Corn to ethanol is big business. The Federal Government pays ethanol producers 50 cents for every gallon of ethanol they produce. Corn farmers are riding a boom in corn prices not seen in their lifetimes. All sorts of groups, consortiums, corporations, and communities are trying to get on the ... Click to read the article details

A couple of years ago our daughter thought we should buy a gas heated clothes dryer. Having moved into partment life during graduate school she thought having to carry the laundry out to the line was just too much work for her mother since she was getting old, or at least older. I reminded her we ... Click to read the article details

I woke up this morning thinking about Iraq. Last night I learned President Bush has asked for another 50 billion dollars to cover the cost of the Iraq war. Some news agencies report the cost of the war is now at 3 billion dollars a week.

How much more suffering can be inflicted on the ... Click to read the article details

On July 6 there was an article on the Washington Times website about a ruling given by a federal appeals court panel in Cincinnati challenging the Bush Administrations claim to be able to conduct secret surveillance on individuals within the United States. The panel ruled in favor of the Bush side ... Click to read the article details

Imagine this, every home in the US with solar panels on the roof. Each one feeding power into the national power grid. Or, industrious individuals producing biodiesel out on their suburban or rural homesteads. How about wind generators on buildings in cities making power and sending it all into ... Click to read the article details

Over the years I have purchased my garden seeds from a number of different places. I have ordered seeds and I have purchased them over the counter. If you order seeds you need to do it well in advance to be ready when the ground is ready to work in the spring. Nothing worse than ordering seeds and ... Click to read the article details

About 25 years ago I was working on the farm where I live in Illinois. We were working on an implement of some type making some adjustments preparing to do some field work. A chemical spray truck backed up to a field not more than 16 feet away and began spraying herbicides. It is this stupidity on ... Click to read the article details

I really like the idea of green manure crops. You grow some vegetative crop up to a certain point and then take your tiller and work it all into the soil. This operation probably takes a rear tine tiller like one of the Troy Bilt series tillers. I think it is a wonderful thing for the soil. Years ... Click to read the article details

June and it is still 70 degrees. It has been pushing 80 today but overall it has been very nice weather. Spring was slow to start and we had a very bad freeze in April, down to 18 degrees, two nights in a row that killed the uncovered cabbage and broccoli plants but my early planted spinach and ... Click to read the article details

What a problem. You spend all your spare time for months creating a web page. Staying up late into the night even when you have to get up and go to work the next morning. Your wife or kids or friends wonder what happened to you and start to believe you do not care about them anymore.

... Click to read the article details

Are Americans lazy or just poorly informed? In today's world, there are no valid reasons for being poorly informed, only excuses. Our current crop of power holding politicians seem to extol the virtues of being less than interested in learning or gaining greater understanding of the world around ... Click to read the article details

Man invents 100 mpg carburetor! Disapperats down black hole!
Electric Cars Work! There just aren't any.
Big automakers are looking out for your future!

Which of the above statements is false? Are any of them false? Well maybe number one is false. For years there ... Click to read the article details

On the evening Lyndon Johnson dropped out of the 1968 Presidential it was a celebration. We could not believe it. If there was any politician that I loathed it was LBJ. He had lied about Vietnam. He had kept us in that war at the expense of tens of thousands of lives on both sides. My blood boiled ... Click to read the article details

If you drive past a car dealer these days you will see a lot full of big gas guzzling cars and trucks. It is not just American makers but also foreign makers who are sitting on some inventory that I would think they will have a hard time moving.

I was in a Toyota dealer last week. ... Click to read the article details

There are no "good old days" of farming. From when people first started to herd animals and scratch the ground to plant seeds, farming has been an environmentally destructive force. We have heard a lot in recent years about the destruction of the rainforest in South America and the Red Woods in ... Click to read the article details

Unlike many millions of people, I need a small SUV for my business. We need the space to carry tools, a ladder, a laptop, antennas, boxes of cable, and the electronic equipment to be installed at a customers location.

We had been using a Chevy Blazer for the last 4 years that had ... Click to read the article details

In January, 2007, I purchased a Ford Escape Hybrid four wheel drive vehicle. The Escape is a mid sized SUV that is smaller that the Chevy Blazer I had been driving for the past 4 years and is rated at 31 miles per gallon or about twice the 15 miles per gallon I was getting with the ... Click to read the article details

I began selling stuff on Ebay in July of 1998. Since then Ebay has grown to enormous proportions and I am not sure how many of the millions of people who visit Ebay every day really know much about what it was like and how it has changed. I will not pretend to present a comprehensive history of ... Click to read the article details

On March 31, 2007, people and businesses in Sydney, Australia turned off their lights for one hour. The city streetlights and traffic lights were left on for safety purposes. Can you imagine a city like New York in the dark? Maybe some New Yorkers wouldn't care to go dark since it was not that ... Click to read the article details

In 1971, a friend of mine invited me to supper. He fixed brown rice with vegetables that were sauteed in a wok using soy sauce. All of this was pretty exotic to me because I had grown up in a working class family in Illinois. During the meal my friend mentioned there were people who ate like this ... Click to read the article details