Saturday, September 5, 2026

On this, the occasion of my 10,000th birthday, I would like to say ... oh, OK, I'm not really 10,000 years old.

The deeper the joy, the more devastating the heartbreak. The journey across this life brings a mixture of both and somehow we must be strong enough to hold it all.

I'm too busy. We'll start after the corn is planted and the hay is made. We tried them before and they didn't work.

A rap on my kitchen door told me that our neighbor Zoe was outside. She's developed a bold, persistent knock, probably because there is such a delay before one of us answers.

Applying fertilizers to hay and pasture fields to stimulate plant growth will generally increase yields substantially.

When March arrives like a lamb, the old saying goes, it roars out like a lion. How then will the 2006 growing season finish if current numbers, courtesy of the USDA, show it hobbling out of the gate on weak knees and a bent back? Six months, of course, will tell the tale, but February USDA figures begin it with some opening lines that are grim - Brothers Grimm grim.

It is almost spring and the first specks of bold, new colors are sprouting among us. No, not spring flowers silly.

Joy is found in simple moments if our eyes and our hearts are open. Today, from the back porch of what will soon be our new home, I watched nine deer amble across the hay field, just about 75 yards from where I stood, only the white board fence separating us.

(Note: Editor Susan Crowell is traveling with an agricultural trade mission to Israel. This is her first report, filed after arriving in Tel Aviv.

A month ago this space outlined the ongoing Australian probe of AWB Ltd., that nation's single-desk wheat exporter, and the nearly $215 million in kickbacks and bribes it paid to Iraqi officials to keep Aussie wheat flowing into Iraq between 1999 and the U.