For anyone who's looking for larger quantities of Siberian Pea shrubs at a
reasonable price, you may wish to try www.greenwoodnursery.com. They sell
the shrubs in quantities of 25 or 50, with free shipping for orders over $60 and
a 10% discount if you sign up for free membership to their web site
(discount good for the first week of membership only.) I found them via an
online search and just placed my first order with them.
In addition to being a high protein source for chicken feed, I've read that
these shrubs are commonly used in permaculture gardens to fix nitrogen for other
fruit trees and that they're an early blooming source of nectar and pollen
for honeybees. I'm always looking for early blooming plants to feed my bees and
I'm hoping that the shrubs will provide a boost for the plum trees
that I planted last year.
Anna
In a message dated 4/3/2010 1:21:03 P.M. Eastern Daylight Time,
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Today's Topics:
1. The White House
Egg Roll v. Gulag Ag (Tradingpost)
2. Siberian Pea shrub
(Pumpkin Lady)
3. Re: Siberian Pea shrub (Harvey
Ussery)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message:
1
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2010 14:26:46 -0700
From: "Tradingpost"
<tradingpost@lobo.net>
Subject: [Livingontheland] The White House Egg
Roll v. Gulag Ag
To: livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org
Message-ID:
<201004021426460437.10167050@mail.lobo.net>
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The White House Egg Roll v. Gulag Ag
By
ALEXANDER COCKBURN April 2 - 4,
2010
http://www.counterpunch.org/cockburn04022010.html
There?s
America the mythical, with the White House Easter Egg Roll scheduled for next
Monday and activities, in the words of the White House press release, designed
to ?encourage children to lead healthy and active lives and follow the First
Lady?s ?Let?s Move!? initiative, a national campaign to combat childhood
obesity. The White House will open its South Lawn for children aged 12 years
and younger and their families.?
Then there?s America the Real, where
on March 23 a big fire in Ohio in a warehouse at a Concentrated Animal Feeding
Operation, owned by Ohio Fresh Eggs, prompted the euthanizing of 250,000
laying hens after ? in the words of a local news report ? ?electricity in some
of the buildings had to be shut off, and some of the birds suffered from
issues with ventilation and smoke inhalation.?
Rotten luck on the
birds, of course. But, fire or no fire, their future was not bright. The same
news story quoted Kevin Elder, executive director of the Ohio Department of
Agriculture?s Livestock Environmental Permitting program, as saying Ohio Fresh
Eggs was permitted to keep 2.4 million birds and had about 2.2 million on
hand. He said the birds were euthanized according to industry standards and
none were known to have died in the fire. He said those euthanized were
nearing the end of their laying cycle and would have been euthanized soon,
regardless of the fire.?
As Martha Rosenberg, a freelance journalist
who covers America?s ghastly agro-industrial landscape wrote on this site, ?At
Ohio Fresh Eggs, only eight employees were tending 16 barns when the fire was
reported ? What kind of ?care? can workers give animals in fume-filled barns
the size of football fields? Removing the dead and putting the half dead into
kill carts, say those who've worked there.?
Mythical America is
interminably featured in pastoral commercials and cute cartoons, where
contentment reigns at Animal Farm. The cackle of chickens mingles euphonically
with the grunts of what Bertie Wooster, commenting to Jeeves on his breakfast
bacon, invoked as coming from ?contented pigs.?
There aren?t many
contented pigs on this continent, certainly not those imprisoned in the Netley
Hutterite Colony hog farm in Manitoba, where 8,700 pigs perished in a 2008
fire. Witnesses reported hearing the animals' "ear shattering" squeals and
"screams." Only six full-time employees tended the animals, and bulldozers
could not breach the factory farm manure pits. Fires at two other Hutterite
Colonies, Vermillion Farms and Rainbow, both near Winnipeg, incinerated 8,500
pigs previously.
Every Thanksgiving, the U.S. president pardons a
turkey, a cute ceremony ? in fairness, Obama did not look enthusiastic ? as
repulsive as would have been the spectacle of Adolf Hitler excusing from the
gas chamber on each anniversary of Kristalnacht a Jew imported for the
ceremony from Auschwitz.
