The Law in its majestic equality,
forbids rich as well as poor to sleep under bridges,
to beg in the streets,
and to steal bread
~Anatole France~
Since 1993 we’ve been an organically certified small farm in California. I had a job with a contractor which paid our household expenses and kept us solvent even when the farm sales were less than our farm expenses. But two years ago when the factory in town closed down, and most of us were laid off, I decided to go into the cactus growing more full time. We grow a unique vegetable which we’ve shipped throughout the country. Initially we shipped the cactus leaves as nursery stock, then governmental regulations tightened and we became more aware of the laws and regulations of shipping nursery stock into other states. So we switched to shipping the younger leaves for people to eat themselves as produce. Our goal has been to ship to Health Food Stores, and restaurants as well as individuals who might be interested in the leaves we grow. Through the years our customer list grew slowly but steadily at a steady 30% rate. As the years progressed the governmental regulations seemed to grow more onerous… and the last year we’ve lost many of our older customers due to the recession. Other businesses have quit, some people seem to have stopped their regular orders. Yet, due to aggressive marketing, our sales this year are the highest we’ve ever had due to many new customers. Yet this was done at the expense of any profit we might have had. And again the government has come down on us harder. Now we have been notified that we must complete a fifteen hour ‘continuing education’ credits in water pollution and conservation. I’m all for education, but these government-mandated classes for all farms in the state are not provided for free… we must pay for them ourselves. The worse part is that they are given in the major population centers of Ventura or Monterrey to which we must take ourselves, and pay for our own lodging for the three days of the course.
It is this extra bit that has me stymied. We don’t really make any money doing this cactus business. All of our money goes to shipping, governmental fees of several thousand dollars yearly in order to maintain our licenses, permits, and associated fees and overhead expenses. Knowing that this trip will lead us into negative financial territory makes me reluctant to want to go. Knowing that due to these regulations, we must take a sample of our water and have it analyzed monthly at unknown costs…. I am seriously aggravated at the state of our laws and the level of compliance required even for tiny little micro-farms.
We have some months in which to take the classes, and maybe I’ll find some classes nearby, but this more personal posting than usual is to let the people know that governmental regulations are a double-edged sword. While they give the USA good traceability in produce, and what is perhaps the safest produce in the world, it also makes for stronger economy-of-scale issues that stymie the small grower… right at a time that we are needing MORE small farms, not less. If we were a huge corporate farm, with many employees, still we would need just one person to go to the classes, but when it’s a one-man operation, the standards are the same. The costs are the same, but they are a larger share of the profit in a small operation like ours.
My usual outlook is of hope and positive thoughts. Rarely am I dragged into this level of aggravation. I am sure I will sign up for the classes in Monterrey, they seem very informative and interesting. But people need to know that excessive governmental regulations strangle small business, they hamper the process of business formulation. We need to seriously look at what we want for this country, a place where people can transact business legally and efficiently with little governmental interference. If the government requires classes such as this, it should place them within the reach of the people, if it requires monthly water sampling, it should have a method to make such sampling efficient and inexpensive, (the paperwork mentions some samples might cost $8,000 yearly).
Excessive governmental regulations hamper small business more than the large. If due only to ‘economy of scale’.
When my dad grew up on an Ozark farm in the thirties and forties, they raised corn and wheat, raised hogs which they sold every fall and winter, and had a hundred or so chickens from which they sold eggs daily. They had five or six milk cows which they milked by hand, using the milk for food and their dogs, and one milk-can daily which they left on the roadside for the milk company to pick up. They also went to neighboring farms to supply skilled farm labor. Nowadays they would have to have many more permits, and each operation would require specialized equipment and permits and licensing. As all these regulations pile onto business, you must streamline your operations, drop aspects that have no profit and require permits, then you start to specialize. Yet a small family farm should not be a specialist farm, it should have a wide variety of foods and animals to create the ‘loop system’ for bio-diversity. Yet through the years we have had to drop livestock from our farm, first initially because we did not have proper butchering facilities, so we stopped the breeding of animals, until we had no more. We stopped using manures for fertilizer years ago because the government is worried about contamination of the soils with bacteria from manures. We stopped bringing in mulches for weed control and soil building because we could not vouch for the exact trees the wood chips came from. We are now a closed system with no outside inputs, and only material going out at a rate of a ton a month. Yet even this production is priced so low, and the shipping and governmental costs are so high, that we make no profit. One day, it might just get through my head that I’m better off just enjoying the property ourselves, and stop working so hard to make a business out of it. Yet, I know I can’t, we have such great customers….
While mulling these thoughts over in my head, I decided I needed to go for a walk. So with my camera in hand, I went down the road and took photos of the things I love about living here. And it is when in the wilderness, when I am furthest from people and the government, that I am closest to God and nature. These photos are my world, they are my daily activities and sights…. it is what is most in my heart.
