Feed to Others What You Would Feed Yourself

Today I received my first issue of a very interesting publication, Acres USA.  I subscribed to learn more about the best practices in growing plant and crops organically.  I've become very interested in what are the processes going on in the relationships between soil and plant.  The modern methods of agriculture have been very successful in growing large quantities of food.  What are the long-term consequences of these practices though.

In this issue there's an article by a rancher in Missouri, Cody Holmes, website www.rockinh.net   He relates how his thinking about his cow/calf operation changed over the years until he is now operating totally organically.  He now believes that the nutritional quality of the food we eat, whether vegetable or animal, is largely dependent upon the fertility of the soil from which it comes. 

He says that in the first part of his career he was more interested in producing animals to feed the faceless, anonymous public without so much concern for whether it was good for them or not. The animals that he was going to feed his family were treated differently however.  He now operates under the philosophy that  "It is irresponsible to produce anything less than the best I can on my ranch before I send it out into the marketplace."

I have great respect for the growing number of farmers and ranchers with this attitude.

Free Aggrand Organic Fertilizer Giveaway

Hi I'm Jim Allen, an independent dealer of Aggrand Liquid Organic Fertilizers.  These products are being used very successfully in applications from houseplants to landscapes to organic gardens to commercial agriculture.

To make more people aware of this awesome stuff, I am conducting a give-away contest.

Go to www.lube-direct.com/jallen/agsite to see if these are products that would be useful to you.  If you grow anything in the dirt I'm telling you they will be useful to you.  They work better than chemical fertilizers and are less expensive too. 

If you want to enter the drawing just follow these 2 simple steps.

Step 1: retweet this EXACT message on Twitter. Simply copy and paste the text below and post it to your Twitter account.  If you don't have a Twitter account you will need to get one for free here: http://www.twitter.com   That's it Simply copy and paste the text below

RT @txjallen A Give-away drawing for Aggrand Organic Fertilizer. to enter: http://jimsconnection.xanga.com/weblog

Step 2: Follow me on Twitter. You can follow me by visiting the link below and clicking on the ,,follow" button below my picture: http://www.twitter.com/txjallen

That's all!  One winner will be picked at random by the "Twiveaway" application that I use to run this drawing.  I will end the contest and randomly select the winner on July 12, 2009.

Good Luck.  Feel free to contact me if you'd like more information about the products.

Cheap junk

I hate cheap Chinese junk with a passion.  I can get Chinese-manufactured versions of most of the items that I sell in my pressure washing equipment business but refuse to carry this stuff whenever possible.  I've found the quality of almost every Chinese-made item that I've seen to be "cheap junk," so I try my best to stock and sell only good quality products products made in the US, Italy, and Germany.  A lot of the low-cost stuff you buy at Home Depot and the other "big box" stores is cheap Chinese junk.

The fact that people value the dollars they save by buying inferior products affects my business negatively. 

Here's an exerpt from a report that makes me even more concerned about the economic results of this phenomenon. 

From a Thomas Publishing report by David Butcher dated July 31, 2008

"Contrary to the stereotype and to some economic theories which hold that jobs lost are predominantly in low-skill, low-pay industries, the trade deficit with China has in fact forced workers from better-paying jobs to lower-paying sectors," the EPI revealed in a statement. "More than half (55.6 percent) of the displaced jobs were in the top half of American wage earners. Nearly a third (31 percent) of the jobs lost were among workers with a college degree."

What would it be like to be trapped in a body with no way to communicate?  I'm in the middle of watching a movie  right now in which the story is told from that perspective (The Diving Bell & the Butterfly.  It's French with English subtiltles). 

(Sometimes I watch movies like that.  5 minutes here, 15 minutes there, when I have a little time)  I haven't finished the flick yet so maybe shouldn't rate it yet but so far I think it's brilliant.

45-yr-old Jean-Do is in this state, having survived a massive stroke that has left him with the the use of nothing but his left eye.  Before that he was the handsome editor of a very popular fashion magazine. He's very attractive to and attracted to lots of beautiful women.  Now he finds himself unable to so much as tell his caregivers to go away and let him die.

He journeys from that self-pitying state of mind to learning how to communicate using that one eye and finding how precious and full life can be, even for him.  He still has full use of his mind, including memories and imagination.

We've all heard people say that if they ever get into a situation like that, they'd want to go ahead and die.  But how do they know until they've been there and tried to survive?

Truth or Delusion?

I revisited some of the videos of Jeremiah Wright's rantings about the US government's successful efforts to keep the Negro race down, infect them with HIV, etc. etc. , this in light of the rantings of Father Pfleger in the same church last week, but that's not what I want to talk about here.

Barack Obama at first defended Wright and said that the church was not particularly controversial.   (I see that he today has officially resigned from membership of that non-controversial church)  Some of the members were quoted as saying that Wright's comments weren't controversial, it was just the truth about being black in America.  Is this a way that many black people in America view their prospects for success and freedom in this country?  Gosh I hope not.