Merry Christmas to all – and God Bless us, Every One…

December 23rd, 2010

Just wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas.

Ours was made very nice by a couple of friends – and of course, Jesus…

You see, our barn burned down on Monday.

Marilyn had brought the boys to town to meet me at the allergist. Sam & I had to get our allergy shots. After that, Sam and I headed to the Tractor Supply in Williamstown to get a ton of wood pellets for the pellet stove. Marilyn and Nathan headed home.

I got a call on the cell phone just as we were preparing to exit at Dry Ridge. Sam answered the call and Nathan asked to talk to me – Sam told him that I was driving and couldn’t talk when Nathan interrupted and said “It’s an emergency!”.

Nathan told me that the barn had burned down. We lost one chicken, but all the goats (that had been in the paddock where the barn was) were safe and sound. When I got home, a fireman was giving oxygen to a chicken. He said that the fire was started by an electrical problem. There was one 8 X 8 section standing and everything else was in rubble. A big, smoldering rubble…

Marilyn and I both posted on facebook that the barn burned down. Many people said that they would pray for us, 1 person said that they would bring us hay, and another volunteered to come out Christmas weekend to help in any way that they could.

Then came the email…

A friend emailed and said that she and her friend wanted to buy Christmas for our boys – so we could use our money to rebuild the barn.

Not only did they do what they said, but they gave us money for the barn project, got money from a chiropractor for the barn (when the husband told the story to the chiropractor, she wanted to give), and said that they had 6 people lined up to help build it when I was ready! Even one of their daughters took money out of savings for Christmas for us – so we would have money to rebuild.

In the end, it was a testament to God’s goodness and of how He works through His people.

I will always remember this Christmas… because love DID come down at Christmas – in more ways than one…

–Pat

Carcinogen found In Tap Water Of 89% Of US Sampled Cities

December 20th, 2010

Recent testing of the water supplies in leading US Cities by the Environmental Working Group has found cancer causing “Hexavalent Chromium”  in the  Tap Water Of 89% Of US Sampled Cities.

This is the very carcinogen that was found in the “Erin Brockovich” case.

So, we “trust” our water supply to the federal and local governments because, quite frankly, they are the “only game in town”.

And if the Food Safety and Modernization Act passes, we will also trust the Federal and local government with the food system for the very same reason – they will be the only game in town.

The FSMA will take away our ability to choose what sources we can get our foods from.

From the grocery giants, to the local farmers, to growing our own foods, the only choice left, would be the grocery giants.

All because people would rather know who won Survival, American Idol or Dancing with the Stars than know where their food comes from, or, worse still, to stand up and tell the government to leave us and the food system alone and let us choose for ourselves…

Read the full article here:

Cancer-Causing Hexavalent Chromium In Tap Water Of 89% Of US Sampled Cities.

Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510

December 3rd, 2010

Natural News has provided a list of issues about S.510. Yopu can read it at the link below:

Top ten lies about Senate Bill 510.

for those of you that don’t want to jump from site to site, I am republishing it here in its entirety:

Here are the ten biggest lies that have been promoted about S.510 by the U.S. Congress, the food industry giants and the mainstream media:
Lie #1 – Most deaths from food poisoning are caused by fresh produce
Here’s a whopper the mainstream media won’t dare report: Out of the 1,809 people who die in America every year from food-borne pathogens (CDC estimate), only a fraction die from the manufacturer’s contamination of fresh produce. By far the majority of food poisoning is caused by the consumption of spoiled processed foods, dead foods and animal-human transmission of pathogens.

For example, one of the largest food-borne killers according to the CDC is Toxoplasma gondii, a disease that people acquire from cat feces coming into contact with their food, which can happen right in their own homes (http://www.cdc.gov/ncidod/eid/Vol5n…). Salmonella poisoning accounts for 553 deaths a year. As a reference for relative risk, over 42,000 people die each year from road accidents in the USA, meaning driving a car has a roughly 7600% higher chance of killing you than eating fresh produce. (http://www.driveandstayalive.com/in…)

In terms of food-borne illness, many of the deaths come from things like spoiled tomato sauce, spoiled canned foods and spoiled pasteurized milk. S 510, of course, does absolutely nothing to address these food contamination deaths, since those foods are considered “sterilized” at the time of sale.
Lie #2 – Under S.510, the FDA would only recall products it knows to be contaminated
Not true. S.510 merely requires the FDA to have “reason to believe” a food is contaminated. So right there, that means all raw milk will be targeted by the FDA because even without conducting any scientific tests at all, the FDA can say it has “reason to believe” the milk is contaminated merely because it is raw.

