Earth Day and the 50th Anniversary of Silent Spring
Rachel Carson…she’s one of my heroes. This year for Earth Day (April 22, 2012) it is fitting to honor the 50th anniversary of Rachael Carson’s book, Silent Spring.
Why Don’t Farmers Just Do It?
Why don’t farmers just do it? I mean fence their cattle out of the streams. If farmers would do this one practice, at least in the Shenandoah River watershed, agriculture would probably be finished with its part of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL. Excluding livestock from streams is possibly the single...
Harpers Ferry, John Brown and Sediment in the Shenandoah
“T” Stands For Tolerance
There has been a lot of talk about “T” these days because of the Chesapeake Bay TMDL. I hate jargon so here’s a quickie on these two terms. The TMDL is the agreed-upon pollution diet for the Bay; it stands for Total Maximum Daily Load. It’s the maximum amount of...
Mr. Farmer, What Compelled You To Do It?
Monday I went to see a farmer that was interested in fencing his cattle out of a stream on his farm. He operates one of those down-home, “buy your local meats here” farms. They raise beef cattle, “free range” turkeys and hogs. They sell all kinds of meats, from bacon...
Bare Ground in Dayton
Yesterday I was called out on a job in the Dayton area of Rockingham County, Virginia. This area is intensively farmed with livestock and crops. I was totally amazed at two things: the amount of bare ground and the number of fields farmed up and down the slope of the...
Our Pot of Gold…Is Our Water
If a one-gallon jug filled with water represented all the water in the world the amount of available freshwater would equal just over a tablespoon – less than one half of one percent of the total. The rest is salt water or unavailable such as the freshwater frozen in the...
Cover Crops a Must
Here in the Bay states and across the temperate zone of the world farmers are busy planting cover crops on fields that were used to produce their summer crops such as corn. The purpose of a cover crop is to “cover” or protect the land during the winter so that...
