June 30, 2019
A farmer friend in northern Indiana, Tom Gunden, stopped me in my tracks when I saw this photo today.
Tom writes, ” I have been across all of my seed corn acres twice this week, once to spray herbicide and once to sidedress nitrogen, and saw one plant like this on 260 acres. There would be about 9.3 million corn plants on those acres. Needle in a haystack! A genetic defect of some kind, I guess.”
I’m thinking it is an albino seed.
Thanks, Tom.
June 29, 2019
These are days of light. Compare today, for example, with a Saturday in late December. Which means, among other things, that amateur photographers don’t have to look hard to find light. On this bright (and hot) day outside, I mostly stayed in and found light at many places inside our house.
under the kitchen door this morning
Farm photos
photo # 52
photo # 53
photo # 54
June 27, 2019
It doesn’t take many particulars to make a walk worthwhile.
A path, of course.
Vegetation in its variety draws the eyes from left to right.
Something unusual makes the walk unique.
And, in my case, an enjoyable walk is issured by water of some kind.
June 26, 2019 farms and farming
June 25, 2019 farms and farming
June 24, 2019 Farms and farming
Farm photo # 41
farm photo # 42
leading sheep in northern Spain
farm photo # 43
farm photo # 44
farm photo # 45
June 17, 2019
Come walk with me … and I’ll show you the very wet spring in central Indiana. We’ve had rain and more rain since the first of May. Farmers will suffer significant losses this year. Many of them weren’t able to get into their fields to plant corn. Many of those who were able to plant now have lakes in their fields.
Today I returned to Fort Ben, intending to hike the Fall Creek trail. Intended, that is.
The woods was a tropical forest.
As in tropical rain forests, beauty was far away and sometimes very near.
The trails were, of course, muddy.
From higher ground I could see the expanse of the flooded Fall Creek.
Yet as usual, Fort Ben brought nature to heart.
Not often does one see Fort Ben in flood.
Where shall we walk tomorrow?
June 15, 2019
Jim called my attention to a June report from American Enterprise Institute’s department of society and culture. The AEI is widely and generally considered to be a conservative think tank. I welcome this perspective on our eco-social moment even though I personally tilt in favor of informed economic and social controls.
The report was written by Lyman Stone.
Americans are getting older. While we were once a youthful country with fast growth propelled by high fertility and immigration, today Americans are getting older at an even faster rate than many European countries. This will have significant economic and social consequences over the next several decades.
But paradoxically, while Americans are getting older, they are also dying younger. Life expectancies have begun to decline, driven by so-called deaths of despair, which can be better thought of as man-made deaths. These deaths include not just suicide and drug deaths but also, in recent years, increased traffic accidents and homicides. Man-made deaths can account for 100 percent of the decline in American life expectancies: We are, on a national scale, killing ourselves. The result is even slower growth in the labor force just as baby boomers approach retire- ment. The fiscal strains of this one-two punch on local, state, and federal budgets will be enormous.
Meanwhile, American society is changing. As Americans have gotten older and more settled, our institutions have also become less dynamic. A coun- try that was once typified by a sense that anyone could be or do anything is now hidebound by an increasingly heavy weight of rules and regulations. While this trend toward more regulation and greater constraints on regular life can be seen across all walks of life, this report focuses on five main areas:
• Increasing stringency of land use regulations such as zoning,
• Greater prevalence of restrictions on work such as occupational licensing,
• Unusually high incarceration rates given currently low crime rates,
• An education system that forces people to spend more years in school for a higher cost and less value, and
• Growing debt and other financial burdens among households and at all levels of government.
These trends can all be traced back to policy choices made between the 1940s and 1990s. That is to say, while they disproportionately afflict younger generations such as millennials, they are problems created by baby boomers and their parents. If the United States is to have a 21st century as prosperous as its 20th century, these damaging legacies of the baby-boomer generation must be fixed.
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