth
In Sweden and Norway, children have access to free education after high school any time they qualify, apply or need it for a job. The minimum wage is what we would call a livable wage here--something homeless youth rarely can earn. Healthcare for anyone is available in Sweden and Norway. Here, even if children have healthcare, there is little mental health benefits beyond a pill to control mood. Thus we have a self medicating society. With the health issues and wages, plus education, a 16 year old in Sweden can get an apartment. Here, a 16 year old needs legal documents or someone else to sign the rental contract.
posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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on No Place to Call Home: Youth
In the 1980s, I was part of many Portlanders that pushed to open the Green House for homeless youth. It discouraged me beyond belief that it took well over (then) $50,000 of charitable donations, let alone volunteer time, to get one homeless youth of the street. One could have gone to Harvard for near two years for that price. The potential being lost and the friction to society of turning youngsters on to the street, many through no fault of their own, is a problem still with us. It is a problem for all of us that has few simple solutions, but the best is to know about it and work with children and parents in crisis much earlier than teenagehood to help solve such a social issue.
If given one thing to do, I'd fix the foster care system. A system that dumps even the best children who want to succed on their heads at 18 can't be good for troubled children. Not telling foster care parents about the problems of a child (thus taking them out of the solution and putting them into a land of discovering what is going on) is a real problem in attracting the foster parents we'd like to see volunteer.
Blessings to those who can and do help.
posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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on Urban Chickens
I lived in inner Northeast Portland for 30 years. I can point to places that have had chickens that long. They were few in number 30 years ago, but they were there. Since moving to very rural Yamhill County, I have been selling pullets to Portlanders and other folks in the region now for five years. Last year, demand was very high. But I sold a lot of chickens five years ago, so this is no sudden trend. (I sell pullets so folks don't have to fall in love with a chick and find out that they have a problem with a rooster. Plus folks love choosing from many different breeds when they form their first flock or look for a replacement bird.)
There is a funny 1950's germ phobia base mentality out there that think chickens are "dirty." Well, chickens do clean themselves with a good dirt bath (which a little diatomacious earth will help them make themselves very clean of small bugs that like chickens.) But they are cleaner than cats or dogs, whose waste is, well, toxic and not welcome in compost piles.
Chickens are changing other folks views. We took a rooster to what had been a dog show last year and he placed third on a public vote. (We had to give his prizes of dog food to the neighbor.) Folks do make pets out of them.
Portland is very chicken friendly. But many small towns, once closely aligned with agriculture, usually is where you find the hard rules against chickens. (I don't know how to explain Salem's problem in banning chickens. Insecurity? You can buy all sorts of exotic animals in Salem pet stores that I wouldn't want in my backyard, yet they have a problem with chickens?)
What I have learned from selling chickens to Portlanders is that they come back for friendly breeds, not exotic high maintence birds. Most tell me that they have no problems with neighbors, especially if some extra eggs have been given to the neighbor. Many of my customers are neighbors of customers. That is a sign of a health trend.
The biggest problem I see with chickens is that some folks over build for them. Yes, they need fences, a place to roost and shelter from racoons plus the winter wind, but they don't need second homes! Remember lot line rules and ask neighbors usually stops complaints before they happen.
posted 3 years, 7 months ago
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on Leading a Horse to Slaughter
Sorry...even "the natives" walked here from somewhere else. They just got here a lot sooner than our relatives. Man is the invasive species....who is trying to grow into responsibility for his actions.
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Leading a Horse to Slaughter
Any process done for you--banking, investing, slaughter, sushi preparation, cooking of rice--that is not done in a caring manner can make you sick. We need care in processes, not marginalization to the "unclean" to do such work no matter what it is in our life. When we separate ourselves from production of goods, we get sweat shops and all that. Caring and knowing what is done in our names is our responsibility, not something we can hide from. On all topics, not just food.
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Leading a Horse to Slaughter
Yes, horses were on this land thousands of years ago. Isn't it fun to study history--many of the found bones show tool work, so one could conclude that the reason horse were missing between 10,000 years ago and when the Spanish let some go is that they were all hunted and then eaten for food. There is no continuous record of horses in North America for thousands of years.
Then there was the rise of the people who walked when horses came to the Plains. The males were culled, as one kept the best to bred or ride and when they couldn't work, they were food.
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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on Leading a Horse to Slaughter
Portland once had great horse meat markets. I raised beef and horses then when I read the classic Reed College cookbook "The Starving Student" which gave addresses of horse meat markets. Lewis and Clark ate horse. It isn't just the French! Folks that say we don't eat horses haven't really known their own history!
The meat tastes much like elk.
I consider all the animals I raise as pets. But they are meat animals. The culls are eaten. Yes, I sell goats (a smarter animals and more pet like as they can live in a house) and sheep, plus have chickens. Horse is a missing element in my diet that I once used extensively as a nornal Oregonian.
The logic is do you eat any animal or all...there is little to dance between them. I'm an omnivore--as are we all--with a large garden and I eat meat at least five meals a week. That is moderation. I want horse back as an option.
posted 3 years, 11 months ago
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