Word: farmer
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Rick Letourneau lost so much money as a conventional dairy farmer that he had to sell all his cattle and burn furniture to heat his house. Today, though, he proudly shows off his three dozen lowing, impatient cows as they wait their turn to give it up to a mechanical milker. He nods toward the new mudroom and double-hung windows and pale yellow siding on his home and talks about building two more winter shelters for the livestock. And he plans to keep improving his 85-acre spread near North Troy, Vt., with financing from his local bank...
Organic farming used to be about saving the planet; now it's about saving the family farm. To be certified organic, a dairy farmer can't treat his cows with antibiotics or hormones and he must feed them grain and hay grown without herbicides, pesticides or chemical fertilizers. By meeting these tests, Letourneau gets $22 for every 100 lbs. of milk--about twice the price of conventional milk. That adds up to about $120,000 a year, which he supplements with $70,000 in contract work--spreading manure, baling hay--for nine other farms, allowing...
Those who take the leap usually say they're glad they did, according to Jack Lazor, an organic farmer in Vermont since 1976, who has helped dozens of others get their start. "They try it for the money, and then six months later, they say they'd never do it any other...
...beer with him after work, showing him how to use a Palm Pilot, sharing the business plan for a new venture or discussing Bill Clinton's foibles and George Bush's foreign policy. He would laugh at the latest joke about a priest and a rabbi or about a farmer's daughter. We would admire both his earnestness and his self-aware irony. And we would relate to the way he tried to balance, sometimes uneasily, a pursuit of reputation, wealth, earthly virtues and spiritual values...
...companies, including FleetBoston and J.P. Morgan Chase; and such railroad giants as CSX and Union Pacific. Although the municipal ordinances don't address reparations, they require companies to research their records to disclose whether they benefited from slavery--information that could help identify "specific targets for reparations," says Deadria Farmer-Paellmann, a New York attorney leading the campaign. "Multibillion-dollar corporations are still around spending money they earned stealing people, breeding humans and torturing people...