Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 25 July 2023…
Hey Y’all!
Good evening and happy Tuesday from Free Missouri! It was hot and muggy today but tomorrow starts the heat advisories for temps near 100 and heat indices nearing 110. The animals are all doing really well today. We decided to go a different route with the ewes and lambs, at least for a moment. Instead of separating them today, we loosed them on about 15 acres of fresh new grass. The lambs are doing so well that we hate to set them back at all so are going to attempt to boost the ewes by giving them the best grass we have to offer them. They love the grass when it is new and short. That’s what we gave them. We’ll see if this works. If not, we will go ahead and separate them. We also moved the cows today, they moved across the creek. I fixed the waterer this morning so they could move over. We made yogurt, cheese, and pickles. Shelley made a quick trip to town and I mowed a few acres of saplings on top of the hill. We have a pile of tomatoes and peppers that we hope to take care of tomorrow. The pumpkin patch is making quite a few large pumpkins! We picked one after the vine died and we think they are going to turn out well. Makaylah helped me roast the seeds and we all think they are a treat. The pics today are of the sheep enjoying their newfound freedom on about 15 acres of the best we can offer and the clean-up crew. “Clean-up in the milk barn!” The guineas have figured out that there is often feed left on the ground after the dairy cows have their morning snack. This morning they were busily taking care of business. We are down to 4 guineas now. We read that they just slowly dwindle away and in our case, that seems to be true. I don’t think we will immediately replace them when they are all gone.
We’ve discussed mRNA in the past but I want to bring it up again in a different light. As a reminder, Messenger Ribonucleic Acid (mRNA) carries a message to the DNA in our cells and tells it to do something. In the past we’ve discussed its use in vaccines for livestock. Today I want to discuss a different use. Recently, scientists have found mRNA might be an answer to treating cancer. As we all know, typical cancer treatments don’t discriminate between cancer cells and healthy cells and can cause serious damage to healthy cells. Thinking mRNA might be a way to better target cancer cells, scientists encoded a bacterial toxin into mRNA to hijack cancer cells and force them to kill themselves. mRNA particles with the bacterial toxin were injected into melanomas in mice where the code hacked into the cancer’s genes and forced them to produce the toxin. After one injection, the tumors shrank significantly as the cells did as commanded and killed themselves. The healthy cells around the cancerous ones were unaffected. Add to this ground-breaking science Artificial Intelligence’s ability to sequence our genes and there could be real hope for the treatment of cancer in the near future!
Local Farm Report for 25 July 2023:
Harvest:
18 Chicken eggs
10 Duck eggs
6 1/2 Gallons of milk
Cheers!
Psycho & Shelley
I have a relative that does welfare checks on pigs used in the research mRNA and they have had great results for diabetes cures. Very interesting for sure. Very tired of the heat….