People come from miles around to get water from our spring. The neighbor below us even pipes water into his house from our spring. What gall for him to complain our septic tank was running down our hill and stinking up his property. (We had just moved in but still...}
Farmer Bob just above us is a dairy farmer doing it the organic way. Maybe that little something extra in the spring water is what draws the crowds. We get our water from a well so it doesn't have any of that extra something in it just in case.
This diary is about doing farming the natural way.
I vowed not to look at what harm the evil bureaucrats at the EPA might be doing to those nice Amish farmers.
But I did. Probably shouldn't be swearing like the Good Book says but since I don't have a Good Book around I couldn't look it up.
Farmer Bob is not Amish and probably doesn't get the high prices other organic farmers get. But I can tell you for a fact that Farmer Bob and other farmers around us do it the organic way. One needs only to smell the air up and down the roads in the Spring when the spreading of stuff like the overflow from our septic perfumes the air.
How come our neighbor piping organic water from our spring didn't complain about them?
I guess they are better armed.
To the Amish:
"We are supposed to be stewards of the land," said Matthew Stoltzfus, a 34-year-old dairy farmer and father of seven whose family, like many other Amish, shuns cars in favor of horse and buggy and lives without electricity. "It is our Christian duty."
But farmers like Mr. Stoltzfus are facing growing scrutiny for agricultural practices that the federal government sees as environmentally destructive. Their cows generate heaps of manure that easily washes into streams and flows onward into the Chesapeake Bay.
Good thing Mr. Stoltzfus and his neighbors don't raise ducks. The most productive cow can't begin to generate the output of a duck, pound for pound.
Then again, they probably do raise a few ducks.
We did.
Ducks are kinda neat.
But so are fish, like in Chesapeake Bay for instance.
Fish don't grow well in open sewers - except the Salton Sea where the world is upside down.
Maybe the Good Book says God hates fish and it is Mr. Stoltfus' Christian duty to kill fish as a good steward of the land. I am not really up to date on Christian duties.
There is another way that the heathen of southeast Asia invented centuries ago. Anaerobic digesters were then longitudinal boxes buried in the ground to produce actual fertilizer from manure. The methane was a curiosity then.
Today, modern methods that go beyond anaerobic digestion can produce energy and recycle nutrients on limited land so the Chesapeake Bay and Baltic Sea and vast stretches of ocean with dead zones are fully alive again.
But that means winters may not be finished and bears and penguins can go on living like the fishies and birdies and we won't need BP to finish them off.
There are always trade-offs.
Best, Terry