Priorities...Where is Food?

Colonel’s Blog, Earthdate 9 May 2023…

Hey Y’all!

Good morning and happy Tuesday! The warm humid weather continues today. We can almost watch the grass growing. The animals on the farm are doing well today. The only real highlight is that Betty was especially vocal this morning. She was bellowing her displeasure that we got a late start to milking. We were about 30 minutes behind schedule and she let us know that she was none too pleased. We decided to sleep an extra hour this morning, delaying morning staff meeting and cutting it short by 30 minutes. We didn’t get to bed until after midnight, very late for us. We left the house a bit before we normally get to bed for a trip to Mountain Home Arkansas to visit the Emergency Room. As we were preparing to milk yesterday evening, Shelley was checking the grain dish in Stella’s area to make sure her feed was good. As Shelley leaned over the rail and down to look at the bucket, Stella flipped her hard nugget upward catching Shelley just above her eye and below her eyebrow on the left side of her face. All I heard was a yell and then saw blood running down her arm. It took me a moment to convince her to let me check her eye but I quickly determined that her eye was ok and we needed pressure to stop the bleeding. I provided the best thing I had available, a freshly washed/bleached milking towel. She maintained the position you see in the first two pics while I milked Happy and got everything finished up with the milk cows for the night. We went inside and took a closer look at the damage and made the decision that since it was on her face and so close to her eye (3rd and 4th pics) we would let the experts check it out. The hospital is just over an hour away and so we set out for Arkansas. The Dr. decided that it had bled well and already closed so he didn’t want to reopen it to clean and stitch it. He gave it a quick wipe with alcohol and put a bead of superglue on it. Of course, because she went to the hospital with an open wound, she walked away with a sore shoulder from her tetanus booster to go with her sore eye. The bottom pic is the damage as it looks today. I told her if she put purple eyeshadow on her right eyelid, you could never tell. We will make a pork delivery to town today and have a new customer coming to the farm to pick up her first weekly subscription of milk. I’m also going to try to finish editing our next YouTube long Video.

Again yesterday, I thoroughly enjoyed the comments regarding the blog! Tim foreshadowed the next step in my thought process when he expressed gratitude for having the ability to make the choice to consume healthy food. I posed a hypothetical question to end the blog discussion yesterday “Is it worth a bit more money and the trouble of finding an alternative to the grocery store?” I would like to take that question a bit further and then discuss. Not everyone has additional funds at the end of the month to add the expense of “healthy food.” In those situations, the question can be morphed to: Is it worth giving up on discretionary spending items, like entertainment subscriptions, mobile data plans, cable/satellite TV, etc so that there is more money available to make different food choices that include higher costs and additional effort? I’ll pause right now to acknowledge the fact that there are actual food deserts in this great nation in which we live. There are areas, especially in the heart of the big cities, where folks often don’t have the transportation choices to get them to an alternative that provides healthy options. These areas are often described as food deserts, areas where real food alternatives simply are not available. Let’s set those areas aside for a different conversation, like the one a few weeks ago about the fact that the USA is one of if not the only nation on this globe that doesn’t have some type of food rights in its foundational documents. I am not, in any way, expressing that I believe in social programs (quite the opposite)…just pointing out the nation may have priorities in the wrong order. Many people use grocery budgets as the ‘flex’ in their weekly/monthly finances. If there are a couple of extra dollars, maybe a frozen pizza gets added to the cart. I submit that the national priorities are backward when, for example, there are government guarantees to mobile phones with data plans. This misplaced priority artificially raises the importance of what should be discretionary to the status of ‘need.’ Society continues to add to the list of ‘needs’ until the grocery budget that remains after paying for all of the ‘necessities’ relegates folks to the middle isles of the store squarely in the realm of highly processed chemical concoctions loosely referred to as food. Let’s take a step back in order to reprioritize financial decisions. Let’s relook at what is ‘necessary' when our well-being is on the line in order to free resources to make different food decisions.

Local Farm Report for 8 April 2023:

Harvest:

34 Chicken eggs

19 Duck eggs

0 Goose eggs

5 1/2 Gallons of milk

Cheers! Psycho & Shelley