The large oak once was a nut that stood its ground
Spanish Moss on Black Oak
Cutbank on the canyon road
Cutbank on the canyon road
The green lush creek bottom
The green lush creek bottom
Live Oak reaches over the creek
Live Oak reaches over the creek
Old cattle Loading Chute
Miocene Deposits, this was all once underwater
Oak Woodlands
Poison Oak vines wind up the Oak Trees
Spanish Moss on the Oak Tree
A tarantula, means rain is coming soon!
A tarantula, means rain is coming soon!
A tarantula, means rain is coming soon!
Right around the bend from home, my daily view
‘One Tin Soldier’
`Lambert-Potter’
Listen, children, to a story
That was written long ago,
‘Bout a kingdom on a mountain
And the valley-folk below.
On the mountain was a treasure
Buried deep beneath the stone,
And the valley-people swore
They’d have it for their very own.
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after….
One tin soldier rides away.
So the people of the valley
Sent a message up the hill,
Asking for the buried treasure,
Tons of gold for which they’d kill.
Came an answer from the kingdom,
“With our brothers we will share
All the secrets of our mountain,
All the riches buried there.”
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after….
One tin soldier rides away.
Now the valley cried with anger,
“Mount your horses! Draw your sword!”
And they killed the mountain-people,
So they won their just reward.
Now they stood beside the treasure,
On the mountain, dark and red.
Turned the stone and looked beneath it…
“Peace on Earth” was all it said.
Go ahead and hate your neighbor,
Go ahead and cheat a friend.
Do it in the name of Heaven,
You can justify it in the end.
There won’t be any trumpets blowing
Come the judgement day,
On the bloody morning after….
One tin soldier rides away.
We have a pretty big Internet presence… links to animal sites, nature sites and produce sites mean we get a fair amount of e-mails trying to sell us anything from pots and pans to animals. We don’t do any animal trading, but since we supply browse/feed materials to people in the animal trades business, we tend to follow it, and we get e-mails regarding aspects of that trade.
Today I got an e-mail offering to sell us reptiles from Egypt. Now, while Egypt is interesting, and has a glorious history and environment, I’m not interested in buying any animals from Egypt or anywhere else. Regardless, I got an offer of animals today….
Dear Sir,
My Name (name withheld for posting) From Egypt,
We have best price, good quality of
reptiles,mammals,scorpions and insects,tortoise,CITES…etc,
We can give you shipments asap,
if you interest please contact us,
thank you very much
Best regards,
Well, he seems legit enough… he mentions CITES which is an endangered species agreement. In general, people with the license are going to be pros (we possess CITES licenses that we use on occasion for plants). So I wrote back that we don’t buy or sell animals nor trade in them, thanks anyway.
He wrote another e-mail offering me scorpions….
Dear John,
How are you doing?If you are interested in scorpions ,
I can send you them in toys through post.
inform me about the numbers you need.
I send the scorpions in good
health and I hope to do business with you.
I wait for your reply.
we wait your answer.
Well now, what part of “I don’t trade in animals” did he not understand?
Then I got to thinking about the part where he says…. “I can send you them in toys through post”
Eh, does this mean he will put the scorpions into dolls, balls and play cattle-calls? Huh? Anyone who’s shipping legally is going to put the animal into a proper container, with a hot or cold pack, shipped by overnight delivery and with proper documentation and permits. The shipping company must also be notified that they are transporting live animals, and any poisonous creature is covered under special requirements.
No Virginia, you cannot just stuff a bunch of animals into toys and ship them… and anyone who is doing such needs to be stopped. Any authorities who wish copies of the e-mails, can contact me…. upon proper verification, I am interested in passing them on.
But yet… maybe there was a language barrier, maybe when he wrote it in English, it came out wrong… so I asked him if he sends them in toys,
Hello, Thanks for the offer. I do like scorpions but we don’t sell any
animals… nor do we collect them. We have native scorpions here… not
exotic like yours, although I suppose to you, ours would be exotic also.
When you say you send them in toys… you mean,
it is a good way to get them
through the Post without being confiscated? Thanks,
John
He wrote back….
Dear John,
this way has no problem .If you need ,inform me.I wait for your reply
Yeah, usually I let others go about their own way, as long as they are not directly harming anyone or critters, leave it be….
But this guy IS harming animals…. shipping animals in toys to the USA is not the proper way to go about this…. So in this instance, even though I feel a bit like a ‘snitch’, I can’t sit on this one…. this is wrong on so many levels. So I post this so folks will know that this does go on…. don’t participate in anything that hurts people or animals.
There’s another level of problems with shipping animals around without the licenses…. the licenses are to ensure that the animals are shipped humanely and with as little risk of injury as possible… but they are also to make sure we don’t have animals shipped around the world to be introduced into environments where they may have no natural predators and eventually take over an environment…. we have instances over the entire world where some introduced organism ends up causing all kinds of environmental destruction and has to be hunted down and killed at great cost before it displaces native species.
