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Essay published in The Christian Science Monitor, April 14, 2008 Discovered: My Inner Gardener I have always thought that I was born with a brown thumb and an innate inability to nurture anything green. Despite my good intentions, the few times I've owned a plant, I've managed to ensure its death by drowning or dehydration. The only plant I've owned that actually flourished was an African Violet with velvety purple blossoms that stood on the small windowsill in my bedroom. I was 9years old and I spent hours reading to it after hearing that this could help it grow. Whenever a flower would bloom, I'd be as excited as a kid going to the county fair. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in Motherhood, April 2008 10 Reasons Why NOW is the BEST Time to Have a Baby! We give you our top 10 reasons why NOW is really the best time to have a baby... 1. Pain relief. Need we say more? Our choices are better than ever before. In the not so distant past, labouring mothers were injected with a combination of morphine and scopolamine, keeping them in a semi-conscious state and leaving them with no memory of the birth. Often, restraints had to be used with this method, called "twilight sleep," since the drugs couldcause women to thrash around. Not only are we now able to participate in our babies' births and create our own birth plans, we have pain control options ranging from sitting in the hot tub to massage to low-dosepainkillers to epidurals. Plus we're allowed to change our minds about going through labour with no pain relief, as the going gets harder. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in Motherhood, February 2008 Boy or Girl? Pregnant with my third baby after having twin girls three years earlier, I was consumed with finding out the gender. I already had an ultrasound scan early in my pregnancy, somy doctor wouldn't schedule another one. I'm not a patient person under the best of circumstances, but being half-crazed with hormones on top of my inclination to impatience, I defiantly called the obstetrician and scheduled my own ultrasound. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in Farm Journal, February 2008 Pick a Peck of Pulse If you've ever considered adding pulse crops to your crop rotation, you may want to give this option a closer look. Not only do pulse crops improve the quality of the soil and reduce the need for herbicides and fungicides, they also break up the cycle of insects, weeds and crop diseases. Research shows that pulse crops may increase the yield of subsequent crops and produce a better-quality crop. Pulse crops are defined as legumes with dry seeds that are edible for humans. The most common pulse crops are field peas; beans, such as navy, pinto and kidney; lentils; and chickpeas. Though soybeans are technically a pulse crop, in the U.S. they are classified as an oilseed. Pulses may be used for livestock and human consumption. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in Massey Ferguson Today, Spring 2008 Cultivating the Desert In this age of corporate farm expansion, the Baldenegro clan proves that not only can a family farm do well, it can flourish. Located on the west-central border of Arizona in the Colorado River Indian Reservation, the Baldenegros have been living in Parker, Ariz., and farming in Poston and Bouse, Ariz., since 1967. Farming is in their blood, says Mike Baldenegro: the family has been farming since the early 1900s. Baldenegro began farming with his father, Fernando, in 1994 with 154 acres. His brother Armando worked with the two as well until this year when Baldenegro's other brother, Sonny, took Armando's place. Thirteen years later, the trio now runs around 8,800 acres of land, leased from the Mojave, Navajo, Hopi and Chemehuevi tribes that make up the reservation. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in Singapore's Motherhood, August 2007 Child(less) Envy There are some days when I wholeheartedly envy the childless. Today has been one of them. After a morning spent cleaning up after two little boys hell-bent on tearing down everything on each of the three floors of our house, and then throwing it into various corners and odd places, I was relieved when nap time finally arrived. Two hours later, my red-cheeked, messy-haired partners in crime crept down the stairs. They seemed to be fairly cheerful, so my forecast for the afternoon appeared to be a sunny one. Sure. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in AGCO Advantage, Summer 2007 It's All About the Orange In a small community where green is more common than orange, Tom Wolf's enthusiastic loyalty to Allis-Chalmers and AGCO tractors gets him a lot of teasing. "They say that if I ever cut my finger, it'd bleed orange," he laughs. Raised on a farm that used only Allis-Chalmers equipment, Wolf began driving the tractors when he was around ten and has been a fervent fan ever since. A dairy farmer from Shreve, Ohio, Wolf owns at least one of every pedal tractor ever made by Allis-Chalmers, as well as a few other brands. "Right now I think I have a total of 110 pedal tractors," Wolf says. He displays them on shelves in a shed where space is "starting to be a problem. But it's a good problem," he adds. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in TWINS Magazine, September/October, 2006 One-Pound Miracles! When Ann Lee of Aberdeen, S.D., went for her 24-week prenatal check-up, her obstetrician described different signs of labor. The birth of her twins seemed somewhere off in the hazy future. The babies were due in February, long months away. The following afternoon, Lee lost her cervical plug. Suddenly, the twins' imminent birth was nightmarishly close. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in Massey Ferguson Today, Fall 2006 Carrots & Buckwheat & Pumpkins, Oh My! Ever thought about venturing into nontraditional produce? Alternative crops can provide additional income, give your farming some variety, and, when used in crop rotations, breakup the cycle of diseases, weeds and insects. Of course, as with all new business endeavors, it's important to thoroughly research your idea beforehand and begin gradually. That's how Don Schuster, a project economist with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, made his farm so successful. Schuster started his business inadvertently by growing pumpkins and raising exotic animals for fun. As the income from the pumpkins started to increase, he took the plunge and Schuster's Playtime Farm of Deerfield, Wis., was born. When the pumpkin income began to dwindle, "we started adding things like hayrides, a bonfire pit, and a large corn maze. We started slowly and we've grown slowly," he says. