I simply wasn’t prepared for what I saw when Fred Colby, co-owner of Laughing Dog Brewery in Ponderay, pulled open the heavy door to his walk-in cooler. Instead of setting eyes on cases of craft beer, I caught the cold gaze of six very pink pig carcasses. “Pig beer!” I blurted out reflexively, in order to...
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It’s harvest time on the Palouse, and North Idaho wheat farmer Wayne Jensen has invited me into the air-conditioned cab of his massive combine. A color-coded computer screen shows us exactly how many bushels of grain he’s harvesting moment-to-moment, while an automatic leveling system keeps the cab true to the horizon even as the...
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Kevin Dinius cocked his head to one side, as if trying to slide all the brewery names into a neat row before he spoke. “We’ve got Wallace Brewing from Wallace, Idaho,” he began to a Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band accompaniment in the distances. “We’ve got Payette Brewing from Boise, we’ve got Sun Valley, Van...
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Three years ago, Alma Hasse walked purposely, head down, toward a red brick building. The Jerome County Courthouse held a mountain of files on the county’s dairy CAFOs, or concentrated animal feeding operations, and Hasse wanted a look at them. She and her agricultural watchdog group, Idaho Concerned Area Residents for the Environment believed...
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It’s easy to get all Dickensian when looking at what’s happening across the agriculture landscape. As the spring growing season begins, there are plenty of examples sprouting that suggest that, in terms of food and farming, we are indeed living in the best of times and, if not the worst of times, some pretty...
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In conversations about agriculture and health, I think the issues raised in the book, Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn Mckenna, need to be front and center, especially as it relates to CAFOs (Concentrated Animal Feeding Operations) and the use of antibiotics as a growth enhancer in animals. The book explains: Food animals...
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I remember seeing them along the roadside. As a kid growing up in rural Idaho, those orphaned gray lumps were a common sight. I even kicked one once, then picked it up, dusted it off and bit into it. That was a mistake. I hadn’t thought much about sugar beets since, at least until they...
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