Category: Agriculture & forestry
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The Virtues of an Ancestral Diet
On the hillside above the Blancaneaux Lodge in Belize, six gardeners tend to a three-and-a-half-acre organic garden that supplies the hotel’s three restaurants with delectable vegetables, fruits, beans, and herbs. As a prelude to a communal dinner at the hotel’s Garden restaurant, Elicer Tribz takes lodge guests on a tour of the garden. He proudly…
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I Love this Goal: 10 Billion More Oysters
I love this goal: Adding 10 billion oysters to the Chesapeake Bay by 2025. A partnership of more than 20 organizations, businesses, non-profits, and educational institutions announced that objective earlier today. The 10 billion oysters will come from a combination of expanded restoration activities, fishery repletion activities, and the continued growth of the Bay’s oyster aquaculture industry.…
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Clowns vs Menhaden Goes into Overtime
by D.J. Rippert Northam channels Tom Brady. The ongoing battle between The Imperial Clown Show in Richmond (a wholly owned subsidiary of Dominion Resources) and Brevoortia tyrannus (aka menhaden, bunker, pogy, mossback, etc) has reached a new low. Our always corrupt General Assembly decided it didn’t like the latest ruling of the Atlantic States Marine Fisheries…
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Supply-Side Experiment in Food Desert Goes Bust
Poor Jim Scanlon. He bought into the conventional wisdom that food deserts are a supply-side problem — an unwillingness of grocery store operators to locate in inner cities. Hoping to remedy that deficiency, the idealistic former Ukrop’s executive opened Jim’s Local Market in a low-income neighborhood in Newport News in May 2016. Now, a year…
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A Giant Step Forward for Pigkind
In vitally important news from the porcine world, Virginia-based Smithfield Foods Inc. has ceased its practice of keeping sows in “gestation crates,” spaces so confined that the pigs can’t turn around. The company, reports the Virginian-Pilot, has spent $360 million renovating its farms with “group-housing systems,” a technocratic term for pens. Pigs are highly intelligent,…
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PHCC Drops Agricultural Degree Programs — Why It Matters
The Patrick Henry Community College in Martinsville has dropped its agricultural degree program along with certificate programs in horticulture and viticulture. Between declining enrollment in the programs and state budget cuts, it is no longer feasible to offer the courses, President Angeline Godwin told the Martinsville Bulletin. Many people might view this flotsam in the torrential…
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Bacon’s Mushroom Theory of Economic Development
We’ve all heard the mushroom theory of management — shovel s*** and keep ’em in the dark. Well, brace yourself for Bacon’s mushroom theory of economic development. Almost half of America’s mushrooms are produced in Chester County, Pa. After peaking in 2014, however, production has declined slightly in recent years. A big problem: a labor…
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Name this Flower!
My wife and I were walking along the James River this morning when we came across this beautiful little flower, which appears at roughly life size in the photo to the left. We have no idea what it is. Does anyone recognize it? The flower most often appeared in clumps, like that seen at right. It…
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Hmm, hmm. Oreo-Infused Hornswoggler Beer!
Let me start by saying, I love the name of Hornswoggler. If there’s anything that could move me to drink craft beer, it’s a name like that. And let me also say that, regardless of what the nutrition scolds have to say, I love Oreo cookies. But Oreo-infused beer? That just doesn’t seem right to…
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Wild Life in the New Dominion
Forget the bears, bobcats and coyotes. Camera traps near Virginia’s Mountain Lake Biological Station, manned by Virginia Tech researchers, have captured photographs of a strange hominid species. So reports Motherboard.
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More Mead!
With the explosion of breweries, wineries, distilleries and cideries around the state, Virginia was missing only one thing: meaderies. The taste for mead, made from fermented honey, died out after the Middle Ages but it appears to be making a comeback as the craft revolution gains momentum. Purcellville has the Stonehouse Meadery (opened in 2013), Richmond has…
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Pipelines and Property Lines
The Atlantic Coast Pipeline wants to inspect land along a proposed 550-mile route. Legal challenges from landowners could re-write a 2004 law governing property rights in utility surveys.
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Richmond Is Better with Bacon
It was 96° degrees in the shade yesterday at the 17th Street Farmer’s Market, but thousands of people showed up for the second annual Richmond Bacon Festival. With all those bacon lovers gathered in one place, I felt the love! Dozens of restaurants and confectioners had set up booths peddling bacon-flavored drinks, bacon-flavored candy and everything…
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Adapting to Climate Change: 11 Proposals
Working under the direction of University of Richmond professors Peter D. Smallwood and Stephen P. Nash, eleven UR environmental studies majors wrote papers on topics relating to the environment and climate change in Virginia. Each paper defines a problem and lays out a practical solution. All eleven papers are compiled in a document entitled, “Nature…
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Pulp and Circumstance in Chesterfield
By Peter Galuszka Jim Bacon has a fascinating cover story about the future of Short Pump in the latest Henrico Monthly magazine. Not to be outdone, I humbly point out that I have a cover story in the Chesterfield Monthly, a sister publication. I explain how Chesterfield County, the state and other officials landed Shandong…