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Thursday, May 1, 2008
Animal-Rights Groups Rake in Cash, Influence Felt on Farm
Contributions to animal-rights groups, who increasingly are having a say over how farm animals are raised, caught my attention this past week. Consider these figures from 2006 and how they compare to 2005, the most recent years for which data were available:
Humane Society of the United States: $130.2 million, up 9 percent Massachusetts SPCA: $46.9 million, down 5 percent People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals: $30.2 million, up 17 percent Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine: $7 million, unchanged PCRM Foundation: $6.1 million, unchanged Friends of Animals: $5.6 million, up 12 percent Foundation to Support Animal Protection: $5.1 million, up 18 percent Farm Sanctuary: $4.5 million, unchanged Animal Legal Defense Fund: $3.8 million, down 5 percent Compassion in World Farming: $3 million, up 114 percent
Do you think groups like these should have more say over how livestock are raised, or do you think they already have undue influence?
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Hauling Rock
Random musings on hauling rock:
I spent part of this past weekend picking up rocks in the fields out at my family’s farms in Miami County’s Elizabeth Twp. as we continue spring planting. In recent years, hauling rock — a rather mindless but relaxing job — has had me thinking. It seems I could convince some of my city-slicker friends to pick up rock by telling them they could get a tan while finding rocks for landscaping, much as Tom Sawyer convinced his friends that they couldn’t pass up a chance to whitewash a fence.
Out on the farm, we pick up rocks the size of a fist or larger to keep them from damaging the farm equipment. We dump them in the corners of fields, and some big piles have built up over many decades. (I have to admit the sight of huge boulders dumped in a ditch is a pretty cool one.) A lot of farmers don’t pick up rocks anymore, especially those who have switched to no-till practices. (We no-till soybeans, but still raise corn the old-fashioned way.) Other farms are farming more acres and simply don’t have the hours for such a time-intensive chore.
The job has gotten a lot more pleasant just in the 32 years I’ve been alive. When I was very young, my cousins and I used to sit on the front bucket of a noisy tractor and fetched the rocks we spotted, with the occasional obligatory throwing of a dirt clod at each other. Today, we use John Deere Gators, bringing out the tractor only for the biggest rocks.
I was struck by a neighbor’s perspective on rocks seven years ago when I wrote an article on how we view rocks. She had seen the stone pile on her old farmstead east of Troy depleted in the five years since her family had moved there.
“To the people who were living here at the time, it represented a great deal of effort,” she said of the stone pile, speaking on condition of anonymity lest she attract more stone snatchers. “To me, a present homeowner, it represents history.”
A local landscaper summed it up well: “Rocks in the past, when we were more of an agricultural society, were looked at as more of a nuisance. Now that we’re more of a suburban society, people look at them as a thing of beauty.”
What’s your take on rocks?
