Few things are as enjoyable as watching your enemies fight each other. It's a whole lot better than fighting you. The vegan meat substitute manufacturer Lightlife Foods has taken out huge full page ads in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and other major newspapers titled "An Open Letter to Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods."

Finally, the day has arrived to offer POLYFACE DESIGNS for presale. We expect to have it in hand and available for shipping Sept. 21.

Yesterday I spent all morning with the Virginia Department of Wildlife Management (formerly Department of Game and Inland Fisheries) official in our region planning a forest burn for early next spring. The crew and I spent the morning traipsing over Little North Mountain on which much of our farm acreage lies.

As I look at the shortfalls in my life, too often they've been the result of choosing convenience over consequence. In general, when I've chosen what was inconvenient, the long-term consequences were better. When I've chosen the convenience of the moment, the consequences were decidedly poorer.

How many times have you heard lockdown proponents, politicians, and bureaucrats give the pep talk "We're all in this together?" It's not true.

"Why do we need bottled poison in soft drinks?" That query, uttered by Mexico's coronavirus czar Health Undersecretary Hugo Lopez-Gatell, is splashed today across the pages of USA Today media outlets…

We're coming closer on the POLYFACE DESIGNS BOOK. I'm happy to announced that next week, Friday, we'll begin taking pre-orders.

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.