Please, don’t buy animals or plants from unlicensed people. The licenses are hard to get and expensive, and the ‘under the table guys’ can supply cheaper, but we all pay when a species goes berserk in a new environment.
I’ve been a bit pre-occupied with the nearby La Brea Fire, which is finally going to be put down due to the efforts of the firefighters and the co-operation of the weather. We’ve gotten a rare occurrence… rain in August. We’ve had no rain since May… now while a firestorm is raging… in comes some rain to dampen the fire. I can relax a little now.
Now I can listen to one of my favorite songs without breaking into a sweat and starting to catalogue our possessions and plan escape routes.
The original lyrics are from the Marshal Tucker Band….
but I do like the banjo and mandolin in this version by the Roundhouse band.
Plus, the stunning visuals in the video are great.
‘Fire on the Mountain’
~Marshal Tucker Band~
Took my fam’ly away from my Carolina home
Had dreams about the West and started to roam
Six long months on a dust covered trail
They say heaven’s at the end but so far it’s been hell
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
We were diggin’ and siftin’ from fiveto five
Sellin’ everything we found just to stay alive
Gold flowed free like the whiskey in the bars
Sinnin’ was the big thing, lord and Satan was his star
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Dance hall girls were the evenin’ treat
Empty cartridges and blood lined the gutters of the street
Men were shot down for the sake of fun
Or just to hear the noise of their forty-four guns
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Now my widow she weeps by my grave
Tears flow free for her man she couldn’t save
Shot down in cold blood by a gun that carried fame
All for a useless and no good worthless claim
And there’s fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Fire on the mountain, lightnin’ in the air
Gold in them hills and it’s waitin’ for me there
Waitin’ for me there
Europeans often say we in the US have no history to our country and culture. I disagree completely.
My dad was a youngster in the early forties when his great grandfather was on his deathbed on a farm near Troy Missouri. Each day the family would gather dressed in black, and they would all sit around the bed quietly. The boys of course were restless and fidgety. One thing that always impressed my dad about the old man, who was born in the 1850′s was his revolver he kept hanging on the corner post of his bed. He’d kept it there always, even when civilization came to Missouri at the turn of the century. My dad says it was a huge gun… he was of course young and small.. and just like the snowdrifts over my head I recall as a child… when you grow up the scale of things changes.
My great great granddad had told my dad that in the old days “life was cheap. Men would get killed in the saloons and alleys of Saint Louis, and every morning a wagon would roam the streets to pick up the men who had been killed overnight and thrown into the streets.”
We’re all descended from people who’ve gone through hell.
The local La Brea Fire has gotten to some 48,000 acres. The smokehead rises over the Central Coast like a giant cauliflower when the white head shows…. other times it is a big grey smudge all over the sky. The winds change the shape on a minute by minute basis.
You can find up-to-date news on the fire at local KSBY.
One photo shows a field covered with plastic. This is commonly used in this area to destroy every last bit of life in the soil. The plastic is unrolled over the field… the edges sealed to make the cover one huge uninterrupted cover over the entire field…. then when the outside edges have been buried, a machine goes over the field poking a small hole into the plastic, it will then inject a deadly poison into the ground… a patch is placed over the plastic to seal it, and the machine will move a bit further down the field to re inject poison. The covers are kept on for a while so that the poison gasses will have plenty of time to destroy every last bit of life. Then the plastic is pulled off… whatever gasses remain will be released into the atmosphere, and strawberries will be planted.
What we’re seeing in this photo is common… the wind will often get under one edge and cause huge ‘bubbles’ of plastic to rise up… sometimes the plastic will even lift up on the windward side, eventually blowing across a road and causing real problems. The local recycle area has acres of these plastics in a huge yard… great heaps of this plastic piled high… probably coated with toxins.
We can see that this cover has not yet been punctured for the poison….. we see none of the little plastic ‘patches’ that are put over the plastic to seal it after the injector has done its job.
I worry that one day this entire valley will be seen as toxic. Be assured that we live many miles up the canyon (near the fire), and our plantings are not affected directly by the toxins injected into this beautiful, productive and verdant valley.
I’m not a strawberry grower…. and we’re organically certified, so I am naturally against this type of poisoning of the environment and the use of such a huge amount of plastic. Yet being a grower and having to deal with bureaucracy and governmental and public dismay, I am naturally a bit hesitant to critique these foul methods (but I did it anyway).
The big huge firestorm head is called a Pyrocumulus….
UPDATE 081509:
The fire is now at 75,500 acres and ten percent containment.
Galileo was forced to capitulate to the religious/political authorities.. and science took a step backward.