In other words, the FDA no longer needs science to outlaw a food product. It merely needs an opinion.

Is this “reason to believe” section really true? Yep, and here’s how it was amended:

SEC. 208. ADMINISTRATIVE DETENTION OF FOOD.
23 (a) IN GENERAL. – Section 304(h)(1)(A) (21 U.S.C.24 334(h)(1)(A)) is amended by
(1) striking ”credible evidence or information indicating” and inserting ”reason to believe”;
(http://frwebgate.access.gpo.gov/cgi…)

In other words, in negotiating this bill, the U.S. Senate removed the requirement that the FDA needed “credible evidence” in order to recall a product and, instead, replaced that with the FDA only needing “reason to believe.”

It is utterly amazing that the U.S. Congress would give the FDA to conduct large-scale product recalls and even imprison people based entirely on what the agency “has reason to believe.”

Last time I checked, the FDA held some pretty bizarre (if not downright moronic) beliefs, including this jaw-dropping whopper: The FDA literally believes that there is no food, no herb, no vitamin or supplement that has any ability to prevent disease of any kind. They don’t even believe limes can prevent scurvy, and you’d have to nutritionally illiterate to believe that.

The FDA believes foods are inert and that all the amazing phytonutrients in those foods (carotenoids, antioxidants, therapeutic fats like omega-3 and so on) are utterly useless for human biology.

This belief, held by the FDA that has now been put in charge of the food supply, is the belief system of an insane government agency that has completely lost touch with reality while abandoning nutritional science.

Lie #3 – They didn’t tell you that nearly 70% of grocery store chickens are contaminated with salmonella every day

Yep, it’s true: Amid all the fear-mongering over salmonella, everybody forgot to notice that the vast majority of fresh chickens sold at grocery stores every single day are widely contaminated with salmonella (http://www.naturalnews.com/028661_c…). Yet S 510 does absolutely nothing to address this. It’s not even mentioned in the bill.

In fact, it is these contaminated chickens that end up cross-contaminating the fresh produce in many kitchens across America. So the so-called “food poisoning” that’s often blamed on spinach or onions often originates with the contaminated chicken meat people bring home and slice on their kitchen cutting boards.

Lie #4 – S.510 will exclude and protect small farmers

The Tester Amendment, which was finally included in S.510, excludes farmers who sell less than $500,000 worth of food each year from the more onerous paperwork and compliance burdens described in the bill. But this dollar amount is not indexed to inflation, meaning that as the U.S. dollar continues to lose value due to the Federal Reserve counterfeiting machine running at full speed (more “quantitative easing,” anyone?), food prices will continue to skyrocket — and this will shift even small family farms into the $500,000 sales range within just a few years.

In fact, a single-family farm with just four people could easily sell $500,000 worth of fresh produce a year right now, even before inflation. Remember, $500,000 is not their profit, but rather the gross sales amount. The profits on that might be only $50,000 or even less.

Furthermore, this $500,000 threshold means that small, successful farms that are doing well and would like to expand will refuse to hire more people or expand their operations. To avoid the tyranny of S 510, small farms will try to stay small, and that means avoiding the kind of business expansion that would create new jobs.

Lie #5 – The FDA needs more power to enforce food safety

The FDA already has the power to effectively recall foods by publicly announcing a product has been found to be contaminated. The FDA already has the power to confiscate “misbranded” products, too, and it could easily use this power to halt the sale of contaminated food items.