Michele Obama has planted an organic garden on
the White House grounds. The symbolism would be more admirable if one did not
know that Obama installed as his secretary of agriculture Tom Vilsack, a
former governor of Iowa and a notorious supporter of everything that is awful
in the mass production of food in America ? from bioengineered crops from
Monsanto to the treatment of compromised meat with ammonia to produce what one
USDA microbiologist, Gerald Zirnstein, called "pink slime," saying to
colleagues in an email, "I do not consider the stuff to be ground beef, and I
consider allowing it in ground beef to be a form of fraudulent
labeling." It?s in fast-food chain hamburger and school
meals.
These days, animals in the days before slaughter are dosed with
a dangerous chemical additive fed to animals in the last days before
slaughter. To quote Rosenberg again, ?Ractopamine, aka Paylean and Optaflexx,
is banned in 160 countries, including Europe, Taiwan and China? Yet, in the
United States 45 per cent of pigs, 30 per cent of ration-fed cattle, and an
unknown percentage of turkeys are pumped full of this drug in the days leading
up to slaughter. This drug increases protein synthesis. In other words, it
makes animals more muscular ? and this increases the food growers? bottom
line." How does a drug marked, "Not for use in humans. Individuals with
cardiovascular disease should exercise special caution to avoid exposure. Use
protective clothing, impervious gloves, protective eye wear, and a
NIOSH-approved dust mask" become "safe" in human food? With no washout
period?? asks Rosenberg.
She answers:
?The same way Elanco's
other two blockbusters, Stilbosol (diethylstilbestrol or DES), now withdrawn,
and Posilac or bovine growth hormone (rBST), bought from Monsanto in 2008,
became part of the nation's food supply: shameless corporate
lobbying.?
Across rural America, in the past fifteen years have spring
up CAFOs. As Steve Higgs writes in our current newsletter ? In most
instances, the C in CAFO means ?concentrated,? but it can also stand for
?confined,? as in Confined Feeding Operations (CFOs). Regardless what the
letters stand for, the meaning is the same: the concentration and confinement
of huge numbers of hogs, cows, chickens and turkeys in places where
sustainable agriculture had served both farmers and society for
centuries.? These animal gulags emit appalling stinks, clouds of methane
so toxic that they kill, sewage filling vast poisonous lagoons.
America
the Mythical loves backyard barbecue. America the Real services the myth with
hogs from Gulag-Ag. The coastal plains and piedmont of North Carolina, and now
many other states, are pocked by vast pig factories and pig slaughterhouses.
People living there sicken from the stink of twenty-five-foot deep lagoons of
pig shit, which have poisoned the water table and decanted nitrogen and
phosphorous-laced sludge into such rivers as the Neuse, the Tar-Pamlico and
the Albemarle. Ammonia gas burdens the air. In North Carolina, it is as though
the sewage of fifteen million people were being flushed into open pits and
sprayed onto fields, with almost no restrictions. That's where the millions of
pigs? worth of manure go.
The reeking lagoons surround darkened
warehouses of animals trapped in metal crates barely larger than their bodies,
tails chopped off, pumped with corn, soy beans and chemicals until, in six
months, they weigh about 240 pounds, at which point they are shipped off to
abattoirs to be killed, sometimes by prisoners on work release from the county
jail. The sows are killed after about two years or whenever their reproductive
performance declines. It takes maybe eight to ten people to run a sow factory,
overseeing two thousand sows, boars and piglets. A computerized ?finishing?
farm, where the pigs are fattened, may just require a part-time caretaker to
check the equipment and clean up between arriving and departing cohorts of
hogs.
The noise in these factories is ghastly, and many workers wear
ear pads against the squealing and crashing of the animals in their cages.
When the Raleigh News and Observer did a series on North Carolina's pig barons
in the mid 1990s, readers were told they could call the paper's number in
Raleigh, 549?5100, extension 4647, and listen to a recording of this terrible
sound.
America?s food corporations, only a handful of them, wield huge
political power. Their lobbyists shuttle in and out of government. Their
bought politicians safeguard the CAFOs from local regulation and okay
?organic? standards designed to destroy the small farmers and
processors.
Only last week Obama recess-appointed Islam Siddiqui to be
chief agricultural negotiator in the office of the U.S. trade representative.
Dr. Siddiqui?s nomination had been held up in the Senate and was opposed by
the Center for Biological Diversity and more than 80 other environmental,
small-farm, and consumer groups. More than 90,000 concerned citizens contacted
the White House and Senate to oppose the nomination. Siddiqui is a former
pesticide lobbyist and is currently vice president of science and regulatory
affairs at CropLife America, a biotech and pesticide trade group that lobbies
to weaken environmental laws.
