09 Jun 2010
Amish Farming Draws Rare Government Scrutiny

I'm sorry, I don't believe that manure from these farms is a primary cause of pollution in the Chesapeake. Not unless they're doing things a lot differently than the Old Order Amish I know here in Indiana. Here, the dairies leave the cattle on pasture all day, and they don't go thru the fields and shovel the shit into piles, nor do they let it pile up in barns - they spread it over their pastures. It seems as though the government is trying to make these farms more like feedlots, with management plans and manure lagoons. Those are real polluters - just ask anybody living downwind from a feedlot.

One tidbit of real information from the article said that E. coli had been found in wells and streams in Lancaster County, with the implication that this is necessarily the result of Amish cow piles. But the E. coli problem in cow manure is demonstrably the result of feedlot practices - cattle on pasture don't have any of the harmful strains in their rumens and certainly don't dump it. And the Amish would never stuff their cattle with grain like that - they're too cheap!

The Amish are by no means perfect farmers nor are they necessarily environmentally friendly. But in this case, I'll reserve judgment until I have more information on exactly which Amish practices are causing the problem. That's assuming there is a problem. If there is a problem, I seriously doubt that it's caused by anything resembling natural farming methods.

[Amish farmers] like Mr. Stoltzfus are facing growing scrutiny for agricultural practices that the federal government sees as environmentally destructive. Their cows generate heaps of manure that easily washes into streams and flows onward into the Chesapeake Bay.

(link) [New York Times]

18:32 /Agriculture | 0 comments | permanent link

Closing the Digital Frontier

Sad, and altogether too true. Let's hope this is a temporary trend. AOL tried this "walled garden" approach in the mid to late 90's, and we know how that turned out. We'll see.

The era of the Web browser’s dominance is coming to a close. And the Internet’s founding ideology—that information wants to be free, and that attempts to constrain it are not only hopeless but immoral— suddenly seems naive and stale in the new age of apps, smart phones, and pricing plans. What will this mean for the future of the media—and of the Web itself?

(link) [The Atlantic]

07:05 /Technology | 0 comments | permanent link