Gene Logsdon's Blog, page 21

Horse Filet Mignon. Yum.

From GENE LOGSDON Recently, as everyone knows by now, horse meat was found in Swedish meatballs being sold in various parts of Europe, and the Great Horse Scandal of 2013 was off and (pardon me) galloping. From the consternation being voiced in some quarters, you would think that human flesh had been found in the [...]

Here’s Mud In Your Sty

From GENE LOGSDON Mud is the most appropriate icon (how I hate that overused word anymore) of the struggle between humans bent on making money in farming and a nature bent on stopping them. Mud in springtime turns barnyards into forbidding quagmires that can swallow pigs. I say this with some authority. As a child [...]

Burning Brush Piles

From GENE LOGSDON March brings the job I enjoy the most, fittingly for this drab season. I burn brush piles that have been collecting from cutting firewood over the past year. Authors who write books about nature are sometimes not pleased by brush pile burners like me. They want us to keep the piles around [...]

Shit Makes Good Medicine

From GENE LOGSDON Researchers at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit recently announced a startling breakthrough. Transplanting feces from healthy humans into the digestive tracts of people suffering from a deadly bacteria (Clostridium difficile) cured 90% of the patients. This bacteria causes some 14,000 deaths a year. The feces were transplanted during colonoscopy or through a [...]

The Fallibility of Numbers

From GENE LOGSDON Those of you convinced that global warming is a grave danger should try to forgive skeptical farmer types like me. We deal with potential destructive weather change every day of the growing season. Feeling helpless in the face of an uncaring human society is part of our daily lives. When Budd Shepherd [...]

We Need More “Perspeck”

From GENE LOGSDON When I was a greenhorn journalist starting to work for Farm Journal magazine in Philadelphia many thousands of years ago, I got all wrought up over news that my hometown state of Ohio was having a crop failure in the cornfields. I wanted to write an alarming piece on how the grain [...]

Pigweed Is Bringing Us To Our Knees

From GENE LOGSDON Awhile back I wrote here about how Palmer amaranth, a pigweed native to the Southwest, was marching northward into the kingdom of corn and soybeans because it has become immune to most herbicides. That was only a small part of the Great Pigweed Uprising. Other versions of the plant (there are lots [...]

Yes, What Is Art Anyway?

From GENE LOGSDON The comments on the last post were so interesting that I can’t let the subject go. As Troy said, and many others echoed, who’s to say what is art and what is not. Maybe we should distinguish between human-made art and natural art. The everyday farm is full of examples of the [...]