Free Republic

The future is always filled with uncertainty, especially for individuals involved in growing and producing safe, nutritional food for the world. As the agriculture community, spends a great deal of time and effort in pondering the “what ifs”, consumers still sit in the driver seat. One thing futuristic minds can agree on is the world population clock is clicking away at much quicker rate than the U.S. population. Recent estimates show a global population will not slow down its pace even after it reaches the United Nation’s projection of 9.2 billion in 2050. For now, the drop in global population...

Anyone have one? Can you get a decent, reliable one without spending a fortune? Likes/Dislikes? Sliding or Opening? I may need one for our property, 1) To keep dogs out of our property. 2) To keep out free range goats and chickens in our property and an occasional dog (we have 3) that may get stupid and get out of the house without a leash. Don't need anything hardcore or fancy. Not trying to keep out bad guys. Also, how did you handle UPS/FedEx/US Mail Box deliveries?

I have tried to post an apology about ten times now. I apologize for me earlier threads. All I can say is don't drink and post. Hope you all have a great week. Don't shoot the messenger. The devil is in the details. Happy is as happy does.

(VIDEO-AT-LINK)HBO’s “Real Time” host Bill Maher laid out the dystopia he believes would have occurred if President Obama had lost the 2008 and 2012 elections to encourage his audience to vote on Friday. Maher addressed those who refused to vote because Obama didn’t keep his promises by stating, “the choice was never between the perfect Obama in your head and the real one who came to Washington, it’s between the real one and the two guys who desperately wanted to beat him so they could stamp America in their image.” Maher then laid out his alternative scenario where McCain and...

A Columbia High School biology teacher killed and slaughtered a rabbit in front of 16 sophomores to show them how livestock is processed into food, Allison Westfall, the Nampa School District spokeswoman, said Thursday. The matter has been turned over to the district’s human resources department, Westfall said. She would not speculate on what might happen to the teacher because it is a personnel matter. She said she didn’t have the name of the teacher. The teacher expressed remorse for his action in class on Monday, Westfall told the Idaho Statesman. “That is not part of the biology curriculum,” she...

The owners of the website Ebola.Com have scored a big payday with the outbreak of the epidemic, selling the domain for more than USD 200,000 in cash and stock. The deal highlights the rewards and risk of industry trading and speculating in domain names that see high interest following news events. According to a securities filing, the buyer was a Russian-registered firm called Weed Growth Fund, previously known as Ovation Research. The October 20 filing said the price was USD 50,000 cash and 19,192 shares of Cannabis Sativa worth close to USD 170,000, which promotes medical uses for marijuana. The...

Most clear-thinking people can see by now that there isn't going to be a functioning global carbon emissions abatement scheme in the foreseeable future. Whether or not that's a good thing (and I think it is) is a separate question. Because regardless, we should look at the world as it is. Now of course, excessive carbon emissions into the atmosphere remain a serious concern and a real problem. So what can we do to solve it? First, let's look at the main sources of carbon emissions. The two big ones are energy production and agriculture, which is set to explode...

The "climate change industry" has become such a religion of environmentalism gone berserk that they are now trying to ban farming

The mind of an animal is a far richer, more complex thing than most people know — as a new TIME book reveals.Let’s be honest, you’d probably rather die than wake up tomorrow morning and find out you’d turned into an animal. Dying, after all, is inevitable, and there’s even a certain dignity to it: Shakespeare did it, Einstein did it, Galileo and Washington and Twain all did it. And you, someone who was born a human and will live your life as a human, will end your life that way too. But living that life as an animal —...

FORT WORTH, Texas (AP) -- One of the largest ranches in the U.S. and an icon for Texas horse and cattlemen has been listed for $725 million, marking the end of a decades-long courtroom battle among the heirs of cattle baron W.T. Waggoner, who established the estate in 1923. The estate includes the 510,000-acre ranch spread over six North Texas counties, with two main compounds, hundreds of homes, about 20 cowboy camps, hundreds of quarter-horses, thousands of heads of cattle, 1,200 oil wells and 30,000 acres of cultivated land, according to Dallas-based broker Bernie Uechtritz, who is handling the sale...

Conakry — Medical teams struggling to curb Ebola in West Africa have been discouraging bush meat consumption, believed to have caused the outbreak, but some rural communities dependent on the meat for protein are determined to continue their traditional hunting practices. While meat from wild animals such as fruit bats, rodents and forest antelopes have largely disappeared from market stalls in main towns like Guéckédou (in southern Guinea and the epicentre of the disease) or the capital Conakry following campaigns to avoid contamination, it is still being eaten in remote villages despite the risks. "Life is not easy here in...

