Dear sir or madam:

If we learned anything from this spring, it is the vulnerability of centralized amalgamated industrial mega-scale meat and poultry processing facilities versus the resiliency of small, local abattoirs. Yet the USDA stacks the National Advisory Board on Meat and Poultry Inspection with overseers hostile to small abattoirs. This is a matter of national security and survival.

Faithful readers know that last evening I was supposed to fly to Sweden to do a 4-day Masterclass with regenerative agriculture guru Richard Perkins at his Ridgedale Farm. We searched for requirements and found only two: a letter from the host describing the need to be there in person and N95 surgical grade mask for flying. I had those two things.

The last two years we've struggled with our apprentice/intern program. In fact, last summer for the first time in 20 years we had no interns (5 months) who wanted to stay for the one-year apprentice program. We've been doing this for about 25 years, so to have that disinterest was disheartening. In fact, we considered abandoning the program.

Anyone who has ever loaded pigs has stories. They are funny . . . months later. It takes awhile to move the memories from nightmare to mirth.

Faithful followers know that Dr. Sina McCullough and I have just released BEYOND LABELS, a conversation between a farmer and a nutritionist PhD. about food, farming, and health.

I was heartened with warm fuzzies looking over the kind and nostalgic comments to my blog post yesterday about farm schooling. What a delight to see so many wonderful memories and parallel lessons. Thank you all.

With all the brouhaha surrounding going back to school, we've suddenly had several folks contact us about hosting a farm school. This is not something you just kneejerk into because of a pandemic so we're not offering anything formal.

How do you feed hay in the winter? That's always a question folks have because they've heard about our hay shed and the boxes and pigaerators and deep bedding. In the upcoming POLYFACE DESIGNS book, due out Sept. 21, we diagram all the infrastructure surrounding this efficient seasonal set-up.

Every year we open a special email for queries to our steward/apprentice program August 1-10 (midnight). We're exactly halfway through that query week right now and although we're getting many, I thought I'd throw it out on this as well just to extend the reach.

When the USDA set up its coronavirus aid program for farmers, it said no farm would get more than $250,000. That was then.

By now you've all probably seen the news reports that we have a big outbreak of salmonella going on due to backyard ducks and chickens. When the grocery store shelves went empty, thousands of families decided to become more self-reliant and get a backyard flock of poultry.

It's Friday and time for another teaser about the upcoming book POLYFACE DESIGNS. Aren't you loving these little teaser pictures from the book?