Air Date: Week of August 13, 1993

Steve reads the mail.

Transcript

CURWOOD: And now, join us for a trip to our mailbox.

"Your extended piece on the Saxon Homestead Farm, and the discussion of its mix of contemporary and rediscovered practices was intelligent and compelling." So writes a Philadelphia listener, about our report on a Wisconsin dairy farm that's switching from conventional confinement farming to rotational grazing. "When that piece started," he writes, "I realized that I had stopped reading the paper and was just leaning back against the kitchen counter listening. The program got my undivided attention." But a listener from Honolulu wonders what's so newsworthy about rotational grazing. "My grandparents have been doing it that way for 50 or 60 years," she says. Louise Neville, of Mill Valley, California, agrees that some of the methods being used on the Saxon Farm aren't new, but she still found the program informative. "Post World War Two farming taught in colleges," she writes, " was to benefit chemical manufacturers, to aid them to sell leftover war chemicals. This was good for business, bad for everything else." And Mary Jane Hildreth, of Sweet Home, Oregon, takes our report to task for not acknowledging that whether they're kept in a barn or allowed to roam in a pasture, dairy cows are treated "above all as milking machines." She points out that while grazing cows live twice as long as confined cows, they still "wear out" at much less than half of their natural life span. "The nutrients found in milk are available from many delicious plant foods that do not contain hazardous animal fat or drug residues . Broccoli, for example is rich in calcium." Ms. Hildreth writes, "There is no excuse for cows or the environment to suffer."

Our story about insects as food prompted several calls from listeners, including this one:

CALL:

CURWOOD: Aw shucks, and here I thought I sounded so brave. Oh, well.