Gene Logsdon's Blog, page 6

Looking At Climate Change Like A Farmer

From GENE LOGSDON I don’t like to write about climate change because it only inspires bristle talk: bristles to the right, bristles to the left, bristles from the pulpits, bristles from the labs, bristles on social (unsocial) media. It is just a bristly subject that is never going to be solved anyway. But because all […]

Happy Thanksgiving from Gene and Carol Logsdon

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How Can You Keep Them Down In Paree’, After They’ve Seen The Farm?

From GENE LOGSDON ​Although the song “How Can You Keep Them Down The Farm, Now That They’ve Seen Paree?” is nearly a hundred years old (1919) and just as stupid then as now, it still lingers around the edges of popular music. The notion was that when American soldiers were shipped to Europe to fight […]

One Lonely Little Red Clover Plant

From GENE LOGSDON On my way back from the mailbox recently, what should I see under the big sweetgum tree at the edge of the lawn but a red clover plant blooming there all by its lonesome. Red clover happens to be one of my Heroes of the Plant World so I took special note. […]

Good Farming Means More Than Good Food

From GENE LOGSDON ​Some 19,000 people die in traffic accidents every year and another two million are seriously injured. If death rates like this happened in any other sphere of activity, society would be rising up in holy wrath but travel is the most sacred part of our culture and any effort to diminish it […]

How About a Manure Magazine?

From GENE LOGSDON ​If I were young and crazier, I think I would start a magazine called “Manure Matters” or “Fecal Point” or “Defecation Nation” or “Excrement Extra.” I had no sooner written about manure a couple of weeks ago when there appeared in the New York Times Sunday review section a most interesting editorial […]

The Good, the Bad, and…the Zucchini

From GENE LOGSDON Zucchini has about as much taste as a roll of toilet paper and yet it is one of our favorite vegetables. It gives us an excuse to smother its taste with stuff we really like: butter, garlic, parmesan cheese, crumbled bacon, chopped ham, sour cream, paprika. Or hide it in omelets, soup, […]

Who Really Owns The Farmland?

From GENE LOGSDON The general queasiness among farmers right now over low grain prices and whether we are headed into another big dip in land values reminds me of a story. Herb Walton, long gone now,  was a local farmer I much admired years ago. He was truly an original thinker. After World War II, […]

Manure: The Gift That Keeps On Giving

From GENE LOGSDON Our son, Jerry, gave his mother a big trailer load of cow manure for her birthday last spring. She could not have been more pleased. Where can you buy even from Neiman Marcus, barn manure aged for three years with a bouquet somewhere between old English leather and woodsy leaf mold? My […]

Dancing With the Weeds

From GENE LOGSDON It is fashionable now to see who can come up with the most damning information about herbicides and I take my turn at that pastime too. But those of us who grew up on farms when only the hoe and the cultivating shovel stood between us and the avenging weeds, the arrival […]