Commentary: Remembering the Way Farming Used to Be

by Victor Davis Hanson   Almost all the pragmatic agricultural wisdom that my grandparents taught me has long ago been superseded by technology. I don’t anymore calibrate, as I once did when farming in the 1980s, the trajectory of an incoming late summer storm by watching the patterns of nesting birds, or the shifting directions and feel of the wind, or the calendar date or the phases of the moon. Instead, I go online and consult radar photos of storms far out at sea. Meteorology is mostly an exact science now. Even the agrarian’s socio-scientific arts of observation that I learned from my family are seldom employed in my farming anymore. Back in the day, when a local farmer’s wife died, I was told things like, “Elmer will go pretty soon, too. His color isn’t good and he’s not used to living without her”—and tragically the neighbor usually died within months. Now I guess I would ask Elmer whether his blood tests came back OK, and the sort of blood pressure medicine he takes. I don’t think we believe that superficial facial color supersedes lab work. Farmers did because in an age of limited technology they saw people as plants,…

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Green Ooze Clean Up in Madison Heights Could Cost Millions

  Fully cleaning up the source of the toxic green ooze found on Interstate-696 last month could cost taxpayers millions, according to officials. Although the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency emergency response team has been vacuuming contaminated groundwater for more than three weeks, fully cleaning up the site includes removing contaminated soils from beneath the former Electro-Plating Service business, according to the Detroit Free Press. Doing so comes with a hefty price tag. “I could throw out a number just to be dramatic. Is it $2 million? Is it $10 million? I don’t know,” said Tracy Kecskemeti, Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) southeast Michigan district coordinator, during a Michigan House Appropriations Committee hearing in Lansing on Wednesday. Kecskemeti called removing the contaminated groundwater a “short-term Band-aid” to the real issue. “As the groundwater moves through, we’re going to be perpetually generating contaminated groundwater if we don’t address the source of the contamination, which is underneath that building,” she said. EPS owner Gary Sayers is currently serving a one-year sentence for illegal storage of hazardous waste. Sayers was ordered to pay the federal government nearly $1.5 million for a cleanup at the same location in 2017. Restitution has…

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