I’m Off to Polyface Farm for Field Day 2008

Posted in Healthy Food & Agriculture on July 11th, 2008 by dhawkinsmo

Many of my close friends know that I think Joel Salatin is the most ahead-of-his-time, revolutionary, forward thinker in agriculture today. He describes himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.” (Michael Pollan, author of Omnivore’s Dilemma). When asked what he does for a living, he replies: “Mob-stocking herbivorous solar conversion lignified carbon sequestration fertilization.” (Salatin, Joel, “Tall Grass Mob Stocking: An Aggressive Approach to Controlled Grazing,” Acres USA Magazine, May 2008, p. 16) Gotta love it. You’ll have to read the article to find out what he’s talking about. Joel strikes so many chords with me I feel like a piano.  Home school father. Unbelievably frugal. Out of the box thinker.  Bob Jones grad. Contrarian. Not afraid to get his hands dirty, and he can string together some pretty powerful paragraphs to make a point. I have a hard time deciding which book of his to recommend first, but way up there is Everything I Want to Do Is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front which will make you laugh, cry and get mad all at once. Then there’s Family Friendly Farming: A Multi-Generational Home-Based Business Testament which I think is destined to motivate hordes of Dilbert Cubicle Workers (Joel’s term) to once and for all tell their Faceless Bureaucrat Companies to take a hike and don a permanent pair of overalls.

Here’s a little more about Joel …

Called “the high priest of the pasture” by The New York Times, Joel Salatin likes to refer to himself as a “Christian-libertarian-environmentalist-lunatic farmer.” He lives with his family on Polyface Farm in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia.  Salatin has developed a system of pasture rotation that produces nutrient-rich grass and maximizes the composting of animal waste. Each species on the farm is dependent on another. The cows, for example, eat the nutrient rich grass in Pasture A and then are moved to Pasture B. The chickens then move to Pasture A where they pick through the cow pies … LINK HERE

NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE NOTICE

I want all my blog readers to notice that I have added a new Post Category — Healthy Food & Agriculture — of which this post is the first of many to come. And with that … I’m off to Polyface! See you soon!

New Dead Sea Tablet Sheds Light on the Jewish Messiah

Posted in Biblical, Christianity/America on July 11th, 2008 by dhawkinsmo

I am an avid reader of Joel Rosenberg’s blog and you should be too. Joel Rosenberg is the author of the uncannily accurate predictive fiction works, The Last Jihad, The Ezekiel Option, The Copper Scroll and Dead Heat, all runaway best-sellers.

Yesterday, he highlighted and commented on an article which appeared in Haaretz (a leading Israeli daily newspaper).  From Joel’s blog

The Messiah stories are particularly interesting to me. Iran, as I mentioned the other day, is running a new documentary TV series on Jewish, Christian and Islamic eschatology (End Times theology), consistent with President Ahmadinejad’s on-going call for the Muslim world to prepare for the “imminent” arrival of the Islamic Messiah, known as the Mahdi. The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?

The Israeli archaeological community, meanwhile, is currently abuzz over the discovery of a ancient stone tablet dated not long before the birth of Jesus that strongly suggests that religious Jews of the day were expecting the coming of a Messiah who would suffer, die, and be resurrected three days later. Most Rabbis and other Jewish scholars have long argued that the death and resurrection of a Jewish Messiah was a “Christian” invention, not part of long-established Jewish thought or Biblical teaching. But a front-page story in Haaretz, a leading Israeli newspaper, just a few days ago has a lot of people asking: Are Jews really supposed to believe their Messiah will actually die and rise again, and was this really Orthodox religious thinking before the time of Jesus?