As the Center for Biological Diversity
remarked, ?As undersecretary for marketing and regulatory programs at the U.S.
Department of Agriculture, Siddiqui oversaw the development of the first
national organic labeling standards, which allowed sewage sludge-fertilized,
genetically modified, and irradiated food to be labeled as organic before
public outcry forced more stringent standards. Siddiqui has derided the
European Union?s ban on hormone-treated beef and has vowed to pressure the
European Union to accept more genetically modified crops.?
Michele
Obama campaigns against obesity. She doesn?t campaign against Chicken
McNuggets, as sold by the McDonalds Corporation and devoured by kids across
America. Here?s a slice of America the Real, from Michael Pollan?s The
Omnivore?s Dilemma:
?Of the thirty-eight ingredients it
takes to make a McNugget, I counted thirteen that can be derived from corn
starting with the corn-fed chicken itself ?McNuggets also contain several
completely synthetic ingredients, quasi-edible substances that ultimately come
not from a corn or soybean field but from a petroleum refinery or chemical
plant ? But perhaps the most alarming ingredient in a Chicken McNugget is
tertiary butylhydroquinone, or TBHQ, an antioxidant derived from petroleum
that is either sprayed directly on the nugget or the inside of the box it
comes in to ?help preserve freshness.? According to A Consumer's Dictionary of
Food Additives, TBHQ is a form of butane (i.e., lighter fluid) the FDA allows
processors to use sparingly in our food: it can comprise no more than 0.02
percent of the oil in a nugget. Which is probably just as well, considering
that ingesting a single gram of TBHQ can cause ?nausea, vomiting, ringing in
the ears, delirium, a sense of suffocat
ion, and collapse.? Ingesting five
grams of TBHQ can kill."
Many Americans eat at fast food outlets
because it?s all they can afford or have time for. I count myself lucky. I
live in the country, and I take care to know which pasture and farm yard the
pig, the steer and the lamb in my freezer came from. There?s no reason why
there couldn?t be mass online ordering from small farms and real-time footage
to show how the creatures are treated. No, it?s not veganism, thank God, but
it would be progress
nonetheless.
------------------------------
Message:
2
Date: Fri, 02 Apr 2010 11:57:05 -0500
From: Pumpkin Lady
<pumpkingal@clearwire.net>
Subject: [Livingontheland] Siberian Pea
shrub
To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing
<livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID:
<4BB621E1.4070908@clearwire.net>
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
Harvey Ussery wrote:
>
Another screening plant (this one perennial) might be Siberian pea
>
shrub, Caragana arborescens. I'm planting six of them here this season.
> The seeds are high in protein and from what I read relished by
chickens.
Where did you get yours?
They sound like they might be
invasive, but they also sound
like I could turn the goats on to them if
they got out of
hand.
;-)
Morgan
------------------------------
Message:
3
Date: Sat, 03 Apr 2010 07:40:17 -0400
From: Harvey Ussery
<harvey@themodernhomestead.us>
Subject: Re: [Livingontheland]
Siberian Pea shrub
To: Healthy soil and sustainable growing
<livingontheland@lists.ibiblio.org>
Message-ID:
<4BB72921.4080301@themodernhomestead.us>
Content-Type: text/plain;
charset=ISO-8859-1; format=flowed
An online search revealed plenty of
sources for seeds of pea shrub.
However, I wanted a chance to get at least
a small harvest this fall,
before deadline for my book, so maybe include
actual experience feeding.
The only started plants I could find were from
Raintree
http://www.raintreenursery.com/catalog/productdetails.cfm?productid=M095
I
bought six, bare root, potted them up for rooting before setting them
out.
Will probably experiment with planting them in three different
locations.
~Harvey
Pumpkin Lady wrote:
> Harvey
Ussery wrote:
>
>
>> Another screening plant
(this one perennial) might be Siberian pea
>> shrub, Caragana
arborescens. I'm planting six of them here this season.
>> The seeds
are high in protein and from what I read relished by
chickens.
>>
>
> Where did you get
yours?
>
> They sound like they might be invasive, but they also
sound
> like I could turn the goats on to them if they got out of
> hand. ;-)
>
> Morgan
>
--
Harvey in northern Va
www.themodernhomestead.us
My book, THE
MODERN HOMESTEAD POULTRY FLOCK, will be published next year by Chelsea Green
Publishing.
------------------------------
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