Free Republic

Once again I must apologize for not posting anything last week. A lot of challenges came up & bit me in the backside at different times & I could not force myself to sit down & "write" this up. So with that being said, I have a couple of different topics for this week. The first one is, for those of us who have a bit of land/space what kind of poultry do you want to raise & for what reason/s. Do you want chickens for meat or the eggs, what about bug control in your garden/s. Someone on my...

Water: Without interference by humans, it's meant to be a pure substance that makes up around 70 percent of the Earth, with most of it contained in the oceans. We enjoy the beauty of water in many different states, from cascading waterfalls to the still pond that allows us to skip stones--to a fun family day at the beach or out fishing for flounder in a bay or on the ocean in our boat. While that may all seem fairly simple, sustenance is the biggest priority regarding our relationship with water, and that's a very complex subject. Water--and our need...

The two events had nothing to do with one another, and yet they are inextricably linked. I am an inveterate coupon clipper and in the latest mailer from BJ's Wholesale Club (my big box savings store of choice) I noticed an eye-popping deal on LEDs--8 60 watt-equivalent bulbs from Sylvania for $19.99, or roughly $2.50 apiece. The next day, GE announced that it planned to stop manufacturing compact fluorescent lamps (CFLs) and focus instead on LEDs. The market never really took to CFLs, for understandable reasons noted in my household as well: Most of them could not be used with...

SIDNEY -- We've seen some truly eye-popping developments with 3D printers and medicine lately -- cells from an eye that were inkjet printed, for example; prosthetic ears that look real; complex silicon pathways used to stimulate nerves to grow and repair themselves -- just to name a few of the marvels. But medicine is not the only arena where 3D printing offers eye-popping possibility for the future. With the advent of cheaper and cheaper printers and better and better materials -- some of them approaching metallic strengths -- 3D printers could one day be as common a tool on the...

Ok, folks, 2 weeks ago I started us on a series of discussions, on what we need to be looking at for long term survival, if & when the need arises. [I need to apologize for missing last week's installment, I had some family issues come up that needed my attn all weekend long] So we started on the need of looking at a long term food supply/ies, because the stores are going to go bare very fast & chances of resupply maybe very dim. I was hinting around gardening & raising your own. [Because every durned fool is going...

In 2017, the Japanese company Spread will open the world's first fully automated agricultural plant, with robots working the whole process: from seed to harvest. Spread, headquartered in Kyoto, explained that this plant will start operating regularly by mid-2017. Mechanization will allow it, among other things, to produce 30,000 heads of lettuce a day, as noted on their website. This figure falls short of the firm's expectations, as its goal is to produce half a million heads of lettuce a day within five years. Furthermore, the new automation technologies will reduce labour costs by 50% and energy use by 30%...

Indoor agriculture has definitely put down roots in the United States. Vegetable Growers News in 2015 cited a white paper released at the third annual Indoor Ag-Con that outlined 15 existing commercial-scale rooftop greenhouses and vertical farms in the U.S. Authors of the report, titled Indoor Crop Production: Feeding the Future, conceded that indoor farming will never replace conventional outdoor agriculture. "It will instead augment the food chain to create a diverse, distributed system more resilient to supply shocks and better prepared to meet the demands of a global population." Indoor agriculture typically entails growing produce with hydroponic and aeroponic...

Hello "Fellow" FReepers; Since I was asked to help out on this page, I have been figuring out how do we discuss Prepping with out going over board? So now let us gather 'round and discuss with calm cool head/s & level thoughts. What are we prepping for. [Just remember to use Operational Security Rules (OPSEC), keep your mouth shut on your specific gear] Not everyone here is friendly to our/your cause or self! So now, what are we worried about, storms, economic collapse, civil unrest, grid down, earth quakes, pandemic, or what. I have several nightmare scenarios, that keep...

Following the mysterious death of seven cattle near an oil field in Kansas, public health authorities are investigating whether oil drilling could be the cause. In late December, seven dead cattle were found near an oil field in the Cimarron National Grassland, Kansas, and authorities believe that cows inhaled something toxic, prompting them to deny public access to the 2,500-acre Cimarron National Grassland until at least May. Six of the cattle were discovered together in a low-lying area, while a seventh was found a short distance away, with local veterinarians identifying the ingestion or inhalation of something toxic leading to...

In Roman Britain the weather was warmer than it is now, and this warmer climate allowed extensive vine growing throughout Britain's Roman period, and for a long time after. By 1086 when the Domesday survey was carried out there were thirty nine vineyards officially recorded in England, although the actual figure may have been much higher. Then temperatures began to drop in the second half of the sixteenth century causing a retreat of vine growing from the north and east of Europe.

