RURAL FARMING IN SOUTHERN OREGON
When the radio show got to Rush Limbaugh, I just had to find something more like real news, the news junkie that I am. I got a station in Grants Pass and stayed there awhile while I tore into the old vinyl flooring. We'd found a stack of tiles at a flooring place in Central Point and the price was right. All I had to do was 'apprentice' with a friend who was putting in a tile floor for his sister-in-law. Nothing like apprenticing to by-pass all the stacks of how-to books.
On a rainy recent day I found myself wired on coffee and the radio turned up loud and heading for a blister with the floor scraper. In the heat of battle with the floor I heard someone say there was only about 3,000 acres of farmland in all of Josephine County and so just give up on it already. I didn't hear what he was promoting, but it sure wasn't farming. Even if he had known of a plant product selling for $48.95 a pound, I don't think he would have been swayed. Obviously he's the sort that thinks that milk cartons come from trees and that the European settlers on this continent found ready made fields with fences and idling tractors. What about clearing land my mind screamed at this narrator.
Now I'm no farmer, even though I was a loan officer at something called the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank and worked for a couple of months on a Kibbutz in Israel. I confess I mostly think in terms of restoring salmon runs. But I was reading up on the cultivation of Gogi berries today on the Internet and found a sweet article on rural farming in the AARP e-newsletter.
Seems a former basketball star has been promoting this concept for 30 years. Somebody started an on-line nomination process to 'elect' a gardener for First Lady Michelle Obama's White House garden. 60,000 votes were cast and he won, even though he declined the opportunity to putter around under the watchful eyes of the Secret Service.
And another source told me he heard of a guy getting 6,000 pounds of produce on a fifth of an acre. At that rate, Josephine County could produce 90 million pounds of produce a year. Not a bad GDP for a mostly forested county, and I'm sure the unemployment rate would be right at the level of children with chickenpox and widows with macular degeneration.
The article on Gogi berries on Wikipedia on-line says they are mostly all grown in one province in China, to the tune of $190,000,000 worth a year. That might mean the poundage is a lot higher than that. Not that you could tell from the price of dried Gogi berries over here. One Rogue Valley land owner, or land lessor, is planting olive trees. I always thought if you were going to plant a crop it should be the most valuable one you could manage.
Remember, the government can't give you any advice on what to plant because they don't want you coming back and suing them if the crop doesn't come up. Or if everyone else does it and floods the market. I do see signs of true entrepreneurship in growing products of unusual value for a 21st century marketplace. I just hope the remaining lending folk and zoning folk have more confidence in the free enterprise system than the guy telling everyone to fuggetabat the impact farming in Josephine County.
When the radio show got to Rush Limbaugh, I just had to find something more like real news, the news junkie that I am. I got a station in Grants Pass and stayed there awhile while I tore into the old vinyl flooring. We'd found a stack of tiles at a flooring place in Central Point and the price was right. All I had to do was 'apprentice' with a friend who was putting in a tile floor for his sister-in-law. Nothing like apprenticing to by-pass all the stacks of how-to books.
On a rainy recent day I found myself wired on coffee and the radio turned up loud and heading for a blister with the floor scraper. In the heat of battle with the floor I heard someone say there was only about 3,000 acres of farmland in all of Josephine County and so just give up on it already. I didn't hear what he was promoting, but it sure wasn't farming. Even if he had known of a plant product selling for $48.95 a pound, I don't think he would have been swayed. Obviously he's the sort that thinks that milk cartons come from trees and that the European settlers on this continent found ready made fields with fences and idling tractors. What about clearing land my mind screamed at this narrator.
Now I'm no farmer, even though I was a loan officer at something called the Alaska Commercial Fishing and Agriculture Bank and worked for a couple of months on a Kibbutz in Israel. I confess I mostly think in terms of restoring salmon runs. But I was reading up on the cultivation of Gogi berries today on the Internet and found a sweet article on rural farming in the AARP e-newsletter.
Seems a former basketball star has been promoting this concept for 30 years. Somebody started an on-line nomination process to 'elect' a gardener for First Lady Michelle Obama's White House garden. 60,000 votes were cast and he won, even though he declined the opportunity to putter around under the watchful eyes of the Secret Service.
And another source told me he heard of a guy getting 6,000 pounds of produce on a fifth of an acre. At that rate, Josephine County could produce 90 million pounds of produce a year. Not a bad GDP for a mostly forested county, and I'm sure the unemployment rate would be right at the level of children with chickenpox and widows with macular degeneration.
The article on Gogi berries on Wikipedia on-line says they are mostly all grown in one province in China, to the tune of $190,000,000 worth a year. That might mean the poundage is a lot higher than that. Not that you could tell from the price of dried Gogi berries over here. One Rogue Valley land owner, or land lessor, is planting olive trees. I always thought if you were going to plant a crop it should be the most valuable one you could manage.
Remember, the government can't give you any advice on what to plant because they don't want you coming back and suing them if the crop doesn't come up. Or if everyone else does it and floods the market. I do see signs of true entrepreneurship in growing products of unusual value for a 21st century marketplace. I just hope the remaining lending folk and zoning folk have more confidence in the free enterprise system than the guy telling everyone to fuggetabat the impact farming in Josephine County.
posted by Alaskacafe at 5:19 PM
1 Comments:
Yeah sure, 6,000 pounds of zucchini, that's what they grew!
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