Gene Logsdon's Blog, page 17

He Is Just So Happy

From GENE LOGSDON My loveliest Christmas gift this year was the outpouring of recollections about the little things in farm life that so many of you wrote about last week. I am trying hard not to utter grandiose statements about how you are turning this blogsite into something profoundly wonderful, but I don’t think I’m […]

Tiny Details About Farm Life

From GENE LOGSDON Responding to the recollections a few of us made recently about milking cows in days gone by, Berny remembered how the cats would eat milk-soaked strainer pads after they were discarded and, to use her words, what came out the other end of the cat as a result. I don’t know that […]

Land Grabs, Now and Forever

From GENE LOGSDON I am not sure of very much in this crazy old world, but one conviction I hold to firmly: the more people in a society who have the opportunity to own their own homes and a little land, the better the chance for democracy and individual freedom to flourish. So I am aghast […]

Arguing About Raw Milk

From GENE LOGSDON Forgive me if this turns into a maudlin memory of barnyard days gone by. I do it not out of sentimentality but hopefully to shed a little light on the pros and cons of pasteurizing milk. I loved it when, two weeks ago, a number of readers recalled some of the same […]

More Trees Than A Hundred Years Ago

From GENE LOGSDON Some readers found it hard to believe when I wrote in my last book, A Sanctuary of Trees, that at least in the eastern half of the United States there is more woodland now than there was a hundred years ago. Just recently, a report out of Penn State’s Department of Agricultural […]

The Cow Stable: Health Spa of the Future

From GENE LOGSDON You know we are in some kind of new era when the most intriguing information about farming comes from big city newspapers rather than farm magazines. Last week (Nov. 10), the Sunday Review section of the New York Times carried an article about how we are suffering from an “epidemic” of allergies […]

Overdosing On Bread

From GENE LOGSDON After years of hearing how great grains are for health and how awful red meat is, I see that the diet mythologists are busy discovering and deciphering a new Dead Sea Scrolls of holy food. Grain is a culprit now, sending us to early graves. Two popular recent books proclaim the gluten-free […]

Small Mysteries Never Solved

From GENE LOGSDON I husked out my little patch of open-pollinated corn last week. It was something of a disappointment because the deer ate about half of it. But perhaps I should be grateful. I planted it so late (June 6) it is a wonder I got any. Frost did not come until Oct. 24 […]

The Decentralization of Nearly Everything

From GENE LOGSDON Is that what’s happening? I kind of think so, in food production anyway. Yes, the vast bulk of our industrial food comes out of large scale factory farming, but electronics surely seems to be leading the way toward something else. The backyard, local food revolution is actually only part of a larger […]

“The Need For New Herbicides Has Never Been So Critical”

From GENE LOGSDON Those words come not from anti-Monsanto sources looking for excuses to discredit chemical weed killers, but from Big Farming itself. More and more weeds are becoming immune to glyphosate (Roundup) and the chemical companies are moving forward as fast as they can to find new genes they can stack in corn and […]