New abundance of food and fodder in the world is not only a result of genetic modifications. Greening of the world is also the consequence of the atmospheric carbon dioxide level that’s beneficial to plants worldwide The world is going green – literally, in all kinds of places that were desert-like before. Have you ever been in an airplane crossing the semi-arid foot hills of the Rocky Mountains and looking down at the ground? You’ll have seen large green, circular patches between the miles of dry brown land. Those patches are irrigated fields sprouting vegetables and fruits of various kinds....

At any given moment there are approximately a zillion different crowdfunding campaigns happening on the Web. Take a stroll through Kickstarter or Indiegogo and you'll find no shortage of weird, useless, and downright stupid projects out there - alongside some real gems. We've cut through the Pebble clones and janky iPhone cases to round up the most unusual, ambitious, and exciting projects out there this week. Keep in mind that any crowdfunded project -- even the best intentioned -- can fail, so do your homework before cutting a check for the gadget of your dreams. Flashlights are a handy thing...

Congress rejected the Forest Service plan to give the agency access to up to $2.9 billion a year to suppress wildfires. In response, Secretary of Agriculture threatened to let fires burn up the West unless Congress gives his department more money. In a letter to key members of Congress, Vilsack warned, “I will not authorize transfers from restoration and resilience funding” to suppress fires. If the Forest Service runs out of appropriated funds to fight fires, it will stop fighting them until Congress appropriates additional funds. This is a stunning example of brinksmanship on the part of an agency once...

The fortunes of the wonder fuel that promised to help clean the environment, secure America and save small family farms have steadily dwindled as environmentalists, food advocates and auto enthusiasts sour on its promise. Now that fuel, corn-based ethanol, finds itself threatened with a defection that was once unthinkable: Iowa voters. The electorate here in the early voting state often defined by its vast expanses of corn has long demanded that candidates pledge allegiance to government production mandates for millions of gallons of ethanol, the homegrown product. But as the 2016 White House hopefuls traverse the state, they are seeing...

When this race first kicked off, one of the first things which attracted me to Ted Cruz (among others) was the fact that he was one of only two candidates who were willing to go into the heartland of the ethanol political machine and tell the people of Iowa some hard truths about the Renewable Fuel Standard. The guy has managed to stick to his principles and still found a way to surge in the polls there, currently holding a spot as the strongest challenger against Trump. (For the record, Trump showed up at the big fair in Iowa and...

Former California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger says people should go meat-free one or two days a week to protect the climate. Meat-eating was an environmental problem, with farming creating an estimated 28% of global greenhouse gases, the body-builder and movie star told BBC News. Asking people to go totally vegetarian would be too demanding, he said. It would better to suggest giving up meat once or twice a week, he added. When asked how young men would achieve a body like The Terminator - the cyborg assassin in the film of the same name - without steak, he said many successful...

Beijing: The Chinese scientist behind the world’s biggest cloning factory has technology advanced enough to replicate humans, he told AFP, and is only holding off for fear of the public reaction. Boyalife Group and its partners are building the giant plant in the northern Chinese port of Tianjin, where it is due to go into production within the next seven months and aims for an output of one million cloned cows a year by 2020. But cattle are only the beginning of chief executive Xu Xiaochun’s ambitions....

Among the many duties of the president, the pardoning of a turkey on Thanksgiving stands as perhaps the most important. It is for that reason that conservative online publication IJ.com invited a few Republican presidential candidates to practice their turkey-pardoning skills, thereby making the case to the American people that they are truly Oval Office material.

Marijuana legalization advocates want the support of Black Lives Matter activists in 2016. But a debate on tactics is brewing legalization groups and Black Lives Matter activists who worry people of color are being left out of the burgeoning legal marijuana industry. WASHINGTON — Leading up to his meeting with the Black Lives Matter group Campaign Zero at the Frederick Douglass House in September, Democratic presidential candidate Bernie Sanders steeled himself for an argument. He’d only previously come face-to-face with Black Lives Matter protesters who wanted to interrupt him. But over the course of the meeting, the activists spoke authoritatively...

From the army of machines that work in Amazon warehouses to automatons that milk cows, the job-taking robots of the future are among us. Now the lettuce in your salad of the future might be grown by robots too. Oh, by “future,” we mean 2017. That’s the hope of Spread, a company in Kyoto, Japan, that plans to begin constructing the world’s first large-scale lettuce factory next spring. Once it’s fully operational, the entire process of growing a head of lettuce—from seeding to harvest—will be automated and run by robots. The efficiency of machines will enable the factory to produce...