Usually religion will trump reason when placed toe-to-toe by their respective adherents. Because when ‘push-comes-to-shove’, the religious will often energetically promote their perspectives, and endeavour to embarrass all others to silence by implying they are not ‘properly pious’. In a social context, this is tantamount to banishment. Humans, the social animal will tend to modify their public statements to avoid the social stigma associated with ‘going against the flow’.
Religion does not always mean worship of a ‘Creator-Being’… religion can be any faith and belief in a system that has no real basis in verified proof. This is why we call religious persons ‘people of faith’. Many in the environmental/political worship system will say they are agnostics or atheists…. but perhaps their deep commitment to social and environmental issues is actually a type of religion.
The professor of the Classics in Calif, Victor Davis Hanson has a great article…. ‘I no longer quite believe’.
The adage ‘those who do not remember the past are doomed to repeat it’, has an ancillary meaning… we need to learn the past… and we should listen very well to the researchers in the antiquities of mankind.
He dragged the garbage can out from under the table where we store it to keep it safe from Opossums and Raccoons. He just pulled the end of the table off the porch to tip the can over…. the strength of this animal is astounding.
He’s a sad starving bear…. eating cheese-paper and plastic.
For a while now, we’ll have to keep our garbage locked up to keep him away from it… otherwise he’ll hang around all the time. We don’t need a bear here on a constant basis… they make it hard to get our work done.
We’ve had bears climb onto the top of the house, we’ve had them on the patio, and we’ve had them invade our garden. One year they ate some of the watermelons we grew. The small ones they could crack open, the large ones they tried, but failed… they had thick and deep scratch marks from the claws and teeth. It was fun eating watermelons that bears had marked up that way. It’s been four years or so since we’ve had a bear come by… so we got lax and forgot we live in ‘Bear Country’. Now for some time, the garbage will be inside a wire and cement dog run we use for the occasional animal that comes by…. only this time, the animal will be locked out.
The Kevin referred to is our neighbor…. he’s the next person the bear would likely visit… so we wanted to warn him.
the canyon bottoms are about the only places with water
a burned-over area
a tree that snapped off
massive…. imposing, impressive
Tall conifers in Hugry Valley Calif
Military-style Hummer
It’s a monster
able to climb large rocks with a single climb
a capable Jeep
who can climb higher?
teeter-totering
burned-over Manzanita
We went with the neighbors to Hungry Valley Recreational Vehicle Area to do some off-roading on extreme trails.
Properly done and careful four wheeling can be done with little real injury to the environment. Once a trail is cut, the local wildlife will use it as a quicker and easier way to get from place to place. Four wheel vehicles should go on such areas in a slow and careful way… don’t spin your tires, don’t go flying in the air….. the real way to four wheel is to gruel nice and slow….. the tires always getting maximum traction by letting the thick treads dig into the dirt and rocks…. this is not the place to slide and spin…. one bounce the wrong way, and you might find yourself on a thousand foot-roll.
I took the video below…. the descent was very steep and does not really show on film. It was difficult just walking this trail down…. that Hummer is a very capable off-road vehicle, and our neighbor Lane who owns and drives it is a very capable driver.
Now, I like Four-Wheel-Drive to get from one place to another that can’t be traversed by regular vehicles… yet for me it’s mostly a practicality issue. We use our Four-Wheel Drive dump truck to drive up and over huge piles of mulch when we’re dumping…. but the fellows in the video below like to use Four-Wheel-Drive in much the same way others will complete a complicated puzzle… they like the combination of mind-work required for such an operation…. get up and over an obstacle that others would pale at just contemplating.
No, I’m not likely to ever try anything like this video below. It is a very complicated series of maneuvers, requiring a mix of spacial cognition and knowledge of physics in a ‘seat-of-the-pants’ way that is beyond the ken of most.
Bob Jones was an early naturalist of the area… he pushed and after some time, the Southern Pacific Railroad ‘right-of-way’ was used to make this trail. It runs from the 101 Freeway, to San Luis Bay….
This is really a great place for locals and visiting vacationers to walk… it follows the creek… so you are in the canopy of the willows and other water-loving trees. You are likely to see waterfowl… and if very early in the morning, before the joggers and roller-bladers come out, you will likely see much local wildlife.
The Bob Jones Bike Trail is a very safe place for a family or lone females to roam, I’ve even seen uniformed Sheriff’s Officers on bicycles patrolling this path! Yay, go cops! It passes alongside the properties of several resorts and private homes, so there are many vacationers as well as locals who will use this paved trail for recreation. You are not likely to be alone on this trail, it can actually carry a large number of people on weekends and holidays. The scenery is nice and the trail is a very beautiful example of California river-stream habitat… and on hot days, being under the cooling canopy of the trees and near the cool water… very nice. Yes, this is a good place to be on a warm day.