KINGDOM CITY, Mo. — Missourians already have the constitutional right to religion, speech and guns. On Tuesday, they could make a novel addition to the State Constitution: the right to farm. A proposal known as Amendment 1 will be taken up in a statewide vote on Tuesday, leaving Missouri poised to change its Constitution to guarantee the rights of its people to “engage in farming and ranching practices.” The right to farm hardly seems threatened in Missouri, one of the leading agricultural states, with nearly 100,000 farms producing crops including soybeans, corn and wheat. But a coalition of state farming...

Shanghai (AFP) - A scandal involving expired meat sold by a China unit of US food supplier OSI Group spread to Japan Tuesday, as McDonald's confirmed that the now shut factory provided Chicken McNuggets to its restaurants. Shanghai authorities on Sunday shut an OSI plant -- a supplier to McDonald's and KFC in China -- for mixing out-of-date meat with fresh product, re-labelling expired goods and other quality problems following an investigative report by a local television station. A Tokyo-based spokesman for McDonald's Japan told AFP the restaurant chain had sourced about 20 percent of its McNuggets from the Shanghai...

It has been more than three months since my constituents in Bunkerville, Nev., had their lives turned upside down by the standoff at the Bundy ranch. Although Bunkerville (population 1,300) is no longer in the media spotlight, life there has not returned to normal. The militia presence may have dwindled, but a sense of chaos and uncertainty lingers in my state and the broader American West. When news of a rebellious rancher facing off with federal agents broke in April, conservative media and politicians pounced, quickly lionizing Cliven Bundy as a patriot. They handed Bundy a megaphone, and self-proclaimed militia...

July 16, 2014 (LocalOrg) - Corporate biotechnology monopolies like Monsanto, Syngenta, Bayer, and others have met increasing resistance to their attempts to patent and control global agriculture. They have spent untold fortunes attempting to sway the public but to no avail. Local, organic agriculture is growing in popularity and proliferating across all social-strata. The introduction of technology to automate and augment organic farming is making it as competitive and accessible or more so than the capital-intensive models of monopoly employed by big-ag. In response, big-ag has attempted several distasteful public relation stunts, including "super bananas for Africa" and "Golden Rice" to allegedly...

It's rare when any business in Clark County attracts national or even regional interest, so the media throng that greeted last Wednesday's opening of Main Street Marijuana was quite a curiosity. The clever "weed and weenies" event that accompanied the store's opening, along with the presence of Mayor Tim Leavitt at the ribbon-cutting, captured the attention of media outlets that devour eye-catching visuals. But business likely would still have been brisk at Main Street Marijuana even if it hadn't snagged the free publicity. With a state-imposed limit of just 15 retail outlets for all of Clark County, and with some...

And most is consumed by a minority of daily users. About 9% of Colorado’s population consumes marijuana, according to a market demand study conducted by the state department of revenue’s Marijuana Enforcement Division and the state’s Marijuana Policy Group. And those users, it’s estimated, will get through about 121.4 metric tons of pot every year. According to the report, that consumption — calculated through survey results, demographic data and source data — is “31 percent higher than a recent department of revenue assessment, 89 percent higher than a study by the Colorado Futures Center, and 111 percent higher than an...

There is bad news for moonbats who don’t eat meat because it is morally wrong to devour the flesh of murdered animals: plants don’t like getting eaten either.According to a study by Heidi Appel and Rex Cocroft at the University of Missouri, plants can identify the sound of caterpillars chewing and react to it defensively. In the study, caterpillars were placed on Arabidopsis, a small flowering plant related to cabbage and mustard. Using a laser and a tiny piece of reflective material on the leaf of the plant, Cocroft was able to measure the movement of the leaf in response...

ISIS emerged around the same time Iraq experienced its warmest March-April-May season on record. It may just be an interesting coincidence, but it could mean more.This winter was not a good one for farmers in the Fertile Crescent. A punishing drought hit most of Syria and northern Iraq during what’s normally the wettest time of the year. In the mountains of eastern Turkey, which form the headwaters of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, snow and rain were less than half of normal. The region has seen one of the worst droughts in decades. Drought is becoming a fixture in the...

My mother and her sister inherited a substantial amount of land from my grandparents. My sister, her husband, my mother, my aunt, two of her sons, and I met with the attorneys last Friday. Despite my voiced disagreement, it was decided to pursue a "conservation easement" for the mountain land. My mother has been trying to divide the property with her sister for over 20 years, since my grandmother's death.