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in Feedlot Magazine, September/October 2006 Vet Clinic Embraces New Trend Thought about looking into a different means of record-keeping for your livestock? Electronic identification may be the way to go. Once the wave of the future, electronic identification, or EID, also known as RFID (radio frequency identification), is now becoming a trend of the present. Take for instance Northwest Veterinary Supply (NVS) in Parkston and Wagner, SD. In less than one year, the clinic has tagged over 11,000 head of cattle in their area, says Tom Martinez, veterinary assistant. Much of this success is due to the education they have done in the region, helping people understand what EID can do for them, Martinez says. The clinic got started in EID by chance two years ago when a couple of clients wanted to use it in their cattle so they could penetrate niche markets. The technology piqued the clinic's interest, so they started researching niche markets that livestock owners could get into using EID tags. For the rest of the story, click here. Editorial column published in Aberdeen American News, October 2005 It's clean, it's plentiful, it's renewable, and it doesn't take all that much to produce a whole lot of power. What is it? Wind energy, something South Dakota has in plenty. I recently read that South Dakota is ranked fourth in the country for its wind resources. Fourth? That's it? Are they kidding? I'm hardly an expert on such matters, but where I live, more often than not, the wind is blowing. Not just some nice, gentle breeze either; it's usually enormous gusts that have even been known to blow my daughter head over heels, right down the steps, slam our swing-set to the ground multiple times, and almost rip our screen doors right off the hinges. Imagine my surprise when on one particularly windy day, I looked out the window to see pieces of my house blowing across the lawn! Somehow the wind had managed to get underneath our siding and rip almost the entire east side off. We scurried around trying to save as many pieces as we could, which was quite a task considering how fast the siding was blowing away. For the rest of the story, click here. Editorial column published in Aberdeen American News, September 25, 2005 Ahhh... Remember the good old days? The days when families would gather around the TV and watch the evening sitcoms without fear of profanity, nudity or other sights inappropriate for children; when a movie that was rated PG-13 was actually okay for thirteen year olds? Forget about TV shows on public stations with nudity like "NYPDBlue;" they were unheard of. And the PG-13 movies we have today? They would have been rated R when I was a kid. Wait a minute, was this really so long ago? The fact that I am only thirty, yet have seen such a rapid decline in the morality of our society and the media through-out my relatively short lifetime, tells a really sad story. It's not like I'm some old codger, reminiscing about the "innocent" days gone by, or even that I'm ultra-conservative, but I find myself becoming increasingly offended with the images and attitudes portrayed in the media. It is said that art (in this case, the media) reflects reality, but these days it's more that the media hugely influences our reality. For the rest of the story, click here. Published in The Farm Forum, December 10, 2004 Ingenuity Leads to Successful Business in Rural Faulkton Necessity was certainly the mother of invention for Kelly Melius of rural Faulkton. In 2000, Melius had been farming with his father, Roger, for twelve years and knew he needed to start supplementing his farm income. There just wasn't enough land for both he and his father to run. Thus began Common Sense Manufacturing, Inc. in Fall 2000 with only one type of product in its inventory; Melius's unique style of bale feeder. Frustrated with the quality and durability of bale feeders he had seen, Melius decided to create his own. His bale feeder, which holds the hay up off the ground, was such a hit that Melius went through the time and trouble, about two years, to get it patented. The distinctive design allows calves to eat from the bottom of the feeder rather than being unable to reach the hay or even getting caught in the middle of a traditional feeder. The creation of his innovative bale feeder led Melius to design other useful products for farmers and ranchers, including bottomless feed bunks, calf shelters, windbreak, hydraulic wire winders, and horse shelters. All of the products made by Common Sense are extremely heavy-duty and come with five-year warranties for breakage. "We want our products to last a long time," Melius says. "My products are very practical and I know they work well because I use them too." For the rest of the story, click here. Published in The Farm Forum, July 26, 2005 Demand For Organic Crops Keeps Prices High When Jerome Stiegelmeier's brother, Jim, decided to turn all his land into an organic operation in 1988, Stiegelmeier wasn't entirely convinced it was a good idea. Seventeeen years later, Stiegelmeier's business is a full-fledged, certified organic farm near Bowdle. He credits his brother, who passed away in 2002, for helping him and others in the Selby and Bowdle area to get started. Stiegelmeier raises spring and winter wheat, soybeans,rye, buckwheat and millet, and is certified by both the National Organic Program (NOP) and the Organic Crop Improvement Association (OCIA), an international program. Stiegelmeier says that one of the biggest benefits of having gone organic is that he doesn't have to put up a lot of cash in the spring for pesticides, fertilizers and fuel and then wait until much later to profit like he did when he was farming commercially. The trade-off for that is the amount of labor he has to put into his crops. "I use a rotary hoe to combat weeds, which takes quite a while to do. Though I don't have to come up with a bundle of cash, my method of farming is much more labor-intensive," Stiegelmeier says. For the rest of the story, click here. | |
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