But the FDA simply refuses to enforce the laws already on the books and, instead, has sought to expand its power by hyping up the e.coli food scares. The ploy apparently worked: Now in a reaction to the food scare-mongering, the FDA is being handed not just new powers, but more funding, too! And you can bet it will find creative new ways to put this power to work suppressing the health freedoms and food freedoms of the American people.

Lie #6 – Fresh produce is contaminated because of a lack of paperwork

There is no evidence that requiring farms to fill out more paperwork will make their food safer. The real cause of produce contamination is the existence of factory animal farms whose effluent output (huge rivers of cow feces, basically), end up in the water supply, soils and equipment that comes into contact with fresh produce.

The food contamination problem is an UPSTREAM problem where you’ve got to reform the factory animal operations that now dominate the American meat industry. S.510, however, does absolutely nothing to address this. Factory animal farms aren’t even addressed in the bill!

Lie #7 – The American people are dying in droves from unsafe fresh food

The truth is that Americans are dying from processed food laced with toxic chemical additives, not from fresh, raw produce. Partially-hydrogenated oils, white sugar, aspartame, MSG and artificial food colors almost certainly kill far more people than bacterial contaminations.

The American public is also dying from pharmaceuticals — anywhere from 100,000 to 240,000 people a year are killed by FDA-approved drugs (http://www.naturalnews.com/001894.html), most of which have been approved under the guise of blatantly fraudulent science and drug company trickery. The FDA doesn’t seem to mind. In fact, it has been a willful co-conspirator in the scientific fraud carried out by Big Pharma in the name of “medicine.” (http://www.naturalnews.com/027851_h…)

To think that the FDA — the very same agency responsible for the Big Pharma death machine — is now going to “save us” by controlling food safety is highly irrational.

Lie #8 – The FDA just wants to make food “safer”

Actually, the FDA wants to make the food more DEAD. Both the FDA and the USDA are vocal opponents of live food. They think that the only safe food is sterilized food, which is why they’ve supported the fumigation, pasteurization and irradiation efforts that have been pushed over the last few years.

California almond growers, for example, must now either chemically fumigate or pasteurize their almonds before selling them (http://www.naturalnews.com/021776.html). This has destroyed the incomes of U.S. almond farmers and forced U.S. food companies to buy raw almonds from Spain and other countries.

Lie #9 – Food smuggling is a huge problem in America

One of the main sections of S.510 addresses “food smuggling.” Yep — people smuggling food across the country. If you’ve never heard of this problem that’s because it’s not actually a problem.

Not yet anyway.

But there’s a reason why they put this into the bill: Because they’re probably planning on criminalizing fresh produce and then arresting people for transporting broccoli with the “intent to distribute.”

Yep, farmers bringing fresh produce to sell at the weekend farmer’s market could soon be arrested and imprisoned as if they were drug smugglers. Hence the need for the “food smuggling” provisions of S.510.

Soon, we will all have to meet in secret locations just to trade carrots for cash.

Lie #10 – S.510 will make America’s food supply the safest in the world

Actually, even with S.510 in place, America’s food supply is among the most chemically contaminated in the world, second only to China. You can find mercury in the seafood, BPA in the canned soup, yeast extract (MSG) in the “natural” potato chips, and artificial petrochemical coloring agents in children’s foods.

Eating the “Standard American Diet” is probably the single most harmful thing a person can do for their health. It’s the fastest way to get cancer, diabetes and heart disease. Every nation in the world that begins to consume the American diet starts to show record rates of degenerative disease within one generation. This is the “safe food” that the U.S. Senate is now pushing on everyone.

Remember, with S.510, SAFE = DEAD. And the FDA says it wants to keep everybody safe.

Learn more: http://www.naturalnews.com/030587_Senate_Bill_510_Food_Safety.html#ixzz173VuSL2D

Farm update

November 23rd, 2010

Well, in between craft shows and enclosing the porch, the boys and I have moved the laying hens into a winter house and moved the broilers to an outside pen. Now back to the porch.

I worked in the dark last night. I built an 8 ft/ frame complete with the openings for 2 – 33″ wide x 29″ high windows. With Nathan’s help, I put it in place. Tonight I have to anchor it down to the concrete with masonry screws. Then I will cut out the opening for the glass slider and frame it in. That will be about it for tonight.

Hoping that sometime (between the rain storms) on Wednesday and Thursday, I can finish the framing (one 2 x4 to put in) on the East wall and get the house wrap and siding on. Then it’s on to the insulation and inside walls!

Education a Good Thing

November 22nd, 2010

We just wrapped up our busiest craft show of the season.

We always set up a booth at Ryle High School craft show in Union, KY. it is a very big show, attracting vendors from other cities and even other states.

We enjoy having a profitable weekend (it is a Friday night – Saturday show), and we are usually wiped after it is over.

But despite the physical drain, we always come away with a sense of satisfaction – not so much for the monies earned (even though we don’t deny that it helps), but because we have the opportunity to share our hearts with others. We give them information about the food and cosmetic industries, and things that they can do to live more healthy lives.Good choices go a long way in providing good health practices, and we believe that teaching people about the things they can avoid and what they can use when making those choices is an important step on the road to health and well being.

Besides, we enjoy meeting and visiting with people, and the craft show venue is an excellent way for us to do that.

To Your Health,

Pat

Last Minute Things.

October 29th, 2010

Well, I need to feed the bees one more time before it is too cold to do so.

I intend to add wintergreen and lemon grass essential oils to the sugar water, for colony health and to help ward off mite troubles.

Before I do that, I will have to run electric fence wire on top of the buck goat’s paddock. Went up to milk he goat and cow (with Nathan) last night, and the buck was in with the girls. Not a good thing. Looked like Whisper (the herd matriarc) was in heat, because that was the only one he paid any attention to.

After I get the hot wire on that, I need to scoop out the mess in the front-part of the cow paddock. We’ll move her to a different paddock first, then clean up the old one. I’ll let it dry out for a couple of days before putting her back in there. It has a shelter, so I’ll get that done before we have any bad weather. All the yuck we scoop out will go on the compost.

After that is done, I can get back to the porch. Once the house wrap and siding are done, I can insulate and put paneling on the inside. Then it’s on to the wood burning cook stove piping – need that to cook with over the winter.

Slowly moving toward independence from the utility company. Hoping to be off of the grid next year sometime…

Why McDonald’s Happy Meal hamburgers won’t decompose – the real story behind the story

October 22nd, 2010

We’ve been telling people about this for a long time. And it seems, someone in 1989 knew about it, and started a museum in his basement.. of non-decomposing hamburgers!

The article below tells why they don’t decompose – and lists other processed food items that will not decompose either.

So go ahead, get a McDonald’s hamburger, settle in and read the article while eating it -

Why McDonald’s Happy Meal hamburgers won’t decompose – the real story behind the story.

–Pat

Honeybee Killer Found by Army and Entomologists – NYTimes.com

October 8th, 2010

With this news, along with the essential oils guide for honey bee management and health, published by the West Virginia University Ag department, beekeepers should be able to overcome CCD.

Tea tree oil (among the list of essential oils used to ward off varroa mites in bee colonies) is a natural anti-fungal.

Read the article here:

Honeybee Killer Found by Army and Entomologists – NYTimes.com.

Read the study on essential oils usage at the ag. page at WVU:

http://www.wvu.edu/~agexten/varroa/varroa2.htm#Revised

Happy bee keeping!

2011 CSA Information now available on the web site

October 8th, 2010

After several people have emailed and called about the 2011 CSA, I put the information up on the Farm website.

You can access the information page here:

http://www.weber-farms.com/csa_registration-2011.php

The registration page can be downloaded/printed from there, or from this link to the page:
http://www.weber-farms.com/csa_registration-2011.pdf

Cheers,

–Pat

Bill Gates says vaccines can help reduce world population

October 6th, 2010

Our “philanthropic” software giant has other items on his agenda besides giving away half of his wealth for “the good of the people”.

This insightful article echoes what we have been saying – it is not the first time these statements have come out, nor will it be the last.

Immunizations are a death-knell for all those that believe the government has their best interests at heart.

They’d rather save a tree than you…

Read it and prepare…

Bill Gates says vaccines can help reduce world population.